Sersi and the witch fell into the sky.

  Kingo would have watched them, but his attention was instead drawn by a flicker of frantic movement just beyond the ruined fa?ade of the building across the street. His eyes widened and he broke into a run, his feet starting to move before his mind had finished fully registering the scene.

  Makkari was pinned to a ruined concrete pillar like an insect to a collector’s board, her feet dangling above the ground as she flailed an arm in his general direction. Blood stained her armour, alternately blending in with the red and starkly visible against the silver-grey of the Celestial designs as it dripped from where Wanda Maximoff’s vibranium spear jutted from her shoulder. Her expression was twisted with pain, mouth moving silently as she took short, sharp breaths, tears welling in the corners of her eyes. The trembling fingers of one of her hands were hooked over the haft of the spear just above where it protruded from her body, while the other flicked weakly, trying to sign something to Kingo.

  “Easy! Hey, it’s okay, I, uh. Okay. Okay.” Kingo took a deep breath, his mind buzzing as he looked over Makkari’s wound and the spear impaling her. It had gone all the way through, the head of the weapon embedded deep within the concrete column behind her. He hesitated for a brief moment, paralysed with indecision. Pulling it out, especially with it holding her weight like that? He had no idea how to do that safely. Arishem, he wished Ajak was here. She’d know what to do. “Hang on, I’m… I’m gonna get you down, okay?”

  Makkari’s eyes were wide, scepticism and worry painted across her features, but she gave him a small, tight nod of confirmation. However, as he stepped in, one hand going experimentally to the haft of the spear, she let out a sudden huff of air, her eyes fixed on something above and beyond Kingo. He stopped what he was doing and followed her gaze, looking back up toward the Domo, before his eyes widened once more with shock.

  The Domo was gone.

  Instead, a massive cloud of something fluttered and flowed downward, spreading out to blanket the city as it started to descend like a dense, sudden snowfall. Were those… flower petals?

  It took Kingo a moment to work out what had happened. Sersi must have—

  “Karun!” His mind kicked into sudden, screeching overdrive as he jerked away from Makkari and the spear. He ran the half-dozen steps back out into the street in a panic, his head on a swivel, eyes searching the darkened sky. “No. No, no, no, no, no!”

  A growl in front of him forced his attention back to ground level. Emerging from behind the remains of Kamar-taj’s wall was the ten-foot-tall Wakandan gamma mutate, now free from Phastos’ bindings, her face set in a furious scowl.

  Kingo didn’t know what to do. His eyes bounced up and down frantically, torn between looking up at the sky and the threat in front of him. “Please,” he started. “We’re not fighting anymore. We’re done. I don’t want to—”

  Something heavy bounced off the top of his skull, cutting him off. He flinched, blinking as the leatherbound tome landed facedown, pages against the asphalt. It wasn’t alone. The entire street, the monastery, and the gardens and buildings around it were suddenly pelted with a short, sharp burst of… stuff. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of books from every era, paintings and other irreplaceable artworks, pieces of fine jewellery, an arsenal’s worth of ancient weapons and armour, small statues and idols and countless other precious relics and cultural artifacts rained down, clattering noisily across the asphalt or smashing on impact, as though someone had gathered up the contents of a dozen different museums before simply dumping the whole lot out over the city.

  The giant woman across from Kingo lunged toward him in a catlike pounce.

  Instinctively, traceries of golden cosmic energy flared into being across the Eternal’s hands, but he stifled the urge to raise them. He didn’t resist at all as she slammed him to the ground, pinning him under her weight as her claw-like nails buried themselves in his chest and shoulder, shredding through armour and flesh alike.

  “Please,” Kingo managed to choke out.

  She snarled in his face, pressing down, carving her claws deeper into him.

  “Shuri! Stop!” Gilgamesh’s voice rang out from off to one side, followed by pounding footsteps. “He’s not fighting anymore!”

  The Wakandan giantess whipped her head to the side, her long braids smacking Kingo in the face as she glowered angrily at the other Eternal. A few long seconds passed before, with what seemed like a massive amount of restraint on her part, she lifted her weight off Kingo and rose to her feet, leaving him gasping for breath on the ground. She took a step backwards, still tense, flexing her hands like she was considering lunging at him again.

  Kingo started to sit up, then a hand appeared in his peripheral vision. Gilgamesh. He took it gratefully, letting the larger man help him back to his feet.

  “Phastos and Ikaris,” Gil said, his voice tight. He looked rough. At some point, he’d lost the simple, roughspun shirt he’d been wearing earlier, his bare, barrel-like torso criss-crossed with long, angry red marks, superficial cuts and soot marks.

  Kingo shot a lingering, helpless look back across the street, toward Makkari. She was staring in their direction with wide, fearful eyes. “I know. I… Karun,” he said, gesturing vaguely with one hand. “My v— my friend. He was on the Domo. I don’t…” He paused, voice on the verge of breaking. “He…”

  Gil dropped a heavy hand onto his shoulder. “Okay. We’ll find him,” he said, his tone gentle. “We need to get Makkari first. She can help.”

  There was a tightness in Kingo’s chest that had nothing to do with the claw marks Shuri had left there. He nodded, stumbling slightly as he followed the other man the short distance across the street back toward Makkari.

  The Wakandan giantess watched them guardedly as they moved away from her, her head cocked lightly to one side as though she was listening to something. After a few seconds, she turned and loped away, her long strides carrying her swiftly back into the monastery grounds proper.

  Gil’s brow was furrowed as he took in Makkari’s predicament. “Makkari,” he said gently. “The fight’s over. We’re done. Okay?”

  She gave him a tight, shallow nod in return, wincing at the movement.

  The larger man stepped in close, one arm going around her to take her weight while the other reached up and took firm hold of the spear pinning her in place. Makkari made a pained noise—a sharp exhalation—as he pulled the weapon free of the concrete with a short, sharp motion. Next, he carefully laid her down on the ground in a sitting position, trying not to jostle or move the bar of metal that was still through her shoulder as he knelt by her side.

  There was a lot of blood. Makkari’s face was pale, her brow beaded with sweat. Each breath seemed like an effort to draw in.

  “Kingo! Gilgamesh!” Sersi’s voice came from behind them.

  Kingo turned and straightened a little when he saw that Sersi wasn’t alone. Ajak was with her. The two women closed with them swiftly, Ajak sweeping past Kingo to immediately kneel down on the other side of Makkari, opposite Gilgamesh.

  Golden energy was already playing across Ajak’s palms as she held them over the other Eternal’s injuries. She looked at Gil. “The spear,” she instructed, her voice low.

  He nodded, then shot Makkari a sympathetic look. “This is probably going to hurt,” he told her. One hand went to her shoulder, to hold her in place, while the other closed around the haft of the weapon. “On three, okay? One—” He yanked the spear free with a single, smooth motion.

  Makkari opened her mouth in a quiet scream, a spasm of pain running through her body. Gil tossed the spear off to one side, the metal ringing as it hit the ground, and held her still while Ajak’s power healed her. It was only the work of a few seconds, though each one felt like it took a lifetime to crawl by.

  As the three of them stood back up, Gil lending a slightly shaky Makkari his arm for support, Ajak turned toward Kingo. Her expression made his stomach drop, his tongue suddenly dry and thick in his mouth. “Kingo… I’m so sorry,” she said gently, eyes full of sympathy and sorrow.

  Kingo blinked, feeling tears starting to burn at the corners of his eyes. “Wh…” It was too hard to get the words out. He already knew what she was going to say. “Karun,” he whispered.

  “He died on impact,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do.”

  He exhaled sharply, not quite a sigh, not quite a sob, blinking as he turned away and looked back in the direction Ajak and Sersi had come from. He couldn’t see anything from where he was, but his feet refused to move. It felt like they were encased in lead.

  Sersi reached out to touch his arm. “Kingo—”

  He slapped her hand away, recoiling slightly. His fingers flexed, slowly clenching into a trembling fist as he glared at her. “You,” he ground out.

  Her eyes dropped, a chastened look on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I couldn’t… It was the only way.”

  A memory flashed through Kingo’s mind. Karun, on the Domo, bowing. Thank you for everything you do for humanity, Miss Sersi. Please do not give up on us. Kingo’s vision blurred, his eyes full of tears. “You—” He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to say.

  Before he could finish getting his thoughts in order, however, orange sparks of magical energy coalesced off to one side, opening into one of the sorcerers’ portals. The Sorcerer Supreme was standing on the other side. She looked just as battle-worn as the rest of them, her robes torn and streaked with dirt and blood. “Ajak,” she said mildly. “Perhaps now you would be more amenable to standing down?”

  Ajak straightened, setting her shoulders and schooling her expression into something calmer and more neutral. She glanced around, meeting the eyes of each of the other Eternals briefly, giving the woman through the portal a small nod. “Yes. I think that would be for the best.”

  The Sorcerer Supreme took a step backwards and gestured with a hand. Ajak took the invitation for what it was, stepping through to join her on the other side. The rest of the Eternals followed, though Kingo hesitated, lingering until he was the last. The sorcerer’s expression softened slightly as she looked at him, but she didn’t say anything. She just waited. He shot one more mournful glance back down the street where Sersi and Ajak had come from, then followed the others through the gateway.

  He stepped out into what was left of the scorched gardens of Kamar-taj, on the complete opposite side of the monastery from the street they’d just been on. The Eternals and the Sorcerer Supreme stood gathered next to an empty shrine; Kingo vaguely recollected seeing a black stone statue of Lord Vishnu there earlier, before Wanda had ripped it from its place and shattered it against one of Phastos’s barriers.

  Druig was there. Alone.

  He was standing maybe a dozen meters ahead of them, staring wistfully up at the sky as the last remaining petals that had once been the Domo twisted through the air and came to rest on the bare earth and scorched grass around him. He glanced briefly in their direction, a half-hearted smile flashing across his face for a moment, before he dropped his eyes to the ground, wilting slightly under the combined gazes of the other Eternals.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  Ajak took a step toward him. “Druig…” she started, her voice gentle.

  He shook his head slowly, letting out a little huff of disbelief. “You know, I—”

  A solid dome of Celestial stone, green marble threaded through with golden filigree, materialised over him, as if a piece of the Domo had just decloaked in the space.

  “Druig!”

  Kingo flinched and a few of the others took several steps forward. Makkari was suddenly right in front of them, pausing briefly before carefully reaching out a hand to the stone. Her fingertips passed through it instead, faint golden ripples of light spreading out across the surface from her touch.

  It took Kingo—and everyone else, it seemed like—a moment to realise what they were seeing, and by then it was too late. The illusion dissipated, green stone evaporating into nothing and golden lines re-tracing themselves out of existence.

  Makkari fell to her knees, hands and shoulders shaking, her mouth open in a silent scream of grief.

  In front of her, Druig lay still on the ground. His skin was already deadening and turning grey, his eyes clouded over with white, blood leaking from what looked like several stab wounds in his chest, through his armour. Sprite stood over the body, a long, bloody dagger held in one tightly clenched fist. She was staring down at Druig, her body tense, shoulders trembling slightly, her breath coming in small, sharp fits.

  “Sprite…” Sersi said, her voice small and sick with horror. She took a step forward and stopped.

  “For Ikaris,” the child-like Eternal said, dully. She lifted the bloody dagger, hand trembling, then opened her fingers and let it drop from them.

  Kingo just felt numb.

  --

  My arm tingled with the familiar cold shock of cosmic energy as threads of golden light spilled out of the stump and solidified into bone, tendons, muscle, fat and skin. The channels of cosmic energy I’d carved into myself reformed with the rest of it, too, which I hadn’t expected but made sense. They were based on the Eternals’ internal designs, after all, and Ajak’s power was meant to heal and repair them, too. They were a part of me now.

  I flexed the new fingers experimentally as they formed—it felt weird, but the sensation only lasted a few moments, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention in any case. Watching myself regrow a hand and having my insides knit themselves back together as Ajak held her glowing hands over me was something that I should have found fascinating. I probably should have found some relief and comfort as the golden light spread throughout my body, repairing all the damage that had been done to it, easing the pain and relieving the pressure in my chest so I could breathe easily again. But as things were, it was hard to work up any degree of real interest. I still felt cold inside. Detached and a little numb, like I wasn’t even really here.

  As the Prime Eternal stepped away, Bucky moved in to join Natasha, Pietro and me. He’d been the first she’d healed, and I’d been the very last, at my own insistence. A little part of me had been surprised that, when she’d healed Bucky’s other wounds and gotten him back on his feet, his missing arm hadn’t grown back. I hadn’t been the only one to be surprised by it, either. The Eternal had explained something quietly about spiritual imprints and the specifics of how her power worked, but I hadn’t really processed it at all—again, I just wasn’t as focused on what was happening around me as I should have been.

  The important thing was that he was okay.

  “Thanks,” he said, reaching out tentatively to brush my forearm with his fingertips, as if to reassure himself that it was really back. “For protecting me.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured back, still not really paying attention.

  Nat nudged me with her shoulder, but I didn’t really respond to that, either.

  My hand was still up in front of me. Something seemed off, and it took me a few seconds to realise that it was because the tip of my ring finger—the physical piece of me that I’d lost to Eliza—had grown back along with the rest of it. That didn’t seem fair, somehow. Bucky didn’t get his arm back, but I got my finger?

  I let my arm fall back to my side and looked over at where the rest of the Eternals had relocated to, near the split and blackened remains of the ancient tree that had once crouched in the corner of the courtyard. The sorcerers had retrieved the corpses of Phastos and Druig and laid the two of them out side by side. There was a small gap between them and the body of Karun—Kingo’s valet. He’d fallen when the Domo had disappeared. The Bollywood actor was kneeling by his dead friend’s side, his head bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped together in front of him as if in prayer. Behind him, Sersi and Sprite had sat down on opposite ends of a low stone bench that had remained miraculously unbroken, together and yet still apart, the distance between them more than just the physical space.

  Gilgamesh was speaking quietly to Mordo. They were a little too far away for me to overhear, not that I was particularly interested in listening in. A few more sorcerers stood guard nearby, watching the Eternals warily, but it seemed a little perfunctory. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Hostilities had apparently started to grind to a halt even before I’d killed Phastos. The remaining Eternals weren’t exactly prisoners—if Makkari, at least, decided to leave, it’d be tricky to try to stop her—but it wasn’t like we were going to just let them walk away after all of this, either.

  As Ajak returned to the others, Makkari started to sign something to her, but barely got through a couple of gestures before she broke down, great, grief-filled sobs wracking her body as her shoulders heaved. Ajak put her arms around her, resting one hand on the back of Makkari’s head as she buried her face in Ajak’s shoulder.

  I looked away from them, feeling my eyes start to sting again.

  Steve, Maria and Sam were just outside of where one of Kamar-taj’s walls used to be, a group of a dozen or so IAF pilots and airmen standing in front of them. The flight crews looked confused and shaken, huddling close together in a defensive cluster as Steve tried to keep them calm and talk through what had happened.

  It didn’t feel like we’d won.

  We hadn’t, had we? Not really. Not in any way that actually mattered. When it came right down to it, this entire fight had been pointless. There’d been no real reason for it to happen. It hadn’t presented any sort of solution for the Emergence. Everything that had happened here had happened for nothing.

  Almost unwillingly, my eyes came to rest, once again, on the corpse of the Hulk. A magical barrier had been erected around him: there was a faint shimmer of orange mandala patterns in the air, something to cordon off and contain his gamma-tainted blood, to avoid anyone getting sick. Tony and Shuri were standing at the outside edge of the space, looking in. Looking lost.

  The Ancient One was standing off to one side, speaking to Wong. The librarian bowed his head and headed off somewhere, and she turned to meet my gaze, tucking her hands behind her back. I felt my magic rippling below the surface, responding to my emotions. My hands clenching into fists, I strode purposefully past Pietro, heading over to where the sorcerer was waiting for me.

  “Undo it,” I said to her. I flicked my fingers toward the Hulk’s body, just in case it wasn’t a hundred per cent clear what I was talking about.

  “No.”

  Power surged within me, wisps of chaos magic dripping from my fingers. I couldn’t see myself, but I was pretty sure my eyes had just done that thing where they glowed red. “Undo. It,” I hissed, practically spitting the words at her.

  The others who had been standing with me—Nat, Bucky, Pietro—had followed me over, but I was pretty sure a lot of other people were looking at me now, too.

  The Ancient One met my gaze evenly, her tone quiet and precise. “I can’t.”

  I didn’t say anything in response, my eyes just dropping to the amulet around her neck. The Eye of Agamotto. With the right spell, the right magic channelled into the Time Stone, I knew that time could be reversed in a small area. People who had died didn’t have to stay that way. They could come back. I’d seen it happen. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. Vision…

  The Ancient One shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s been too long. Too much has transpired—too many small, entangled events. It would be extremely dangerous and irresponsible.”

  “You could save him.”

  “I could cause a temporal paradox, trap us in a feedback loop and collapse the universe.”

  …I’d seen that sort of thing happen, too. Strange Supreme. The version of Dr Strange that had basically torn his own universe apart trying to undo the death of Christine Palmer. Regular flavour Strange, on the other hand, had only ever risked reversing time like that once, and only then because Kaecilius had won and the Dark Dimension was already invading our reality—everything would have been lost anyway, had he not. That wasn’t the case here.

  I lifted my eyes to look back up at her. “It was supposed to be me,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “You said it was going to be me.”

  “What?” Natasha asked, looking between us.

  If I tell you what happens, it won’t happen—that’s what she’d said to me. The exact words that Dr Strange had spoken to Tony Stark, before Tony had sacrificed himself to stop Thanos. Things rhyme, right? Things were supposed to rhyme.

  The sorcerer shook her head again. “I said no such thing.”

  “You did,” I persisted. “You said, you—”

  She held up a hand. “Whatever your interpretation of my words might have been, it was not how they were intended.”

  My vision had started to blur again, a fresh batch of hot tears welling up in the corners of my eyes as I looked back over toward where the Hulk’s body lay. “I… If I’d known, I could have done something different—”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  “I could have tried—” My voice was getting louder.

  “You couldn’t have.”

  “I could have done something!” I was yelling, now. “I could have saved him!”

  “Wanda—” Nat’s hand was on my arm.

  “You couldn’t have done anything,” the Ancient One said.

  “I could have saved him!” I screamed, the air around me rippling with wisps of red energy.

  “Wanda! Look at me—look at me!” Nat was suddenly in front of me, her hands at the sides of my face, her forehead pressed to mine, heedless of the power swirling around us.

  My eyes locked on hers, my breath hiccupping in my throat. Her eyes were red as well, shining with tears of her own.

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” she told me.

  I could barely get the words out, mumbling as my voice broke. “But I could have… I could have saved him…”

  She shushed me and I fell silent. I was trembling, trying desperately to keep some semblance of composure, to hold myself back from breaking down. Pietro stepped in, trying to put his arms around me, but I flinched away, pulling out of Nat’s grasp and holding a hand up to ward them off. My brother blinked, looking a bit hurt, and I took a step backwards, crossing my arms in front of me defensively. I felt shitty about it, but I knew that I wasn’t always fully in control of my magic when I was emotional like this and I really didn’t trust myself very much right now.

  Out of my eye, I saw the IAF airmen hesitantly step through a sorcerous portal that had been opened for them. The gateway closed, and Steve and the others who had been with him started over to join us. Nat met his gaze, something unspoken passing between them, but I was too tired and wrung out to pay that much attention to whatever nuances were there.

  Steve briefly glanced toward the fallen Hulk as he approached us, but Tony stormed over to the Ancient One first.

  “You saw this coming,” Tony said, his tone clipped and angry. “You knew it would happen.”

  Back by the magical barrier cordoning off the Hulk’s body, Sterns and Darcy had emerged from somewhere to join Shuri. While the two of them were watching Tony, the Wakandan princess’s eyes were fixed on me. Our eyes met for a moment, her eyes boring into me like she was trying to beat me in a staring contest. I looked away, focusing on Tony and the Ancient One instead.

  The sorcerer inclined her head, acknowledging his statement. “I did.”

  “Why didn’t you stop it?”

  “I had to make choices. This was one of the consequences I accepted.”

  “Accepted?” Tony hissed, an incredulous look on his face. He took a step forward, getting up into her personal space. The sorcerer didn’t flinch, calmly meeting his gaze as he spat his words practically in her face. “It wasn’t yours to accept! I don’t see you on the ground.”

  “Tony,” Steve said, his tone one of gentle rebuke.

  Tony turned toward him, eyes blazing with anger, but didn’t say anything.

  “I know.” Steve looked upset, though he didn’t seem as badly shaken as Tony or I were. When it came down to it, I suppose, he was a soldier. He’d fought in World War II. He was a lot more used to seeing comrades-in-arms die than the rest of us. He looked at the Ancient One. “We didn’t choose this. We don’t trade lives.”

  The sorcerer cocked her head lightly to one side. “You may have the luxury of pretending that that is the case, Captain, but it was your choices that led us here as well, not mine alone. The fact that you don’t know the results of your actions in advance does not, in itself, lend them some inherent moral righteousness.”

  “We could have talked it through,” he persisted. “Worked out another way.”

  “Talking is an action with its own consequences. I weighed many possibilities when I sought a way through this, and in this case, discussing what I had seen would have provoked needless actions that would have erased every path I could see with minimal harm.”

  “And we’re just supposed to trust your word on that?” Tony scoffed.

  “Yes,” the Ancient One said, raising her voice slightly for the first time. “The Avengers came to Kamar-taj for help with a problem that you were incapable of solving on your own. You have some idea of what I have at my disposal and when I tell you this was the best way? You need to accept it.”

  “People are dead,” Steve said.

  He gestured around the courtyard—toward the Hulk. Toward a small gathering of sorcerers at the other end of the courtyard, where several motionless forms had been gathered up and laid out together in a row on the ground. Toward the Eternals and their fallen.

  “Yours and ours. Even if this was the best outcome, it was still you who made the call. You chose for them to die.”

  “I know.” Heat rose in the Ancient One’s tone. “You don’t need to lecture me about the lives lost because of the choices I’ve had to make. I remember every single one of them, Captain. But we are not just our losses. As much as they hurt, we learn from them. Then we go back out there and we do our best to make up for them, even though we know we never will. We save as many as we can to make up for the ones that we couldn’t.” She paused, taking a breath. “That’s all we can do.”

  Tony let out a scornful huff. “Yeah, well—”

  The Ancient One held up a hand, cutting him off without a word as she pointedly turned to one side and looked up at the sky. He followed her gaze, as did the rest of us, and a flicker of something very much like relief penetrated the tightly packed bundle of emotions in my chest.

  A fiery streak—a figure silhouetted in burning energy—dropped out of the sky, heading toward us.