Everlife
Flickering with ominous light, the circle hummed with unstable energy, a gateway designed to draw Dormammu himself to the mortal plane.
"It's time."
Under Ancient One's orders, the Three Sanctums dimmed their barriers, just briefly, and the magic circle Soren crafted began to pulse violently. Tendrils of dark energy writhed like serpents, weaving a portal to the Dark Dimension itself.
And across the void, Dormammu noticed.
He felt the ancient wards of Agamotto flickering, the earth unprotected for the first time in millennia.
Dormammu, in the midst of devouring an entire world elsewhere, halted.
This was the moment he had waited for and without hesitation, he abandoned his conquest and hurled himself toward Earth's dimension.
Even aware that something was off, that this opportunity came too easily, Dormammu was beyond mortal caution.
What trick could possibly matter to a being whose will could swallow suns?
The link between dimensions crackled with malignant force. A tremor rolled through the fabric of space itself as Dormammu's vast essence pressed against the thinning barrier.
"FEAST!"
The magic circle within the medical hall exploded in black flame.
A swirling vortex tore through the room as Dormammu's dark power began forcing its way through the dimensional crack.
Soren teleported to the chamber's edge, eyes fixed on the unraveling summoning array.
Under Dormammu's overwhelming power, space itself cracked like brittle glass. The dimensional breach twisted larger and larger, a chaotic storm of raw darkness.
"Time still."
With a single command, the Time Gem's glow bathed the room in a suspended amber light. The chaotic dark currents froze.
Without hesitating, he charged into the unstable space portal, feeling reality twist around him as he passed through dimensions.
The moment he crossed the threshold, his mind screamed.
Dormammu's dark space was unlike anything conceivable, a boundless abyss where dark power bled from every inch of non-space, suffocating the soul.
A realm that existed only to consume.
The dimension rejected him outright and attacked.
Waves of dark energy and mental assaults rained down, clawing at his body and mind. He was a trespasser here, a fragile anomaly.
"Time Freeze!"
Another burst of temporal light burst forth, halting the onslaught around him, trapping those crushing forces in a frozen moment.
Breathing hard, Soren pulled out a vial of radiant blue elixir and downed it. Warmth surged through his veins, shielding his body, steadying his mind.
"I was nearly careless." Soren felt the terror of this place settle in his bones.
But he would not turn back.
He activated the magic circle embedded within his being a portable construct designed to anchor his position and manipulate the Time Gem's power.
Within the frozen pocket of time, he moved as a phantom, slipping through Dormammu's monstrous dimension unchallenged.
Soren had long known that venturing into Dormammu's realm was madness, but was his only chance.
The situation was paradoxical by its very nature.
Two different rivers of time were flowing simultaneously, one belonging to the material world, the other to the Dark Dimension. In normal circumstances, it was fundamentally impossible for the creatures of one timeline to attack a traveler from another.
Unless… time magic was involved.
The moment he mastered the ancient and forbidden art of Chronomancy, he had gained the one power Dormammu himself could never fully devour, the ability to stand outside the ordinary flow of time.
This was his trump card. His one hope to survive the unholy ground of this eldritch realm.
Yet keeping the Time Circle active constantly drained the divine essence within him.
Its consumption was relentless, gnawing at his strength like a ceaseless flame.
Every few minutes, Soren was forced to take another bottle of his custom-brewed Essence & Mysteries Elixir, just to hold his body and magic together.
ROAR!
A bone-rattling roar echoed inside his mind, not through the air, but within the very core of his being.
Soren spun around, but the space remained unchanged, an endless expanse of corrupted ground, flickering blue lights in the void, and twisted structures.
"…"
'Tiny ant… do you not realize that the great Dormammu transcends time and space itself?'
The voice wasn't spoken aloud.
It was directly imprinted into his consciousness, every syllable felt like a mountain pressing against his mind. Soren's limbs trembled under the weight of it.
So powerful…!
This ~~ was Dormammu.
Gritting his teeth, forcing down the primal fear rising in his soul.
"Dormammu!"
"This is your idea of courage, hiding in your own realm?"
"I've come to you stand and fight, Lord of Darkness, not tremble like a girl!"
For a moment, there was stunned silence.
Before light gathered.
Two vast points of azure-blue light, as thick and terrible as twin suns, emerged from the dark. They locked onto Soren's tiny, mortal frame.
A cold dread swept over him.
Those were eyes.
Dormammu's eyes.
Looking up into them was like staring into eternity itself.
The blue light bathed his body, and though none of the dark energies touched him physically, thanks to the time magic keeping him half-phased through parallel rivers of time, he could feel the vast, endless force surrounding him.
A single fluctuation from these energies could annihilate him utterly if not for the thin layer of temporal isolation around him.
Then, the face came into view.
Planet-sized.
A cosmic visage of unholy fire, endless shadows, and eyes like galaxies.
"…"
"I… am here. The Dark Dimension is my body. You walk within me, fool."
Soren's breath caught. The sheer scale of Dormammu defied mortal comprehension.
He wasn't facing a 'being' in the conventional sense. Dormammu was the space, the walls, the ground, the void, every inch of this dimension was him.
The system interface appeared.
[Lord of Darkness: Dormammu]
[EX-Class Dimensional Entity]
[Abilities: ???]
EX-Class…
Soren felt cold sweat run down his spine, and he had only one thing going through his mind.
"You look like you took on a garden tool… and it wasn't a fair fight."
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
Fellow Phantoms and aspiring Phantoms to be, if you seek to access advanced parts of this story procced to my shadowy realm of p@treon.
PhantomDream