Banner felt the Hulk stir not with rage, but with a strange, mournful recognition. Lingkh meant brother in a language that hadn't existed for ten thousand years. The creature—a Celestial’s failed first attempt at creating a guardian for Earth—had been buried here before humans learned to make fire. Its power was pkti : the opposite of gamma. Where gamma mutated and destroyed, pkti erased. Not killed. Unmade . Every second it remained awake, it was deleting itself from history.

As the sun refused to rise, as the pkti -radiation slowly unmade them both, the Hulk whispered one word back.

The pkti was gone. But Bruce Banner never dreamed again without hearing, somewhere in the deep cold of sleep, the echo of a grateful, guttural lingkh .

And it was terrified.