Chapter 136
Too much time had passed since Carol had flown into space and exploded for me to have had much hope that she’d survived. I hadn’t even tried to open a portal to her. I’d expected the attempt to fail, and the longer I put that moment off—the longer I didn’t have confirmation that she was dead—the longer I could pretend that she wasn’t. That I hadn’t gotten two Avengers killed, instead of just one. It was stupid and selfish and short-sighted, but hey, that was me in a nutshell, right?
There were a lot of complicated emotions still wound up tight inside my chest, but part of me managed to relax slightly as I looked up at the sky, watching Carol’s descent. She was radiant, in the most literal sense of the word. A wispy, translucent aura of burning energy surrounded her: the usual blazing yellows and oranges, edged in blue, but writ on a larger scale than I’d seen before. The waves of power rolling off her back, sweeping out to either side of her, were unmistakably wings, though they had more in common with solar flares or the bow shocks formed by stellar winds than anything physical.
The sleeves of her uniform had burned away almost to her neckline, leaving what remained charred black and ragged at the edges. The star in the middle of her chest had turned to molten gold and streaked outward, its new shape twin to her aura, reminiscent of a bird with spread wings. Thena’s helmet was gone entirely—I’d seen it start to come apart when Carol had first absorbed the Mind Stone’s energies—leaving her hair floating loosely around her head, almost like she was underwater.
As she drew closer, it became obvious that she was still struggling with it all. Her face was a mask of concentration, each breath she took slow and deep and deliberate, her fists still clenched at her sides. The moment her feet touched the ground, she inhaled sharply and the fiery aura and wings winked out of existence, evaporating into nothingness. She stumbled forward a step and I moved without thinking, darting in to steady her.
She flinched slightly at my touch, looking at me wide-eyed. Her eyes were bright and clear and normal again, no longer the white-hot holes in space that had seared themselves temporarily into the back of my eyelids. “You’re okay,” she said, faint surprise and relief mingling in her voice.
I shrugged and lifted my healed arm. “Good as new, with easy terms,” I quoted half-heartedly. “You’re okay?”
“I… think so.”
“You exploded,” Pietro told her. A few of the others had gathered in closer as well, staying back just far enough to avoid crowding her.
Carol nodded, her eyes flicking briefly in his direction before she looked back at me. Holding a fist up, she turned it over, fingers trembling as they came apart to reveal the Mind Stone clutched safely within. I put my own palm over it, squeezing her hand briefly, before taking the gem back. Slipping it back into the locket at my throat, where it belonged, I felt the walls of my mental fortress rise once more as it connected to the Celestial circuit that traced its way across my chest and arms.
Movement in the corner of my vision caught my eye. The remaining Eternals were all watching us intently—Ajak and Gilgamesh’s expressions were unreadable, and Makkari and Kingo just looked resigned, but faint, hesitant glimmers of hope played across Sersi and Sprite’s faces.
“Glad you made it back, Carol. We lost too many others,” Steve said from somewhere behind me. “What happened to Ikaris?”
She looked at him for a moment, as if the question confused her and she needed a moment to puzzle it out, then shook her head. “He’s gone. I barely managed to hold myself together.”
Hope flickered out.
“What happened… It wasn’t just the Stone. That power. There’s something inside me.”
“Something alive,” I said.
Carol nodded slowly, her brow furrowed. “It feels so familiar. I think… it might have always been there? Since I got my powers. It spoke to me.”
I’d heard it, too. I am born anew.
A flicker of something I didn’t quite catch passed across her features—guilt? Shame?—and she dropped her eyes to the ground. “I don’t know exactly how to explain it. When it woke up, something in me wanted him to burn. Not just him. All of them. And it didn’t… it didn’t matter that other people were there. In the way,” she shifted slightly, not quite willing to look at me. “I had to fight to stop myself. I needed to get away, or…”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Whatever it is, it wasn’t you.”
“It was me,” she said stubbornly. “Or a part of me, somehow. Even when I was up there, I had to fight—to hold myself back—because it felt so obvious that the answer was to just burn everything.”
“Everything?” Nat asked.
“The Celestial. It was the problem and I could solve it. Earth was… It was like it didn’t matter. It was just something in the way. All I had to do was… make it burn. Make everything burn.”
The incredible power, the heat, the fiery wings, the impulse toward destruction, the fact that there was some sentience behind it, even the white space I’d intruded on—all of it seemed to add up to one thing. Except that it was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
“It’s…” I licked my lips, hesitating, hardly believing what I was about to say. “I think it’s the Phoenix Force.”
My mind was racing, my sense of self having been snapped entirely back into the here and now by the impossibility in front of me. Although, thinking it through a bit… it actually made a kind of sense?
Carol got her powers from what I’d thought was a blast of uncontrolled Tesseract energy, but exposure to a blast of uncontrolled energy from an Infinity Stone typically resulted in a normal person having an Extremely Bad Day™ (usually the last of their life), not spontaneously gaining superpowers.
She was also really strong. Almost inexplicably so. Did it really make sense for her to have become that strong? To have somehow absorbed that much power from the exploding lightspeed engine core, second-hand from the Tesseract? Looking at it in context to everything else I knew about the Stones, it did feel a bit disproportionate. Even so… the Phoenix Force was a very big deal, from what little comics knowledge I had of it, and it wasn’t like Carol had been going around burning up planets or restarting dying stars.
There was nothing particularly Space Stone-themed about her powers, though, and she had always run hot. Hot enough that I’d seen her boil a kettle just by touching it. The blue-orange shimmer of her power always had put me in mind of a solar flare or stellar corona. And you know what I did know that the Tesseract could do? Spontaneously send people across space to fill a cosmic need somewhere, like it had done to the Red Skull. Or act as a receiver for someone transmitting in from elsewhere, like when Loki had used it to arrive on Earth.
What if, instead of the exploding core of the lightspeed engine granting Carol powers, it had sent out a signal and called something to her?
The Phoenix Force…
Okay. Accept that as a working theory for now. What did that imply? What had happened? I’d only felt smouldering embers of power inside Carol after Phastos had drained her. ‘Phoenix’ implied a cycle of life, death and rebirth… did that mean that Phastos had killed it, almost entirely by accident? Then, I guess, exposure to the Mind Stone had somehow reinvigorated it. The Phoenix Force had an affinity for psychic power, which matched the Stone’s particular flavour of cosmic energy, so… the sudden infusion of energy had jump-started its rebirth and the beginning of a new cycle? Was that at all possible? Did it make sense, flow logically? Or was I making way too many assumptions and leaps of logic based on incomplete information, here?
“What’s the Phoenix Force?” Steve prompted me gently.
My eyes snapped over to him and I realised that I’d fallen silent while I got my thoughts in order. He and a few of the others were looking between me and the Ancient One, as though she might also be a source of answers here. Actually, maybe she was? I looked at her for a moment, too, searching her features for any hint that she might know more than I did about any of this. Her expression remained neutral; she was simply waiting for me to speak.
Sigh.
“The Phoenix is…”
Once again, I found myself chafing against the limits of my outside knowledge. I knew the Phoenix Force was a Thing, but details-wise? I only had vague memories, drawn from the X-Men cartoon series that version of me had grown up with, the Fox X-Men movies, and a few decades of cultural osmosis. Beyond that? I had very little information to go on. The white space I’d caught a glimpse of… The White Hot Room, I thought it was called? I had a vague idea that there was a Black Bug Room, too? I had no actual idea what either of those were, though. What they meant. And even if I had had some greater knowledge of the comics, there was no guarantee how much of it would have been useful in understanding this particular incarnation of the Phoenix anyway, given how much variance there always was between the comics and MCU versions of things.
“Honestly, I don’t know much about it,” I said, a little lamely. “Just that it’s something big—something I wasn’t expecting to ever see. Some sort of primeval force of life and cosmic destruction.”
I found myself looking back over toward where Sterns was standing, alongside Shuri and Darcy. The gamma mutate was watching me carefully, a faintly luminescent green glint in his one unclouded eye, naked curiosity painted across his face. Trying to use that mutated brain of his to figure out what I was thinking and whether I was lying, no doubt. I still hated that he was here at all.
First the Leader, now the Phoenix Force.
I’d already known that Kang was lurking somewhere in the Quantum Realm as a future threat that would need to be dealt with, even if I did have almost zero knowledge about him. But somehow—even after every curveball this universe had already thrown at me so far—some part of me had stupidly assumed that that would be all there was. I’d stop the Emergence, save half the universe from Thanos, stop Kang and Hela and Gorr the God-Butcher and every other villain I knew about, and then… that would be it, somehow. The universe would be Saved, with a capital S, and I’d be done.
Now, though? If the Phoenix Force existed, then what other threats were there that hadn’t made it into the MCU as I’d seen it, that I was still going to need to worry about? The Phoenix Force was tied heavily to the X-Men, so did I need to worry about mutant-related villains like Magneto or Apocalypse? What about Mephisto? Dr Doom? Galactus? Was there worse than Galactus in the comics? There probably was! I didn’t have a fucking clue.
Not for the first time, I really, really wished that the me from that other world had actually bothered to read some fucking comic books.
“Agamotto wrote very briefly regarding a great phoenix spirit that visited our world once,” the Ancient One said, measuring her words carefully. “An entity far beyond his power, and beyond his understanding of time and space. Unfortunately, the details were very limited.”
I hesitated some more, turning to look questioningly over at where Ajak was standing. She was millions of years old and had a lot of dealings with the cosmic side of things—if the Phoenix Force existed here, then maybe she knew something about it?
The Prime Eternal met my gaze and straightened slightly, as if asking permission to join the conversation. I flicked a hand toward her in vague invitation, and she moved to join us, a few of the other Eternals trailing in her wake. The sorcerers who were on guard looked to Mordo for instruction and he waved them off.
“I do not know of this entity,” she started. Behind me, I heard Tony huff derisively. “But its power is unmistakable. A primal cosmic power, one quite unlike and yet akin to the power of the Celestials. I have been thinking about what will happen next, what we will do, and—”
“Yeah, you don’t get to decide that,” Tony interrupted. “You don’t get a say.”
Ajak paused, looking uncertainly toward me again.
“What were you going to say?” Steve asked her, shooting Tony a warning glance. The other man just glowered at him, arms folded tightly in front of his chest.
“This is wrong,” she said simply. “None of this should have happened. The cost of Arishem’s design; it’s not worth it. I see that now. I have… changed, though I did not think it possible after all this time. This world and its people have changed me.”
“Little bit late,” Pietro said with a small shrug.
“I know. It is something I fear I will always regret. But I also know that Arishem will not see things as I do. He has placed his trust in me for millions of years, but I am just one, and his design spans the entirety of creation. My words and memories alone will not move him alone,” she said, looking around the group gathered around Carol. “But I am not the only Prime Eternal. There are other groups out there, fulfilling other missions, making preparations for other Emergences.”
Just behind her, Sersi was nodding along. “We can talk to them. Reveal the truth to the other Eternals, convince them to join us.”
“You want to try to start a revolution?” Steve asked, curiosity in his voice. “Will that work?”
Ajak inclined her head briefly. “I would seek out Zuras, the eldest Prime Eternal. If I can convince him, the rest are likely to follow. If enough of us speak with one combined voice, I have faith that Arishem will hear us.”
“You think he’ll listen?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But if there is to be hope for us to change things, then we must try.”
“Are you sure you can even find the other Eternals? The universe is a big place,” Natasha pointed out.
Ajak touched the centre of her chest with a fingertip. “My communications orb will be able to lead us to them. The modifications that Phastos made to it will keep Arishem from realising I have left Earth. But it will be difficult without the Domo. We will need a ship.” She turned to address Carol. “Zuras is older than I am—he may know more about this Phoenix that lies within you. And if he doesn’t, the Celestials will.”
Carol looked at me askance, hesitating briefly. “I do think it’d be safer if I got off-planet, for now. Just until I get this thing under control.”
I pressed my lips together in a tight line, my eyes searching her expression. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t… I don’t think I should be around people right now. I feel like I might—” she cut herself off, swallowing hard.
I reached out a hand to touch her shoulder and she shrank back a little—not pulling away completely, but enough to make me hesitate. “Okay.”
She looked back at Ajak. “My ship’s in orbit. We can use that.”
Tony let out a snort of disbelief. “Really? That’s it?” he said, his tone tight with anger. “We’re just letting them walk away? After all of this? After Bruce? Someone has to—”
“Has to what, Tony? Pay?” I interrupted him, turning to glare. He glared back. “They already have—Druig is dead, Ikaris is dead, Phastos is dead. They’re not our enemies. Not anymore.”
“She’s right, Tony,” Steve said, his tone gentle. “They’re done. And this is the sort of fight we can’t afford to turn away allies for. If Thor can’t convince Arishem, then having his own people rise up as well might be the thing that tips the balance.”
“You can’t all go. Sersi has to stay behind, just in case,” I said suddenly, earning a few surprised glances. “You’re the backup plan. If Thor fails, if Ajak fails… Sersi’s power stopped the Emergence in the original timeline.”
“That makes sense,” Steve agreed, then looked at Ajak and Sersi questioningly.
Sersi nodded slowly. “Okay. If that’s what’s needed.”
“I’m not going, either,” Kingo said. The Bollywood actor was standing at the back of the group of Eternals, staring stonily at the ground. “I don’t want any part of any of this. Any of you. I’m just… I’m done.”
“Kingo—” Ajak started.
“No. I’m done, you hear me?” he looked up at her, eyes blazing with anger. “No more. I’m out. I can’t do this anymore.”
Ajak met his gaze unflinchingly. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice soft and full of regret. “I failed you. All of you.”
“There is one more thing I need to do, before anyone goes anywhere,” the Ancient One said, looking at me meaningfully. “The Runes of Kof-Kol. I’ll tune the casting to the barrier around the monastery, so that it excludes everyone within the grounds.”
I let out a sigh, looking out through the space where one of Kamar-taj’s walls had been. Some faint sirens had started up in the distance. I knew that Druig had cleared quite a bit of the city around us, but wherever he’d cleared everyone off to, people had probably started to panic. There’d be emergency service responses. Not to mention however the fuck India would react to Druig hijacking a chunk of the IAF and bombing a neighbouring country, plus however Nepal was going to react to that, plus whatever the global consequences of all that would be. It made sense for her to want to use the Runes, but I had a feeling we were about to have another fucking argument about it.
“What are the Runes of Kof-Kol?” Nat asked, looking between the two of us, a slight frown on her face.
“A spell of forgetting,” I said. “She’s going to make it so no one else in the world remembers any details of what just happened.”
There was a flurry of surprised reactions from the gathered Avengers. “What?” “She can do that?” “That’s…”
“Hang on a second,” Steve said, holding up a hand in a ‘stop’ gesture as he shot the Ancient One a hard look. “Isn’t that sort of mass mind control the exact sort of thing we were just fighting against?”
“The Runes are not mind control,” she responded. “The magic travels the dark borders between known and unknown reality. It doesn’t simply make people forget; it makes the universe forget. No record of these events will remain; only the memories of those excluded from the effect.”
“But see, that sounds worse,” Tony said. “You understand how that’s worse, right?”
The sorcerer shook her head. “I do understand your concerns, but this is not something that we can move forward without. There are already events occurring elsewhere that must be nipped in the bud before they spiral rapidly out of our control.”
“International scrutiny, political investigations, the whole world looking into Kamar-taj,” Natasha said, her tone thoughtful. “You can just… make all that disappear?”
Steve shook his head. “No. This isn’t what we do. We don’t have the right to—”
“I didn’t say ‘we’ need to do this, Captain,” the Ancient One interrupted him. “You may believe that you do not have the right to decide something of this import, and I would agree. I, however, do. This isn’t something up for debate. I am allowing you to remain for the spell as a courtesy.”
I sighed. “Can we stop arguing for five minutes? Please? This isn’t helping anything. If the Ancient One says she needs to cast the Runes, then she needs to cast the Runes. End of story.”
The Sorcerer Supreme shot me a small, appreciative smile before turning back to Steve. “There were paths I could have taken that would have avoided the necessity of the Runes. The Avengers, however, would not have survived them. The Runes are not something I cast lightly, but I do not exaggerate when I say that the literal fate of the world hinges on me doing so now. And above and beyond anything else, I protect this world,” she said, her voice clipped and precise. “That is my role. That is my responsibility. That is my duty as Sorcerer Supreme.”
Steve set his jaw stubbornly, the two of them glaring at each other.
“Things may become extremely difficult, should the world remember these events,” a voice from the side broke in. I turned, surprised, to see Sterns taking a few tentative steps forward. “Any approach we take would have far-reaching consequences. How would this work, exactly?” he asked the Ancient One. “The wreckage isn’t going to just vanish… is it?”
“The magic reaches out to the multiverse, seeking details from other realities that could match ours, and draws them in through the path of least resistance. Some small physical changes may be made, but the overall outcome will remain the same. The damage will be thought instead to have been caused by an alternate, mundane reason. Something utterly plausible and ordinary. Nothing of note, nothing worthy of investigating too deeply. Cracks will be papered over.”
Sterns frowned, but nodded. “I wouldn’t dismiss this so easily, Captain Rogers. It may achieve better results for everyone, on balance—particularly for those who would be caught up in the consequences of our actions through no fault of their own. I might argue that we have a responsibility to mitigate the harm this event has caused as best we can.”
Glancing off to the side, Tony shot Mordo a brief look, as though the other man might chime in. The green-robed sorcerer, however, said nothing, only giving a small nod of assent. Tony ran a hand through his hair, hesitating another moment, before he looked back at the Ancient One and let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah, okay. Fine. You’ve seen the future and don’t like Wanda. Wanda’s seen the future and doesn’t like Sterns. Sterns… has got his thing going on. If allthree of you are agreeing on something? I don’t think I’ve got an argument against it.”
Steve paused, looking around at everyone else as he weighed his response. Bucky and Sam met his gaze but didn’t say or indicate anything, clearly looking to take his lead. Natasha gave a small nod. Pietro was just looking at us expectantly. Maria glanced sideways toward Sterns. Clint looked up from flexing the hand of his new arm—regrown by Ajak, and once again, wasn’t that unfair? Clint gets his arm back, I get my arm back, but Bucky doesn’t?—and shrugged.
“I don’t like it,” Steve said eventually. “We’re going to have to discuss this properly later, when heads are a bit cooler. It isn’t something that we can have happen again, not like this. But… Alright. I understand. What do we need to do?”
The Ancient One gave him a shallow nod of acknowledgement. “You don’t need to do anything. Simply wait within the walls of the monastery for a short time while I perform the spell.”
As she turned and left, heading toward the library—the one part of Kamar-taj that had remained miraculously nearly completely untouched—the rest of us milled about a little bit, breaking off into smaller groups to talk and wait for however long this was going to take.
Gilgamesh stepped past Ajak to join those lingering near me. “I’m sorry about Phastos,” I said to him quietly. “And Druig. And Ikaris, even.”
He gave me a tight, sad smile and nodded. “They made their choices. You only did what you had to do.” He turned to Carol. “How much room is on your ship?”
“Hoopty had a crew of four, originally. Five of us will fit fine. I’ll just need to rearrange and store some things. It’s been a while since I’ve had anyone staying on board.”
The Eternal looked at me. “Look after our place while I’m gone?”
I nodded.
Reaching out, Gil placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, forcing me to meet his gaze directly as he looked at me with a serious expression on his face. “If any of my brews are left undrunk by the time I return, I will consider it a grave personal insult.”
That actually managed to get a smile out of me. I nodded again. “Of course, King of Heroes. I wouldn’t dare commit such an offence.”
He gave my shoulder a squeeze before letting go. “Oh, your spear, it’s…” he turned, looking beyond the monastery grounds, toward the street frontage and the building across the way, where I’d stapled Makkari to the wall.
“It’s okay, I got it.” I held up my hand and, with a brief exercise of will, called my spear to me. There was a flicker of movement, a thin silver-black streak arcing up and over the courtyard, and the weapon arrived in my hand a moment later.
I could still feel the added weight, but now I felt like I understood it better. It wasn’t physical weight I was feeling, but something else… something that the weapon had gained during the events of the last couple of days, something that I couldn’t quite put into words. It wasn’t just a spear, anymore. It was my spear.
I looked back the way it had come, through the missing wall of Kamar-taj, and paused as something caught my eye. Was that…?
“Hang on a sec,” I said, maybe a little abruptly, then broke from the group, walking over to take a closer look.
“Everything okay?” Pietro appeared by my side, keeping pace with me.
“Yeah.”
Right near the border where Kamar-taj’s wall had been cleanly cut by Sersi’s power, one of the remaining terraces had collapsed at some point. Among the wreckage was a chunk of ancient stonework, maybe a half a metre tall. Plunged into the stone, hilt pointed toward the sky, was a sword. I could see a series of engravings—magical, maybe?—along the blade, just above the guard.
I stepped up to it, wrapping my free hand around the hilt. Part of me expected it to be stuck, but when I pulled, it came free relatively easily. I stared at the blade, holding it out in front of me. There were glimmers of something there. The sword had weight to it, similar to what I could feel in my spear, but there was more to it than that. Something deeper. It actually reminded me a little bit of the ineffable quality that I’d felt within Thena’s helmet. Like it was alive, somehow. Whatever it was, it also felt… dormant. Right now, it was just a sword. But it was as if it held the potential to be more.
Pietro looked between the weapon and me. “Uh, cool sword?”
“Yeah,” I said absently. “Although I think I might be the rightful Queen of England now?”
“That was a different sword, actually,” Gil’s voice came from behind me.
I turned to see him walking up behind us, along with Natasha and Carol. It looked like Bucky had gone over to join Steve, instead, which was absolutely fair enough. “Yeah, I know,” I said with a small shrug. “Was just making a joke.”
Nat frowned at our little exchange, connecting the dots between what we’d said in her head. “…Is that Excalibur?”
Pietro blinked. “You mean, like, King Arthur Excalibur?”
Gil and I both nodded at the same time. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “There was a whole heap of stuff in the Domo. It must have all fallen out when Sersi…”
Ugh. I winced a little, thinking about the sheer amount of priceless cultural artifacts that had probably been destroyed when we’d done that. Some would be recoverable, but still.
I looked around the courtyard. There were a few other things, bits and pieces, strewn about—at first, I hadn’t even really noticed them, assuming they were just relics that Kamar-taj had already been holding, but now that I was looking, it was clear that the entire area had received a sprinkling after the fighting had concluded. A few sorcerers were seemingly already on clean-up duty, picking things out of the wreckage.
Mordo caught my eye. He was standing near where the fallen sorcerers had been laid out. Glancing at the others with me, I flicked my head toward him and they continued to follow me as I walked over. Mordo gave us a guarded look as we approached. “Ms Maximoff.”
I reversed my grip on Excalibur’s hilt and held it out to him. “You should probably keep this safe somewhere,” I told him.
Mordo hesitated, eyes narrowing briefly, before he reached over to take it from me. He weighed the blade in his hand for a moment, his gaze tracing the markings near the guard. After appraising it for a few seconds, he gave me a small nod. “We will. Thank you.”
I turned to face the row of dead sorcerers, sharp emotions rising in my chest once more, a mix of guilt and shame and self-loathing mingling with sadness and anger and grief. There were eight in total, lying side-by-side in a space that had been cleared for them as they’d been collected. They were uncovered, though someone had taken the time to neaten their robes and close their eyes for them.
At the far end of the row was Rintrah.
Patches of the minotaur’s green fur were matted with dried blood. Other than that, he looked peaceful, as if he were only sleeping. He’d seemed nice, from our brief conversation. Yet another person that, like Bruce, I wished I’d taken the opportunity to get to know better. And now I never would, because he was dead. Because of me.
I recognised one of the other fallen sorcerers as well. A Chinese woman, dressed in torn blue robes, a ragged mess of red seeping through from a wound at her side. She’d followed the Ancient One unhesitatingly. Fought against Pietro and me, the first time we’d come to Kamar-taj. Come to the Avengers compound to fight the Eternals and rescue us. And now she was dead, too. I swallowed, eyes prickling once more.
Natasha moved in by my side, watching me carefully. I ignored her for the moment, just continuing to stare at the dead woman, replaying the few times I’d seen her in my head. “Who was she?” Nat asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I said. There was a thickness in my throat, my voice on the verge of breaking again. “But she was very brave.”