It’s honestly impressive to see. In his time, Thor has seen civilizations crumbled into nothing but rust and rubble, history forgotten by future generations. Yet the Citadel and its people have preserved artifacts of the old world, not just in dry facts but real tangible works of art, touchstones of who they used to be. It makes him wonder if Asgard will ever achieve its like, even if the surviving craftsmen must recreate such things by memory.

What will Asgard become, as the centuries pass? How much of their heart still lives, buried and waiting to be rediscovered? What of the old ways will be forgotten, and what will be remembered? If humans can build something new from their own ashes, something beautiful and meaningful and defiant of all that tried to crush them, surely Asgard could do no less.

His gaze stops on the shining letters above the ever-open door, the rejection of their subjugation so clear that it’s been carved into the rock so none could deny it. “We are not things,” he reads aloud in a murmur, and thinks it a fine thing to base one’s community on. A world where every life is precious, a person, not some nameless faceless cog in a great machine that can be easily replaced.

Things can be broken, discarded, replaced. People cannot.