Battle at Time's End by David Scholes

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A few moments before Time's End

Time's Guardian looked out upon the bleak, barren, rocky landscape. There were no stars any more and the small Celestial body that he now stood upon was the last planet.

It should have been totally dark but a few mystical fires still burned on various parts of the planetoid, the last remnants of the final battle. There was no strength in the fires and they would soon die. .

Time's Guardian's ancient adversary, Fate, looked at him silently from across the planetoid. The final facet of a struggle nearly as old as time itself had played out. There was nothing left to say.

Ultimately this struggle had transcended even that between good and evil.
Fate was a component of the original forces of creation. An entity with a strong pre-conception as to exactly how events should play out. Time's Guardian had been a creation of all of the contemporary great powers and civilisations when the Multiverse was yet very young. A powerful counterweight to Fate.

Still, the end time was nigh upon them and far, far sooner than it might have been.
The great Guardian of Time thought to himself that there was no bleaker, no more hopeless, no lonelier place than here on this barren rock watching the very last flows of time. Soon now even the small planetoid would disintegrate and even Time's Guardian himself would cease to exist.

Fate itself prepared to dissipate into the nothingness of end time. Yet even now Time's Guardian readied for one last throw of the dice. A totally unexpected final gambit.

Husbanding his final reserves of energy, the great protector of the time stream had just enough in reserve to summon forth one of the great powers of the past.
Yet which ally to call forth? who to summon against Fate itself?
Time's Guardian reviewed the history of the Multiverse, considered all of its great powers.

He who was called forth from the past would need to be strength and power personified. Yet strength and power alone would not be enough. Courage would need to be his middle name. More he would need to intimately understand the nature of time and the role that Fate and Time's Guardian had played in that. More still the entity called forth would need to have been warned at some time in the past of just this contingency.

One name stood out among them all. The mighty Thor, God of Thunder, Son of Odin, one time liege lord of all of mighty Asgard. The only other question? At which point, in his immensely long lifetime, to seek out the great Asgardian? Not as a callow and inexperienced youth, nor as a headstrong young adult. Nor at the other end of Thors life as an ageing, venerable adviser to the mighty Magnison. It would have to be at the very zenith of his great life.

So it came to pass that as his final act, the great Guardian of Time brought forth from the past the inconceivably powerful entity known as Thor of Asgard.

Millions of years ago, in the great hall of Asgard, Time's Guardian had met with the mighty Thor, and spoken to him, warned him of this very moment.