Magical Marvel: The Rise of Arthur Hayes-Chapter 270: Movie Night Part - 2

Memory: The Wider Universe

The sky was wrong.

A dim sun hung at different points on the horizon - one orange, one pale violet - casting double shadows across a landscape that no one in the room had ever imagined. Silver-barked trees. Leaves shimmering between blue and gold. A wind carrying scents no earthly nose had ever processed.

Nobody spoke.

"Is this... another planet?" Daniel whispered.

The wizards had no framework for this at all. Sirius looked at the alien sky the way a man looks at a wall that’s suddenly become a door. Wizards knew about magical creatures, enchanted spaces, hidden communities. They did not know about other worlds with other suns.

"Where are we?" Susan asked.

"A world in a neighbouring star system," Arthur said. "Not Earth. Not our sun. One of thousands of inhabited planets in this galaxy alone."

"Thousands?" Amelia repeated, her face pale.

"That I know of."

The memory shifted.

A Kree military installation. Vast. Rows of soldiers in dark, angular armor, standing in perfect formation. Thousands of them. Disciplined, identical, armed with energy weapons that dwarfed anything Tony Stark had built. Behind them, warships the size of cities hung in orbit, visible through the installation’s massive viewport.

"The Kree Empire," Arthur narrated. "One of the oldest civilizations in the universe. They’ve been fighting wars across galaxies for ten thousand years. Their military technology makes everything on Earth look like children’s toys. A single warship could destroy a continent from orbit."

Nobody responded. There was nothing to say to that. The sheer scale was suffocating.

The memory shifted again. Quick flashes. Planet after planet. Worlds Arthur had visited over the years on his journeys through space with Carol and alone.

A trading hub on a rocky moon. Species of every conceivable shape bartering with technology and materials that had no earthly equivalent. A forest world where the trees themselves moved, their canopy forming a living architecture that stretched to the horizon. A scarred battlefield on a dead planet, craters still glowing from weapons fired in a war that had ended before humans learned to write.

People who looked like them. People who did not. Civilisations that were ancient when Earth was young. Places that looked beautiful beyond description and places that radiated menace even through the pensieve.

"The universe is old," Arthur said softly. "And the things that live in it are beyond anything Earth has imagined."

He let the silence breathe. Then he spoke again.

"Now I’ll show you one of the oldest civilizations still standing. The one that even the Kree respect."

The memory shifted one final time.

Asgard.

—

The golden city materialized around them. Towers reaching into an alien sky. Architecture that made human cathedrals look like garden sheds. Bridges of crystal spanning chasms of starlight. A palace that crowned the realm like a jewel on a sceptre.

"Merlin’s beard," Sirius breathed.

Eleanor gripped Elena’s arm. "It’s beautiful."

"Wait," Lily said. She was staring at the golden spires, at the rainbow bridge shimmering in the distance. "Wait. Asgard. As in... the stories? Odin and—"

"Yes," Arthur said.

The room went very still. The wizarding world had their own versions of those stories, passed down through generations like everything else. Whether they’d originated with wizards or filtered in through Muggle-borns was a question for another day. What mattered was that everyone in the room recognised the name.

"Those stories are imperfect records of real events," Arthur continued. "Asgardians visited Earth thousands of years ago. Humans told stories about what they saw. The stories became legends. The legends became myths. But the beings behind them never stopped existing."

"What about the other myths?" Eleanor asked. She was pale, but her voice was steady. Amelia’s daughter through and through. "Greek? Egyptian?"

Arthur let the question hang for a beat. "The Olympians are real. Zeus is real. From what I’ve gathered, every pantheon that humanity has ever worshipped has a basis in beings who actually exist."

"Every one?" Amelia’s voice was barely above a whisper.

"Every one."

The silence lasted a long time. The Iron Man and Harlem memories had been shocks to their understanding of power. The alien worlds had been a shock to their understanding of reality. This was something else. This reached into the stories they’d been told as children, the myths they’d assumed were metaphors, and said: all of it. Real. Here. Now.

Before the weight could settle too deeply, Arthur redirected.

"Asgard isn’t just a pretty city. It’s the strongest military civilization in the Nine Realms." 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

The memory shifted to a battlefield. Vanaheim. Silver-barked trees burning. Marauder raiders pouring over the hills by the hundreds, armed with energy weapons.

A small force of Asgardian warriors engaged them. Forty against hundreds.

Sif led the charge. The Warriors Three fanned out behind her. And the room watched what a thousand years of combat mastery actually looked like.

The four of them carved through the raider force like it wasn’t there. Coordinated, effortless, lethal. Each one individually more dangerous than anything the group had ever seen. Together, they were an army.

James was mesmerized. Even Harry, who had spent years teaching combat, watched with the humbled recognition of a man witnessing skill that eclipsed anything in his experience.

"Each of them has fought for over a thousand years," Arthur said. "They’ve defended the Nine Realms against threats that would have destroyed Earth a hundred times over."

Then a figure moved through the same battlefield. Portals splitting enemy formations. Magical constructs shielding evacuating civilians. Moving through the chaos with the same fluid certainty as the Asgardians.

Arthur. Fighting alongside them.

"You’ve been doing this," Harry said. Not a question.

"For the past month."

The memory ended.

"That was brilliant," James breathed. He looked at Regulus. "Did you see the one with the axe? He sent that raider flying about fifty—"

"The sword lady was better," Elena said firmly. "She didn’t waste a single move."

"I liked what Uncle Arthur was doing," Leo said quietly. Everyone looked at him. He shrugged. "He was the only one protecting the civilians. Everyone else was fighting."

Arthur blinked. He hadn’t expected anyone to notice that.

Eileen caught his eye and smiled.

"Alright," Arthur said, reaching for the Pensieve again. "Now I need you to watch carefully. What I’m about to show you happened on Earth. Recently. A small town in New Mexico. And it starts with those same warriors."

The lightness left the room. James stopped mid-sentence. Something in Arthur’s voice told everyone that the tone was about to change.

—

Memory: The Destroyer

After the splendor of Asgard and alien worlds, the setting felt insultingly mundane. A dusty desert town. Pickup trucks. A gas station. The kind of place where nothing important was supposed to happen.

Then the Destroyer appeared.

Humanoid. Featureless dark metal. Its faceplate opened. A beam of orange energy struck a building.

The building ceased to exist.

Lily gasped. Eleanor’s hand found Elena’s.

Then four figures materialized on the street.

"That’s—" James started.

"The same warriors," Arthur confirmed quietly.

James didn’t finish his sentence. The boy who’d been gushing about Volstagg’s axe thirty seconds ago went very still.

Sif’s glaive struck the Destroyer’s chest. It bounced harmlessly. Volstagg’s axe connected with the shoulder. Sparks. Nothing else. Fandral lunged for a joint. His rapier snapped in half. Hogun’s mace hit the back of its knee with everything an Asgardian warrior could give.

The Destroyer didn’t move.

It took less than five minutes. Sif thrown fifty feet into a wall. Volstagg blasted through two buildings. Fandral and Hogun’s armour cracked from single strikes. The four warriors they had just watched carve through an army. Broken.

"This is what I meant," Ariadne said into the silence. She looked at Susan. "When I said I was nothing compared to what’s out there. Those four warriors could each take me apart. And that thing dismantled all of them like they were made of paper."

Nobody tried to suggest Stunners or Shield Charms. Nobody suggested anything.

The memory shifted.

Lightning split the sky. The desert air cracked with thunder. A figure descended, wreathed in storm, eyes burning white. A hammer in his hand hummed with power that made the hair on everyone’s arms stand up even through the memory.

The God of Thunder. Thor.

He called the sky down. A vortex of lightning and wind that reached from the ground to the upper atmosphere. The Destroyer fired its beam. It vanished into the storm like a match flame in a hurricane.

Thor came down with Mjolnir. One strike. The Destroyer shattered from the inside out. The construct that had broken four of the greatest warriors in the Nine Realms, obliterated in seconds by a single god with a hammer.

The memory faded.