Thor
and Amora take off to discover who has been trying to kill him while Detective
Inspector Curzon demands the police lab give him a Thor detector, a device that
can trace the radioactive emissions of Mjolnir because he thinks Thor has been
killed and wants to locate his body….
Thor
and Amora arrive at the underground passage where he was found unconscious
after issue #1. Descending they discover a massive machine hooked up to
Yggdrasil. They are met by an elderly man introducing himself as Price and with
a note of pride in his voice, he offers them a tour of his Worldengine. Price
gives a precis of his strange research interests and his fondness for
cannibalism as a means of acquiring knowledge. He gets to his point: he had a
strong desire to see the new race of humanity that the World-Ash would create
after Ragnarök. But he would not survive Ragnarök so he had to devise a means
of convincing the World-Ash that Ragnarök had passed. So he built this machine,
operated by powerful workers who are cloned from the cells of Thor and Amora. The
Asgardians consider destroying the Worldengine and going home but Price tells
them that such an act would not stop what would happen. Indeed, the
Enchantress’ spell to protect Thor only convinced the Tree that Thor was dead.
So now, as they watch, bubbles drop like dew from the tree’s branches. The new
humans, blue-skinned, golden eyed, with elongated skulls, living solely on the
air they breathe, rise from the ground. But then they start dying; Amora
explains that they were intended to absorb their food from the skin particles
of the extinct humanity that should have been in the post Ragnarök atmosphere. Then
the worldengine becomes very active, trying to correct its mistake by ending
the world for real. Price is killed by his workers while Thor, without his
divine power, seizes the engine’s wheel and struggles to turn it backward—and
succeeds. Out at the tunnel’s entrance, Curzon arrives to ask Amora if anything
unusual is going on. She disintegrates him….
Epilogue:
Thor returns to the Ash Hotel and stands on the roof in the lightning for a
flashy end to the story….