I would like to talk about Eldrac, the living Inhuman gateway with the plot-convenient power to teleport those who enter him wherever they need to be.  So you think okay, sure, a living door, that’s fun.  But in the previous issue it took Lineage – this new sneaky, schemey Inhuman who’s been all hangin’ around the Attilan throne room in a black suit and grinning all the time, clearly just an incredibly trustworthy kinda guy – to have a chat with Eldrac, pointing out that while everyone else gets fantastic powers, he gets turned into architecture?  Which is a fair point — nobody thinks about poor Eldrac’s feelings!  So in exchange for Eldrac teleporting Medusa and company to precisely where they aren’t supposed to be, giving Lineage the opening to enact his coup, he rewards Eldrac with his own giant mechano-body awwwww!  Look how happy he is, presumably!

The following annual continues the story of the temptation and ultimate redemption of Eldrac.  While Medusa and her allies fight for their lives and Lineage continues his mischief, we find Eldrac in a quiet moment of contemplation.  At last he comes to a momentous decision: he activates his portal, reaches through his own maw all the way to Eastern Europe,  plucks an unsuspecting Medusa, Triton, and Frank McGee into his giant robo-hands, pulls them back out of danger, and before a disoriented Medusa can demand to know what the royal @#$% is happening, he immediately hurls them all back through his own face to return them safely to New Attilan, and as penance for his betrayal, pulls his own head from his mechano-body and presumably dies on the Long Island shore, if an Inhuman gateway can even be said to be “alive” in the first place!  I do not know whether or not it is a compliment to Charles Soule’s writing that the character who I found most engaging never said a word of dialogue, but there it is.  Misguided, noble Eldrac, your sacrifice was not in vain, and you will be missed.