Chapter 6: The Witch's Lament
Scarlet Witch | Setting: Warp Rift, near the Eye of Terror
The void breathed her name.
Not in words, in feeling.
A thousand whispers bloomed in the dark, curling like silk smoke around the woman suspended between light and oblivion. She twitched, body half – formed, her flesh rippling between shadow and scarlet flame.
Her scream tore through the Immaterium like music.
"Wanda..."
The Warp answered her grief with compassion or something that felt like it.
Limbs, faces, emotions all drifted around her in spectral shreds. Memories of herself mother, monster, savior, witch all breaking apart and folding in on each other. Every version of her spoke at once.
"We did what we had to."
"We hurt them."
"We saved them."
"We were never enough."
And over it all, another voice purred.
Silken. Seductive. Agonizingly kind.
"You poor, broken child…"
The darkness around her blossomed into color golds, shimmering like perfume caught in light. From within it stepped a figure of impossible grace, neither man nor woman, both and neither. Skin smooth as marble, eyes like galaxies curling inward.
Slaanesh. The Prince Of Excess.
"You have suffered," the god whispered. "You are suffering. And you do not need to, not anymore."
Wanda floated in the void, tears falling upward. "I... I hurt them. I hurt everyone."
"And yet," the Prince smiled, "they begged you to save them. To love them. To be what they needed. It was never you who failed, my sweet Witch – it was the world that demanded too much."
The words slithered through her mind like silk.
She wanted to resist – to remember Vision, the twins, Strange's warning but their voices were fading beneath the gentle tide of divine empathy.
"You only wanted peace," Slaanesh continued. "Harmony. Love. And when they would not give it, you tore the world to make it yours. That... is not evil."
Wanda closed her eyes. "Then what is it?"
"Beautiful."
Her form flickered, collapsing into red mist and reassembling again stronger, sharper, but trembling.
Her form flickered, collapsing into red mist and reassembling again stronger, sharper, but trembling.
She felt arms around her. Not real arms sensations. Gentle warmth pressing against her cheek, a heartbeat that matched her own.
"You have spent your life choosing who you must be," Slaanesh whispered against her skin. "Daughter. Sister.
Lover. Monster. You do not need to choose anymore. Here, every version of you can exist. Every sorrow, every desire, every sin."
"And what... do you want from me?"
"Only that you feel."
A hand – delicate and cruel traced her chin, lifting it until her scarlet eyes met those star-dark ones.
"Do you not see? You are mine already."
Wanda's breath caught. The air shimmered with emotion so thick it hurt to breathe.
Her magic – the Chaos Magic pulsed, wild and alive. The Warp sang to it, bending around her like a lover's embrace.
"I can make it stop," the Prince said. "The doubt. The guilt. The endless noise of wanting and hating yourself. All I ask...
is that you let me hold you."
She wanted to refuse.
She wanted to scream.
But she was so tired.
Her body arched, releasing a wave of crimson energy that rippled through the Rift, lighting the darkness in soft scarlet and gold.
The Warp moaned.
Slaanesh smiled beautiful, terrible.
"Yes," the god whispered. "Give yourself to joy. To pain. To me."
Wanda opened her mouth to speak but the words that came were not hers.
"No more pain," she whispered. "No more choices."
And the Warp rejoiced.
Her essence, the Witch, the Woman, the Wanderer – dissolved into a tapestry of light. Thousands of Wandas shimmered, overlapping, merging into one.
She was no longer singular.
No longer separate.
She was choral.
The Warp had taken her, but in doing so, it had given her something she had never had before peace through surrender.
.
.
.
.
Her mind unfurled.
Like the petals of a bleeding flower, Wanda opened – not to one consciousness, but to a choir of them. Every Wanda that ever existed, every possibility she once feared – merged and harmonized within the tides of the Warp.
The mother who loved her sons.
The Avenger who stood against gods.
The witch who tore reality apart in grief.
The child who only wanted to be seen.
All of them sang, and in their harmony, she heard something like divinity.
"Do you see now?" the Dark Prince whispered, voice tender and cruel, wrapping around her like a velvet chain. "Multiplicity is mercy. You were never meant to bear the burden of being one."
Her laughter echoed fragile, crystalline.
It sounded like wind over a dying world.
"Multiplicity..." she repeated softly, "then what am I?"
"You," Slaanesh smiled, "are the answer to suffering. You are the indulgence of self that mortals fear. You are freedom from the singular lie of control."
The Warp pulsed, and color bled into color red folding into violet, violet into gold. Her hair drifted like threads of blood and light. Her flesh shimmered, half – mortal, half – myth.
All around her, Warp – beings knelt – not from fear, but reverence. The tides had a new rhythm now, and it pulsed with her name.
Wanda's lips parted, and the song of her countless selves flowed outward a hymn of paradox, soft and terrible:
"I am the wound and the salve, the fire and the ash, the love that undoes itself."
The Warp trembled.
In that instant, even Slaanesh – eternal in ecstasy – paused to listen.
Something shifted.
The god reached forward, tracing a finger along her jaw, but the energy recoiled slightly not from resistance, but recognition.
For in surrender, Wanda had not been consumed. She had assimilated the Warp that sought to claim her.
And for the briefest moment, the Dark Prince's smile faltered.
"You... would turn pleasure into peace?" the god murmured. "Chaos into calm?"
Her many voices all of her answered at once:
"I would turn it into understanding."
A crimson ripple spread through the rift, vast and infinite, shattering a thousand lesser daemons into dust. The Warp keened in delight and agony alike, unable to tell the difference anymore.
Slaanesh laughed then, quiet and thrilled.
"Oh, little witch... what a beautiful heresy you are."
Wanda's eyes, now galaxies of scarlet and silver, opened slowly.
"And what are you," she whispered, "if not a god desperate to be understood?"
The question hung in the air, tender and sharp as a blade.
Slaanesh's gaze softened, not in pity but in respect.
"Then sing, my Witch," the god said finally. "Sing until the stars know your sorrow."
And so she did.
Her lament became a current within the Warp, a melody that bent even daemons to stillness. It wound through the endless madness like a thread of scarlet silk, refusing to break, refusing to end.
The Witch's Lament.
A song of surrender that was, in truth, the first act of rebellion.