Chapter 12
It had been a long day. We'd resolved to keep ourselves relatively mobile, portalling across the globe every few hours to stymie the Avengers' attempts to track us via the radiation emitted by the Mind Stone. We'd avoided large cities for the most part, reasoning that they had a higher risk of detection. When it had come to choosing a place to rest, we'd compromised by selecting a small city at the southern edge of Western Australia called Albany—almost on the exact opposite side of the planet to the Avengers' home base in New York.
Normally, a whole day of running about grabbing supplies and finding places to hide out would have left me pretty exhausted by the evening, but I was still buzzing with energy. I'd already been pretty fit in general, but the Heart-Shaped Herb had elevated things to a whole new level. I actually kind of wanted to go for a jog, which was extremely out of character for me. Not just a jog. I wanted to run, to climb, to jump. I was stronger and faster than I'd ever been, and my body felt eager to test its new limits.
I realised I was pacing, stalking back and forth in our cheap hotel room like a caged tiger as Pietro watched me with a vaguely amused expression. Was this what he felt like all the time? No wonder he always seemed impatient.
After watching me for a few minutes, Pietro stood and walked past me to the window, nudging the curtain aside with a finger so he could see outside. A frown marred the corner of his mouth. "I don't like that we're still running."
"I know. Neither do I," I said. "Kamar-taj… Wakanda… they were the top of the list because I'd thought they'd be safe places for us to stay."
"And now we're scurrying from city to city, constantly looking over our shoulder, trying to keep one step ahead of the Avengers."
"Yeah. I'm sorry."
Pietro shook his head. "Don't be sorry. Make better plans. What do we do now? You won't go after the Avengers, even with them hunting us down. You won't go after Tony Stark. So what, then? What are we doing?"
I sighed. "I've been trying to rush things. Make big moves that have big payoffs. Maybe that's the problem and we should be aiming smaller. Easier."
"What do you mean?"
"We have other options. There's this," I said, taking out the inscribed bronze sphere that Kaecilius had given me and weighing it in my hand. My best guess was that he was already planning his moves against the Ancient One and was looking to recruit me. I was actually a little surprised—I didn't know exactly when that whole thing kicked off, but when I'd originally sketched out a rough timeline, I figured I had most of a year before the events of Doctor Strange. I suppose the sort of betrayal that Kaecilius was intending took time, planning and waiting for the exact right time to strike, but still. It felt very early.
From just a cursory examination, it was clear that the sphere was a similar sort of magical 'executable' as the sling rings—if you channelled magic into it, it would automatically output a specific effect. The problem was I had no idea what any of the geometric ritual designs meant, so I didn't know what the sphere would actually do when activated.
"The sorcerer gave you that, right? The one you said turns evil?"
"Yeah. He said he wanted to talk, so it's probably a communicator or signal or some kind, but…"
"But he's a bad guy, so it could be a trap."
"Exactly. Still… it could be worth exploring. If he's looking to recruit me, I could maybe use him to access some of Kamar‑taj's resources without involving the Ancient One."
Pietro nodded slowly. "You said the sorcerers know more about magic than anyone."
"Yeah. We've been scrambling for resources but, when it comes down to it, I still have so much to learn about using the power I already have." I touched the locket at my throat, a wisp of chaos magic from my fingers briefly brushing against the Mind Stone. "The sorcerers aren't our only option there, either."
"Who else?"
"There's another witch I know about. Agatha. She's powerful, but she's a loner. If she doesn't see us coming… if we take her by surprise, with no opportunity for her to cast any spells, I think we have a good chance of taking her down without much trouble."
Agatha Harkness had access to resources and abilities accumulated over several hundred years—including the Darkhold, a tome of incredibly powerful dark magic. The Darkhold itself had a similar problem to Loki's sceptre, in that it had an inherently corruptive effect that made it dangerous to use, but that was far from the only benefit of a captive Agatha. Rifling through her belongings might come up with other, less dangerous books on witchcraft, and at the very least I'd be able to observe and hopefully replicate any witch runes she had set up. I might even be able to use magic and the Mind Stone to ransack her mind directly for knowledge, skeevy as that felt.
"Do you know where she is?"
I held up the sling ring. "Not really, but I don't need to, remember? I've got a pretty solid mental image of her to work with, so I should be able to just open a portal directly to her."
"You open a portal, I run in, take her down fast…" Pietro mused. "Doesn't seem too risky."
"I imagine she'll have some sort of defences, but she won't be expecting us. She definitely won't be expecting you."
"Alright, I'm in. Let's do it."
I blinked in surprise. "What, right now?"
"Why not?" he shrugged. "I don't think either of us are ready to sleep just yet. It shouldn't take too long, right?"
A knot of anxiety rose in my chest, warring with an electric thrill of excitement. This was incredibly spur of the moment, but Pietro was right, wasn't he? There wasn't really much in the way of planning to do for something like this, and it shouldn't take long to tie things up. It'd be nice to have an easy win, for once. But if it went wrong… everything seemed to be going wrong so far.
"…okay. Agatha's a witch, so her magic is very similar to mine. Telekinesis, mind control, all of that, but she needs to do incantations to cast most of her spells. Hit her fast enough, knock her out and gag her, and we should be fine. Anything you think would stop me will probably stop her just as easily. The only other thing I think I need to warn you about is the Darkhold."
"Darkhold," Pietro repeated the name of the artifact, rolling it around in his mouth. "What's that?"
"Magic book. Very evil. Corrupts anyone who reads it. It's one of the reasons she's as strong as she is. It's kind of hard to miss—you'll know it if you see it. Don't touch it. Just leave it to me."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Nothing. Honestly, I'm thinking it might be best to just destroy the damn thing. I don't really know how the corruption works or if it's even possible for it to be used safely."
Uncontrolled, the book could cause all kinds of problems if it fell into the wrong hands. Even if I hid it away somewhere, having an easy route to extra power tucked away would make using it tempting, even knowing the risks. Better to remove it from circulation entirely. If it came right down to it and something happened that made me desperate enough to want to access the Darkhold's knowledge, there was always the structure on top of Mount Wundagore, where the tome's text had been transcribed from. I'd already proven with Wakanda's City of the Dead that a strong mental image of a location was sufficient to get me there and the Darkhold Castle was fairly striking-looking, so I was reasonably confident I could picture its profane altar and throne well enough if I needed to.
Nodding, Pietro bounced on the balls of his feet, stretched his arms out to either side and tilted his head to crack his neck. He gestured to an empty spot of floor in front of him, then looked at me expectantly.
Slipping the sling ring onto my fingers, I glanced thoughtfully toward the bundle of vibranium spears leaning against the wall in the corner of the room for a moment before deciding they weren't needed. Agatha would be a hell of a lot more useful to me alive, and with any luck Pietro would be able to knock her out before she had a chance to act properly. Bringing the spears would only make things more lethal.
Taking a deep breath, I fixed a picture of Agatha Harkness in my mind—her features, her voice, her personality, the purple glow of her magic, her mother's locket that she wore at her throat. Raising my hands, I began the now-familiar gestures to summon a portal, channelling thin wisps of chaos magic into the ring. After a moment, crimson sparks flared into being at the point in space where Pietro had pointed but, before they could grow and form into a portal, a spike of sudden, searing pain flared up in my hand, as if I'd stuck it into an open fire.
I yelped, reflexively grabbing at my hand to find that my sling ring was glowing an angry red. As I ripped it off my hand, it singed my fingertips and I dropped it to the carpet. I stared at it in shock for a moment, looking between where it lay on the carpet, rapidly cooling, and the angry red bands across my fingers.
Pietro was at my shoulder already, one hand on my forearm, alarm in his voice. "What happened? Are you okay?"
I nodded dumbly, holding up my hand so he could see, my vision blurring slightly as I blinked back tears. He pulled at me insistently, leading me quickly over to the bathroom where could turn on the tap and run cold water over the burn. I stood there for a few minutes, letting the water flow over my scalded skin while Pietro went back to the ring on the floor.
Holding it gingerly, he placed it on the counter next to the sink. "It's not even warm," he muttered, looking between it and my hand. "Left a scorch mark on the carpet, though."
Reaching over with my free hand, I picked the ring back up. Pietro made a noise of protest and moved to stop me, but I waved him off. Looking it over, I was relieved to see that the artifact seemed perfectly fine. I'd have to test it to be sure, but there was no obvious damage, and Pietro was right—I'd seen the glow fading the second I'd dropped it. Whatever had happened had stopped the instant I'd stopped channelling magic through it.
Mentally, I was kicking myself. "Okay," I said, still slightly shaken. "Maybe I should have considered that Agatha Harkness, the most powerful living witch, would probably have defences against magical attack."
It hadn't really come up much outside of using the sling ring so far, but I knew I needed to be smarter about this kind of thing. Just because I had watched a bunch of movies and TV shows didn't mean I knew all there was to know. Some stuff had never had cause to come up, but that didn't mean it didn't exist.
Whatever had just happened seemed like a radically different effect to the wards that Mordo had set up for us, though. I reached inward for a moment, touching the ongoing enchantment to reassure myself it was still there. The sorcerer's wards basically prevented a sling ring from locking onto you. There was no backlash or anything, any attempt would simply fail in the same way that it would if you weren't properly focused on your destination. This had been more like a trap than a ward, which I guessed suited Agatha's style.
"Are you okay?" Pietro asked again.
"It's fine. It's not that bad. It was more of a surprise than anything."
"So, no portalling to the witch, I guess?"
I shot him a look. "No. No portalling to the witch."
"I'll go out and get you some cream to put on it," he said. "Do we need anything else?"
"No. Don't worry about it. Look, it's fine." Taking my hand out of the water, I wiggled my fingers at him. They were a little red and tender, but otherwise fine. I didn't think it'd even blister, given the minor enhancement to healing speed that the Heart-Shaped Herb granted.
"You're impossible," he said, shaking his head and walking out of the bathroom.
Turning off the tap, I followed him out. "Look, that didn't work out, but there are other things I can try. Stuff that's less risky." Pietro just looked at me, brow furrowed. "Don't look at me like that," I protested.
He changed his expression to a different but equally judgemental one, raising an eyebrow instead.
"… don't look at me like that, either," I grumbled.
"Fine, then. What else?"
I looked at him seriously. "Space."
"Space?"
"Space."
"You… want to go to space?"
"We," I corrected him, "definitely want to go to space. You have no idea how much is out there. Allies, technology, the rest of these stones." At that last point, I touched the pendant around my neck.
"This sounds more risky, not less. How do we even get to space? You can't just open a portal, right?"
I pursed my lips. "I don't know," I said honestly. "I know interstellar portals are theoretically possible, but I haven't tried. We can test it. See if it's possible and, if it is, then we can talk about next steps. At the very least, if we can get off-planet then we can stop looking over our shoulders for the Avengers."
"…where would we even go? In space, I mean," Pietro asked reluctantly.
"Like I said, we can talk details later once we know if it's possible or not." I shrugged. "There's a planet called Xandar. That'd be the safest place to start, I think, and we might be able to make some friends. There are a group of heroes—kind of like the Avengers, but in space. The Guardians of the Galaxy. From there, there's a whole heap of things we could do. We just need to take that first step and see if we can get out there."
He stared at me for a few long moments, then nodded. "Okay, but we're just checking it works first, right? See if you can make a portal to space. If it works, you close it, and we plan properly."
I nodded. "Yeah, exactly."
"Fine," he said, but his body language was tense and ready, as though he was preparing for something more akin to what we'd discussed for Agatha. It was a little annoying that he was expecting things to go wrong again, but I couldn't really blame him, given our recent track record.
Slipping the sling ring back onto my fingers, I tried not to wince. I closed my eyes, blocking out distractions to better build a mental image of where I wanted to go. After a minute, I felt like I had it as good as it was going to get, so I opened my eyes again, chose a point in space in front of me as I fed magic into the ring, and gestured. Seconds crawled by, with no sign of a portal.
I focused, trying to reinforce the picture I'd painted in my head, channelling even more magic into the ring. I felt the spellwork reach out, but it felt like it was flailing. Untethered. Like it wasn't quite able to find my target to connect to, but not in quite the same way as when it slid off a ward or if I wasn't doing a good enough job visualising my target. I had no idea if the issue was power, range, or something else, but it just felt like it couldn't quite get to what it was reaching for.
Switching targets, I tried picturing Knowhere instead—the severed head of a long-dead Celestial, floating through space, mining colony and black market in one. I pictured the Collector, the current custodian of the Reality Stone. I tried visualising the interior of the Milano, the ship that I was pretty sure the Guardians of the Galaxy were currently using. None of them worked, but I still wasn't really sure why. Dr Strange had managed to open an interstellar portal in the original timeline, but that was a one-off in unusual circumstances. It could just be an experience thing—I did only get the ring less than a week ago, whereas Strange had had a significant amount of practice at that point. There might also be other spells or techniques you could use to enhance the ring's capabilities, and if that was the case then I was pretty much shit out of luck for now.
Closing my eyes again, I tried a different tack and raised my hands, framing the pendant containing the Mind Stone between them. My fingers twitched, threads of chaos magic interfacing with the stone, and I thought back to the way I'd accidentally projected myself to Ulysses Klaue. Instead of using the artifact to direct my consciousness outwards in an uncontrolled expansion, I tried to focus it, picturing Star Lord and the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy in my mind and reaching up and outwards.
Several long minutes passed as I ran into what felt like a similar issue to what was happening with the sling ring. It wasn't that the capability wasn't there, but directing the effect outward just felt like flailing into the void. Was it a problem of scale? It may well be that something I could do easily when my target was on the same planet might require an aid or existing connection when I was trying to reach across interstellar or intergalactic distances. I sighed softly to myself, taking the sling ring off as I opened my eyes again and rubbed at my tender fingers absently.
Pietro watched me, then shook his head. "I think that's enough for tonight, yeah? I'm going to get some cream for your hand. We can work on plans in the morning."
Part of me wanted to argue, but three more small failures in a row had left me feeling a little sensitive. I hadn't been counting on contacting the Guardians the same way I'd been counting on success with Kamar-taj and Wakanda, but it still stung a little to know that a whole raft of options remained closed to me.
I opened my mouth, but my stomach beat me to the punch, noisily signalling that it was empty. Pietro grinned at me and I couldn't help but smile back. "We'll both go. I could do with a burger or two. Maybe some chips."
--
Agatha Harkess swept through her lair like a summer storm, gesturing rapidly as she cast spell after spell, Latin incantations echoing hollowly in the underground stone chamber. Threads of wispy purple laced with blackness lashed out from her fingertips, further empowering the protective runes arrayed around the perimeter of the room. Magical energy boiled off the sigils, cascading into a net-like web of energy between two pillars where a thread of threateningly unfamiliar red magic had been caught in her defences.
She held her breath, poised to continue reinforcing her spellwork, but there was no follow up, no imminent assault of foreign magics. After a few moments had passed, she allowed herself to relax somewhat, stepping close to the crimson thread that had been trapped in her web. The specific wards that had been set off first were the translocation runes, keyed to a specific expression of sorcerous magic. Her initial thought had been that the Masters of the Mystic Arts had foolishly decided to make another attempt on her life and had thought that her defences against their predictable mystical wormholes had grown lax. It would have been far from the first time she'd had to tangle with the minions of the Sorcerer Supreme over the last three hundred years. But while the spellwork was definitely sorcerous in origin, the magical energy itself was… unusual.
It glimmered faintly in her net, on the verge of being extinguished. Ordinarily, sorcerous magic would have maintained its cohesion, held tight by the witchcraft. This, however, was barely holding together at all—she checked it over and it was very obviously being impacted by the basic protective spell that bounded her workshop. The only reason that would be was if it was magic cast by another witch. Which didn't make any sense. How could a witch use a sorcerer's spellwork? Both were magic, but they weren't normally directly compatible like this. Unless…
"Chaos magic?" she breathed, surprise and fear warring in her tone as she looked over at a small shelf off to one side, beneath a bookcase full of folios of her original research. Sitting in its display stand on the shelf was a graven black tome with thin traces of molten, hellish energy emanating from it. There was a whole chapter within the Darkhold devoted to the prophecy of the Scarlet Witch, a being capable of spontaneous creation with limitless possibility; a font of chaos magic who needed no incantations nor coven to cast her spells.
She had always taken the myth of the Scarlet Witch as just that: a myth. A story. But this was evidence that, perhaps, there was more to it after all. Even so, if the Scarlet Witch really existed, why would she be looking for Agatha Harkness? Well, beyond the obvious. She was an exceptional witch, and rather infamously so. Agatha had accumulated a lot of enemies over the years, but she had a habit of making things rather personal, so it was unlikely they'd send someone else after her rather than come themselves.
A theoretical Scarlet Witch had no reason to seek her out, unless… she sought the power of the Darkhold to add to her own. It was the only thing that made sense. The Scarlet Witch must be seeking the power of the tome for her own ends. Which would be a problem, because Agatha was using it right now and it wasn't exactly something she was willing to give up.
"'It is her destiny to destroy the world'," Agatha quoted softly to herself, feeling a small frisson of dread. She quickly brushed it aside, took a deep breath, then reached out to the fading ember of scarlet thread. A word of Latin and it separated from the web, caught between her fingers. She blew on it, stoking its power to keep it burning, then walked to the other side of the chamber, passing alcoves filled with minor magical artifacts, curiosities, and the assorted other tools of her craft.
She paused beneath an ancient stone arch festooned with clinging roots, a goat's head leered down at her from where it sat mounted on the wall above an aged globe of the world sitting atop a workbench. An incantation spilled from her lips in a litany of spellwork and she gestured, sending the thread of chaos magic toward the globe. It disappeared inside, passing through the yellowed paper and vanishing. Agatha waited and, a moment later, a tiny red pinprick of light appeared on the surface.
"Australia? Huh," she mused as she stepped over to one side to collect Señor Scratchy, who was currently wearing the appearance of a brown and white piebald rabbit. As Agatha cradled him in her arms, stroking his soft fur, a small smile played across her features.
A world-ending being of immense power? A challenge, to be sure, but this was her whole deal, really: taking power from the undeserving.
