Description

“There is a Fire Down Below” — Namor barely has time to enjoy the open ocean before nature turns hostile. A column of living magma erupts from the seafloor — not lava, but Lava Men, dozens of them surging upward in a writhing mass. He fights back with characteristic fury, conjuring a powerful vortex to scatter them across the ocean floor, but the creatures are smarter than they appear. A colossal stone sphere drops from above, breaking his momentum, and before the Sub-Mariner can recover, the Lava Men engulf him and carry him directly into it — sealing him inside with the very Avengers he had only just left behind.
Trapped within the sphere are Captain America, Thor, Quasar, the Black Panther, She-Hulk, and Gilgamesh, all hammering at walls that heal themselves as fast as they are broken. Namor arrives unconscious and badly dehydrated — grimly ironic given that an ocean sits just beyond the shell pressing in around them. Thor and She-Hulk throw themselves at the wall in tandem, one breaking stone while the other beats back the reformation, until Thor makes his final, decisive gambit — letting himself be swallowed whole by the rock, then detonating a lightning burst from within that tears the sphere apart.
The Avengers emerge into a vast underground cavern, deep beneath the earth, impossibly uncrushd by the pressure that should have killed them all. Thor summons rain to revive Namor, and before the team can gather its bearings, Jinku — witch doctor of the Lava Men, last seen decades ago — steps from the shadows. His indictment is ancient and precise: the Avengers killed Cha’sa’dra, the living god who had transformed his people into Lava Men and granted them immortality. When the demon fell during the Inferno conflict, hundreds of Lava Men crumbled instantly to dust. The survivors hardened into living stone — conscious but immobile, their thoughts moving at glacial speed across centuries. Jinku, shielded by his long practice of Cha’sa’dra’s own magic, endured — and planned.
Captain America attempts to reason with him. Jinku is unmoved. He raises his staff, and from the depths of the cavern, the avatar of Cha’sa’dra himself rises to deliver judgment.
Above it all, Edwin Jarvis sits alone at the communications console of Avengers Island — which is perched on a crumbling pillar of Lava Men that is slowly dissolving into the sea. The West Coast Avengers intercept his distress call and turn their Quinjet around. And somewhere in a quiet suburban basement in New Jersey, an elderly professor named Paul Harker tends to a device that nobody on the surface knows exists — yet.

Writer: John Byrne
Penciler: Paul Ryan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterer: Jack Morelli
Colorists: Max Scheele & Tom Fine
Editor: Howard Mackie
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco