Thor confronts the Eye of Odin, which offers to answer one
question and one only; Thor asks what Odin meant when he said he had slain his
son once and would not do it again. The Eye agrees to tell him—but warns he
will never be the same afterward.... As
Thor surrenders his will to the Eye, the divine orb needs him to relive his own
life, starting with the false Ragnarok (#274-278). He then proceeds backwards
through his career with Sif, through the time when Jane Foster held Sif's
life-force, through a gallery of his familiar enemies and his adventures with
the Avengers, backward to when Don Blake found the stick and was first
transformed into Thor, the time before Don Blake and his mighty acts as a
prince of Asgard, his childhood back to his birth. Then the Eye reveals to him
a giant locked door in his memory, concealing secrets inherited from the mind
of the All-Father. Thor mentally breaks the lock and overpowers the colossus
guarding the portal. And stepping through Thor sees...
...Ragnarok—but one featuring gods and monsters he has never
known. This is the Asgard of Earthly legends. The Thunder God sees this Balder
die by a wicked scheme of Loki's, touching off the final battle. Odin is killed
by Fenris Wolf, in turn slain by Odin's son Vidar. Heimdall and Loki deal one
another fatal blows. Thor kills the Midgard Serpent but succumbs to its poison.
All of the nether realms are burned by the demon Surt and only a small number
of Aesir who survived the battle, led by Balder, returned from the dead, to
start anew. Thor demands to know when this earlier Ragnarok all happened and
what it has to do with his father's treachery. And the Eye of Odin shows him
when: the burning realms shone as a star above Bethlehem two thousand years
ago: the star shining over the stable in which Jesus Christ was born....