My thoughts came slow and scattered, fleeing from my consciousness even as I tried to focus on them. There was a voice above me somewhere, speaking—whispering?—though I couldn’t make out the words.

  …Thena?

  I couldn’t really feel my body at all. It felt a little like I was floating. Was I dead? I might be dead.

  A whispered memory passed through my awareness, murky and wavering. Eliza’s voice, this time. “Where do you think someone like you is going to end up, when you die?”

  Oh. Right. I remembered what had happened, now. Ikaris. I’d lost. I wasn’t strong enough to win.

  “Maybe not. You should get back up and do it anyway,” came the response.

  How? I was too weak. Too stupid. Too pathetic. I always had been.

  Above me, scarlet clouds flowed and churned across a darkened sky. To my side, a trio of dim silhouettes stood, watching and waiting.

  “You think of yourself as so little, sometimes,” the part of me that was Eliza said. “But that’s not who you actually are. That’s never been who you are.”

  “You are not who you think you are,” Thena agreed. “In much the same way that a child imagines monstrous things lurking in the dark, this fancy of how stupid and weak and small you are? It’s nothing but a thought. An idle imagining only, not a reflection of reality.”

  The third figure—me as I was when I collapsed the Darkhold Castle on myself, clad in the full regalia of the Scarlet Witch, a twisted crown upon my brow and framing my face, my fingers blackened with corruption—didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Her presence was enough. She just stared balefully, her glowing eyes unblinking.

  “You are, and always have been, strong. Frighteningly so, and I don’t just speak with regards to your power,” Thena said softly. “Most, were they to try to follow your path, would crumble. You don’t recognise the strength needed to take even one step forward as you.”

  I didn’t feel strong.

  My vision was swimming in and out of focus as I tried to squint at her, ethereal and pale against red skies. “Are you real,” I murmured, “or just in my head?”

  “This may be just in your head,” she responded, “but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

  I let out an annoyed grunt. “That’s… no. Don’t do that. None of that shit. I mean, are you real?” I asked. “Part of Thena from our connection, or from the helmet, or something. Or am I just imagining this?”

  She looked down at me, her blurry expression seemingly neutral. When she opened her mouth again, the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, high above us. “Hey, hey. Wanda! Come on…” The voice wasn’t hers.

  I tried to blink blearily, then realised that I couldn’t because my eyes weren’t actually open. Awareness of my body and its various parts was starting to return, though some part of me really wished it wouldn’t. Everything hurt, but it all still felt so… distant. Far away. Like the pain was happening to someone else and I was floating above it all, detached. It was all just noise.

  It took an inordinate amount of effort to open my eyes. Even then, I only managed a brief flutter. A second round of effort opened them properly, and even then, my vision was still blurry and unfocused. I felt almost drunk. I tried to say something. My lips moved and I exhaled a bit of air, but it didn’t manage to quite come together into anything even remotely intelligible. Red-tinged froth flecked my lips.

  “Hey! There you are. Come on, Wanda. You’re gonna be okay, okay? I just need you to stay awake. Please.”

  “Carol…?” I managed to mumble her name as I finally placed the voice and matching, blonde-framed face looking worriedly down at me. Her hairline was matted with blood, semi-dried streaks of it across her face. Red and blonde. Scarlet and gold. Heh. My colours, kind of.

  Vaguely, I realised that I was partially propped up on something—a hard, uneven surface—and tried to straighten up a little. The distance between me and the pain instantly contracted, everything slamming into me all at once. I found myself wheezing for air, each dragging breath a struggle. There was a dense, crushing pressure on my chest, like a giant rock with razor-sharp edges was sitting on me, compressing my insides and scraping against my lungs. I’d had a broken rib or three before, but this felt more like my entire ribcage had been staved in. My vision went blurry again, though I wasn’t sure if it was from me losing the ability to focus again or from the tears.

  “No, no—hey! Stay with me. Don’t try to move,” Carol whispered urgently, pressing the palm of one hand gently and somewhat awkwardly on my shoulder, like she wasn’t even sure if it was safe to hold me still. Some part of me dimly noted she was trying to keep her voice down.

  There was muffled droning in my ear, pieces of conversation that sounded like people talking underwater. I couldn’t make out who was who, or what the actual words that were being said were. It took a fuzzy moment, my head still not entirely all there, for me to realise it was some rapid comms chatter.

  Carol’s eyes flicked away from me as she responded. “Yeah, she’s conscious, but she needs medical attention as soon as possible.”

  A buzzing mush of words came in response. Something about Bruce?

  “I get that, Sam, but I don’t think it’s safe to move her.”

  I licked my lips, forcing the words out. “How bad?”

  Carol looked down at me again, something grim in her expression. She hesitated a moment before answering. “Bad.”

  “’Kay,” I mumbled, slurring my words. “Feel free to dress slutty at my funeral… It’s what I would’ve wanted.”

  I might’ve been a little delirious.

  My broken ankle had settled into an undifferentiated cold burning sensation that spiked warningly with pain as I shifted… There was also an especially sharp, burning, grinding sensation in my right arm, any attempt at even twitching it sending a fresh batch of white-hot pain signals lancing into me. A glance sideways to see what was up made me blanch and wish I hadn’t. Knowing what it actually looked like, rather than pushing forward in blessed ignorance, made it feel approximately ten times worse.

  The limb hung limp and twisted and useless—my elbow bulged at the joint, flopping backwards in a way that made me feel ill, and my forearm was distorted and bent in a place it wasn’t supposed to bend. A stark bit of bone poked through a ragged rent in the flesh, yellow-white peeking out of bloody red. There was a lot of blood, even if it didn’t seem to be actively gushing. Past it, my wrist was set sideways at a ninety-degree angle, fingers bent and splayed oddly.

  More words in my ear. “—fallen back—library.” It was weird. I could definitely hear them talking, but my brain was really struggling to make any sense of them for some reason, only small snatches actually registering. “Don’t think—…”

  “—Eternals.” I recognised Sterns’s voice. “What—…?”

  Carol straightened a bit, peering at something off to one side, her brow furrowed. “Makkari’s keeping Shuri busy. The others are arguing.”

  “—cohesion is faltering, but they’ll—… Ninety-three per cent chance. We don’t have much time.”

  “If anyone’s got anything left, now’s the time,” Tony’s voice came through, almost a snarl. He sounded upset. Angry. “Make ‘em bleed.”

  Carol bit her lip, looking down at me. “I have an idea, I think. It’s probably a bad one.”

  “Whatever it is, do it. —don’t have any other options.”

  “Okay,” Carol said softly.

  I blinked uncomprehendingly as she reached toward me with both hands.

  --

  The purple giantess threw herself forward into a reckless charge, sending Kingo scrambling to get out of the way. He flung out one hand, clipping the Wakandan gamma mutate’s shoulder with a burst of energy that threw her off just enough for him to dive off to one side, out of her path.

  Ikaris dived forward to meet her, ducking under a wild swipe of her vibranium-sharp claws to drive his fist into her side. She staggered back slightly, off-balance, and he followed up with his eye beams, twin lances of cosmic energy catching her full in the face and taking her feet out from under her. Shuri turned the rough tumble into a flip, landing in a crouch before immediately springing forward again. Appearing from seemingly nowhere, Makkari slammed into the ten-foot woman’s side, sending her ragdolling into a cluster of rubble.

  A set of footsteps pounded across the shattered ground behind Kingo. He turned reflexively, chaotic balls of energy forming at his fingertips, but froze with his hands half raised.

  Sersi ignored him completely as she stormed past. She looked rough, her hair matted and dusty, bruised, dirty, with several bloody lines gouged in her once-pristine armour. Beyond that… she looked absolutely furious.

  “Druig!” she snarled, her hands balled into fists at her sides, eyes fixed on the floating figure of Ikaris.

  The other Eternal turned away from the fight, gliding over to float in front of the two of them. His brief clash with Shuri had shaken a good amount of the Hulk-ichor from his body, though his formerly-pristine armour was still marred with greenish stains. “Sersi,” Druig said through him, his voice firm. “We can talk about this later.”

  Sersi slashed her arm in front of her. “Are you joking?”

  Kingo looked up at him. “Druig… what did you do, man?” he asked, a plaintive note in his tone.

  “I did what I had to,” he responded curtly. “The Avengers allied with the Sorcerer Supreme and Ikaris is our most powerful weapon. It would have been stupid to ignore that. I made a decision.”

  Sersi’s eyes dropped for a moment. “You erased his memory,” she said quietly, almost to herself, before raising her voice again at him. “After everything that happened, how could you go and do that?”

  “You should have… why didn’t you talk to us about this?” Kingo asked.

  Kingo hadn’t known. Sersi hadn’t known. Makkari… did she know? She’d always been closest to Druig. Phastos would have known—Kingo couldn’t imagine Druig using the Domo’s systems to do something like this without their resident technopath at least being aware of it.

  “Why? So you could have tried to talk me out of it?” Druig scoffed, the posture and tone of voice feeling out of place coming from Ikaris. “I don’t remember you stepping in when Ikaris and Ajak were going to erase my memories, Kingo. I’m the Prime Eternal now. This is no different.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  There was a blur of movement and Makkari was suddenly in the middle of them all, exasperation obvious in every flicked hand gesture as she looked rapidly back and forth between Sersi and Ikaris. Yes, by all means, I’ll just hold everyone off for as long as it takes for you all to have a wonderfully casual and lengthy conversation.

  “She’s right,” Druig agreed through Ikaris. “We need to focus. We’re not done here yet.”

  Sersi ignored him, rounding on the other woman instead. “Makkari,” she said, her tone clipped. “Did you know?”

  The speedster’s expression faltered for a moment. No, she signed, shoulders sagging slightly. But Druig is right—how is this any worse than what Ikaris and Ajak wanted to do to him?

  Across the courtyard, the purple giantess pulled herself free of the rubble she’d been slammed into. The Druig-possessed Ikaris rose several feet into the air, reorienting on her and unleashing twin golden lances from his eyes. Shuri roared a challenge as she braced her feet against the ground and set her shoulders—the beams slammed into her and she hunched over, stubbornly trying to power through the continuous stream of cosmic energy.

  “I didn’t agree to follow Druig because he wasn’t worse than Ajak,” Sersi snapped at her. “I agreed to follow him because he said he would be better. This isn’t right. You know this isn’t right.”

  Makkari’s eyes briefly dropped to the ground, then she looked back up at Sersi and shook her head. A moment later, she was gone, rejoining the fight.

  Sersi stared after her for a moment before turning to Kingo. “So that’s just it, then?” she asked him plaintively. “Accept it and move on?”

  “I’m not happy about this either, Sersi—I love Ikaris, too! But Druig isn’t an idiot. He knew just as well as you did what Ikaris would have done the second he woke up,” he said, a sharp spike of anger rising in his chest. He wasn’t even sure who the feeling was directed at anymore… Sersi. Druig. Ikaris. Ajak for putting them all in this situation to begin with. Everyone. “You were counting on it, remember? Keeping Ikaris in your back pocket in case Druig needed to be taken down a peg. You were going to use him, too. Just like Druig is using him now.”

  Sersi flinched back like he’d slapped her across the face. “That isn’t… Kingo,” she said, stumbling over her words. “That’s not—”

  “You’re a hypocrite,” he told her.

  “And you’re a coward!” she practically snarled back. “Do you actually even care about the rest of us at all? Or only when it’s convenient to you?”

  “I—” Kingo started to respond, but cut himself off abruptly as his—and Sersi’s—attention was drawn by a burning orange light flaring into being on the other side of the courtyard. A burst of sudden heat prickled at his skin in the cool night air.

  --

  Carol put a hand under the back of my head to support it. Then, moving carefully and slowly, she slipped Thena’s helmet off of me. I winced, the vague feeling of something missing reasserted itself in the back of my mind. I focused on it briefly, letting it distract me from the various distress reports being sent by every other part of my aching body.

  My thoughts were still foggy. Scattered. I didn’t really understand what Carol was doing. It seemed weirdly incongruous with the situation… We were in danger still, weren’t we? I needed the helmet to protect my squishy brain meats.

  Easing me back down, she held the construct in both hands in front of her for a moment, studying the softly-glowing golden wireframe of cosmic energy. She took a deep breath—almost a sigh—then lifted it and slipped it over her own head.

  Something was tugging at the periphery of my mind, an unfocused thought that was trying to point something out, but it failed to fully coalesce. I just stared at her, still feeling confused.

  One of Carol’s gloved hands reached down again, this time toward my throat. I felt a brief touch. A small tug. When she withdrew, she was holding a glimmering, golden gem gently between her thumb and forefinger.

  I felt the Mind Stone’s sudden absence, the Celestial-grade mental fortress I’d carved into myself weakening as the source of the cosmic energy cycling through my system was removed. The feeling snapped me out of it a bit, a small frisson of alarm poking cold fingers into my chest. What was Carol thinking?

  “Druig,” I mumbled, my breath still coming in long, rasping wheezes. “If he notices ’m not protected—” With a supreme act of effort, I reached up with my non-mangled hand, trying to take it back.

  “Shh, it’s okay. It’s fine. You can barely move,” Carol shushed me, easily evading my hand and clenching the Infinity Stone tightly in a fist for a moment. Her lips compressed in a half-hearted smile and her whispered tone dropped even lower, as though she were talking more to herself than to me. “I already said this was probably a bad idea.” She leaned down and I felt a light pressure on my forehead for a moment, her lips hot against my skin.

  The grim look on her face when she pulled away again made the worry in my chest spike sharply into focus, blooming into near-panic as I belatedly realised what she was doing. I reached for her again. “No! Don’t, we don’t, you can’t—” I slurred as the words all tried to come out at once, “—wait! Please, don’t, please.”

  Her hand went to her forehead, clicking the Mind Stone neatly into place in the focal point of the construct’s energy channels, exactly where it was meant to go.

  Carol gasped, her entire body going tense and rigid.

  The Infinity Stone glowed, blazing as the helmet immediately started to draw out as much of its power as possible and channel it inwards. Wisps of blue-edged, yellow-orange energy cascaded outwards from the Stone, racing down and outlining Carol’s body like flames catching on a pool of oil.

  As far as I knew, the outcome of Carol’s initial exposure to the Tesseract had been a fluke. A messy confluence of variables that had somehow resulted in her harnessing a raw, primal expression of the same cosmic energy wielded by the Eternals and their creators. Exposing herself to a second Infinity Stone like this, with the helmet ripping out the full power of the Mind Stone and pouring it all directly into her, was stupid and reckless. We still had no idea how any of this worked. Not really.

  But.

  Her power hadn’t been gone. Not completely. I’d felt the traces of it when I’d checked her over earlier, a chaotic jumble of still-smouldering embers of cosmic energy spread all throughout her body. And now the Mind Stone was stoking those metaphorical embers, fanning them, feeding them, coaxing them to reignite.

  …Uh, or maybe it was actually less metaphorical than that.

  A wave of sweltering heat buffeted me, kissing my exposed skin and leaving it red and raw. It suddenly felt like I was sitting way too close to a bonfire, the scorching heat a novel addition to the clamour of competing pain signals my body was already sending me. The power crawling across Carol roiled and seethed angrily, a heat haze rising around us. The air scorched my throat and lungs as I wheezed it in, making it even harder to breathe than it already had been. The cloying, iron-rich smell of burning blood clogged my nostrils.

  Carol was hunching over, her face a trembling mask of concentration. My clothes and what was left of my hair started to singe, my lips dry and splitting. The edges of Carol’s suit were blackening, armoured material that I knew was capable of surviving atmospheric re-entry starting to crack and fail.

  She was running way, way too hot. At this rate…

  I drew on my magic, trembling as I scrabbled at the well of power inside of me and flung what I could toward her. If I could syphon off some of the excess energy, draw it in through the Celestial channels I’d carved into myself, maybe I could help her ride this out. The Guardians of the Galaxy had done something like that with the Power Stone’s energy, right? They’d shared the burden between themselves so Quill wouldn’t burn up. Maybe we could do the same.

  Or maybe we’d just burn together.

  There was nothing else I could do. Nothing that came to mind, at least.

  Fuck it, we ball. Probing tendrils of scarlet magic reached for the helmet—for the Stone at Carol’s brow—questing, pulling, trying to draw what I could into me instead of her.

  And then we were somewhere else.

  An endless expanse of formless white. A blank space: nothingness stretching into infinity.

  What was happening? Was this Carol’s mindscape? That didn’t seem right. I hadn’t tried to enter her mind. And it felt… Heavy. Like an immeasurably vast weight was pushing down on me. It felt a little like the space was actively trying to hedge me out, somehow, like I wasn’t supposed to be here. I realised I was translucent. A ghost. Barely even here at all.

  Carol turned her head to look around, visible confusion warring with the effort and focus already on her face. She couldn’t see me.

  Above her was someone else. Something else. I got the vaguest impression of something humanoid, formed of the same blank nothing as the rest of… wherever we were. I wasn’t even sure how I was perceiving it. The fact that I recognised it as conscious—and powerful, somehow—was the only thing differentiating it from the background.

  In the place that wasn’t a place, the entity that was not an entity spoke words that were not words.

  I am born anew.

  Carol looked at it uncomprehendingly. “I… I know you.” Her voice was soft, almost inaudible.

  It held out a hand toward her.

  You cried out for aid. I heard. I came.

  Tentatively, she reached for it.

  As quickly as the vision came, it was gone again, leaving me lying amid the cracked and fallen rubble of Kamar-taj, Carol still kneeling over me. My perception felt disjointed and off-kilter, like reality had been paused for a moment and someone had just hit ‘play’ to pick up where we’d left off.

  I didn’t really have any time to process what I’d just seen, though. My eyes widened slightly as, above and behind Carol, Ikaris rose into the air and oriented on us, his armour dirty with greenish stains. A raw bolt of panic rose in my chest and I clawed at my magic, trying to pull something together to get us moving out of the way. There was nothing else I could do—I didn’t feel like I could pull together the juice to block Ikaris, or at least not do it quickly enough to matter. Just staying conscious felt like it was taking an active effort on my part.

  Even so, in my current state I just wasn’t fast enough. Golden beams of cosmic energy tore through the air toward us.

  At the same time, a visible wave of burning power flowed out from Carol, orange-blue tendrils of power shimmering like flames as they formed a cocoon around the two of us. I flinched back from the flames, expecting the heat to intensify—to consume me, to burn me alive. But it didn’t. Instead, it wrapped gently around me, cradling me like an oppressively warm blanket. Still uncomfortable, but clearly intended to protect rather than harm.

  Carol was still visibly struggling—her shoulders shaking, her breathing ragged and irregular. A pair of white-hot holes in space burned where her eyes should be, fixed on me and blazing with so much power they looked almost like tiny stars. Even so, aside from the sudden enveloping wave of power shielding me, she barely seemed to even notice the lances of cosmic energy as they dissipated forcefully against her back.

  Several seconds crawled agonisingly past before Ikaris relented, eye beams cutting out.

  Carol’s hands were clenched, white-knuckled, at her sides. Slowly, as if every bit of movement was taking an immense amount of effort and concentration, she rose to her feet, turning to face the Eternal. As she moved up and away from me, I saw that the tall, rigid crest of the helmet she wore had dissolved, Carol’s hair replacing it in a golden, fiery plume like it did when she was in her Binary state. Her suit was almost entirely charred black now, the ruined material flaking away from her arms. The golden star and bars in the middle of her chest had started to melt, drooping and distorting.

  The shimmering waves of power that had wrapped around me lifted away from my body and unfurled, spreading out from her shoulders. The structure of them wasn’t solid, exactly—the cosmic energy burned and seethed like living flame—but the shape they took reminded me of the wings that Thena had manifested when she’d channelled the Mind Stone.

  There was a moment where the two of them just stared at each other. Eternal and ascended human, two beings holding immense cosmic power.

  Carol moved.

  I was hit twice. First, the pressure wave from Carol taking wing pinned me to the ground like a butterfly on a collector’s board, compressing my injured chest and setting me choking on my own spit and blood as I struggled for breath. A bare fraction of an instant later, she slammed into Ikaris and—even though I had to be thirty metres or more away—the shockwave from the impact dropped on me like a hammerblow. If there had been any intact windows left in Kathmandu, there weren’t anymore.

  Purple-black afterimages, pinprick marks left by Carol’s eyes, danced across my retinas. The edges of my vision darkened for a moment as I pushed through the pain, fighting to draw a thin trickle of air between clenched teeth. I forced myself to sit up, drawing on my magic to support me.

  Carol and Ikaris were gone.

  The scattered clouds in the night sky overhead had been displaced by their passage, leaving a completely clear circle of brightly-visible stars to one side of the floating monolith of the Domo, which still loomed large over the monastery. In the centre of the clear space blazed a star brighter than the rest, angry and flickering.

  I twitched the fingers of my non-mangled hand and my magic wrapped around me, threads of telekinetic energy trying to keep things steady as I started to force myself back to my feet. I could barely move at all without feeling like I was being stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Even keeping it as steady as possible, my other arm was just a smear of agony. My ankle was, somehow, even worse than it had been before. A second passed. Two. Three.

  Then, high above, the star blossomed silently, expanding until it lit up the sky like the sun. A sharp intake of breath almost set my chest to seizing up again as I flinched back from the sudden light, squinting upwards at it with a sick feeling in my stomach. Night had been chased away by unnatural, blazing day; stark shadows reaching black fingers through the remains of the partially-destroyed monastery around me and, presumably, the rest of the city. The country. The world.

  It only lasted a moment. Night managed to reassert itself, the blazing light in the sky guttering and waning back to a pinprick before fading away completely.

  I managed to pull myself to my feet, though really, the only thing keeping me up was the telekinetic energy I was using to hold myself steady. My shoulders were trembling as I stared up at the sky, eyes fixed on the place where Carol had vanished, looking for some trace of her. Something. Anything.

  Someone was talking in my ear. “—Wanda, can you hear me? Wanda? You need to—”

  My tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth. Part of me wanted to respond, but I wasn’t even sure what to say. Was Carol…?

  My breath was still coming in shallow, wheezing gasps. I tore my eyes away from the sky, blinking away the tears. Even if Carol and Ikaris were gone—God, I really hoped Carol was okay, she had to be okay—I had to focus, I couldn’t let what she’d done be for nothing. There were still the other Eternals to—

  In front of me lay the body of a fallen giant.

  “…No. Please, no. That’s not…” The words were small and weak, barely even audible. I felt numb.

  The Hulk lay less than a half-dozen metres away from me, his bulky, over-muscled form still and silent on the ground, the shattered flagstones around him dark with a wide pool of green ichor. Sightless eyes stared up at the stars. There was a hole where his chest should’ve been.