“Hello, Ajak,” the Ancient One said, her tone light. “It’s been a long time.” I thought she was smiling as she addressed the Eternals outside of my field of view, though it was difficult to tell, exactly, from my position.
The portals had deposited her and a small cadre of sorcerers beyond where Carol and Phastos were, on the opposite side of what was left of the compound’s lawn. Mordo and Wong were by the Sorcerer Supreme’s side, each wielding their favoured relics, along with three others. One was a white guy with long hair and red robes that I didn’t recognise, but I was pretty sure that the severe-looking Chinese sorcerer in blue was one of the ones who’d fought Pietro and me way back when we’d originally visited Kathmandu, though she’d been wearing red then. Did that mean she’d been promoted? I still had no idea what the differently-coloured robes meant, but that was hardly the most interesting thing about the group.
Standing at the rear—and a full head and a half taller than anyone else—was a bull-headed sorcerer with green fur, also in blue robes. I’d forgotten that that guy even existed! What was he? ‘Minotaur’ was the obvious answer, but was he a cursed human, or an alien, or from another dimension, or what? I really had no idea.
“It has,” Ajak responded after a brief pause. “I was not expecting to see the Sorcerer Supreme here today.”
“Merlin’s successor…” Sprite breathed quietly to herself. She watched them intently, a grim expression on her face.
The Eternals knew the Ancient One. The Ancient One knew the Eternals. It wasn’t completely surprising, given how long she’d been kicking around, but it felt like something that someone should have told us. Maybe they had told the Avengers, and I’d just missed it. Still, it was a little bit annoying.
“I find that, in our line of work, reality rarely bends to meet our expectations. Or our preferences,” the Ancient One added. “For example, my preference would be to not fight with you if it is at all avoidable, and so I ask you to stand down.”
“This was a misunderstanding,” Sersi said quickly. “We didn’t want a fight.”
With the direction I was facing and the awkward way that she was pinning me to the ground, I couldn’t actually see most of what was going on—the only Eternal that I could see, apart from Sprite, was Phastos, and he was also looking far more tense and guarded than he had been at any point during the earlier conversation.
“I’m glad. Let us not have further misunderstandings, then,” the sorcerer said, though there was a wry edge to her tone. “Simply allow us to retrieve our allies and we will withdraw.”
“The Avengers are free to leave. As Sersi says, we didn’t want to fight them,” Ajak responded. “We were only ever here for our own.”
“I understand. However, we would be poor allies, indeed, if we did not uphold guest right on the Avengers’ behalf while they are indisposed. Thena and Gilgamesh will be joining us, should that be their wish.”
“It is,” Thena said.
“Thena…” Ajak sounded conflicted. “Please, return to the Domo with us. We can still talk this through.”
“Do you wish only to talk, or will you simply erase our memories should we remain unconvinced? We know now that you lie as easily as you speak, Ajak. It hardly engenders trust.”
There was a moment of tense silence, then Ajak spoke again, a heaviness in her tone. “Druig.”
“They’re protected,” the mind controller responded.
The sorcerers reacted instantly to what I assume was an attempt to take control of them, spreading out from their initial positions as they assumed battle postures, calling magic to their hands and activating the relics they carried. The Ancient One gestured, a pair of burning fans of orange, sorcerous energy appearing as she darted forward.
Phastos severed the connections between his gauntlets and Carol’s bindings, turning his attention fully to the active threat. Metal rings flew from his gauntleted arms, forming a dozen gyroscopic constructs with no visible means of propulsion save the glimmer of golden cosmic energy. The devices flew after the sorcerers as they moved beyond where I could easily see. The edges of my vision lit up with bursts of gold and orange light, colliding in the air like fireworks. The ground trembled as something heavy slammed into it not too far away.
Sprite shifted atop me, the line of pressure at my throat easing as she straightened up to better watch what was happening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw small rings of cosmic energy appear around the fingertips of her free hand. She was distracted, her focus no longer on me as she went to join the battle with some kind of exercise of her power.
With her attention elsewhere, I had an opportunity—it was still risky, but I couldn’t just lie here and hope for the best. I was pretty sure that, with my magic suppressed, she’d discounted me as an ongoing threat. But magic wasn’t the only thing I had up my sleeve. The Mind Stone’s frigid power came easily to my call, and I immediately directed it outward.
Sprite didn’t have any time to react as a beam of golden cosmic energy lanced out of the pendant at my throat. It caught her full in the chest and she was gone, ripped bodily away from me with a small scream of pain and surprise. The blast threw her several metres into the air before she landed in a bundle of flailing limbs, bouncing several times as she tumbled across the ground.
“Sprite!” I heard Sersi shout, an edge of shock and panic in her tone.
I rolled to my feet, trying to get my bearings and work out what my next move was. Sprite lay on the torn-up lawn a dozen or so metres away, curled into a ball and clutching at her chest. Carol was about the same distance from me in another direction, struggling against her restraints while the Eternals focused on the new arrivals. I glanced over to where I’d left Shuri unconscious on the ground. She was gone now—hopefully that meant one of the sorcerers had already portalled her away, but I couldn’t be sure.
No one else had stayed still, either, the sorcerers clashing with the Eternals in a flurry of magic and cosmic energy. I didn’t even actually see Makkari until she slipped on a carpet of orange geometric shapes crackling across the ground—I recognised the weird anti-friction spell that the Ancient One had used against Pietro the first time we’d met. Makkari’s momentum turned the trip into a violent tumble that catapulted her into the side of the lab as if she’d been slapped away by the Hulk. Mordo bounded through the air toward the impact point, weaving an intricate series of green glyphs midair that spiralled after her into the dust and debris.
At the same time, the Ancient One gestured and the air cracked, fissures spreading in a wide wave of shifting, glasslike facets that rolled towards Sersi, Druig, Ajak and Phastos, none of them able to move quickly enough to evade it. In response, more rings detached from the complicated mechanisms that orbited Phastos’ arms, flicking quickly through the air. They came together instantly into a wide wall of complicated Celestial designs, the air shimmering and rippling between them.
The barrier resisted as the spell ground up against it, trembling in midair as it struggled to hold back the Mirror Dimension. The Sorcerer Supreme gestured again, her face a mask of concentration as the effect spread and strengthened, forcing Phastos to redouble his efforts to match her. He’d turned fully away from us, moving to put himself between Ajak and the sorcerous threat.
Kingo was firing at the sorcerers, rapid cosmic energy blasts smashing through orange mandala shields with a sound like hail hitting glass as Wong and the minotaur moved to defend the Ancient One from the assault. A pair of linked portals opened a moment later and Kingo’s projectiles were redirected back into the Eternal’s ranks. Gilgamesh jumped over the clash, trying to close with Ajak only to sink waist-deep into the ground as he landed—Sersi had refocused on the fight and dropped to a knee, pressing her hands against the ground and briefly turning it liquid before re-solidifying it into a dull metal, trapping him there.
I’d lost sight of Ikaris, but with everyone else distracted, I tried to keep myself as low to the ground as possible and sprinted toward Carol. As I ran, I grabbed at one of my shackles and pulled at it, seeing if I could slip it over my wrist, or find a lock I could force, or anything I might be able to use to get them damn things off me. No luck. The anti-magic cuffs were tight, with almost no give whatsoever in them—even twisting my wrists slightly made the edges of them start to cut painfully into my skin. There were clear joins between the dull, gold-ish metal rings, but I couldn’t so much as get a fingernail between them let alone try to lever them apart.
I dropped to my knees as I reached Carol, skidding across the torn-up ground. “Are you okay?” I asked, my hands going to one of the metal rings that had sealed itself around her shoulders. This close, I could see her injured arm better as well—it didn’t look too bad, the shredded uniform making the actual scratches appear worse than they were.
“Oh, you know,” she replied weakly, her voice thick with strain. “I’ve been worse.”
The larger apparatus was secured to a half dozen anchor points spread out on the ground around us, and I couldn’t see any easy way to get the restraints off her. At a brief glance, the design was superficially similar to the cuffs locked around my wrists, but with thick ropes of cosmic energy looped in to hold them, and Carol, in place. I grabbed at one and hissed between my teeth. It felt like I was trying to touch a live electrical wire, the cosmic energy spitting and stinging my skin, but I ignored the pain, trying to work out some way of freeing her.
Could I use the Mind Stone, somehow? When all you have is a hammer… I wasn’t confident enough in my aim with the thing to blast them off without hurting her, though. If I could use my magic, I could probably pick apart the bindings, but I couldn’t use my magic and—
The Ancient One’s Mirror Dimension banishment effect, looming in my peripheral vision, shattered, separating into glass-like shards that rippled through reality before dissipating. Despite myself, I didn’t really absorb what was happening with the sorcerers, my attention instead drawn to a flicker of movement above.
Ikaris was hovering over the battlefield, and he was looking this way. We locked eyes for a brief instant—the Eternal’s face an impassive mask of determination—before he dropped out of the sky toward Carol and me.
No protection spell. No magic. I wasn’t fast enough to dodge out of the way. My only option was the Mind Stone again, but even as I ripped its power out into a beam of energy, I knew it wouldn’t be enough to stop him. He opened up with twin lances of power of his own, our beams colliding in midair and cancelling each other out.
Oh.
I guess this is how I die, after all.
Thena was suddenly between us, as if summoned by my connection to her, a wide golden shield braced against one arm and a golden sword in her other hand. Ikaris hit her upraised shield like the fist of an angry god. This close, the shockwave from the impact smashed into me like a physical blow, hard enough to plant me in the dirt. I lay there stunned for a brief moment, reeling and blinking, chest tight with fear, my breath coming in short, panicky gasps.
Thena’s construct of cosmic energy shattered under the force of the hit and Ikaris bounced back, reversing direction to fly in a tight arc over us, eyes glowing golden again as he took another pass at me. I was starting to get the impression he didn’t like me very much.
I rolled back to my feet as Thena darted in once again to intercept, golden threads coming together into the shape of another shield, but her power wasn’t quite quick enough. Ikaris’s energy beams shredded the half-formed construct and raked burning lines across her shoulder and back instead, slamming her to the ground. She turned the fall into a roll, coming almost instantly to her feet, her golden sword replaced by one of the vibranium spears that had fallen to the ground earlier.
She swung the spear in a wide arc as she rose, forcing Ikaris to bob back slightly to avoid it, but he wasn’t her target—the vibranium blade caught the edge of one of the rings restraining Carol right where it linked a rope of energy keeping the bindings together, shearing through it. Thena didn’t stop, whipping the weapon back up toward Ikaris as he darted in again. He was a little quicker than she was, though, getting inside the spear’s reach. He grabbed the haft with one hand and yanked, but Thena simply let go, golden energy coming together in her hands in a pair of long daggers instead as she lunged in close.
Stolen novel; please report.
While they fought, I darted over to Carol. Thena’s strike had let her pop free of one of the restraints and I grabbed at the remainder, looking for some way to help free her.
Ikaris caught Thena’s daggers on the haft of the spear, shoving her back roughly, and drove the vibranium weapon forward again before she could recover. She tried to twist aside, but Ikaris was faster.
The spear hit Thena just off dead-centre, the spearhead bursting from her back, glistening with red. My connection with her guttered like a candle in a thunderstorm and I froze.
Ikaris released the haft of the weapon, letting Thena’s weight carry her backward. She staggered, then fell, spear shifting inside her as she hit the ground. Ikaris took a step backward, his mouth twisted tight in a frown. “I’m sorry, Thena. I warned you,” he said, though his voice wasn’t entirely steady. “I warned you.”
As he turned toward me, a rippling wave of glass-like facets rolled over Carol and me from somewhere behind us. The sound of the battlefield was instantly silenced, and there was a brief expression of surprise on Ikaris’s fragmented face as—from his perspective—we vanished into the effect. After a moment, he turned and flew off, toward the others.
Next to me, Carol rose on shaking legs. I reached for her instinctively, steadying her slightly as she stood. The rest of the cosmic energy bindings that had been anchoring her to the ground had been severed by the transition to the Mirror Dimension. Without them, the rings popped apart on their own, the golden light powering them dying out as they fell to the churned earth at our feet.
“Thena!” There was a heavy impact as Gilgamesh landed heavily on the ground next to us. He immediately dropped to his knees, using one hand to gently support the back of her head. She smiled faintly up at him, though it looked like even that was an effort.
I stared at him for a moment, confused, then turned and looked in the direction he’d come from. Wong was there, jogging to close the short distance between us. He was panting, bleeding superficially from a small graze on his forehead, the edges of his robes torn, but he seemed otherwise uninjured.
I looked from the sorcerer, to Carol, to Thena and Gilgamesh on the ground, then back to what I could see of the reality we’d just left. The images were folded and distorted by the nature of the Mirror Dimension, but it looked like the sorcerers had withdrawn from the field entirely and the Eternals were regrouping. Phastos was assembling a device of some kind, golden Celestial designs spreading out from it across the air.
As he caught up to us, Wong gestured, long sparks of sorcerous orange coming together to form a portal. “Everyone else is clear. We need to leave,” he said, his tone urgent, the sound of his voice echoing hollowly in the liminal space.
I ignored him, dropping to my knees next to Thena and Gil instead. Carol hesitated as well, lingering near me.
“Thena, you idiot,” I said softly. “What’d you go and do that for?”
“I did what I had to.” She gave me a strained smile, then turned her head slightly and looked at Gilgamesh. My connection to her was dribbling away—I could barely feel her at all anymore.
“It’s okay,” Gil told her, an edge of desperation in his tone. “We… we’ll leave you with Ajak. She’ll heal you. They might reset you, but that’s okay, we’ll get you back, Wanda’ll free your memories again and—”
“No.”
Gilgamesh almost growled at her. “Thena…”
“Gil… I’m sorry. I won’t let myself be bound like that again—I refuse. I choose this.”
“You can’t…” He hung his head as he trailed off.
“Thank you. For everything. For always taking care of me,” she said softly, then shifted slightly to look at me again. “We weren’t finished. Hopefully what I’ve given you is enough… I wish we’d had time for more.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came, so I shut it again and just nodded dumbly.
“I always knew this would happen, someday.” Gilgamesh’s voice was steady, though thick with emotion. “I thought it’d be the Mahd Wy’ry, but… I’m glad that you got to be your true self instead, for a little while at least.”
Thena lifted her hands, holding them in front of her chest, just above where the haft of the spear was jutting from her body, as if she were holding something. “Me too.”
Cosmic energy spilled from her fingertips, threading together to form a golden helmet between them. I blinked, a little confused. The Mind Stone interface? Why? Over the space of a few seconds, Thena’s skin deadened and turned grey—as if forming the construct was draining life and vitality from her—then she fell limp, her eyes clouding over milky white.
There was a beat of silence where nobody stirred, then Gil reached up and carefully removed the vibranium spear from Thena’s chest and dropped it to the ground. He slipped one arm under her legs, lifting her as he stood back up, cradling her body against his chest. The golden helmet persisted somehow, balanced on her chest. He glanced at me, then stepped past without a word, moving through the portal.
Wong looked between Carol and I, his expression soft with sympathy, then jerked his head toward the gateway in a ‘go on’ gesture.
Carol touched me gently on the arm. “Wanda?”
I nodded, my eyes flicking back to the discarded spear, Thena’s lifesblood coating it in a thin sheen of red. It felt almost disrespectful, but it was still vibranium and I didn’t want to just leave it. I stooped to pick it up, holding the weapon gingerly before hurrying after Gilgamesh.
Stepping through the portal, I found myself in the Kamar-taj’s central open-air courtyard. The air was several degrees cooler here, the sky above us a late-afternoon orange, though it was still light enough that the burnished lamps that lined the edges of the space had not yet been lit.
A dozen sorcerers stood alert and ready around the perimeter, with the Avengers and others that had been rescued from the compound clustered under the ancient tree that dominated one corner, most of them looking in my direction with a variety of mixed expressions. A handful sat on a pair of low stone benches—Sam, Bruce, Shuri and Sterns, all in various states of apparent exhaustion, their shoulders slumped and heads hung wearily even as they eyed me. Tony, Steve and Maria were gathered in a loose circle in front of them. Steve saw me and a little bit of colour rose in his cheeks before he looked away, as if he was suddenly very interested in something on the other side of the courtyard.
Pietro was standing with Natasha and Bucky in a close cluster next to Bruce—he looked away as well for some reason, closing his eyes and pressing his thumb against the middle of his forehead as he muttered something under his breath. Darcy was there as well, standing just a little bit further back, on her own, her eyes a little wide as she stared back at me. That was a bit surprising. I’d assumed she’d left the compound with all the other regular staff.
Gilgamesh moved off to one side, stepping away from everyone else, his back still to me. It would probably be best not to bother him; he’d need some space for a bit.
As for me… well… I had complicated feelings about Thena. I really hadn’t liked the connection that Thena and I had—always feeling her there. It had been incredibly intrusive and I’d had no way of getting away from it. But now that she was gone, I just… I didn’t know. Something felt missing.
I held out the spear I’d recovered to Wong as I stepped past him, a plaintive expression on my face, and the sorcerer took it with a small nod. Natasha and Bucky had already started toward us, and I stumbled a little on the cobblestones as I rushed forward to meet them, pushing away thoughts of Eternals temporarily while I focused on the people I cared about. “Hey! Thank god you’re all okay,” I said, heaving a sigh of relief.
Bucky was shrugging off his jacket as he stepped in, trying to put it around my shoulders. “Wanda,” he said, a slight note of urgency in his tone.
I lunged forward into his chest, hugging him briefly before pulling back—his hands came up, trying to close the jacket around me, but I brushed him off to grab Natasha next and pull her in close, burying my face in her neck and giving her a tight squeeze.
“Wanda?” she said quietly as she hugged me back for a second, then gently took me by the shoulders with both hands. There was a note of amusement in her tone. “Your top.”
I stepped back from the hug and looked down. At some point during the fight, my boob tube had turned into a belt. “Oh, jeez!” My cheeks coloured slightly as I grabbed at the strip of material, yanking it roughly back upwards to cover myself as I glanced rapidly back up at the small group of gathered Avengers. “You’re welcome!” I told them, then glanced sideways at Carol as she joined us. “Uh, how long was…?”
She looked drained, her skin waxy and pale, but she still smiled faintly and let out a small huff of amusement. “Basically the entire fight, I think. Sorry, I would have said something, but…”
Things had been pretty intense. I’d been way too focused on what was going on to notice at all, myself. It probably didn’t help that I’d gotten quite used to fighting while exposed over the last few days. Weirdly enough, the alarming frequency with which I had had my tits out during fights recently was a small bit of reassuring evidence that I really was real and myself, not a character in some sort of weird, off-the-wall episode of What If…?
Still, note to self: No more fighting in a boob tube.
A few of the others had stepped a little closer, now. Tony waved a hand in a circular gesture, indicating his chest. “So, uh, those are pretty striking. What’s…?”
I straightened up. “Uh, thanks? They are pretty nice, right?”
Tony sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, the corner of his mouth twitching.
“He means the tattoos,” Nat said quietly, her voice strained as she desperately fought off a laugh.
“Oh!” That made more sense. “It’s sort of complicated, but—”
“We don’t have much time,” the Ancient One interrupted as she and Wong strode up to us. I hadn’t actually seen her in the courtyard with everyone else when we’d arrived, so I wasn’t even sure where she’d appeared from. She was holding her hands out toward me expectantly, and it took me a brief moment to realise what she wanted before I offered her my own. Taking firm hold of my forearms, she cast a critical eye over the cuffs that were binding my wrists and magic for a moment, looking at them this way and that, before glancing back at Wong. “The Sands of Nisanti,” she told him.
He nodded, then gestured to summon a smaller portal right next to her, about the size of a manhole cover. On the other side was an ornate gold-and-glass urn, half-filled with sand that seemed to burn with green fire.
The Ancient One let go of me to reach through, lifting the lid of the urn so that she could hold a hand over it, letting some of the green light collect in her palm before withdrawing from the portal. As it closed, she used her free hand to weave a complex burning sorcerous diagram in the air, then cast whatever she’d just picked up into it. The whole piece of spellwork shifted, turning from orange to the same eerie green, edged with a deep blue. The light of the diagram played over my hands and wrists, then the Ancient One gestured again. Green fire lit up along the edges of the cuffs before being drawn up and into the sorcerous design.
As the light faded, I felt the reassuring presence of my personal well of power once more. The metal rings clicked apart and fell to the cobblestones with a dull clank. “Oh, thank god,” I said, rubbing my wrists. “I was worried that—”
The Ancient One was already spinning up another portal. “Not important right now. With me,” she commanded.
I followed her through the gateway unthinkingly then stopped short, looking around in confusion at the bizarre layout of what was around me. It took a moment for me to realise that we’d stepped out onto the wall of a familiar room, as if gravity here had been reoriented 90 degrees. We were inside the library at Kamar-taj, in the circular chamber with the doors to the sorcerers’ sanctums and the Eye of Agamotto’s pedestal in the centre.
“Quickly now,” the Ancient One said, her tone urgent. She knelt down, indicating a long array of glowing sorcerous diagrams and sigils that traced a path around the wall of the circular chamber, just above the doors. “The circuit is fed by a connection to the sanctums’ currents of cosmic energy, but I need you to complete it. The enchantment you’ve woven to protect against mental intrusion.”
“What?” I blinked, feeling a little lost as I looked at the design she was pointing to. “I don’t—”
“Now.”
I dropped down and put my hands on the glowing sigils, drawing deeply on my well of magical power to feel out the nature of the design. It was really complicated. Magical energies forming the same sort of sorcerous enchantments I’d seen before, but writ on an entirely different scale—this was something meant for serious business, not just a dinky little battery enchantment or minor ward. There was cosmic energy running through it, too, channels interwoven with complex spells that I guessed were meant to serve as a translation medium between the sorcerous magic and… well, what the Ancient One was expecting me to overlay.
The problem was that the Celestial programming I’d copied from Thena was designed to be directly linked into a mind, and a building—or a linked network of four buildings, I guess—didn’t have a mind. I could see where those linkages were meant to connect to in the sorcerous diagrams, but there was a conceptual element that would be missing… it just didn’t make sense with what I knew of how it was supposed to work. In any other circumstance, I’d be going slow here. I’d take my time examining everything, trying to understand it as best I could, before making any sort of attempt at adding to it. But it didn’t sound like we had time, and the Ancient One was acting like she knew exactly what she was doing, which said to me that she’d planned for this.
I got to work, shivering as I drew energy out of the Mind Stone, shaping it with my magic as I passed it down into the stone. Golden lines drew themselves on the surface, Celestial language weaving through the existing diagrams in places that seemed like they had been designed specifically to fit them, orange sorcery and golden cosmic energy threading harmoniously together. A minute or two crawled by as I worked… this was a lot less painful than carving it into myself, at least. When I finished, I felt a pulse of power—a diffuse structure of cosmic energy—spreading out from the enchantment to settle over the monastery.
“Thank you,” the Ancient One said, letting her shoulders relax. I hadn’t actually noticed how tense she’d been until just now. “Mental defences are difficult—not too taxing to maintain, but complicated to learn. Most of our masters are skilled enough to protect themselves, but not every sorcerer can and extending a shield to cover many others at once is an entirely different matter.”
I looked at the design below me. “But this shouldn’t work.”
The Ancient One shook her head. “It wouldn’t, normally. I’ve been working on this enchantment for the last two days—it’s one of the most complex workings I’ve ever done.”
“It covers the whole monastery?”
“All of Kamar-taj,” she replied. “Extending through to the sanctums, too.”
Granting everyone inside Eternal-grade mental protections, just as I’d sheltered myself and Pietro under Thena’s personal defences. That was… huge. “Could you extend it further? Tie it to the shield that the sanctums create, cover the whole world?”
The Ancient One smiled faintly. “Perhaps, after several years of dedicated research and careful experimentation. Agamotto’s work is not easily tampered with, by design.”
“So everyone’s only safe as long as they remain here,” I said, letting out a small sigh.
“The situation is… complex,” the sorcerer hedged. “There is something else that must occur before we may act further in any meaningful capacity.” She gestured, spinning up a portal back to the courtyard. “In the interim, join your friends—talk, recover your strength. For the moment, you are guests of Kamar-taj.”
