Embedded Files
Topaz.mp4The Star
The Star
Aerika.mp4The High Priestess
The High Priestess
Nico.mp4The Magician
The Magician
Nico(1).mp4The Tower
The Tower
Topaz(1).mp4The Devil
The Devil
Wanda(1).mp4The Empress
The Empress
Prologue - Seekest Thou the Road
Prologue - Seekest Thou the Road
— How are you, Wanda?
Almost like a point-blank shot into a fragile pane of glass, the small trance the woman was in shatters. All the Captain’s fault…— I’m fine, Steve. — she replies with a grateful smile, crossing one leg over the other. — And you? All of you, actually. Is the team doing well?He nods in response, with a sideways smile. Even so, he doesn’t seem very satisfied. Wanda notices, of course, but doesn’t intend to do much about it. It was strange, and at the same time fascinating, to live alongside Steve Rogers. On the outside, a handsome young man. On the inside, a centenarian who had seen too much. Who had lost too much. And yet, for some reason, he pretended everything was fine. That the wars hadn’t destroyed his life. That his immortal loyalty to his country hadn’t swallowed, chewed, and spat out his soul.Wanda admired him, of course, but she also felt pity. Forever a soldier.— It’s been smoother than we expected, I assure you. We’re in sync and getting along well. — He scratches the back of his head, uneasy. — Our missions have been productive, to say the least. Especially considering the current situation…— The anti-vigilante movement, right? Pietro mentioned something about it. A bit pathetic, if you ask me… — Wanda replies without meeting his eyes. She was waving to Janet, holding a glass of soda. The socialite was celebrating her birthday on top of a table, wings out and all.— Pathetic? — the Captain repeats.Wanda redirects her green gaze to him, her expression still light and casual. On the outside, at least.— No one ever fought for me, Captain. Americans have things handed to them and still complain? As if there weren’t worse problems…Wanda takes another sip from her glass, but the taste goes down slightly bitter. The Captain makes as if to say something, but doesn’t continue. He simply nods with a somewhat defeated energy and rests one of his hands over Wanda’s, which was lying on her lap.— Are you really okay, Wanda?— Steve, I already told you that—— We didn’t hear from you for almost four months. Vision came back on our radar, but you simply disappeared. Janet tried contacting you several times; nothing. Carol and I went through the same thing. Even Vision tried to send you some kind of electronic message, but got no response.— You can imagine the reas—— I can only imagine what you went through and are still going through, Wanda, but you don’t have to do this alone. — He interrupts her, but without rudeness. It was more like he was trying to stop her from doing something. From smiling her way out of an uncomfortable question.— I know that, Steve, but I’m not alone. I have…— Pietro is great company, I know, but you don’t need to isolate yourself from us. We’re a team. A family. You have your place here. I don’t like thinking of you alone, in that place… And after everything… — By that place, of course, he meant the mansion of the late Agatha Harkness, the place where Wanda and Vision lived with their children. Where they lost their children.— I am home, Steve. Transia is my place. It’s not a bad place or part of some wicked witch story. It’s my home. — The Scarlet Witch’s tone grows stronger. The soft-spoken woman with flickering smiles falters for a moment, but seems to return to herself soon after. — And no, I’m not talking about Pietro. I’ve made some new friends.Or at least, she would…[ᱬ]As much as she liked her friend, Janet Van Dyne’s birthday wasn’t the main reason Wanda had shown up in New York that night.It was convenient, that’s all.A large, noisy event, full of people too important to notice when someone simply… disappears.[ᱬ]The apartment was empty when Wanda entered.Not hers, of course. She was far too far from home to have anything that belonged to her.A space rented under a name that wasn’t exactly fake, just… unknown. One of those places that exist in the more remote parts of the city, in a loft on Staten Island.She steps in and locks the door with three turns.Not for safety, but out of habit. She had become a woman of habits lately.The bag is set down on the kitchen counter, and Wanda stands still for a few seconds, looking around as if expecting someone to tell her not to do that.No one does.— Alright then… — she murmurs, more to herself than anything else.She begins.She thought she’d be more nervous, but she was strangely calm.From her bag, Wanda takes out the objects one by one. A small glass vial. Inside, a liquid too dark. Too viscous. A bundle of dried herbs, tied with a worn red thread. A piece of old fabric embroidered by a hand not very skilled in the craft, but sufficient. It was filled with symbols that shouldn’t make much sense, but do. And finally… a blade.Wanda stares at the object for too long.— You’ve done worse… — she whispers.The loft’s dining table had become an improvised altar. A single black candle at the center. Some sage floated, burning in the air with a low red flame.She dips her fingers into the contents of the vial and begins to draw across the surface. Curved lines, symbols that connect in an almost organic way, like roots.When she finishes, she takes a deep breath. Then she brings the blade to her palm. The cut is clean. Precise.Wanda doesn’t react. She simply watches the blood emerge, thick, alive, absurdly real.— This is mine. — she says, as if she needed to hear it. — It’s ours…The blood slowly drips toward the center of the symbol.When they touch, the reaction is immediate.The lines vibrate and glow, like threads of energy about to snap under tension. The air in the apartment changes. Not dramatically, but enough for the silence to grow heavy.Wanda closes her eyes.— I don’t know all your names. — she begins, her voice lower now. More uncertain. — I don’t know how many of you there were. I don’t know what you did… or what you lost.A pause.— But I know you existed. You still do, actually. In me, in my brother… In the trees I touch. In the water that flows beneath my feet. In the wind that moves my hair.The floor beneath her feet seems to shift, like quicksand.— I know because I feel it.The herbs are crushed between her fingers and thrown over the symbol. The scent rises strong, bitter, almost suffocating.— I’m tired of trying to understand this alone.The red begins to spread beyond the drawing.No longer liquid, but energy. Hissing and erratic.— So… if there is a lineage…She opens her eyes. Green, but they don’t remain that way. They begin to glow like ruby.— I’m calling.Nothing happens for a second that lasts too long.Wanda swallows hard.— Great. — she lets out, almost laughing, but without any humor. — Of course it wouldn’t be—The world seems to pull away from her, as if trying to flee. The walls crack, the wooden floor scorches, and the windows burst open with violent gusts of wind.Wanda opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. No voice. No sound, in fact…After sound is gone, soon follows the weight of her body. Then the sense of where she ends and everything else begins.[ᱬ]The place she’s in has no defined shape, as if she were falling down a slide that never ends. It wasn’t solid, but it didn’t feel empty either.It was like being inside a wild, uncontrollable dream.Wanda doesn’t move… not because she can’t. But because she instinctively understands that any movement there… means something.And then…— How are you, Wanda?This time, the question doesn’t bother her. She recognizes the tone. Slow. Firm. Almost familiar…Wanda turns her head.— Funny… — she murmurs. — Everyone wants to know that today.The figure in front of her doesn’t respond immediately. Natalya Maximoff simply watches her. And that, for some reason, is worse.— I’m not here for empty words, mother. — Wanda continues, crossing her arms, trying to regain some control over the situation. — I just need answers.— You always have. — the woman replies.A sharp discomfort cuts through Wanda’s chest.— Then give me one, please.The space around them shifts subtly.As if it were listening. Or rather, adjusting to what they wanted. Or needed. Other presences begin to emerge.Not as clear. Nor as familiar.But similar, both to Wanda and Natalya. Even to Pietro.— There is a path. — her mother finally says. — The one you’ve been searching for so desperately. The one you’ve risked far more than you should for. Far more than you could. The one that…Wanda narrows her eyes, almost desperate to know more.— It’s what I’ve been studying for months, mother. What has haunted my nightmares for even longer. Tell me what I don’t know, please.— The Path cannot be walked alone. — she continues, ignoring the inquisitive tone. — It demands a coven. Not just any, but yours. One that functions as specific reflections of what you represent as a witch.— Reflections… — Wanda repeats to herself.— Aspects of magic. Of your magic. — another voice echoes, coming from somewhere behind. Or was it ahead? — Things you avoid. Things you don’t control. Things you don’t yet understand. Chaos. Order. Truth. Lies. Life. Death.Wanda takes a deep breath.— And how do I find these people?This time, there is something close to a smile.— You don’t find them, child.A pause.— They find you. All you have to do… is open the door…And then, the figures dissipate like smoke. Thick, red smoke, until then formless.But suddenly, it forms.Images. Quick. Fragmented. Cut into rectangular shapes. Cards.A blade. Hell. Golden eyes. Death.
A crooked smile. Lavish garments. The Magician.
A gaze far too attentive. Wisdom spanning ages. The High Priestess.
Erratic magic. Messy. Raw emotional force. The Tower.
Calm. Empathy. Light. The Star.Wanda shuts her eyes tightly.— This doesn’t make sense.But no one answers. She was alone. In the dark.All that remained of that manifestation was a single red door. Tall. Without a handle. Glowing, but not enough. As if that wasn’t Wanda’s exit… but someone else’s entrance…
Almost like a point-blank shot into a fragile pane of glass, the small trance the woman was in shatters. All the Captain’s fault…— I’m fine, Steve. — she replies with a grateful smile, crossing one leg over the other. — And you? All of you, actually. Is the team doing well?He nods in response, with a sideways smile. Even so, he doesn’t seem very satisfied. Wanda notices, of course, but doesn’t intend to do much about it. It was strange, and at the same time fascinating, to live alongside Steve Rogers. On the outside, a handsome young man. On the inside, a centenarian who had seen too much. Who had lost too much. And yet, for some reason, he pretended everything was fine. That the wars hadn’t destroyed his life. That his immortal loyalty to his country hadn’t swallowed, chewed, and spat out his soul.Wanda admired him, of course, but she also felt pity. Forever a soldier.— It’s been smoother than we expected, I assure you. We’re in sync and getting along well. — He scratches the back of his head, uneasy. — Our missions have been productive, to say the least. Especially considering the current situation…— The anti-vigilante movement, right? Pietro mentioned something about it. A bit pathetic, if you ask me… — Wanda replies without meeting his eyes. She was waving to Janet, holding a glass of soda. The socialite was celebrating her birthday on top of a table, wings out and all.— Pathetic? — the Captain repeats.Wanda redirects her green gaze to him, her expression still light and casual. On the outside, at least.— No one ever fought for me, Captain. Americans have things handed to them and still complain? As if there weren’t worse problems…Wanda takes another sip from her glass, but the taste goes down slightly bitter. The Captain makes as if to say something, but doesn’t continue. He simply nods with a somewhat defeated energy and rests one of his hands over Wanda’s, which was lying on her lap.— Are you really okay, Wanda?— Steve, I already told you that—— We didn’t hear from you for almost four months. Vision came back on our radar, but you simply disappeared. Janet tried contacting you several times; nothing. Carol and I went through the same thing. Even Vision tried to send you some kind of electronic message, but got no response.— You can imagine the reas—— I can only imagine what you went through and are still going through, Wanda, but you don’t have to do this alone. — He interrupts her, but without rudeness. It was more like he was trying to stop her from doing something. From smiling her way out of an uncomfortable question.— I know that, Steve, but I’m not alone. I have…— Pietro is great company, I know, but you don’t need to isolate yourself from us. We’re a team. A family. You have your place here. I don’t like thinking of you alone, in that place… And after everything… — By that place, of course, he meant the mansion of the late Agatha Harkness, the place where Wanda and Vision lived with their children. Where they lost their children.— I am home, Steve. Transia is my place. It’s not a bad place or part of some wicked witch story. It’s my home. — The Scarlet Witch’s tone grows stronger. The soft-spoken woman with flickering smiles falters for a moment, but seems to return to herself soon after. — And no, I’m not talking about Pietro. I’ve made some new friends.Or at least, she would…[ᱬ]As much as she liked her friend, Janet Van Dyne’s birthday wasn’t the main reason Wanda had shown up in New York that night.It was convenient, that’s all.A large, noisy event, full of people too important to notice when someone simply… disappears.[ᱬ]The apartment was empty when Wanda entered.Not hers, of course. She was far too far from home to have anything that belonged to her.A space rented under a name that wasn’t exactly fake, just… unknown. One of those places that exist in the more remote parts of the city, in a loft on Staten Island.She steps in and locks the door with three turns.Not for safety, but out of habit. She had become a woman of habits lately.The bag is set down on the kitchen counter, and Wanda stands still for a few seconds, looking around as if expecting someone to tell her not to do that.No one does.— Alright then… — she murmurs, more to herself than anything else.She begins.She thought she’d be more nervous, but she was strangely calm.From her bag, Wanda takes out the objects one by one. A small glass vial. Inside, a liquid too dark. Too viscous. A bundle of dried herbs, tied with a worn red thread. A piece of old fabric embroidered by a hand not very skilled in the craft, but sufficient. It was filled with symbols that shouldn’t make much sense, but do. And finally… a blade.Wanda stares at the object for too long.— You’ve done worse… — she whispers.The loft’s dining table had become an improvised altar. A single black candle at the center. Some sage floated, burning in the air with a low red flame.She dips her fingers into the contents of the vial and begins to draw across the surface. Curved lines, symbols that connect in an almost organic way, like roots.When she finishes, she takes a deep breath. Then she brings the blade to her palm. The cut is clean. Precise.Wanda doesn’t react. She simply watches the blood emerge, thick, alive, absurdly real.— This is mine. — she says, as if she needed to hear it. — It’s ours…The blood slowly drips toward the center of the symbol.When they touch, the reaction is immediate.The lines vibrate and glow, like threads of energy about to snap under tension. The air in the apartment changes. Not dramatically, but enough for the silence to grow heavy.Wanda closes her eyes.— I don’t know all your names. — she begins, her voice lower now. More uncertain. — I don’t know how many of you there were. I don’t know what you did… or what you lost.A pause.— But I know you existed. You still do, actually. In me, in my brother… In the trees I touch. In the water that flows beneath my feet. In the wind that moves my hair.The floor beneath her feet seems to shift, like quicksand.— I know because I feel it.The herbs are crushed between her fingers and thrown over the symbol. The scent rises strong, bitter, almost suffocating.— I’m tired of trying to understand this alone.The red begins to spread beyond the drawing.No longer liquid, but energy. Hissing and erratic.— So… if there is a lineage…She opens her eyes. Green, but they don’t remain that way. They begin to glow like ruby.— I’m calling.Nothing happens for a second that lasts too long.Wanda swallows hard.— Great. — she lets out, almost laughing, but without any humor. — Of course it wouldn’t be—The world seems to pull away from her, as if trying to flee. The walls crack, the wooden floor scorches, and the windows burst open with violent gusts of wind.Wanda opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. No voice. No sound, in fact…After sound is gone, soon follows the weight of her body. Then the sense of where she ends and everything else begins.[ᱬ]The place she’s in has no defined shape, as if she were falling down a slide that never ends. It wasn’t solid, but it didn’t feel empty either.It was like being inside a wild, uncontrollable dream.Wanda doesn’t move… not because she can’t. But because she instinctively understands that any movement there… means something.And then…— How are you, Wanda?This time, the question doesn’t bother her. She recognizes the tone. Slow. Firm. Almost familiar…Wanda turns her head.— Funny… — she murmurs. — Everyone wants to know that today.The figure in front of her doesn’t respond immediately. Natalya Maximoff simply watches her. And that, for some reason, is worse.— I’m not here for empty words, mother. — Wanda continues, crossing her arms, trying to regain some control over the situation. — I just need answers.— You always have. — the woman replies.A sharp discomfort cuts through Wanda’s chest.— Then give me one, please.The space around them shifts subtly.As if it were listening. Or rather, adjusting to what they wanted. Or needed. Other presences begin to emerge.Not as clear. Nor as familiar.But similar, both to Wanda and Natalya. Even to Pietro.— There is a path. — her mother finally says. — The one you’ve been searching for so desperately. The one you’ve risked far more than you should for. Far more than you could. The one that…Wanda narrows her eyes, almost desperate to know more.— It’s what I’ve been studying for months, mother. What has haunted my nightmares for even longer. Tell me what I don’t know, please.— The Path cannot be walked alone. — she continues, ignoring the inquisitive tone. — It demands a coven. Not just any, but yours. One that functions as specific reflections of what you represent as a witch.— Reflections… — Wanda repeats to herself.— Aspects of magic. Of your magic. — another voice echoes, coming from somewhere behind. Or was it ahead? — Things you avoid. Things you don’t control. Things you don’t yet understand. Chaos. Order. Truth. Lies. Life. Death.Wanda takes a deep breath.— And how do I find these people?This time, there is something close to a smile.— You don’t find them, child.A pause.— They find you. All you have to do… is open the door…And then, the figures dissipate like smoke. Thick, red smoke, until then formless.But suddenly, it forms.Images. Quick. Fragmented. Cut into rectangular shapes. Cards.A blade. Hell. Golden eyes. Death.
A crooked smile. Lavish garments. The Magician.
A gaze far too attentive. Wisdom spanning ages. The High Priestess.
Erratic magic. Messy. Raw emotional force. The Tower.
Calm. Empathy. Light. The Star.Wanda shuts her eyes tightly.— This doesn’t make sense.But no one answers. She was alone. In the dark.All that remained of that manifestation was a single red door. Tall. Without a handle. Glowing, but not enough. As if that wasn’t Wanda’s exit… but someone else’s entrance…
CHAPTER 1 - All Thats Foul And Fair
CHAPTER 1 - All Thats Foul And Fair
"- The High Priestess. Inverted. The Fool. The Tower. The Devil. Death."
The voice comes out somewhat choked, as if the throat were dry. As if those words had not been spoken for a long time. Thinking about them, however...
"And are those the only cards you have been drawing?" - Jennifer asks, curious. From the coffee table shared by the three witches, Kale was definitely the most analytical. "Yes."- And in the same way? In the same position? But is that even possible?" Satana continues.
Generally, the daughter of the Devil took things as seriously as she respected platform heels. Now, however...The sudden seriousness of her friend does not go unnoticed by the enchanting Topaz, who feels her stomach churn.
The fortune teller had summoned her Witches to have coffee. They had not met for a long time, since they were scattered across the four corners of the planet, but they never lost contact. It is clear that women as capable and intelligent as those would not let trivialities like continents get in the way of their five o'clock tea that was so missed...
The High Priestess inverted. A woman... Powerful. Magnetic. Mystic, in every instance and alleyway.But she is a leader of hidden intentions and manipulation... She is not being sincere. With anyone. Shows the well-known card to her friends, pulling it from a small extra-dimensional pocket. Soon after, she pulls another. And then another. The Fool indicates the beginning of an illusory and impulsive journey, the Tower... this one in particular... is pure chaos. Topaz was trembling. Her well-manicured nails tapped on the cards as if it were part of a ritual.
The Devil exposes the true game of control and imprisonment, so the lies will not last for long... But Death in the future... it indicates not a literal end, but a deep and irreversible transformation. The two look deep into Topaz's eyes. None of them was crazy enough to deny a prediction from a fortune teller as good as her, but they also did not know what to say. What was she predicting? What was about to happen? Would they be in the middle of it all? Or were they just spectators of a story that was not even about them? Regardless of what Jennifer Kale or Satana Hellstrom felt, Topaz knew exactly what it was about. What would happen.
And, of course, who would be the culprit for everything...
"So it's you? The great Scarlet Witch?" Illyana Rasputin's voice is full of accent, strength, and a bit of distrust. With a large black leather jacket, her long, straight blonde hair is almost an accessory she is forced to wear.
"What does this mean? Why am I here?" Even though they were almost the same age, Nico Minoru had a much more youthful tone in her voice. Her dark hair tied in a tight bun was intended to make her sound a bit older than she actually was, but she couldn't.
"You can stop drooling now, dear. The Scarlet Witch is nothing more than another megalomaniacal witch in a lineage of megalomaniacal witches." Aerika Harkness was the spitting image of her late grandmother, but with a several millennia of years less. Bright and analytical eyes. A sharp tongue. Magic exploding inside the blood. "And if there is one thing I know, my dear, it's megalomaniacal witches."
"Your skepticism does no one any good, Aerika." - Isolke Li, the most mundane witch of all. Brown hair and receded shoulders. Green and mournful eyes. "We are witches and we are servants of our own intuition." "And mine, just like all of yours, brought me here. To her. Nods with her chin toward the figure in red in the corner of that room.
Toward the center of all that discussion. Toward the culprit of that encounter. Toward the witch who commanded the Harkness Manor since Agatha passed from this life to a better one. The Avenger. The Daughter of the Roma. The Witch. The Scarlet Witch.
"I understand that you must be confused. Lost. Suspicious, even." The voice is sweet and resounding at the same time. "But do not worry. Everything will be explained. And we will be rewarded with everything we most desire." "With what is inside the heart of each of you..." A silence takes over that environment. Wanda Maximoff, for her part, seems to be satisfied. "Tell me, girls... Have you ever heard of the Witches' Road?"
Topaz had already heard that question before. Not there. Not at that moment. Not with those voices. But she had. The memory comes like a broken mirror; overlapping fragments, images that do not obey any order. Wanda was saying many things... and not saying them at the same time. Illyana laughing... but then bleeding. Nico with her eyes glowing... fading... then reigniting.
And then, the smell of coffee. The clinking of cups.
Jennifer saying something that has not been said yet. Or has it been said already? "You need to choose, Topaz." The fortune teller blinks. "What?" And she is back. The cup slips through her fingers. The coffee spreads across the table like a liquid omen, staining cards that should not be there but are. They have always been. "Topaz?" Satana furrows her brow, tilting her head. "You're... strange." She does not answer. She wasn't even there, actually. Not with her eyes, since they no longer serve to separate what was from what will be. No, it was something deeper... Crueler. Something that allows no rest.
"I..." her voice fails, but not out of weakness. Out of excess. "I have already lived this." Jennifer leans forward immediately, interest lit like a flame on gasoline. "Déjà vu?" Topaz laughs. The voice comes out with a dry sound. Wrong. "No." - She runs her fingers over the wet cards. "It is certainty." She pulls a card. The High Priestess inverted. But this time, the figure on the card is not static. It is not a feeling. She breathes. She dances. She conjures. She destroys. She is red and black. She is strength and weakness. She... "She is lying." Topaz murmurs, her eyes too fixed. "Not just to you. To herself. To the entire path."
"Who?" Santana asks, lower now. Topaz does not answer immediately. Because, for a second—a single second—she tries. She tries to change it. Tries to push the next card back into the deck. Tries not to say it. Tries not to confirm it. But it does not negotiate. Still choked by it, she realizes that the next card is already on the table. The Fool. "We are going to accept." She says, almost in a trance. "Even without understanding. Even thinking we have a choice." Another card. The Tower. The coffee runs through it like blood. "And everything will crumble. Not by accident... but because it needs to." Jennifer opens her mouth, but cannot interrupt. Now, no one can. Topaz is... aligning. For the first time, she is not running from the visions. She is not trying to organize them. She is not trying to choose which of them is real.
She is letting them all exist at the same time. And that... is worse.
"The Devil..." her voice lowers, intimate. "It's not a person. It's not just someone. It is the bond. It is the agreement." "It is the moment when we know... and even so, we continue." Her eyes, finally, look up. And meet the eyes of the two.
"And Death..."Silence.A heavy, inevitable silence. Accepted. "...is not the end." - she concludes, firmer now. "It is when there is no turning back." The air changes. Literally. As if the world had finally heard something interesting.The café lights flicker. The sound of the street disappears. And for an instant, too short to measure and too long to ignore, everything remains suspended.Topaz breathes deeply.
And for the first time since she started pulling those cards... She does not seem scared. She seems... decided. "It is going to begin." She says, simply. "What?" - Satana asks. Topaz stands up, haughty and powerful. And when she speaks, her voice no longer has a tremor. Nor doubt. Only truth. "The Trial."
THE TRIAL
THE TRIAL
The coffee is no longer coffee. The walls elongate like shadows pulled by force. The floor fragments into patterns that resemble scattered cards. The sweet smell gives way to something older... dust, incense, time.
And in the center of everything, a circle. Engraved in space itself. Symbols that none of them learned, but that all of them understand.
Topaz takes a step forward. "What is happening?" Nico asks. "Are we already on the Road?"
"What?" - Illyana asks with her arms crossed. "Wasn't the dimensional portal that Maximoff opened enough?"
Topaz smiles. And this time, it is sad. "It doesn't matter." - she repeats, lower now, as if she were saying that to herself before saying it to them. From within complete darkness, an ancient road extends under Topaz's feet.
It is not made of stone, nor of earth, but of cards. Hundreds. Thousands. Some face up, others hiding faces that whisper nonetheless.
The sky above has no defined color. It changes. Constantly. Dawn, twilight, deep night... all at the same time. And along the road, the witches can see various creatures. Monstrous, yes, but not scary. Not for Topaz, at least.
A faun with tired eyes, holding a broken necklace. A silent banshee, lips sewn by ancient mourning. A forest spirit, cracked, as if it had been burned from the inside out. Topaz stops. Breathes. And recognizes. "I helped... all of you..." she whispers, almost without realizing it. And she did help. Not as a heroine, much less a savior. Topaz always knew too much to identify as any of those. No, she was always just someone who saw. She had been an advisor to mages who were afraid of their own destinies. Intermediary for creatures that belonged nowhere. Reader of futures that no one wanted to face.
She always knew. She always warned. But she never stayed. Never until the end.
"So this is your trick?" Aerika crosses her arms, analyzing the scene with a crooked smile. Purple eyes fix on Wanda. "A nostalgic little theater to see if she breaks?" "Don't be so literal." Wanda answers, smoothly. "It will give you wrinkles."
Her eyes are fixed on Topaz. "It is my responsibility." - She answers.
Illyana twirls the sword in her fingers, restless. "Great. So what is the problem? Does she just need to... I don't know, solve all of this again?" Topaz takes a step. The faun looks up and speaks, but his voice does not come from him. It comes from three times at the same time. "You said it would work out." "You said there was no other way." "You said..."
Topaz closes her eyes to listen better. "I told the truth." she answers, firmly.
The banshee laughs. A hollow and broken sound. "Truth is not comfort."
"It never was." Topaz opens her eyes. "And it never will be."
The forest spirit approaches. Each step leaves ash marks on the floor of cards. "Then why did you leave?"
Silence. This time... there is no ready answer. There is no card that says. There is no vision that anticipates. Only her. And the weight.
"Because..." her voice fails, but she does not retreat. "Because I did not want to see the aftermath." The creatures stop. The world, in response, also does the same. she continues, lower. "I could guide." "I could see the path. Point out. Warn. But the end..." she swallows hard. "The end always scared me."
Wanda takes a step forward, but does not interfere. Curious. Nico watches, her eyes far too attentive. Isolke... smiles slightly. As if she already knew where that would lead.
"You knew he would die." the faun says. "I knew."
"That she would lose everything." the banshee completes. "I knew."
"That the forest would burn." Topaz breathes. And this time, she does not hesitate. "I knew."
The silence that comes after is not accusatory. It is just... empty. Confess guilt?
"So what is the challenge?" - Illyana lets out, impatient. "To accept that fate is shit? I get it, next trial, please."
"No." - Isolke interrupts, finally raising her gaze. "It's not about guilt, silly." Her green eyes shine for a second. Something old. Something... wrong. "It's about choices."
Topaz turns her face slowly. "I had no choice."
"You do." Wanda counters, firmly. "You always do. We all do."
"Not about what happens." Topaz corrects. - "Only about how I face it."
The cards on the floor begin to move. Forming... a new draw. Or would it be an old one? Six cards. The same ones. High Priestess inverted. The Fool. The Tower. The Devil. Death. Wait. Is there a sixth? Face down. The air feels heavy.
— Wow… — Nico whispers.Topaz approaches.Each step echoes in different versions of herself.
The one who ran away. The one who lied for comfort. The one who softened truths that were too hard. The one who left before the end. All of them… there. Watching.
— That is the point. — Aerika murmurs, now serious. — It is not about predicting. Topaz extends her hand.— It is about sustaining. — Wanda completes.
Her fingers touch the last card. And for an instant, she sees. All the possibilities. All the versions where she lies. Where she changes. Where she tries to save. And all… lead to the same place.
The Tower falls. The Devil binds. Death transforms. Always. Inevitable.
Topaz closes her eyes and, for the first time, does not try to change anything.She turns the card. The Judgment.
Redemption? No, no… Not a redemption. It is a call. The act of acceptance. The fruit of consequence.
Topaz smiles. At peace, for the first time. Or was it always? — I did not fail you. — she says, looking at the creatures.
— I told the truth. And the truth… led you where you had to go. The faun bows his head. The banshee almost disappears. The forest spirit breathes. And the cracks… stop growing.
— I will no longer run from the end. — Topaz continues. — Nor from mine. Nor from anyone's.
The cards rise. Spinning. Aligning. — I will no longer try to soften the inevitable. Nor hide behind the “maybe”. — She looks at Wanda. Directly. — And I know what you are doing. — Silence. Heavy. The roma's eyes widened. — I know how this ends. — her voice does not tremble.— I know who falls. I know what is lost. — A step forward. — And I will go until the end regardless.
The circle explodes in light again. But this time, nothing is consumed. It is purely the consolidation of something firmer. When everything quiets down, the road of cards has disappeared. The creatures too. Only the group remains. The Road. And Topaz. Different. Whole. Aligned not with control… But with truth. Wanda smiles, after she recovers.
— Congratulations. — she says, softly. — You passed your trial. Topaz tilts her head, somewhat sharply. — No. — she corrects. — I just accepted my judgement.
And in the distance, the Tower continues to fall.
CHAPTER 2 - Gather, Sisters
CHAPTER 2 - Gather, Sisters
— Styrka.
Alex sleeps peacefully, his arms folded behind his head. His sleep was too
deep to hear the whispers.
— Kratos.
Gert isn’t much different, covered in pillows and blankets. Her chest rises and
falls, calm and not the least bit anxious. Unlike Nico, of course.
— Phalang.
Head down on his makeshift bed, Chase was snoring. As always. Even
though the Staff of the Absolute was glistening with the droplets of blood that
sporadically fell onto its orb, almost purring in response, nothing seemed to
rouse him from his little world of dreams.
— Fuerza.
As she sleeps, Molly seems even smaller. Even younger. Even more innocent.
Cuddled up against Karolina, the girl looked more like a baby than a runaways.
And yet, that is what she is. That is what Nico and all his friends have become.
— Strength.
Right after finishing her round of mantras, Nico feels she can finally sleep. She
sits on the bed next to the sofa bed that Karolina and Molly share. The
difference is that now, only the little one is asleep.
— What are you doing, Nico?
Minoru’s dark eyes light up, startled. Ever since they fled, every night and
every three hours, Nico had made the exact same rounds, and no one ever
woke up. No one ever noticed the spells she cast over them. She didn’t know
what they might think of that. What they might think of her.
— “It’s nothing, Karrie.” Her hands start to shake, so she hides them in the
pocket of her worn coat. “It’s just a habit I picked up since… well, you
know.”
Karolina frowned, as if that scene were the weirdest thing she’d ever seen.
Finally, right after tucking Molly into bed, the blonde flashes a smile at the
corner of her mouth and gets up from the bed to sit next to Nico.
— Let me rephrase that, okay? What are you doing up so late? And
alone, on top of that?
Nico could have said she was shocked by Dean’s understanding, but that
would have been a lie. It would have been crazy. Amid so much uncertainty
and suffering, Karolina brought light to Nico’s gloomy mind. She brought
calm. She was… She was…
— You know I don’t sleep very well. And when I do sleep… well. Let’s just
say it’s not much better than insomnia.
Karolina moves a little closer, resting her head on Nico’s shoulder. She says
nothing, but the message is clear: go on.
— I think they’re nightmares, but at the same time they aren’t. You know
when you’re in a horrible situation and you want to wake up, but you can’t?
Because what’s happening is real?
— Like when I fell asleep in the middle of the test and dreamed I was at
home, when in reality I hadn't studied at all and just put my head
down?
Nico lets out a little snort through her nose, smiling, but it doesn’t last long.
Her serious expression returns immediately.
— Hey, sorry. I just wanted to be silly.
— No, it’s okay. I don’t understand any of this either. What I’m seeing. What
I’m feeling. It’s such a… visceral thing.
Karolina nods in response, even though she didn’t understand a thing. And
there was no way she could understand, really. Nico herself knew that better
than anyone.
— You're scared. Why?
— In these dreams, I see myself in a place unlike any I’ve ever been to. Even
unlike any I’ve ever dreamed of. It’s a dark place… and red. And I’m not
alone in there.
— It might just be a metaphor your mind is creating, Nico. You know, for our
situation and all that…
— No. I know I’m not that kind of witch, but I know something is going to
happen.
— To us?
— To me.
— But you said you’re not alone in there… Who’s in there with you?
— I don’t know. I only see shadows. Silhouettes. And eyes that glow.
Although she didn’t show it, Karolina felt a chill when she heard Nico speak.
They hug and stand there, in silence. Very close.
— Look, I don’t understand what you’re going through. Or what you’re
feeling. And honestly? I don’t think I ever will. But that doesn’t matter. I
know you’ll make the best decisions, whether for yourself, for us, or for
whoever is with you inside that place.
Nico’s eyes well up, on the verge of tears. But they don’t fall.
— And you know, right? If everything goes wrong… If the world goes
crazy and everything is about to explode… you run away.
[W]
— So… Is anyone going to say anything about what’s happening, or are we
just going to keep walking until one of us is judged? Is that it?
The witches had been walking for some time. After Topaz’s trial was over,
Nico thought the atmosphere would lighten up. That they would come
together and Nico would feel, for the first time, like part of a nest as strange
as she was. Of course, they were strange too, but in different ways. Some
were curious. And dangerous…
— “Silly children… You must think the Path is nothing more than a legend,
right? That is, of course, if you’ve even heard of it.” Aerika’s tone held not a
shred of kindness. “Tell me, Wanda. Did you find this clan at a daycare
center or a reform school?” She pointed her black fingernails at Nico and
Illyana.
— “I hope the next trial is yours, Harkness.” — Illyana, as always,
doesn’t look at the older witch. She just keeps staring straight ahead,
apathetic. — “And that you don’t pass.”
The two continued to bicker, but Nico’s gaze was fixed on the other
witches—the quieter ones. Their leader, the Scarlet Sorceress, was the one
standing farthest away. Right up ahead on the path, it was as if she didn’t even
hear what was happening right behind her. Isolke Li, on the other hand, was
halfway between them. Just as close to Wanda as she was to Nico, who sensed
something strange coming from her. From Topaz, however, he felt a sense of
calm. As if, for her, it were all over.
Whenever their eyes met, Nico felt a sense of trust. In herself, if that made
any sense. And that bothered Nico more than any of Aerika’s taunts. Before,
everything had been easier when no one expected anything from her. Now,
they did. Now, they counted on her. Her friends.
Those witches.
When her chest tightened with anxiety, it was as if the whole world was
counting on her.
And then, the Path narrows. Literally. The walls—which before seemed like
nothing more than dense shadows—begin to close in, as if they were
breathing. As if they were alive. As if they were… hungry.
— It wasn’t like this before. — Nico murmurs, more to himself than to the
others.
Wanda doesn’t stop. She doesn’t even hesitate.
— “It is now,” she says, without making a big deal of it.
The ground begins to shake. Not like an earthquake or anything like that. It
was more like a footstep. Heavy. Dragging. Another one. Closer.
The air grows hot. Thick. Hard to breathe. And then… the
sound. A double growl.
Out of sync.
Two throats trying to occupy the same space.
The creature appears as if it had always been there—as if the Path had only
just decided to let them see it now.
It was Colossal. Dark skin, almost blackened, cracked like burning coal. The
body drags itself along and supports itself at the same time, too heavy to exist
and yet impossible to ignore.
And the heads… Two. Connected by a grotesquely split neck. One looks first.
Then the other.
And when Nico looks at them more closely, she feels the urge to scream.
The two faces weren’t exact copies, but they were close enough. The features
resembled hers. The eyes. Expressions she recognized even before she could
remember where from.
— No…—the sound comes out weak. Strained, as if in the midst of
sudden suffocation.—No, this isn’t real.
The creature growls, and the two voices come together. Overlapping.
— NICO.
Her name echoes like a poorly healed wound.
The Staff vibrates in her hand. Anxious. Hungry. Begging.
No.
Demanding.
— “Girls…” Wanda’s voice cuts through the air like a blade. “Now.”
But Nico doesn’t move. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. Her eyes are still
fixed. On the two heads. On the two faces. On the two pasts that never truly
stayed behind.
The creature advances, too fast for something of that size.
Illyana reacts first. Her sword slices through the air, instantly projecting a
portal into that space. She is swallowed up by it, narrowly avoiding the
monster by inches.
Topaz is already on the move, with energy swirling and pulsing between her
fingers. Aerika conjures something low, venomous, almost whispered.
Wanda fires an erratic, hissing burst of energy.
But it isn’t enough. It never would be, really. Because the creature isn’t there
for them.
It’s there for Nico.
She embodies what she fears most. What she hates most about herself. Her
own parents. The Path knew this and was using them against her. They’re there
for her… but who is Nico there for?
Wanda? Topaz? No. No. Of course not.
Molly. Alex. Chase. Gert. Karolina.
The faces flash by too quickly in her mind. Small. Human. Fragile. She
always protected them. Always bled for them. Always stood in front of them.
But she never fought for them. Not really. She
never wanted to hurt them. She never wanted to go
too far. The creature charges again.
Straight at her.
And this time, Nico moves. Quick and decisive, leaping with a somersault.
The cut is dry at first, but soon becomes sticky and viscous. The blade cuts
through the skin of his own hand as if it already knew the way.
Blood flows. The Staff responds. Alive. Awake.
— Yánjiāng!
Her voice does not
tremble. The magic
explodes.
A burst of violet lava is spat out of literal nothingness, violently pushing the
creature’s impact backward. Its skin bubbles, covered in blisters, until it is raw
flesh. The creature screams, driven mad by pain and hatred.
But Nico doesn’t stop.
The eyes are still on the heads. They’re
still… in them.
— Fuckers!
The ground shakes again. This time, however, a violet aura surrounds the
small area beneath the two-headed creature. It shatters, and the fragments of
dark stone lodge in the beast’s paws, throwing it off balance and drawing a
few more drops of blood.
A double scream echoes.
But it still isn’t enough. For them, nothing ever is. The
two heads reorganize themselves.
They look at her again. They
smile.
— yOU AlWayS RuN AwAY
Something inside her almost breaks. But it doesn’t break. Not now.
Not here. Nico takes a step forward.
Alone.
In front of everyone.
— I won’t run away anymore.
The Staff pulses more strongly.
Deeper. Like a heart that isn’t just hers. And then, she strikes. For
real.
— Dette!
The air splits. Literally. An invisible cut slices through the space and strikes
the creature’s forked neck, causing it to recoil. It is choking on its own blood.
— Ligare.
Chains appear—not physical, not entirely—made of raw energy, wrapping
around their legs, their throats, pulling, binding.
They all watch. None of them interfere. It’s
Nico’s moment.
The creature tries to advance again, but Nico is already there. Closer. Much
closer. Too close to back down. Blood still trickling down his face, his
breathing ragged, but his eyes steady. His hand steady.
— Exuro.
And then, for one of the first times since she discovered her magic, she
doesn’t protect. She just consumes. It explodes from the inside out. A
violent, hot, brutal flash that pierces both heads at the same time.
The sound that comes from the creature is no longer a roar, nor a cry of
bravery. It is nothing more than a final breath.
The body collapses under its own weight, lifeless. The faces, for their part,
no longer looked so much like their parents. Like the faces she still
remembered. Like the faces she, somehow, was already beginning to
forget.
Nico doesn’t move. The Staff still glowing. The hand still bleeding. Her
breath still trying to keep up with her own body. But she was, somehow, just
fine.
Behind her, the others feel it clearly.
Another trial was complete.
The witches follow down the road.
And for the first time, Wanda isn't leading them, Nico is.
And she doesn't realize that yet. But tha path does. And that's enough.
CHAPTER 3 - Brew with Coven True
CHAPTER 3 - Brew with Coven True
— And so, sisters and brothers… I say: enough!
And the chorus rises along with Harkness.
— Enough!
The crowd of witches and warlocks boiled inside that auditorium. It was as if they were in a trial, seated in rows before the center where Aerika stood. She, in turn, looked both like a judge and an executioner. The accused, however, was nowhere near there…
— As if causing the death of my grandmother, the matriarch of every daughter and son of New Salem, were not enough, the Witch of Wundagore now seeks to further corrupt the very magic she so freely abuses. Wanda Maximoff wishes to use her aberrant magic to tear down every pillar of our society. Of our world! The Witches’ Road itself is already a variable none of us should underestimate. But she is not satisfied with being a mere troublemaker. No… what she holds in her sour heart is far worse…
The crowd responds in unison, loud and enraged. Hands rise into the air, as if holding pitchforks and torches. Aerika, internally, lets out a small laugh. It was somewhat ironic for a group full of witches to be acting like that, but none of them seemed to notice.
— Chaos Magic. — The words come out with disgust. Aerika’s proud posture only made her resemble her late grandmother even more. — Tell me: has any of you ever heard anything remotely good about this magic? About this perversion against nature? All we know is that witches who have wielded this kind of energy bring destruction, death, and imbalance. Chaos, of course! And in the most wicked sense of the word…
The witches and warlocks respond louder. With more rage.
— Maximoff has been an emissary of disaster since birth. Among her many crimes, she has destroyed an orphanage full of innocent children. Created demonic babies out of nothing, to satisfy her mundane and foolish desires. None of this, of course, is even remotely important compared to her greatest crime.
At that point, the crowd seemed to croak with hatred. Everyone wanted blood. Her blood. Aerika seemed to thrive on all that venom. Her expression was stern, but she looked radiant.
— The death of my grandmother, the legendary Agatha Harkness, is a stain on the history of the witch community that will never be erased. Even though her soul is now with the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, her death has not yet been avenged. Her path has not yet been reclaimed. The void left in her place has still not been filled…
The silence that follows is almost palpable. Not that they disagreed with what she was doing… they were simply waiting.
— A void that I, by the duty running through my blood, must fill. Must, in fact. We all have duties toward our coven, brothers and sisters. Some more complicated than others, of course. The heaviest burden of all was certainly the one my grandmother carried for all those years. The High Priestess of New Salem must guide our people toward the best and most fruitful paths. To the safest places and the most important moments. Agatha Harkness always made good use of the faith and energy we placed in her.
Murmurs of agreement. Of nervousness. Of tension. All of them, quite literally, anxious. Everyone wanted to do something about the situation. About her… And Aerika knew that very well.
— I cannot promise that I will follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. Not with the same skill, much less the same wisdom. What I can promise, however, is that I will try. The question that remains is… will you trust me with such an honor?
And the answer comes quickly. From the crowd of sorcerers, witches, and all things arcane, countless eyes glow in different colors and in absolute silence.
(W)
The voice of the dead is never what you imagine. It is not ethereal nor frightening. It is not normal, but it is not that different from how it sounded in life. It is like speaking to someone through a very poor-quality phone. You can understand the basics, but not without difficulty.
— I must congratulate you, my dear. — Agatha Harkness’, for example, is even quieter. More apathetic. As if dying were not as interesting as it seems. — Even though it is part of the craft, few witches can lie with such skill. With such detachment from reality.
Aerika, the granddaughter, simply rolls her eyes. She looks somewhat shaken, her forehead dripping with sweat, gaze unfocused.
— Thank you, grandmother. It’s very good to know you only had to die to recognize my worth. — she replies with sharp irony, but Agatha does not seem to care.
— You may have taken my position. You may have convinced your brothers and sisters to grant you access to the magic of New Salem, as you always wanted… But I know the next step of your ambition, my granddaughter. I know what comes next. And I assure you… all the magic you have just received will do you no good when you get where you want to go.
Aerika sighs, resting one hand on her forehead.
— You don’t know what you’re talking about, you decrepit old woman. I was born for this. — her violet eyes fix on her grandmother’s ghost, shifting into glowing red, then greenish yellow. Her eyes radiated all kinds of energy. So did her body. The magic of New Salem was inside her, writhing like a nest of venomous serpents too large for that small space. — I just need time to get used to it.
Agatha lets out a ghostly tsk, disappointed.
— If you need to get used to the magic of a group of fifth-rate witches, what do you think will happen when you try to bite off more than you can chew?
— There is nothing I cannot chew, Agatha Harkness. People didn’t call me Witch-Killer for nothing.
Agatha’s gaze drifts away, not toward Aerika, but somewhere far more distant. More tragic.
— Your father was always a cruel child and an envious adult, but even he knew his limits. I cannot follow you where you are going. — for the first time, concern colors her voice. — No one can. Do you understand that?
Aerika rolls her eyes, sitting down in a wine-colored armchair.
— Tell me… what difference would you make? Or did you forget how you died? You bit off more than you could chew, grandmother, and were made a fool of by a little girl who dreamed of being a mother. I am not a fool. And I am infinitely more experienced than she is. Perhaps, grandmother, I am even more than you.
She smiles, confidence returning.
— The magic of New Salem is only preparing me to absorb something much more powerful. Something much more… useful. — she shrugs. — After all, as you well know, there is no one more suited to chaos than ME…
(W)
After two trials completed, the Scarlet Witch’s coven still had four ahead.
Who would be next?
Some wondered.
Would it be the mysterious Isolke Li? The stoic Illyana? The silent Wanda? Or the sharp-tongued Aerika?
Deep down, she already knew her trial had begun. The changes were subtle, but she noticed. The Path, once dark and abstract, began to take familiar shapes…
She remembered walking a path very much like this in the forest behind the house where she grew up. Back when she was just a foolish and defenseless little child…
— So, Nico? Does it feel good? — Illyana asks.
— Why didn’t you ask Topaz that? — Nico, still ahead of the others, seemed more serious than at the beginning.
— Because she doesn’t say anything. Like, what’s the point of seeing the future if you don’t tell anyone?
— I think that’s the point, dear… — Isolke chimes in, curled inside her worn moss-green hoodie.
The two younger witches exchange suspicious glances, as they always did near her. Isolke, however, seemed to enjoy that.
— Anyway… — Nico sighs. — It’s satisfying, at the very least. It feels like something changed inside me, you know? — she turns to Topaz, who remained silent just a few steps behind Wanda. — You feel that too, don’t you?
Topaz nods with a calm smile. Wanda slows her pace, attentive. Aerika, of course, notices.
— It’s like…
— Stop talking, dear. You’ll ruin the surprise for those who haven’t gotten there yet! — Aerika interrupts, cynical. Her eyes locked onto Wanda. — Or did you forget that our fearless leader hasn’t reached hers yet? If each of us is to face something that touches us, have you ever wondered what that great Witch hides beneath her cloak?
The witches stop walking, waiting for a reaction. Wanda keeps moving.
— Don’t provoke me, Harkness. It won’t end well.
— Is that a threat?
— You don’t deserve one.
Wanda’s apathy was unexpected. She did not seem like such a cold woman.
— Oh, does only my grandmother deserves one of that?
And then she stops walking.
The air hisses, as if her stillness forced molecules apart.
— You…
But the Witch’s voice never finishes. Her expression freezes mid-sentence. The others are the same.
All witches, motionless.
All… except Aerika.
— What? — she exclaims, startled for the first time in years. She looks around, searching for an explanation.
But there is nowhere to run.
Her trial had begun.
And Aerika Harkness never handled judgment well…
She exhales, not moving immediately. Not out of caution—she never had that—but out of surprise. Not at the moment itself, but at the feeling pressing in her chest. Something cold. Uncomfortable.
Could it be… remorse?
And then…
— Finally.
The voice comes from nowhere. Or everywhere. Layered. Torn. Exhausted.
Aerika smiles, but it lacks confidence. Small. Shaky.
— Took you long enough.
Shadows begin to gather around her. Not like before. Not like the Path. These have shape. Weight. History.
One silhouette appears. Then another. And another.
Until she is surrounded.
Witches. Warlocks. Sorcerers. Monsters. Demons. Even angels.
Men, women, children, animals…
Every being who had ever had the misfortune of crossing Harkness’ path.
All wearing bodies that were no longer bodies.
Just echoes.
All… staring at her.
— I was wondering when you’d show up. — Aerika crosses her arms. — I thought the trial would be more… creative.
No one laughs.
No one responds.
That irritates her.
More than anything, that irritates her.
— You stole from us.
The first voice is firm.
A blonde woman. Her face once beautiful, now partially consumed by whatever lies beyond.
— I killed you. — Aerika corrects. — Let’s use the right terms.
— You stole from us.
— You drained us.
— You consumed us.
— You left us empty.
The voices overlap. Grow. Press in around her.
Aerika rolls her eyes.
— Dramatic. Always were. If something can be stolen from you, it was never truly yours. Take notes.
One figure advances.
A man. Fingers too long. Skin missing in places.
— You promised power.
— And I gave it. — Aerika snaps back. — For a few seconds, you had more than you ever would have alone. You should be grateful.
He stares with hollow sockets.
— Monster.
The word echoes.
Aerika laughs.
— Oh please… if you expected kindness, you chose the wrong witch.
More approach.
Closer.
She tries to summon protection, but nothing she has ever stolen or gained matters there.
— Parasite.
— Thief.
— Empty.
— Hungry.
— Weak.
Something inside her cracks.
Her eyes flicker. Colors shifting. Unstable.
— Careful… — she murmurs. — You don’t know who you’re talking to.
— We know exactly. — they answer together. — You are the daughter of something vile and something irrelevant. The granddaughter of power who chose weakness. You are nothing…
From among the shadows, one emerges.
Familiar.
— Hello, my dear.
Agatha Harkness.
She doesn’t rush. She simply… is.
Aerika swallows.
— We’ve had this conversation. — she tries to hold her tone. — I thought I was clear.
— You always think so. — Agatha tilts her head. — But you never understand.
The shadows retreat.
— Came to judge me too? — Aerika arches a brow.
— No. — Agatha says. — I came to confirm.
The air grows heavier.
— You are exactly what they say.
Silence.
— A monster.
Aerika laughs.
— You think that offends me?
— No. I think it defines you.
Her eyes tremble.
— You steal magic because you can’t sustain your own. You kill because you cannot create. You consume because you are… empty.
— Shut up.
Low.
Dangerous.
— And in the end… you will try to bite something too big.
Aerika doesn’t breathe.
— And no one will be there to save you.
Silence.
— I don’t need anyone! I never did!
Her voice cracks.
— Never did…
— No. — Agatha agrees. — But you will wish you had.
And that breaks her.
— ENOUGH!
Magic explodes.
Uncontrolled.
Violet bursts like grotesque fireworks.
The ground cracks.
Shadows vanish.
The trial ends.
And Aerika fails.
She became a living bomb of uncontrolled magic.
— I knew you’d be trouble… — Wanda’s voice cuts through everything, calm. Apathetic.
Unlike the others, she moves.
Her red eyes fixed on Aerika.
— Nothing that comes from you worries me.
Aerika’s magic calms—not by control, but by force.
— How… how… — she stammers.
— You know how. It’s why you came here. — Wanda’s hands weave scarlet energy. — Why you returned to New Salem. Why you swallowed more magic than you could ever control. I just don’t understand why…
Wanda smiles slightly.
— If you cannot contain New Salem’s magic, how did you expect to contain mine? The Chaos I wield is far beyond anything you can imagine, dear… But I am not your enemy. I swear. — her smile sharpens. — But I cannot allow you to cause me problems.
Aerika can only watch.
Realizing her mistake.
— No… I can’t.
Silence dominates everything.
— So, to keep us on the Path… and to prevent a worse fate than your grandmother’s… I will change a few things, okay?
Total silence.
— Don’t worry, Aerika… Everything will be perfect. Just as I imagined…
CHAPTER 4 - And Glory Shall Be Thine
CHAPTER 4 - And Glory Shall Be Thine
The office was… ordinary.
Too white. Too clean. Organized in a way that felt artificial, as if no one had ever truly lived there. A plant in the corner. Synthetic, probably. A clock on the wall that insisted on marking every second with an irritating tick.
Illyana hated all of it.
She was sitting, but not relaxed. Never relaxed. Her posture upright, rigid, as if any lapse could cost her something. Her hands rested motionless on her lap. Pale eyes wandered through the room without truly focusing on anything.
She had already mapped every exit.
“You can make yourself comfortable.” The psychologist smiled gently. Too gently. “This is a safe space.”
Illyana did not answer immediately. Her eyes finally stopped. On the woman. She analyzed her. Measured her. Dismissed her.
“I know.”
The response came dry. The psychologist, however, did not flinch.
“Alright…” she wrote something down. “Would you like to tell me what brought you here?”
Silence.
The clock marked another second. And another. And another.
Illyana tilted her head slightly, as if considering the question. As if choosing words she did not want to use.
“They told me it would help.”
“And do you believe that?”
Another pause.
“No.”
Dr. Ashley Kafka crossed her legs, still maintaining that soft tone.
“Even so, you came.”
“It wasn’t my choice.”
Her eyes wandered again. To the window. Then the door.
Then… nowhere.
“Sometimes, when we go through very intense experiences…” the psychologist began carefully, “it can be difficult to trust people. Difficult to talk about what happened.”
Illyana let out a small breath through her nose. Not quite a laugh.
“‘Difficult’ is a weak word.”
“Would you like to give me a more accurate one?”
And then she thought. Not for long, of course. Illyana never thought for very long when the answer already existed inside her.
“Unnecessary.”
But she also thought about everything she had endured to get there. Every moment she wished she were dead. Every moment she wished she could take revenge on all the monsters surrounding her. And, of course, the one moment in which she managed to do both.
The psychologist, back in reality, slightly raised her eyebrows.
“So talking about it is unnecessary?”
“Reliving it is.”
The air shifted a little.
Subtle. But it changed.
“And you feel like you would be reliving it?”
Illyana did not answer, but her fingers moved. Almost imperceptibly. A small tension, as if something had crossed her mind too quickly.
“I don’t talk about what happened,” she finally said. “It doesn’t help. It doesn’t change anything.”
“It doesn’t need to change what happened,” the psychologist replied with trained calm. “But it can change how it lives inside you.”
That made Illyana truly look at her for the first time. A direct, cold, sharpened stare. The psychiatrist would not need a diploma to realize she had offended her.
“It doesn’t ‘live’ inside me.” She practically growled. “It’s over.”
The word came out clean, almost like a command. Still, it did not sound true.
The psychologist noticed. Of course she noticed.
“Some things don’t end just because we want them to.”
Illyana leaned back in the chair for the first time. She rested her elbows on her knees, placing her worn combat boots on the suede armchair.
“You talk as if you know.”
“I don’t know what you lived through,” she admitted. “But I know how trauma works.”
“No.” Illyana cut her off without raising her voice. It was as if her sword were attached to her tongue, cutting through sentences as if they were souls. “You know how people break. How weak people give in, fall apart, and fail.” There was restrained anger in her voice. Resentment, even. But not directed at the psychologist, of course. “I didn’t break. I didn’t fail.”
And there it was. The first lie told in that torturous session. Small. Simple. Fragile.
The clock continued.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
“Then why are you here, Illyana?”
And that question had no automatic answer. The blonde searched for something inside her chest, but everything she kept there was impossible to share. Not with that woman, not with her brother, not with Kitty.
No one could know. NO ONE.
Her eyes drifted away again. To the wall. To the floor. To nowhere.
“Because…” she began, but her jaw locked. Her fingers tightened harder now. Nails pressing into her own skin. “Because I don’t want to go back.”
“Back where?”
This time, she smiled.
“To all of it.”
The psychologist frowned slightly, confused.
“Sorry, could you explain that better…”
“No.”
Too fast. Too dry. Brutal, even.
And when Illyana looked up again, there was something there. Someone.
Someone who knew that “place” was not just a memory. Someone who was always listening. Watching. Waiting.
“I think that’s enough.”
She stood before the session ended. The psychologist tried to follow.
“Illyana, we still have time, if you want…”
“I know.”
She was already at the door. Hand on the doorknob.
“It doesn’t change anything.”
And then she left.
The door closed with a soft click, and the office returned to normal.
Silent. Clean. Safe.
But not for long.
Because for the first time since arriving there, the psychologist noticed the room was… cold. Too cold.
And in the reflection of the window, for just an instant…
A reflection that was not hers.
[ W ]
The Road continues.
Illyana walks at the same pace as the others. Firm, precise steps, as if she were simply following along. As if she were present.
But she was not exactly there.
Part of her was still trapped in that overly white office, in that clinical silence pretending to be safety.
She ignores it. As she always does. As she always has. As she always would, if it depended on her…
Her focus returns ahead, to the Road, to the group.
Nico seemed restless, but in an almost excited way. The kind of curiosity that could only exist in the clan’s newest member. Illyana was only a few years older than her, yet she felt as distant from Minoru as she did from Isolke Li.
“Okay, but like…” she began, looking from one to another. “Doesn’t this have an order? Because, I don’t know, it feels kinda random.”
“Maybe it is,” Li answered, shrinking further into her hoodie, as if the fabric could somehow protect her. “Or maybe we just haven’t understood the pattern yet.”
“I hate patterns that don’t explain themselves,” Nico muttered, crossing her arms briefly before returning to a normal walk.
“You hate not being in control,” Aerika corrected without even looking at her.
Acidic. Sharp. Carrying that casual contempt she always had.
Illyana glanced at her. Aerika walked close to Wanda.
Too close.
The blonde frowned.
There was no usual exchange of barbs or palpable tension, but there was… something. A closeness that did not seem accidental, but was not comfortable either.
Strange, at the very least.
Still, no one commented. No one even seemed to notice.
The Road continued, and they continued with it.
Simple as that.
Topaz, a few steps behind, maintained the same silence as always. Calm expression, almost misplaced, as if she were always slightly out of sync with the rest of the group.
But Illyana noticed something from the corner of her blue eye.
When she turned her face, Topaz was already looking at her.
Dark eyes fixed on the Russian for mere seconds, but enough to be noticed.
Illyana held the gaze, but did not understand the reason.
Topaz merely tilted her head slightly, as if fitting together a piece that made very little sense, and then looked away with the same naturalness as always.
Illyana frowned, but said nothing.
She kept walking.
A few steps later, it happened again. Faster this time. When she noticed, Topaz was already looking away.
And that began to bother her.
Not in an obvious way. Not enough to stop or question it. It was just background noise, a faint feeling of misalignment, as if something were shifting inside her stomach.
But she ignored it.
As she always did.
“I’m scared,” Isolke murmured quietly.
Aerika let out a small breath through her nose, almost a laugh.
“Of course you are… I can feel you shrinking like the worm you are from here.”
“Passing the Trial is not proof of supremacy, Harkness. And as far as we all know, you may very well have cheated to pass.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the group’s Mage?” But she did not respond. No one knew what she was talking about. Even so, Illyana noticed Topaz staring at her again. “Where is your wisdom? You do not cheat the Road. No one could act against the incarnate witchcraft that permeates the walls of this place.”
Silence followed her.
Aerika fell quiet and returned to walking close to Wanda.
“You don’t know.”
Illyana startled, looking around. Whose voice was that?
“You know.”
Again. The same voice.
She turned toward the other witches. None of them seemed to have opened their mouths.
But Topaz was still staring at her.
“She made you forget, but you still remember.”
And then, a red glimpse.
“Topaz, what…”
[ W ]
The question died before it could be born.
The Road simply vanished.
There was no clean transition or smooth displacement like before; it was an abrupt cut, an error in the tape. As if reality itself had given up sustaining the façade.
The ground disappeared beneath Illyana’s feet, sound drained from the world, and for one instant, the vacuum was filled by a silence too heavy to be natural.
When the environment reformed, it was not the Road.
Nor was it the office.
It was the worst place in existence.
Illyana recognized it one second before allowing herself to accept it.
The air was a block of dense heat, loaded with static that clung to the skin. The smell struck next: iron, ash, and something visceral, ancient, that found no translation in the human world.
The walls were not solid. They were organic structures pulsing in an uncomfortable rhythm, as if the architecture itself were breathing in a coma.
Illyana did not move.
She did not need to.
She knew the owner of the house.
That was not the Limbo she ruled, nor the one she bent to her will.
It was the other one.
The first.
The one that existed before any spark of power awakened inside young Rasputina.
“You still try to pretend this isn’t you.”
The voice did not echo. It simply occupied the space, manifesting with irritating familiarity, like something that had always been there, merely waiting for the noise to stop.
Illyana closed her eyes for a brief moment, not to escape, but to drive her heels into mental ground.
When she opened them, she faced the abyss directly.
Darkchylde needed no introduction.
She was there, solid and impossible to ignore.
Not a transformation or a “mode” Illyana activated.
She was Illyana herself, condensed into everything inflicted upon her and everything she returned to the world.
Golden eyes watched her without haste and without judgment.
And it was precisely that lack of condemnation that bothered her the most.
“This isn’t the Road,” Illyana said, voice firm, though tension betrayed the effort. “This is you trying to…”
“No.”
The interruption was calm, precise as a scalpel. Unexpected humor coming from a demon.
“This is you, finally, with nowhere left to run.”
The silence that followed was dense, crowded with unspoken confessions shoved to the bottom of the well until they began distorting the reality around them.
Illyana did not retreat.
But she did not advance either.
She simply remained.
And for her, remaining was already a change in the game.
“You want to pass the Trial,” Darkchylde continued, orbiting her like something that knew every scar in that soul. “You want to leave here, want to keep walking around with that look like you have everything under control.”
A brief pause.
She stopped directly behind Illyana.
“So stop lying.”
“I’m not lying,” Illyana snapped back, irritation escaping in a breath through her nose.
“You spent years saying it was over. That it was behind you. That it doesn’t touch you anymore.” The voice lowered now into a whisper reverberating through Illyana’s bones. “And yet you still wake up smelling the place.”
The blow hit its target.
Not a physical impact, but a truth finding the perfect fit.
Illyana closed her eyes again, and this time there was no control.
Only reaction.
“I survived,” she said, stiffening her posture. “I did what needed to be done.”
“I know. I was there.”
The response shattered the axis of the discussion.
There was no refuting the obvious.
The scenery around them began to leak. Limbo did not dissolve, but merged with memories infiltrating the space like oil stains.
Chains.
Marks.
Hands that should not exist.
And pain that persisted long after the body gave up feeling.
Illyana avoided looking, but she saw it anyway.
“You weren’t wrong for surviving, Illyana. You weren’t wrong for hating, nor for reducing to ashes everything that tried to destroy you first.”
The images changed.
Suffering gave way to vengeance.
Blood. Teeth. Hunger.
She saw herself tearing those creatures apart, turning trauma into something physical and tangible.
Every piece ripped away was a form of justice.
“They deserved it,” Illyana stated without hesitation. On that, her compass had never trembled.
“And you deserved to survive too,” Darkchylde completed. “But you decided that surviving turned you into something that needs to be hidden.”
The silence that settled was the definitive answer.
Illyana opened her eyes and faced her other self.
“They can’t see this,” she confessed, voice automatic, conditioned by years of repression.
“They already have.”
The world flipped upside down again.
Now it was the X-Mansion.
Sunlight cut through the windows, familiar voices echoed in the background, but normality felt like a poorly staged play.
Colossus stood before her.
His eyes carried that glow of guilt Illyana hated, the burden of someone who believed he should have been the hero who saved her.
“Yana… I should have gotten you out of there.”
She could not answer.
Kitty appeared soon after, direct and without filters.
“You don’t need to pretend with me. I know what you think you are… and that doesn’t change who you are to me.”
It was unbearable.
Acceptance hurt more than the whip.
The scenery began to crumble, incapable of sustaining such honesty.
The voices fell silent, and Limbo reclaimed its territory.
“They accept you,” Darkchylde said, without pressure, merely stating fact. “But this was never about them. It’s about you stopping treating me like I’m a mistake.”
Something inside Illyana finally gave way.
Not a dramatic surrender, but an internal adjustment; a gear ceasing its grinding after years trying to spin backward.
“You are not what they did to you,” the other voice now sounded gentle, almost integrated. “But you are not only what came before either. You are everything.”
Illyana took a deep breath.
“Then speak,” she challenged, voice low but absolute. “If you remember… speak.”
Darkchylde studied her, making sure it was not just another trick of control.
Then she delivered the truth:
“Aerika’s Trial was not clean. Someone manipulated everything. And you felt it at the time. But accepting the ‘corrected’ version of the story was easier than dealing with the rot.”
The puzzle pieces clicked into place.
Topaz.
The sideways glances.
The loose ends.
“Someone? Who? Who could?”
“You know. But don’t say it out loud yet. The Trial is happening inside your soul, where she still has no influence. But names have power… especially hers.”
Illyana swallowed dryly.
“Topaz wasn’t trying to talk to me,” Illyana murmured, changing the subject and slowly exhaling.
Darkchylde gave a faint side smile.
“No. She was trying to talk to me.”
For the first time, understanding became total.
Because only that part of Illyana, the one that did not deny the scar, the one that did not accept sanitized versions of chaos, was capable of preserving the memory of what had truly happened.
Only she could escape her gaze…
“It’s her…”
And then, another red glimpse.
CHAPTER 5 - Down, Down the Road
CHAPTER 5 - Down, Down the Road
The second-floor café window in Manhattan was cold against Isolke’s forehead. Or Loki’s. In truth, the definitions of flesh and name mattered very little when one possessed the gift of being the very space between words.
Her hands were pressed flat against the glass, her long, pale fingers stretched at uncomfortable angles, almost anatomical in their strangeness. Anyone looking from outside would see only the blurred outline of an obsessive stalker, a shadow that refused to blink, devouring the street below with eyes that glowed in a dangerous shade of green.
Down below, New York pulsed with its usual noise, but for Isolke, the world had been reduced to a single fixed point: Wanda Maximoff.
The witch stood on the sidewalk, speaking with a blond man, tall and broad-shouldered. Loki did not know who he was — and frankly, she did not care about mortal heroes and their patriotic uniforms — but she could read the invisible lines of the conversation. She saw the exact moment when Wanda’s expression changed. It was a fraction of a second. A crease on her forehead, a tightening of her jaw under the streetlights.
There was something terribly wrong written across the Scarlet Witch’s face. A mystical rot, an absolute danger that exhaled from her like invisible smoke. And the blond mortal remained there, smiling, pathetically blind. No one in that damned city noticed. No one understood the weight of the monster Wanda carried in her chest.
And that made Isolke tremble.
An insane, acidic, cutting excitement climbed up her spine. Danger was the finest melody she had ever heard.
When Wanda said goodbye and began to walk quickly toward the south, Isolke’s silhouette dissolved from the café glass.
In the shadows of the next alley, the fabric of reality folded with the sound of torn silk. Where before there had been a goddess, now a thin, striped cat ran, silent in its steps, blending with the garbage and the remnants of snow on the sidewalk. She followed the scarlet trail across the bridge to Staten Island. Every fiber of her animal being could smell the blood and chaos that Wanda left in the air.
Loki watched, perched on the iron railing of the rented loft, as the witch began the ritual. Wanda entered a trance, her body floating a few inches above the ground, surrounded by candles that burned with a flame that was not of this world. Curious, the striped cat closed her eyes and tried to stretch her own consciousness. She tried to slip into that mind, to slide into that meditation to see what the mortal was hiding.
The rejection was violent.
Before even touching the outskirts of Wanda’s thoughts, the witch’s magic struck her back. It was a supreme, overwhelming force, an ocean of pure probability that nearly turned the feline’s brain into jelly. Loki recoiled, her feline eyes snapping open, her fur completely bristled. And then, in the solitude of that Staten Island night, the striped cat opened her jaws and began to laugh.
A sharp, hysterical, unnatural sound for an animal.
It was magnificent. Wanda was a god disguised as flesh.
But the laughter died when the reality of the loft gave way.
Wanda raised her hands and conjured the great red door. The air began to vibrate with the echo of other voices. The coven was being summoned. Loki felt the magical signature of Jennifer Kale, the infernal blood of Satana, the raw weight of Illyana Rasputin. The witches were arriving. The Path was forming right before her eyes.
And she was on the outside.
Loki’s stomach tightened in a cold fury. This could not happen. This should not happen. This would not happen. She had spent centuries observing the currents of fate only to be left behind by a mortal who played at being tragic. Loki needed to take part. She needed to reach the end of that road of cards and blood. She needed to reach her desire.
The cat leapt to the loft floor, her form distorting, trying to force her way into the tear of reality before the door closed.
“I am Loki, the goddess of lies.”
Her voice echoed through the bare walls, but the air remained dense, unmoving. Nothing happened. The Path rejected the divine.
Her knuckles pressed into the wooden floor, her nails nearly digging into the grain. Urgency began to burn in her throat. She changed her tone, stripping herself of Asgardian pride.
“I am a cat, hungry and desperate.”
The silence of the loft was the only answer. Wanda’s candle flames continued to float, ignoring her existence. Nothing happened. The Path did not care for the hunger of beasts.
Cold sweat began to run down Isolke’s neck. She could see the outlines of the red door fading into the void. If she missed the beginning, she would never find the end. She needed to lie to the very magic of the universe. She needed to create a paradox the Path could not refuse.
“I am Isolke Li, a hungry and desperate witch and the goddess of lies. What I speak… is false… but true… and reality…”
The air cracked, the smell of ozone and sulfur rising, but the barrier remained firm. The runes in Wanda’s ancient fabric continued to glow at another frequency. Nothing happened again. The contradiction was not enough to deceive Chaos.
Desperate, with her vision blurring before the receding red, Loki drove her hands into her own chest, suffocating her divine reflex and embracing the humiliation of servitude. She surrendered her will to another’s design.
“I am Isolke Li, a hungry and desperate witch who is part of Wanda Maximoff’s coven. A follower of the Scarlet Witch…”
Nothing happened once again. The loft remained gray and empty for a heartbeat.
But then, everything changed.
The wooden floor beneath her feet vanished, replaced by cold, packed earth that smelled of dead leaves and ancient secrets. The darkness around her took on a suffocating scarlet hue.
Isolke Li smiled, wiping the blood that ran from her nose.
She was on the Witches’ Road.
The dirt road beneath Isolke’s boots seemed to chew on her very steps. The red mist, which had once hovered like a distant curtain, now seemed to merge with the atmosphere itself, dense and carrying a metallic, sweet scent of trampled blood.
Ahead of her, the silhouettes of the coven moved like shadows in a puppet theater.
Nico Minoru wiped the sweat from her forehead, the Staff of One still lightly vibrating with the remaining energy of her confrontation. Illyana Rasputin remained a step behind, her eyes fixed on the back of Wanda Maximoff’s neck — a rigid posture, a perfectly sculpted lie in flesh and bone to pretend that her mind remained as clouded and docile as the others. A little further ahead, Topaz walked in absolute silence, her shoulders weighed down by the invisible burden of a future she had already seen collapse and which, by decree of the Path itself, she was forbidden to change.
And beside them, with a cynical smile and the empty eyes of someone who no longer belonged to herself, walked Aerika Harkness. Or what remained of her.
“Only you’re left now, Isolke,” said Aerika, her voice coming out with an artificial lightness, almost robotic, stripped of the sharp acidity that once defined her before her collapse. She tilted her head to the side, looking at the disguised Asgardian with hollow curiosity. “What secrets does a ragged witch like you hide?”
Isolke did not respond immediately. She savored the absurdity of the scene. She knew everything. She knew that the Aerika present there was nothing more than a shell stitched together by Wanda’s magic after her catastrophic failure. She knew Illyana was terrified behind her iron mask, aware that the Scarlet Witch had trapped them all in a web of false memories. Loki could see the gears of the grand farce. She just could not see inside Maximoff’s mind. What did that mortal desire? What substance was that ambition made of that had driven her to distort so many lives, so many paths?
The goddess felt a nearly physical pang of passion for that audacity. She looked at Wanda’s back and her chest tightened in feverish anticipation. She thought of how the witch’s scarlet eyes would grow dull, of how her expression of outraged divinity would twist when Loki’s blade pierced her lung, making blood — as alive and red as her own magic — spill between her fingers.
“More than you, it seems,” Nico scoffed, crossing her arms and casting a sidelong glance at Aerika. There was a slight irritation in her voice, the typical arrogance of someone who had just defeated a colossal monster and believed the Path was being far too lenient. “What a boring trial, huh? I think the Path got tired of truly testing us.”
“Maybe the Path knows there’s nothing to extract from a beggar,” Aerika commented, letting out a dry, soulless laugh. “Some people are just empty by nature. There’s no drama where there’s no substance.”
Isolke stopped in the middle of the road. The contrast between Nico’s blind ignorance, Aerika’s mocking façade, and the silent terror Illyana tried to suppress was too perfect. It was the most elaborate joke in the universe.
Suddenly, Isolke began to laugh.
It was a bizarre, hysterical sound that scratched her throat and echoed through the invisible walls of the Path. It was not the laughter of a frightened witch; it was the sound of an animal lost at the border between the wild and the human, a creature that found genuine and sick amusement in the most grotesque situation imaginable.
The laughter cut through the air like shattered glass.
For the first time since the journey had begun, Wanda Maximoff stopped.
And turned.
At that exact moment, as if time itself had been beheaded, the environment froze. Nico remained with her mouth half open, her next sentence dying on her tongue; Aerika stood still with her empty smile; Illyana and Topaz became statues of salt in the middle of the mist. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the remnants of Isolke’s breath.
Wanda took a step toward her. Her scarlet eyes, accustomed to dictating the rules of probability, narrowed. As she focused on the ragged figure before her, the witch noticed something that Chaos magic had failed to catch.
She noticed how green those eyes were.
Not the human green of a leaf or a jewel, but an inhuman green, ancient, radioactive with malice and millennial intelligence.
“Who are you?” Wanda asked. Her voice, once unshakable authority, faltered on the last syllable.
Isolke took a step forward, her posture straightening, shedding the submissive curvature she had used to blend among mortals. The disguise of Isolke Li remained, but the presence filling that skin was far too vast for the space it occupied.
“Someone who appreciates the show, dear,” Loki replied, her voice now carrying a melodic cadence, almost theatrical. “Someone who recognizes a good performance when she sees one. You reconstruct your toys with such delicacy… a shame that little Harkness’ seams are so visible to those who know how to look.”
Wanda stepped back half a millimeter. The tips of her fingers began to spark with scarlet energy, but for the first time, there was an erratic fluctuation in it. Her lips parted slightly and a shadow of nervousness — a raw, human vulnerability she had been hiding behind the mantle of the Scarlet Witch — crossed her face. She was dealing with something much greater, something that did not belong to the ecosystem of witches and demons she knew how to subjugate.
“It doesn’t matter what you think you saw,” Wanda said, trying to recover her rigidity, though her breathing had become slightly faster. “I need to reach the end of this road. And I need all of them with me to open what lies ahead. You are not going to ruin this.”
“Oh, I don’t want to ruin anything!” Loki opened her arms, her eyes gleaming with the reflection of Wanda’s Chaos. “I want to reach the end too. The difference, my dear Witch, is that I don’t need to lie to myself about the reason. I only wanted to understand the cause of so much commotion. So much manipulation.”
Loki took another step, closing the distance between them until Wanda could feel the coldness of her breath.
“I remember you, you know?” Loki continued, her voice dropping into an almost affectionate whisper, terrible in its irony. “I saw you in those glass boxes mortals call television. Beside Earth’s heroes. The Avengers. You looked so young, so innocent. A little European girl, full of trauma, doing good without question, crying in corners and being loved by the masses. No one knew. No one saw the demon hiding beneath that pretty little face.”
Loki leaned forward, a predatory smile forming on her lips.
“You are a Goddess of Lies in your own way, Wanda Maximoff. Congratulations. You built an empire of illusions that would make my own father jealous.”
The words struck Wanda like a physical blow. The mention of her past, of the façade of her own sanctity, shattered the last barrier of apathy the witch held.
Wanda did not conjure a spell. She did not attack, nor try to erase Loki’s memories or crush her mind with Chaos. Her hands, once ready for war, began to visibly tremble. Her scarlet eyes filled with tears she refused to let fall, shining under the mystical light of the Path. The monster was stripped of its cloak.
There, before Truth disguised as Lie, stood only a broken woman.
“It’s for my boys,” Wanda said, her voice choked, a whisper that seemed to tear a piece of her own soul as it escaped. “It’s all for them…”
CHAPTER 6 - Maiden, Mother, Crone
CHAPTER 6 - Maiden, Mother, Crone
The glass on the second floor of the café in Manhattan was cold against Isolke’s forehead. Or Loki’s. L
The loft in Staten Island smelled of iron, burnt herbs, and the static ozone that precedes a storm of biblical proportions. But, at the geometric center of the carpet of symbols, where Wanda Maximoff’s blood still dripped from the silver blade, time did not move. It folded.
Let us leave behind the frozen silence of the Road, Nico and Illyana’s statue-like stillness, and the inhuman green eyes of the Goddess of Lies who had just disarmed the Scarlet Witch with a whispered truth. Let us return to the beginning. To the exact moment when the fragmented visions of the Tarot faded and Wanda found herself alone before that monumental red door, without a handle, standing in the vacuum of her own blood magic.
There, on the threshold of her obsession, Wanda did not hesitate. She pushed the void. And the door opened.
What revealed itself before her, however, was not the dirt road she would later cross. It was a moving mosaic, a living wall of mirrors reflecting the absolute present of those whom destiny had stamped into her clan.
Wanda stepped forward, her scarlet cape floating in a gravity that belonged only to herself, and her eyes swept across the scenes.
In one fragment, she saw Nico Minoru. The girl was in a dark alley, holding Karolina Dean close, her eyes heavy with exhaustion and protection mantras failing on the tip of her tongue. Nico was exhausted, broken by the burden of leading runaway children; she still lacked the hardening, she still lacked the blind fury that would one day make her cut her own flesh without hesitation. In another mirror, Illyana Rasputin sat in an artificially white therapist’s office, her knuckles white from tension, teeth buried into her lip to stop the Darkchylde from taking control. She was too busy building walls in her own mind to walk a road that demanded acceptance of the monster.
Wanda looked further. She saw Aerika Harkness speaking in New Salem, a false leadership fueled by grief and hatred, far from possessing the stolen magic she would need to serve as fuel on the Road. And in a dark corner, almost imperceptible, she saw the distorted reflections of a frightened fortune teller named Topaz.
None of them were ready.
None of those witches possessed the maturity, desperation, or mystical strength necessary to perform what the Road would demand from them at that exact moment. Their time had not yet come. Regardless of Wanda, if history followed its natural course, the coven would take months, perhaps years, to align itself to the correct frequency.
Wanda realized she needed to wait.
But the word wait burned through her insides like acid. Every second spent in that world without her children was a century of voluntary torture. She could hear Billy and Tommy’s screams echoing through the cracks of reality. She did not want to wait. She needed the witches now. She needed a complete coven, molded in her own image and likeness, to unlock the secrets of that road and bring back her boys.
She wanted. She needed. And she would have what she desired.
A sickly glow, dark red and thick like rustic wine, lit up in Wanda’s palms. She raised her arms before the mosaic of lives. If destiny was slow, she would tear through the fabric of destiny. If probability worked against her time, she would bend probabilities until they broke.
With a whisper that made the loft in Staten Island tremble down to its concrete foundations, Wanda extended her gifts. Her fingers mimicked the gesture of an invisible weaver, sending threads of Chaos Magic directly into those mirrors. She did not change the circumstances of the world; she distorted their minds. She infiltrated their thoughts, fears, and choices, subtly influencing each of those witches to take the easier path, the most self-destructive and quickest shortcut that would push them toward Harkness Manor.
She accelerated Nico’s trauma. She sharpened Illyana’s paranoia. She fed Aerika’s parasitic ambition. She placed the right cards in Topaz’s hands. She forced, with the raw weight of a selfish goddess, the Witches’ Road to open ahead of time.
The scenes in the mirrors began accelerating, distorting at a frantic speed until all timelines converged toward the same starting point. The farce was set. The coven was artificially ready.
Wanda lowered her hands, her breathing ragged, eyes fixed on the scarlet void consolidating before her. The Road was open. The dirt road was there.
That was when she felt a presence behind her.
Wanda turned slowly. Amid the smoke of herbs and the dying glow of the loft’s candles, the mystical silhouette of her mother, Natalya Maximoff, materialized once again. But there was no pride in the spirit’s eyes. Natalya’s expression was fragile, sorrowful, the lines of her spiritual face dissolving into tears that shimmered like old silver. She looked at her daughter not as an ancestor proud of a powerful lineage, but as a mother witnessing the inevitable fall of her own blood.
Natalya took a timid step forward, her voice escaping like a gust of wind on a winter night:
“May you one day manage to forgive yourself, my little girl.”
Wanda stared at her. Beneath the cape, her entire body began to tremble. Her knuckles paled and an arctic cold climbed up her spine. Even she frightened herself. For the first time, her mother’s mirror reflected back the exact image of the monster she was becoming. The weight of every manipulated mind, every erased memory, every lie woven since the first day she stepped into New York collapsed onto her shoulders.
But the fear lasted only a heartbeat.
The red door was already open. The Road was already beneath her feet. The witches were already on their way to judgment, and the green-eyed goddess already waited for her in the future to expose her farce. There was no return possible for someone who had already sacrificed her own soul.
Wanda looked away from her mother, turned her back on Natalya’s spirit, and faced the red darkness stretching before her. She needed them. God, how she needed her children.
And, with a firm step, the Scarlet Witch entered her own lie.
[ᱬ]
The dirt road that had brought them there widened into a clearing of ashes, surrounded by a darkness that was no longer red, but absolute, impenetrable black. At the center of that clearing floated a point of white light, pure and violent. The final portal. The nexus of all probabilities where desires became flesh.
Wanda Maximoff stood only a few meters away from it, but her body no longer moved with the divine grace it once had. She could feel the first side effects of her audacity. The Road hissed beneath her boots, a sharp and hostile sound, like a wounded serpent. The air was heavy, dense with paradoxes. Around her, trembling luminous cracks opened in the very fabric of the Road’s reality, revealing the void sustaining that forced path. She had broken the rules of time and space to bring the coven there, and now the dimension itself was fracturing.
But the true collapse was not space. It was the minds behind her.
With a negligent snap of her fingers, Lady Loki undid her own lie. Isolke Li’s skin melted like wax beneath the sun, revealing the tall, imposing silhouette and green garments of Asgard. She was the Goddess of Lies, and when her power expanded, the fog of illusions Wanda had woven around the coven was torn apart from top to bottom.
Time unfroze. And the truth collapsed upon them.
Nico Minoru staggered backward, clutching her head as real memories collided against false ones. Illyana Rasputin let out a guttural roar, her Soul Sword igniting in a dark blue flame as her conscious mind finally aligned with the horror the Darkchylde had always known. Topaz fell to her knees, covering her eyes as she saw the future she had feared colliding with the present.
But Aerika Harkness was the greatest victim.
The mystical patch Wanda had placed over her soul instantly unraveled. The artificial smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure terror and agony as the memory of her own failure, rejection, and humiliation at being subdued flooded back into her chest. She looked at her own hands, watching the magic of New Salem leak away like black smoke. She was nothing more than a broken shell.
One by one, the witches raised their eyes. And Wanda felt the weight of their gaze.
For the first time in many years, the hatred emanating from those women truly hurt Wanda’s chest. It was not the hatred of enemies or comic book villains; it was the hatred of those who had been violated in their own will, transformed into chess pieces by a desperate mother. They realized the true enemy, the monster at the end of the road, was not the Road.
It was the Scarlet Witch.
But it did not matter. None of it mattered. The portal was there. Wanda’s desire was within reach of her trembling hands.
“Monster!” Nico’s scream tore through the silence.
Nico attacked first. The Staff of One glowed with violet light, and she cast her most destructive spell: “Annihilare!” A concentrated blast of plasma, capable of pulverizing mountains, ripped through the ground toward Wanda’s back.
Without even turning around, Wanda raised her left hand. A spherical shield of chaos magic materialized. Nico’s spell collided against the barrier and was simply denied, transforming into a harmless rain of purple sparks.
Right behind, Illyana leaped. The armor of Limbo covered her body and her sword descended in a lethal arc, designed to cut the witch’s very soul.
“You used us!” roared the Russian.
Wanda merely glanced sideways. A ring of scarlet energy expanded from her body with the force of a kinetic shockwave. The spell was defended before the blade could even touch her shield. Illyana was hurled backward, her sword digging into the gray ground to stop the impact.
Aerika, in one final gasp of fury and desperation, attempted to channel the shadows of her victims into a blood curse, but Wanda’s chaos magic hissed through the air and simply ignored the attack, dissipating the shadows like smoke in the wind. None of them were a match for the Scarlet Witch. The power of the coven Wanda had forced into existence was formidable, but she was Chaos itself incarnate.
In the distance, Loki remained standing with her arms crossed, observing the massacre with an enigmatic smile. She did not attack. She merely watched, delighted by the purity of the tragedy unfolding.
“It’s over,” whispered Wanda, her voice echoing omnipresently through the Road’s cracks.
With a broad gesture of both hands, Wanda unleashed a wave of scarlet energy that pushed Nico, Illyana, Aerika, and Topaz to the edges of the clearing, trapping them inside force cocoons that prevented them from moving. She did not want to kill them; she only needed them out of her way.
Silence ruled the precipice once again, broken only by the sound of the Road collapsing at the edges.
Wanda began to float. Her feet left the ash-covered ground and her body moved softly toward the point of white and violent light. The Road was fractured, the coven was broken, and her soul was stained with the most unforgivable lie in the universe.
But as she approached the portal, the cracks and the witches’ screams disappeared from her focus.
From the other side of the light, from somewhere deep within the multiverse of probabilities, Wanda finally heard them. Two childish voices, clean and sweet, calling for her in unison.
“Mom?”
The tears Wanda had held back fell, evaporating before touching the ground. She stretched her hand toward the white light. The beginning of the end had ended. And her boys were waiting.
Wanda Maximoff floated at the center of the collapse, her cheeks bathed in tears that shimmered like dying embers. She stretched out her hands, fingers curved and trembling, and captured the pure and violent essence of that ancient magic. She concentrated every fragment of pain, every mind she had violated, every millisecond of desperation that had brought her there, and wished. She wished with everything powerful and dark within her heart that her children would return to her arms. That Billy and Tommy would live again. That they would breathe again.
And it was in that exact moment of apparent triumph that the universe returned silence to her.
Reality did not bend to deliver two children into her arms. Instead, the nexus imploded into her own mind, shattering her consciousness with the most absurd and violent truth of all. Chaos did not create; Chaos revealed.
The visions invaded her eyes like shards of glass.
First, an ordinary American suburb bathed in late afternoon light. A normal house, a common family — a red-haired mother, a dark-haired father, and a boy with dark brown hair. Like Wanda’s. Deep, magnetic eyes. Like Wanda’s. The boy wore headphones, nodding his head to loud music while helping his father set the dinner table. There was life there. A life that did not belong to Wanda.
The mirror shattered and revealed another place. A colder, more urban home, walls filled with holes where a lonely boy threw darts with surgical precision. His hair was light — almost as light as his twin’s — and his eyes… green as well. A restrained fury, youthful insolence. He looked so much like the dark-haired boy. So much like… her?
“No. NO! NOOOOO!”
Wanda’s scream tore through the void, a roar of pure panic and denial that made the cracks of the Road bleed scarlet energy. They were alive. But they were not her boys. They were not the babies she had mourned. They had reincarnated into other lives, other bodies, other families who loved them. Her sacrifice, her descent into monstrosity… had all been for nothing.
From the abyss of death surrounding the precipice, the fog began taking colossal shapes. The familiar voices from that night in Staten Island crawled out of the void for one final conversation with the Witch.
Natalya Maximoff led the march of the dead, her spiritual silhouette floating ahead of the others. Her face no longer held tears, only an ancient and tragic severity.
“I always knew my daughter would become a being of great power, Wanda,” said Natalya, her voice echoing like the beating of a funeral drum. “Of great deeds. But I also always knew the other half of your blood, the lineage you inherited from me, could become heavy. And unfortunately… it did.”
Behind Natalya, the fog parted to reveal the former Scarlet Witches. Women older than Natalya, biblical figures, ancestors with hollow eyes and capes worn away by time. They rose in unison, their presences crushing the last remnants of Chaos Wanda could still sustain.
“Look at what you have done, child,” hissed one of the ancients, her voice scratching reality itself. “You placed this entire dimension in danger. The Witches’ Road is intrinsically linked to incarnate witchcraft. By distorting the lines for your own pleasure, you condemned magic itself to extinction.”
“Your name is now as rotten as Morgana Le Fay’s,” proclaimed another witch, pointing a skeletal finger at Wanda. “Another who judged herself superior to arcane design, another who believed blood justified ruin.”
Natalya stepped forward, delivering the lineage’s final verdict:
“We revoke your bond. We curse your name. You will never find the children you miss so deeply, Wanda. They will walk beneath the same sun as you, but your eyes will never recognize them. You turned your back on everything and everyone you considered important… for nothing.”
When the ancient witches severed the blood bond, Wanda felt her heart skip a beat. It was physical. A dry snap inside her chest, as if the root connecting her to the earth had been ripped away.
The Road around her reacted instantly. Freed from the tyrannical control of the Scarlet Witch, the road devoured itself, the cracks sealed shut, and the mystical dimension expelled the invaders with the violence of a spasm.
The smell of ashes disappeared.
Suddenly, the witches found themselves back in the real world. They stood inside a dark, dusty room, illuminated only by moonlight pouring through the shattered windows of Harkness Manor. The energy cocoons were gone.
At the center of the room, kneeling over rotten wood, was the Scarlet Witch. Her once glorious cape dragged through the filth. She trembled violently, her body folded into itself, shattered. And she cried. A convulsive, humiliating sobbing, the sound of a woman who had lost the universe twice in the same day.
The witches still felt anger burning in their chests, but the spectacle of that ruin stripped them of any desire for revenge. They were finally free.
Illyana Rasputin was the first to move. Without saying a single word, she sheathed the Soul Sword. She looked at Wanda with cold contempt, but her eyes shone with a different urgency. For the first time since being dragged into Limbo, she had a family to return to. Her brother. Kitty. With a snap of portals, Illyana disappeared into the darkness, eager to recover the time stolen from her.
Nico Minoru wiped the blood from her hand onto her coat. She looked at Topaz and nodded — a silent goodbye between survivors. With a firm impulse, her body rose into the air and Nico flew out through the shattered window, fearless, returning to the New York night to find her Runaways.
Topaz remained still for a few seconds. She looked at Wanda’s kneeling figure and a single tear rolled down her face. The fortune teller approached silently, removed a card from her deck, and placed it on the ground beside the witch’s trembling hands.
It was the Empress card. The mother who creates, but who also destroys out of love. Topaz turned around and walked toward the exit, her footsteps echoing through the empty corridor.
Aerika Harkness left shortly afterward. She stumbled as she walked, hitting her shoulders against the corners of the walls in her grandmother’s mansion, her hands clutching her empty chest. She was still the thief who could not create, the parasite who had been exposed. She was desperate, hollow, and perfectly alone — exactly as she had always been destined to be.
In the end, only two remained. Loki and Wanda.
The Goddess of Lies relaxed the rigidity of her Asgardian posture. She approached the fallen witch with almost reverent care, her feline footsteps making no sound against the wood. She leaned over Wanda as if standing before the most valuable, delicate, and perverse prize the universe had ever shaped. Her thin hands touched the witch’s shoulders with a softness bordering on cruelty.
Loki brought her face close to Wanda’s ear, green eyes gleaming in the darkness of the room. And whispered:
“You will rise again, my dear. Just wait and see.”
Wanda did not answer with magic. She did not pull away. For the first time in years, stripped of gods, children, and covens, the Scarlet Witch rested her weight on another person’s body. She allowed the lie to support her.
Loki pulled her upward. Slowly, with complicit patience, the two stood.
Together, they walked toward the exit, their footsteps dragging through the dust, leaving Agatha Harkness’ house behind — as dead, cold, and forgotten as its owner herself.
The glass on the second floor of the café in Manhattan was cold against Isolke’s forehead. Or Loki’s. L
The loft in Staten Island smelled of iron, burnt herbs, and the static ozone that precedes a storm of biblical proportions. But, at the geometric center of the carpet of symbols, where Wanda Maximoff’s blood still dripped from the silver blade, time did not move. It folded.
Let us leave behind the frozen silence of the Road, Nico and Illyana’s statue-like stillness, and the inhuman green eyes of the Goddess of Lies who had just disarmed the Scarlet Witch with a whispered truth. Let us return to the beginning. To the exact moment when the fragmented visions of the Tarot faded and Wanda found herself alone before that monumental red door, without a handle, standing in the vacuum of her own blood magic.
There, on the threshold of her obsession, Wanda did not hesitate. She pushed the void. And the door opened.
What revealed itself before her, however, was not the dirt road she would later cross. It was a moving mosaic, a living wall of mirrors reflecting the absolute present of those whom destiny had stamped into her clan.
Wanda stepped forward, her scarlet cape floating in a gravity that belonged only to herself, and her eyes swept across the scenes.
In one fragment, she saw Nico Minoru. The girl was in a dark alley, holding Karolina Dean close, her eyes heavy with exhaustion and protection mantras failing on the tip of her tongue. Nico was exhausted, broken by the burden of leading runaway children; she still lacked the hardening, she still lacked the blind fury that would one day make her cut her own flesh without hesitation. In another mirror, Illyana Rasputin sat in an artificially white therapist’s office, her knuckles white from tension, teeth buried into her lip to stop the Darkchylde from taking control. She was too busy building walls in her own mind to walk a road that demanded acceptance of the monster.
Wanda looked further. She saw Aerika Harkness speaking in New Salem, a false leadership fueled by grief and hatred, far from possessing the stolen magic she would need to serve as fuel on the Road. And in a dark corner, almost imperceptible, she saw the distorted reflections of a frightened fortune teller named Topaz.
None of them were ready.
None of those witches possessed the maturity, desperation, or mystical strength necessary to perform what the Road would demand from them at that exact moment. Their time had not yet come. Regardless of Wanda, if history followed its natural course, the coven would take months, perhaps years, to align itself to the correct frequency.
Wanda realized she needed to wait.
But the word wait burned through her insides like acid. Every second spent in that world without her children was a century of voluntary torture. She could hear Billy and Tommy’s screams echoing through the cracks of reality. She did not want to wait. She needed the witches now. She needed a complete coven, molded in her own image and likeness, to unlock the secrets of that road and bring back her boys.
She wanted. She needed. And she would have what she desired.
A sickly glow, dark red and thick like rustic wine, lit up in Wanda’s palms. She raised her arms before the mosaic of lives. If destiny was slow, she would tear through the fabric of destiny. If probability worked against her time, she would bend probabilities until they broke.
With a whisper that made the loft in Staten Island tremble down to its concrete foundations, Wanda extended her gifts. Her fingers mimicked the gesture of an invisible weaver, sending threads of Chaos Magic directly into those mirrors. She did not change the circumstances of the world; she distorted their minds. She infiltrated their thoughts, fears, and choices, subtly influencing each of those witches to take the easier path, the most self-destructive and quickest shortcut that would push them toward Harkness Manor.
She accelerated Nico’s trauma. She sharpened Illyana’s paranoia. She fed Aerika’s parasitic ambition. She placed the right cards in Topaz’s hands. She forced, with the raw weight of a selfish goddess, the Witches’ Road to open ahead of time.
The scenes in the mirrors began accelerating, distorting at a frantic speed until all timelines converged toward the same starting point. The farce was set. The coven was artificially ready.
Wanda lowered her hands, her breathing ragged, eyes fixed on the scarlet void consolidating before her. The Road was open. The dirt road was there.
That was when she felt a presence behind her.
Wanda turned slowly. Amid the smoke of herbs and the dying glow of the loft’s candles, the mystical silhouette of her mother, Natalya Maximoff, materialized once again. But there was no pride in the spirit’s eyes. Natalya’s expression was fragile, sorrowful, the lines of her spiritual face dissolving into tears that shimmered like old silver. She looked at her daughter not as an ancestor proud of a powerful lineage, but as a mother witnessing the inevitable fall of her own blood.
Natalya took a timid step forward, her voice escaping like a gust of wind on a winter night:
“May you one day manage to forgive yourself, my little girl.”
Wanda stared at her. Beneath the cape, her entire body began to tremble. Her knuckles paled and an arctic cold climbed up her spine. Even she frightened herself. For the first time, her mother’s mirror reflected back the exact image of the monster she was becoming. The weight of every manipulated mind, every erased memory, every lie woven since the first day she stepped into New York collapsed onto her shoulders.
But the fear lasted only a heartbeat.
The red door was already open. The Road was already beneath her feet. The witches were already on their way to judgment, and the green-eyed goddess already waited for her in the future to expose her farce. There was no return possible for someone who had already sacrificed her own soul.
Wanda looked away from her mother, turned her back on Natalya’s spirit, and faced the red darkness stretching before her. She needed them. God, how she needed her children.
And, with a firm step, the Scarlet Witch entered her own lie.
[ᱬ]
The dirt road that had brought them there widened into a clearing of ashes, surrounded by a darkness that was no longer red, but absolute, impenetrable black. At the center of that clearing floated a point of white light, pure and violent. The final portal. The nexus of all probabilities where desires became flesh.
Wanda Maximoff stood only a few meters away from it, but her body no longer moved with the divine grace it once had. She could feel the first side effects of her audacity. The Road hissed beneath her boots, a sharp and hostile sound, like a wounded serpent. The air was heavy, dense with paradoxes. Around her, trembling luminous cracks opened in the very fabric of the Road’s reality, revealing the void sustaining that forced path. She had broken the rules of time and space to bring the coven there, and now the dimension itself was fracturing.
But the true collapse was not space. It was the minds behind her.
With a negligent snap of her fingers, Lady Loki undid her own lie. Isolke Li’s skin melted like wax beneath the sun, revealing the tall, imposing silhouette and green garments of Asgard. She was the Goddess of Lies, and when her power expanded, the fog of illusions Wanda had woven around the coven was torn apart from top to bottom.
Time unfroze. And the truth collapsed upon them.
Nico Minoru staggered backward, clutching her head as real memories collided against false ones. Illyana Rasputin let out a guttural roar, her Soul Sword igniting in a dark blue flame as her conscious mind finally aligned with the horror the Darkchylde had always known. Topaz fell to her knees, covering her eyes as she saw the future she had feared colliding with the present.
But Aerika Harkness was the greatest victim.
The mystical patch Wanda had placed over her soul instantly unraveled. The artificial smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure terror and agony as the memory of her own failure, rejection, and humiliation at being subdued flooded back into her chest. She looked at her own hands, watching the magic of New Salem leak away like black smoke. She was nothing more than a broken shell.
One by one, the witches raised their eyes. And Wanda felt the weight of their gaze.
For the first time in many years, the hatred emanating from those women truly hurt Wanda’s chest. It was not the hatred of enemies or comic book villains; it was the hatred of those who had been violated in their own will, transformed into chess pieces by a desperate mother. They realized the true enemy, the monster at the end of the road, was not the Road.
It was the Scarlet Witch.
But it did not matter. None of it mattered. The portal was there. Wanda’s desire was within reach of her trembling hands.
“Monster!” Nico’s scream tore through the silence.
Nico attacked first. The Staff of One glowed with violet light, and she cast her most destructive spell: “Annihilare!” A concentrated blast of plasma, capable of pulverizing mountains, ripped through the ground toward Wanda’s back.
Without even turning around, Wanda raised her left hand. A spherical shield of chaos magic materialized. Nico’s spell collided against the barrier and was simply denied, transforming into a harmless rain of purple sparks.
Right behind, Illyana leaped. The armor of Limbo covered her body and her sword descended in a lethal arc, designed to cut the witch’s very soul.
“You used us!” roared the Russian.
Wanda merely glanced sideways. A ring of scarlet energy expanded from her body with the force of a kinetic shockwave. The spell was defended before the blade could even touch her shield. Illyana was hurled backward, her sword digging into the gray ground to stop the impact.
Aerika, in one final gasp of fury and desperation, attempted to channel the shadows of her victims into a blood curse, but Wanda’s chaos magic hissed through the air and simply ignored the attack, dissipating the shadows like smoke in the wind. None of them were a match for the Scarlet Witch. The power of the coven Wanda had forced into existence was formidable, but she was Chaos itself incarnate.
In the distance, Loki remained standing with her arms crossed, observing the massacre with an enigmatic smile. She did not attack. She merely watched, delighted by the purity of the tragedy unfolding.
“It’s over,” whispered Wanda, her voice echoing omnipresently through the Road’s cracks.
With a broad gesture of both hands, Wanda unleashed a wave of scarlet energy that pushed Nico, Illyana, Aerika, and Topaz to the edges of the clearing, trapping them inside force cocoons that prevented them from moving. She did not want to kill them; she only needed them out of her way.
Silence ruled the precipice once again, broken only by the sound of the Road collapsing at the edges.
Wanda began to float. Her feet left the ash-covered ground and her body moved softly toward the point of white and violent light. The Road was fractured, the coven was broken, and her soul was stained with the most unforgivable lie in the universe.
But as she approached the portal, the cracks and the witches’ screams disappeared from her focus.
From the other side of the light, from somewhere deep within the multiverse of probabilities, Wanda finally heard them. Two childish voices, clean and sweet, calling for her in unison.
“Mom?”
The tears Wanda had held back fell, evaporating before touching the ground. She stretched her hand toward the white light. The beginning of the end had ended. And her boys were waiting.
Wanda Maximoff floated at the center of the collapse, her cheeks bathed in tears that shimmered like dying embers. She stretched out her hands, fingers curved and trembling, and captured the pure and violent essence of that ancient magic. She concentrated every fragment of pain, every mind she had violated, every millisecond of desperation that had brought her there, and wished. She wished with everything powerful and dark within her heart that her children would return to her arms. That Billy and Tommy would live again. That they would breathe again.
And it was in that exact moment of apparent triumph that the universe returned silence to her.
Reality did not bend to deliver two children into her arms. Instead, the nexus imploded into her own mind, shattering her consciousness with the most absurd and violent truth of all. Chaos did not create; Chaos revealed.
The visions invaded her eyes like shards of glass.
First, an ordinary American suburb bathed in late afternoon light. A normal house, a common family — a red-haired mother, a dark-haired father, and a boy with dark brown hair. Like Wanda’s. Deep, magnetic eyes. Like Wanda’s. The boy wore headphones, nodding his head to loud music while helping his father set the dinner table. There was life there. A life that did not belong to Wanda.
The mirror shattered and revealed another place. A colder, more urban home, walls filled with holes where a lonely boy threw darts with surgical precision. His hair was light — almost as light as his twin’s — and his eyes… green as well. A restrained fury, youthful insolence. He looked so much like the dark-haired boy. So much like… her?
“No. NO! NOOOOO!”
Wanda’s scream tore through the void, a roar of pure panic and denial that made the cracks of the Road bleed scarlet energy. They were alive. But they were not her boys. They were not the babies she had mourned. They had reincarnated into other lives, other bodies, other families who loved them. Her sacrifice, her descent into monstrosity… had all been for nothing.
From the abyss of death surrounding the precipice, the fog began taking colossal shapes. The familiar voices from that night in Staten Island crawled out of the void for one final conversation with the Witch.
Natalya Maximoff led the march of the dead, her spiritual silhouette floating ahead of the others. Her face no longer held tears, only an ancient and tragic severity.
“I always knew my daughter would become a being of great power, Wanda,” said Natalya, her voice echoing like the beating of a funeral drum. “Of great deeds. But I also always knew the other half of your blood, the lineage you inherited from me, could become heavy. And unfortunately… it did.”
Behind Natalya, the fog parted to reveal the former Scarlet Witches. Women older than Natalya, biblical figures, ancestors with hollow eyes and capes worn away by time. They rose in unison, their presences crushing the last remnants of Chaos Wanda could still sustain.
“Look at what you have done, child,” hissed one of the ancients, her voice scratching reality itself. “You placed this entire dimension in danger. The Witches’ Road is intrinsically linked to incarnate witchcraft. By distorting the lines for your own pleasure, you condemned magic itself to extinction.”
“Your name is now as rotten as Morgana Le Fay’s,” proclaimed another witch, pointing a skeletal finger at Wanda. “Another who judged herself superior to arcane design, another who believed blood justified ruin.”
Natalya stepped forward, delivering the lineage’s final verdict:
“We revoke your bond. We curse your name. You will never find the children you miss so deeply, Wanda. They will walk beneath the same sun as you, but your eyes will never recognize them. You turned your back on everything and everyone you considered important… for nothing.”
When the ancient witches severed the blood bond, Wanda felt her heart skip a beat. It was physical. A dry snap inside her chest, as if the root connecting her to the earth had been ripped away.
The Road around her reacted instantly. Freed from the tyrannical control of the Scarlet Witch, the road devoured itself, the cracks sealed shut, and the mystical dimension expelled the invaders with the violence of a spasm.
The smell of ashes disappeared.
Suddenly, the witches found themselves back in the real world. They stood inside a dark, dusty room, illuminated only by moonlight pouring through the shattered windows of Harkness Manor. The energy cocoons were gone.
At the center of the room, kneeling over rotten wood, was the Scarlet Witch. Her once glorious cape dragged through the filth. She trembled violently, her body folded into itself, shattered. And she cried. A convulsive, humiliating sobbing, the sound of a woman who had lost the universe twice in the same day.
The witches still felt anger burning in their chests, but the spectacle of that ruin stripped them of any desire for revenge. They were finally free.
Illyana Rasputin was the first to move. Without saying a single word, she sheathed the Soul Sword. She looked at Wanda with cold contempt, but her eyes shone with a different urgency. For the first time since being dragged into Limbo, she had a family to return to. Her brother. Kitty. With a snap of portals, Illyana disappeared into the darkness, eager to recover the time stolen from her.
Nico Minoru wiped the blood from her hand onto her coat. She looked at Topaz and nodded — a silent goodbye between survivors. With a firm impulse, her body rose into the air and Nico flew out through the shattered window, fearless, returning to the New York night to find her Runaways.
Topaz remained still for a few seconds. She looked at Wanda’s kneeling figure and a single tear rolled down her face. The fortune teller approached silently, removed a card from her deck, and placed it on the ground beside the witch’s trembling hands.
It was the Empress card. The mother who creates, but who also destroys out of love. Topaz turned around and walked toward the exit, her footsteps echoing through the empty corridor.
Aerika Harkness left shortly afterward. She stumbled as she walked, hitting her shoulders against the corners of the walls in her grandmother’s mansion, her hands clutching her empty chest. She was still the thief who could not create, the parasite who had been exposed. She was desperate, hollow, and perfectly alone — exactly as she had always been destined to be.
In the end, only two remained. Loki and Wanda.
The Goddess of Lies relaxed the rigidity of her Asgardian posture. She approached the fallen witch with almost reverent care, her feline footsteps making no sound against the wood. She leaned over Wanda as if standing before the most valuable, delicate, and perverse prize the universe had ever shaped. Her thin hands touched the witch’s shoulders with a softness bordering on cruelty.
Loki brought her face close to Wanda’s ear, green eyes gleaming in the darkness of the room. And whispered:
“You will rise again, my dear. Just wait and see.”
Wanda did not answer with magic. She did not pull away. For the first time in years, stripped of gods, children, and covens, the Scarlet Witch rested her weight on another person’s body. She allowed the lie to support her.
Loki pulled her upward. Slowly, with complicit patience, the two stood.
Together, they walked toward the exit, their footsteps dragging through the dust, leaving Agatha Harkness’ house behind — as dead, cold, and forgotten as its owner herself.
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