Synopsis
Silver Surfer flies to a desolate lifeless planet and has his 1st sleep in years.
Then he sees a huge skull and walks in through the gaping jaws. Inside is a room with murals of agonised faces and a tower of normal-sized skulls in the middle of the floor. 2 beings walk past carrying a chest, and don't seem to notice him. The mouldy-corpse 1 tells the rat-faced 1 that their mistress has been in a foul mood since her encounter with the In-Betweener (which an editorial comment says was in #17). Surfer looks back out of the door and sees himself still lying beside his board, and realises he is in a dream.
Norrin Radd follows the pair to an audience with their mistress Death sitting on a throne inside a large fanged jaw atop another pile of skulls. The corpse interprets her wishes and tells Ratter to open the box, releasing a spirit the identity of whose vague face is obvious to anyone who's seen the cover of this issue, ie Thanos. But the Surfer has never met the guy so all he can do is sense great evil.
The spokes-corpse explains that Mistress Death has detected an imbalance in the Universe which threatens all, and she wants the spirit to return to life and resolve the problem. The spirit brags about how far he'll go to serve her, but Ratter points out that he's made such promises before and failed. And most of those who opposed him previously are still out there. (Since we know it's Thanos we know he has some deceased opposition in Captain Marvel and Warlock, with a side order of Gamora and Pip The Troll.) But the corpse says Death has seen the future and the only credible opposition is ...
... (ta-da!) Silver Surfer. And suddenly everyone can see him and they're all pointing at him (yeah, had dreams like that, and Surfer is of course basically naked). And the Thanos-spirit blasts him out of the building.
Outside Norrin sees the desert is now covered to the horizon with close-packed aliens, all looking towards a distant smoking steep volcano. He summons his board and flies there. At the lip of the volcano he sees a female throwing baby in. He swoops down and saves the child from the flames. But as he takes it away it turns into a tentacled demon that attacks him and finally smothers him completely in a cancerous mass. Until he blasts his way out. And then he and his board fall to the ground ...
... and he awakes from the dream with his board on an empty planet with no skull-house and no volcano. As he tries to figure out what the dream meant he's confronted by the real Thanos on a hoverchair/throne who introduces himself.
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