[3rd POV]
Tao stood still amongst the other magical apprentices, for a moment washed over by the same profound surrealism he felt whenever he saw the main cast of this universe emerge from background noise.
That feeling dissolved quickly into the weary detachment of a man who had cultivated for who knows how many millennia. Looking at her, he felt no allure in the display and saw nothing more than a toddler carelessly playing with power.
How did he recognize her? It wasn't her face that gave her away ~ it was the crimson chaos streaming from her soul. It was alluring to him in a strange way, alluring enough that even he felt a flicker of unease, despite possessing all the knowledge of dark magic, just short of actually wielding it natively.
He lingered not out of interest in her parlor tricks, but because his real objective was to check out the magical tomes of Sanctum Sanctorum.
He dismissed her, away as just another face inside.
The wards of Kamar-Taj didn't trigger as he moved through. They rewrote themselves, routing around him the way rivers route around new regions, not defeated, simply recategorizing him as a geographic feature rather than a threat.
Detection spells marked him non-applicable. Kill-spells found no valid targets. Monks passed within arm's reach, breath fogging in the cold. Even the air didn't swirl around him.
None of them saw him. None even minded him.
The restricted libraries opened to his divine sense like books left face down. Even the forbidden, living tomes would have reacted to his soul, if not for his perception of divine sense stayed set to absolute minimum from the start.
Tao turned a parchment page on the table with two fingers, careful not to disturb the dust settled into the grain. The ward discussed in the text was a fifth-tier recursion loop designed to curse anyone whose soul had been formally anointed by the same magician.
Kamar-Taj's dimensional theory was ambitious in the way children are when stacking blocks toward a sky they believe they'll reach.
He glanced at the diagram in the margins: dimensional folding, third variation. The mandala's geometry was earnest, intuitive, maybe even the best approach here, but the derivation had dropped an entire tensor from the calculation, forcing the practitioner to bleed twice the vitality just to stabilize the anchor.
Tao picked up an inkless quill from the desk, guided a hairline filament of qi through the tip, and quietly amended the coefficient. A small tip for whichever archivist had the eyes to read it.
He closed the volume, tucked his hands into the loose grey sleeves of conjured apprentice's robe, and walked toward the southern courtyard.
The Witch & the Stray Tourist
The training yard was loud with the crackle of Eldritch light.
Wanda Maximoff moved through a training sequence with the focused desperation of someone who had learned to use effort as a substitute for understanding.
She lunged, planting her boots against the stone. She threw out two overlapping shields~not the golden, geometric wheels of the Vishanti, but crude, jagged mandalas fringed with pulsing crimson. The senior mystic opposite her brought a staff of condensed light down in a clean, disciplined arc.
She was using fear and control as a stabilizer, forcing her way through tension that should have been approached through stillness. The technique would cost her an incomplete spiritual awakening.
She knew that.
She was doing it anyway because it was working, and working fast, gaining her the hope, or the illusion, of control over her own ever-growing reserve of crimson magic.
She didn't parry with stillness, had never had stillness. She met the blow with pure, grinding tension, forcing the crimson lattice upward until the light shattered into flying sparks. Tendrils of scarlet bled out from the hem of her robes, coiling into the flagstones like living roots before dissolving into ash.
Breathe, Master Hamir signed from the perimeter. Yield to the flow.
She couldn't yield. If she yielded, the red took the room.
Five years in this sanctuary, and every morning was a siege against her own pulse. She hadn't crossed two continents to become a sorceress; she had come because she had looked into her own future and seen a red sun rising over a barren crust of bone and glass.
Across the perimeter, a novice in drab grey robes walked past the colonnade. He didn't look at the duel. He was looking at his fingernails, drifting with the languid indifference of a tourist who had wandered into the wrong temple.
Yet as he passed, the crimson tendrils at Wanda's feet snapped straight, orienting toward him like compass needles in an iron storm.
***
He remembered what she'd become, in another life's telling. Avenger, widow, mother, partner, loyalist.
And here, gifting a wonderland to mutants and taking it away with a few words.
Whether she deserved sympathy or condemnation, Tao found the debate meaningless.
What caught him instead wasn't the cruelty or the sorrow. It was the certainty underneath both ~ the same conviction he recognized in himself, that reality was negotiable, that it should bend until it matched the shape of her wanting.
He'd made that same demand of the universe more times than he could count.
Tao
Now, her aura brushed his for a moment and left its whole temporal history stamped on him.
I know that taste, Tao thought, not breaking stride.
It was the lingering ash of an X-gene married to something far older, far more disordered~residual Crimson Chaos. But it wasn't native to this timeline's baseline. It carried the specific, burnt-ozone static of an excision scar.
Ah. That world.
Five years ago~subjective local reckoning~he had needed to adjust the temporal architecture of this cluster. An imprecise bit of celestial surgery, performed back when he was somewhat less economical with his erasures. To balance the ledger of an entire planetary quadrant, he had simply smoothed out an entire branch.
A quick pinch between thumb and forefinger. An entire globe's population, folded down into mathematical zero.
A boy with white hair running faster than sound, caught mid-stride, another red soul pulling away from complete erasure because favor of a near zero probability.
***
She had not come to Kamar-Taj seeking power. She had come seeking restraint. Years before taking shelter here, she'd glimpsed a future where she was different, where nearly every being on the planet was reduced to ash or erased entirely under a power like hers.
That vision, coupled with the wild, untamed nature of her abilities, had left her terrified of her own volatility, rather than drawn to magic out of any genuine yearning for it.
He had thought the excision was clean. But here stood the sister, carrying the grafted phantom of that deleted branch stitched clumsily into her current soul.
Under enough strain, it acted without her permission. One power was hard enough. Two, in a mortal vessel, was unsustainable.
Hunted as a mutant, feared as a freak, her mind fractured by an amateur telepath's crude attempt to soothe her grief, until she had fled into the mountains seeking chains strong enough to hold her.
Too erratic for the mutant sanctuaries and too untamed for the covens, yet pursued by both, she crashed into the one hidden corner of the earth that belonged to neither.
The Ancient Mystic found her shivering at the gates. And so, Kamar-Taj, a fortress built on absolute, rigid order, opened its doors to a girl made of pure chaos.
Yak-butter tea, brass wheels turning on their own patient time, forms repeated until repetition became a kind of cage strong enough to hold a storm. The place offered her comfort, the assurance of people nearby who could contain her if everything broke loose.
A thread of cause and effect~thin, brilliant, and undeniable~hung directly between her collarbone and his chest.
This was the effect, rippling backward up the time-stream from the cause of what he'd done.
In the "proper" timeline, she would have found the sorcerers eventually out of curiosity, trained at a measured pace, and quietly earned her place among them.
Here, a small, accidental reality-warp in her early years had caused enough disaster inside this temple that she still faced prejudice, branded vicious or unstable by fellow disciples. Her master shielded her from abandonment again.
Karmic residue. Tao sighed internally. Tedious.
When Chaos Reaches Out
He gave a nod of understanding, glanced at his rather expensive mechanical watch Long Yuyin bought for him, and decided it was time to head back.
He turned toward the outer gate. Mortal guilt was a swamp; wading into it only muddied the hems.
Stepping forward to 'fix' her would require explanations, theatrics, the tedious moral grandstanding of local heroes who would instantly cast him as a cosmic villain. Far better to let the local monks keep her locked in their little sandbox.
***
Magic, being the symbolism of events, however, rarely allowed observation without participation. Every encounter demanded a rite, an exchange. Crimson Chaos, being primordial, rarely cared for proper etiquette, not when the people nearby carried such cause and effect, more often than not marked by that same tainted magical signature.
But could it really hold him?
No. But something else could.
It arranged for events to follow their own course instead.
Tao turned to leave, but a sudden fog clouded his mind. That's when the thought hit him, sounding completely like his own voice:
You didn't get here by accident. For you, is any meeting outside your own conclusion?
You changed your mind without even realizing it.
He froze. Unknown to him, deep in his gut, his Dantian buzzed for a split second, a raw instinct like a tongue poking at a sore tooth.
It didn't care about the human girl herself. It was drawn to the wild, unformulated magic pouring off her.
Why not stick around, the voice in his head whispered. It might be fun to watch. What's a few minutes to a god?
He almost scoffed aloud. Fun. Pity. He was an ancient being, not a mortal fangirl.
These were glitches, side effects of wearing a mortal body too long, maybe residue from the dark magic he'd recently practiced and half-adapted to, or the Darkhold he'd skimmed near Wundagore's roots.
Maybe he had been too casual with it, not thorough enough cleansing himself of demonic energies.
Then an idle curiosity fluttered in his chest. A strange, sour boredom, laced with a faint echo of pity.
He lowered his interior wards by a fraction of a millimeter, intending only to trace the emotional flare to its physiological root~
When Chaos latched on
As though sensing an impossible weight of emotions pressing against the space behind her, Wanda halted mid-motion.
The karmic filament flared.
Wanda's concentration broke.
The senior mystic's staff struck her shoulder, and the pain shattered her focus. The crimson within her, frantic and suffocating, tore through her sternum in a wild, blind arc as if let out by something.
It did not seek the monk. It sought the only thing in the courtyard vast enough to ground a collapsing star.
It found the hairline opening in Tao's mind.
The crimson latched on.
Tao halted. He could have incinerated the filament instantly with a flare of true-spirit fire. But doing so in this courtyard would vaporize Kamar-Taj, the mountain beneath it, and three neighboring valleys. The noise would ruin his quiet morning entirely.
He could shield himself, but still he didn't.
What he felt instead, underneath her power reaching for him, was the shape of what came next if he did nothing or defended:
Her chaos breaching open in the middle of a crowded training hall, thirty witnesses, a few deaths, and a very attentive institution watching a reality tear happen two feet from a nobody monk who'd spent all morning very carefully not existing.
The energy is trying to open a dimension inside magically shielded space into the micro-verse.
Unacceptable. Not out of concern for her. Out of concern for the few hours of subtlety he'd already spent.
Fine, Tao decided. A private room, then.
He pinched space between his fingers.
***
So he folded it shut. The mechanism arrived in his mind before he willed it, and like solving mental arithmetic, the energy tearing at his body turned into runes and vanished from sight, crafting the best outcome on its own.
It wasn't difficult, not for him. He'd spent the morning teaching the wards here to see him as scenery.
He took the moment, the hall, the girl, the storm collapsing inside her, and folded it back on itself like a page pressed flat against a mirror, until there were two of everything and only one of them was real.
A mirror dimension of still time. Not space. Yet the erratic nature of crimson hex and something else coiled within it still clawed hungrily at the seam, already bleeding beyond regular control enveloping her and slowing as Tao sensed it reaching for him next.
Then suddenly.
A snowflake, frozen mid-fall in the courtyard. Monks turned to statues mid-breath. The master's hand still lifted in whatever gesture he'd been making the instant his student's eyes rolled back.
Time was not frozen. It's just one of them decided to cease thinking like a human.
Both of them standing still, one facing forward, the girl lifting up to look.
Nearby the energies from dimension pulled both of them. A space where physical bodies could not enter. Their astral self to be accurate.
Both physical forms stayed rooted to the stone, while the crimson hex, gone haywire from sudden containment in a dimensional vortex, tore their astral selves free of flesh.
The last thing Wanda saw before reality folded over, before her astral body and soul left, quiet as a turning page, was the face of a young monk. Familiar, the way any acolyte's face is familiar. Wrong, in a way she didn't have a word for yet.
***
Tao had no intention of showing his hand, or letting Crimson Chaos run the encounter.
He told himself the lapse was just his consciousness adjusting to feedback from a mortal nervous system, recalibrating to a mystical energy he'd studied and half-adapted to once at Wundagore, now finding it hosted secondhand in a human girl who hadn't asked his permission to have opinions.
Close enough to true. True enough that it became true.
Yet the crimson tendrils continued latching onto his mortal periphery, recognizing something kin in the marrow. Severing the tether outright would shatter the girl's soul as backlash before she could fully cross over.
Instead, he guided the fold, allowing a slender psionic splinter ~ an outer husk of mortal consciousness ~ to be caught in the crimson undertow and drawn into her wake.
He understood where that fragment was going, and what had carried it there. But it was only a sliver of himself - a thin but core consciousness housed in a mortal avatar, the human before all - the sort of piece too easily colored by whatever vessel contained it.
Whatever thoughts or feelings it might acquire were of little consequence to him. He let it go without concern, never expecting that a fragment severed from the whole could stray so far from the mind that had birthed it.
Outside, none of it had moved. He'd made sure of that first.
***
The dimension of manifestations
Wanda stood in a small room lit only by the low, orange pulse of hearth-fire.
The air was heavy with the simmer of paprikash, sweet onions sweating down in lard, and the resinous tang of dry cedar smoke~the specific perfume of evenings before she had spent years learning to bury beneath mystic mantras.
She knew what this place was the moment the smell hit her throat. She had lost control again.
The guilt arrived first, familiar and sour, followed immediately by the imagined sting of Master Hamir's fallen expression, the guarded, quiet steps her fellow disciples would take around her in the refectory tomorrow.
After half a decade of grinding discipline, she had hoped to at least purchase the illusion of a fight. Instead, she had simply snapped, and the world had rewarded her with warmth, cedar, and quiet~which meant either her training had failed entirely, or someone else had stepped in to pull the brakes for her.
She looked for an exit. The cedar walls met seamlessly at the corners, unmarred by hinges, frames, or cracks.
Against the far wall, a brass clockwork tower taller than an adult stood ticking through hundreds of nested, interlocking gears in perfect, unbroken cadence. Without meaning to, her chest rose and fell in time with the brass escapement, the rhythmic clack-tick siphoning the raw panic out of her blood before she could weaponize it.
Near the hearth sat a rough-hewn pine dining table, arranged with the exact number of mismatched chairs from her childhood kitchen.
Somewhere past the plaster, muffled just enough to sound like a half-remembered morning, Pietro was grumbling about cold water and burnt crusts.
***
An uninvited guest
None of the architecture was Tao's invention, not truly. He had pinned the spatial canvas to keep reality from bleeding; her subconscious had aggressively furnished the rest.
The domestic quiet cracked when the ceiling tore open with a sharp, dry snap. Something dropped through the seam, landing neatly on the floorboards without scuffing the pine.
"So this is where you ended up."
The voice came from the head of the table~casual, faintly beleaguered, carrying the dry tone of a man whose quiet stroll had been derailed by an unnecessary detour.
Wanda spun, hands instinctively coming up, her knuckles sparking with faint crimson static.
Sitting in the central chair was an acolyte in the standard dark tunic of the senior trainees. He was casually tilting an earthenware pot, pouring hot water into a chipped porcelain cup like he owned the lease on her memory, rather than having breached it uninvited.
What made her skin prickle wasn't the intrusion itself. It was the absence of weight. There was no psychic pressure bruising her temples, no violent telepathic tearing at the seams of her mind, none of the oily friction she recognized from every mutant who had ever tried to pry open her skull. Just a warm room, the steady ticking of brass, and a familiar face pouring tea.
"Rudra?" She took a half-step forward, caught between sheer relief and mounting suspicion. "You're off-duty. You're supposed to be asleep in the east wing~no, why would you be in my head~"
She stopped.
The posture was entirely wrong. Rudra carried himself with the stiff, nervous propriety of a third-year initiate who still bowed to the library stairs.
The man at the table had his boots propped against the pine stretcher, slouching with the bored indifference of someone sitting in an empty waiting room.
"Hmm." The face looked down at its borrowed hands, flexing the fingers once with mild distaste, then began to dissolve. "Borrowing the likeness of a sleeping novice at this hour. Rather poor form on my part."
The skin peeled away like ink washing off wet silk, resolving into a young man with sharp, unremarkable features and eyes that seemed completely disengaged from the space around him.
"Hello, Scarlet Witch," he murmured. He took a measured sip of the hot water, letting the memory of dried tea leaves register against his palate. The cup chimed softly against its saucer~an absurdly ordinary, brittle sound in the middle of a broken reality.
The strange, quiet cadence of his voice hit an unexpected chord beneath her ribs, disarming her just enough for an old defensive reflex to take over.
"Who are you calling a witch?" she felt temper, her voice dropping into a hard, defensive line.
Her astral presence was an exact match for her physical form: the plum halter, the rough, layered crimson skirts, the faint purple bruises of exhaustion beneath her eyes. Same stubborn set to the jaw.
"Different history. Different face," he muttered into his cup, almost to himself.
"What?"
"Nothing worth explaining."
She didn't panic. Her fingers traced two swift, measured arcs, weaving jagged scarlet mandalas across the air before her chest. The geometry was rough, but the lines were tight, held in check by discipline rather than fear.
The avatar watched her hands with mild interest. She reaches for structure first, he noted. She wants to understand the room before she burns it down.
"What did you do to Rudra?" she demanded.
"Why would I bother doing anything to him?" he countered smoothly, setting the cup down. "Now tell me~if you are so certain you aren't a witch, what are you?"
The question was simple enough, but as the words left his mouth, a quiet, unfamiliar sensation flickered at the root of the avatar's borrowed mind~the strange realization that beneath all his clinical detachment, he had actually wanted to hear her answer it.
"I am a sorceress of Kamar-Taj," she said, watching his eyes for any sign of a tell. "Why are you inside my mind?"
"...Your mind?"The corner of his mouth ticked upward in quiet amusement. "Young lady, this is as concrete as the stone in the courtyard. You are the one dedicating your youth to mysticism, not I. Look around. Where do you think we are?"
He let the silence hang, curious to see how much of the underlying mathematics her instincts could parse without a master pointing the way.
Wanda kept her guard raised, her eyes scanning the unbroken wood, the brass clockwork grinding through its infinite cycle, the hearth-fire that cast heat without producing ash, and the total absence of any exit.
"...A liminal fold," she said slowly, testing the weight of the syllables. "You cast a containment field."
"Close," he said, refilling his cup with unhurried precision. "A timeless pocket you forced open and I stabilized."
"I didn't~"
"A threshold," he interrupted, before she could spin her defense. "A half-step suspended between the material and the astral. I provided the dimensional perimeter so the room wouldn't collapse on your head; your instinct furnished the curtains and the soup."
"You still haven't answered me," she pressed, taking a slow step toward the table, her crimson shields humming with rising tension. "Who are you? Why am I trapped here?"
"Who I am is entirely irrelevant to your immediate situation. Why am I here? Ask yourself. I was having a perfectly quiet morning in your archives. You reached out and snatched my sleeve."
"I pulled you in?"
"You did. Your internal balance fractured under its own weight. The storm looked for an anchor, found me standing thirty paces away, and dragged us both into the seam. I merely arrived behind you and scribbled enough geometry into the tear to prevent your little tantrum from leveling the southern wing."
He glanced down at the tea, debating whether to offer the technicalities, then shrugged slightly. "Which makes this territory yours by bearing your spiritual mark. So here we sit."
Wanda didn't lower her hands. She thrust her right palm forward, sending a rippling wave of scarlet energy outward. The red light surged across the cedar planks, washing over the hearth and the clockwork, hunting for an edge, a seam, a structural flaw.
The energy struck the walls and simply flattened out, dissipating like water thrown against a sheet of polished glass.
"I asked for your name and your method," she said, her breathing shallow as the red light flared brighter around her wrists. "You're still evading."
"I know." He leaned back in the pine chair, watching her frustration mount with the weary patience of a tutor dealing with a stubborn novice.
"Tell me what do you want to hear, if you're going to keep insisting I am your captor."
"You are."
"You are fundamentally mistaken," he said, tapping a single finger against the porcelain rim.
"Your reserves were collapsing inward. You grabbed the nearest fixed point to keep from falling. I simply used a small measure of esoteric theory so I wouldn't lose my balance inside your childhood kitchen. I am not casting spells~not by your school's definitions.
I am projecting localized runes via phrenomancy and mutant psionics. It is thoroughly documented in your restricted collection, third aisle past the seal of Agamotto, assuming your librarians ever grant you clearance."
A dry, sharp smile touched his face. "Magic is merely an unrefined dialect of a much wider grammar. Your rules were codified by scholars who never encountered someone fluent in the root language. So I make do with what fits."
He kept the rest to himself: that his workaround was paper-thin. So long as her power remained a chaotic, unfocused hemorrhage of emotion, it was just raw material he could shape and redirect at will.
But the instant she focused that grief into a deliberate, structured spell~the moment she exercised true sovereign intent inside her own threshold~the old laws would snap shut and crush his borrowed loophole instantly.
He tucked that certainty away and smiled over his cup. "I am nobody of consequence. I came to Kamar-Taj for the literature. Then I encountered you."
She remained dead still, weighing whether he was an infiltrator, an illusion, or a lunatic.
"I wanted to refine my understanding of local spatial theory," he continued, answering the thought before she could voice it. "Then I ran across a mortal vessel carrying far more temporal rot than should fit into a single incarnation. Natural curiosity took over."
" So then you captured me."
He looked at her speechless. May be hearing herself say this she changed stance.
"What an absurd lie," she snapped. "Infiltrating Kamar-Taj under the nose of the Ancient One just to look at an apprentice?"
"Yet we are still standing here trading accusations," he replied, giving a theatrical, bored sigh.
"Explaining this much to a mortal is already a waste of my morning. You grant yourself far too much importance, girl. I have no business with you; if anyone should be demanding explanations, it is I."
"Try another line. Mortal? What are you, some entity from the Dark Dimension?"
"Convincing you of basic facts is remarkably tedious," he muttered.
The explanation had an infuriating, clean consistency that matched the strange lack of pressure in the room. Yet the suspicion refused to die.
"I am out of patience," Wanda said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, low hum as the crimson mandalas around her hands began to expand, spinning in tight, aggressive orbits. "Who are you? A man? A spirit?"
He watched the red light bleed across the floorboards toward his boots, completely unbothered.
He swirled the water in his cup, watching the pale steam rise. "A stray tourist..."
"That is not an answer. Are you a demon?"
He said nothing, meeting her glare with flat, unblinking calm as if she was stupid.
"Answer me!" she demanded.
"You wouldn't pick a fight with someone who has done nothing but answer your questions with perfect honesty, would you?" he asked mildly.
He studied her across the short span of the table. Her eyes darted constantly~registering the corners of the room, measuring the distance to his throat, mapping three distinct attack angles while keeping her core shielded.
She moved like an animal that had spent its entire life expecting the ground beneath it to give way.
Fascinating, the avatar thought. The world has already finished breaking her, yet she still expects to fight the pieces.
Seeing that she had settled entirely into an attacking stance, the fleeting amusement withered, replaced by that familiar, but now synthetic - ancient weariness.
"Well. This was mildly informative." The avatar raised his right hand, bringing his thumb and middle finger together to break the anchor and return to the courtyard.
"Mind the tea on your way out."
"What are you ..." Wanda surged forward before the fingers could snap, her eyes widening as the firelight caught the slope of his jaw.
Nothing happened on his part other just a regular old snap as he looked at himself in confusion.
"No," she breathed, the mandalas freezing mid-spin. "I've seen you before."