There was falling—and nothing else. From where? Through what? To where? These questions were stillborn, never to be thought—for every eye was splashed with phantasmagoria until blind; every mind, so suddenly immersed in the unknown, let go of the familiar; every being was no being. There were no someones here—only the something of the fall.
It was as though there was, first, a cyclone of green smoke in a horizontal movement; there was also, secondly, a force as if plummeting downward. But none of this could be even remotely grasped until later, until a stillness returned.
There was no ground that came into sight—nothing approached them. It was as if something solid grew from their bodies, outwardly, connecting, so that they could finally lift their heads to face one another, and see, a dream viewed in waking life, the green smoke, their entire world for a moment, dissipated into the sky that was once chaos.
Namor rose to his feet first. He searched the swampland that enveloped him, finding in this alien terrain something of the deep sea he knew so well. It was lit, as if from underneath, the darkness growing the further he cast his looks upward. There was blueish purple fauna, green iridescent waters, and a black sky. Set before this and ominous beyond words, for it was the only vestige of civilization anywhere that Namor looked, a castle jutting from the mountains at their back.
Not finding an immediate enemy, he turned now to the scattered bodies of his traveling companions, discovering then that he was the first to stand—but the last to wake.
Strange was closest to him. The mage knelt, his face buried in his hands. Namor could read nothing more in his motionlessness than defeat.
His gaze moved on to the Hulk, some several feet off at the end of a noticeable rut cut through the mud and terminating where he now crotched, cradling Barbara in his arms. Though perfectly still, with the stillness of a corpse, she screamed as if in permanent agony, one long exhausted by breath which seemed never to cease for want of air. Namor realized the sound, the only sound in the insect-lacking swamp, had been in his head the entire fall, only now, knowing the pain behind it, knowing the unfortunate one who made it, knowing the impotence in any attempt to stop it, he felt sick that he had been listening for so long without sympathizing.
With Strange's posture and visible heavy breathing intimating life, Namor treaded softly over to the Hulk instead, sadness making the journey slow and long.
"She's not waking up," the Hulk said, freezing Namor where he stood. "She's not—. I tried to get to her in time—but she's not the same now." Barbara's eyelids fluttered open, revealing clear white orbs that neither looked, nor rolled, nor twitched—so like pearls were they.
"He did this to her," the Hulk said tearfully.
Namor, twisting at the waist, looked back at Strange, now standing. Strange trembled in place, his hand over his open mouth. Namor, not knowing if the pity was for Barbara or for himself, gave Strange a hard look before sending his glance around the swamp disdainfully.
"Fix her!" the Hulk said, finally looking away from Barbara.
"I—" Strange said, stammering, "I can't."
"Can't?"
"She has seen things no normal human was meant to see. She was already weakened mentally and wreaked emotionally before traveling here. Now—her mind's suffered too much."
The Hulk looked back down at Barbara in his arms, tears running down his cheeks.
"I'm sorry," said Strange, "it's irrevocable."
"Then send us home," said the Hulk. "I'll take care of her—just get us back home."
"I can't even guess where we are, let alone know the road back. Your radiation mixes with my magic—interferes with it somehow." Strange's voice sank. His audience gave back scowls of disappointment. "I can't—I don't know how to control it."
"And you are my equal in this endeavor?" said Namor, his arms folded across his chest.
"I'm—I just got the wind knocked out of me. Give me a second." Strange breathed. "There's magic all throughout this realm. It's comforting me, nurturing me back to health, as it were. So much magic." He closed his eyes, a savoring of returning life, strength, and sanity. "It's emitting from that castle. Someone powerful dwells there. No—many powerful magic users dwell there!"
"Then that is where we shall go," said Namor, turning, as if to abort all argument, toward his hopeful destination. "This—" he continued, "is, after all, no place for a king."
"You'd be wasting what energy you have," said Strange, attempting to straighten his back.
Namor responded with arched eyebrows thrown over his shoulder.
"We don't even know what's waiting for us there. We need to—rest, for one—"
There was an outburst from both sides.
"I will not deign to stall here and do nothing," said Namor, a comment almost lost to the desperate, wretched howl from the Hulk.
"You can't rest until you fix Barbara!" he said.
"Didn't you hear me, monster," said Strange, snapping back. "There is nothing—" He paused. "Maybe I can at least let her sleep."
His blunt steps toward the Hulk put the Hulk on the defensive. He flinched, he sneered, he gripped Barbara tighter as Strange approached. Doctor Strange lifted his hands, a soothing gesture, a prelude to a smoother, slower, more labor step that brought him to the Hulk's side peacefully.
The Hulk set down his burden not reluctantly but with care. He stepped back, his eyes moving to and staying on Strange.
Doctor Strange was still for a moment. He viewed Barbara's face, looking closely into her blind, white, staring eyes from one side then the next. He paused to wipe the stranding tears from his eyes.
The Hulk snorted.
Strange closed his mouth. His eyes narrowed with concentration. He raised his hands so that they hovered over Barbara's head.
As Strange wrestled with a specter neither Namor nor the Hulk could see, the Hulk raised his own hands. He sneered again, leaning forward.
Namor stepped in closer to this drama. He made himself visible to the Hulk, the way he turned full-bodied toward the two actors. He caught the Hulk's eye, which blinked from the empty eyes of the murderous to the irregular slits of the sorrowful. Namor shook his head from side to side, his fists clinching. He did not look forward to doing battle again with the Hulk—neither could he let Strange go helpless to his death.
Barbara's wailing died down, and soon it ceased altogether. In the restored silence, the Hulk looked away, his eye-glaze reappearing.
With the swiftness of a predatory beast, the Hulk leapt. Namor, scrambling several feet forward, was about to hurl himself between the Hulk and he who as thought to be his intended target. But as the Hulk overshot Strange, Namor stayed his legs—though his heart beat wildly on.
The Hulk was now out of sight, hidden in the shadow of a long red reed patch. There were growls heard, and splashing, and several thuds.
Strange gently placed the now slumbering head of Barbara unto the ground, sending a waving hand over her form which caused her image to flickering in and out of sight, protected now from physical harm like a ghost. His fists glowed—his jaw tensed—his eyes focus as he looked up. Both he and Namor watched tensely as the reeds stopped swaying. Parting them, exited the Hulk, hold a writhing but wounded creature by a weakly flailing, obviously broken, rubbery appendage. Strange felt queasy. Never before had he seen what looked like some form of a gorilla, though with shimmering scales running along its sides. He thought one moment he could read terror in its face, giving it, temporarily, the appearance of highly evolved intelligence. But this altered and disappeared with every twist of the creature's head—light had to only fall on it differently for Strange to see the emotionless, alien, dark eyes of a fish one moment, then the vicious, beady, red eyes of a baboon the next.
With neither Strange nor Namor offering support or warning, the Hulk casually tossed his captive into the air, catching it by the head. It emitted a muffled plea, which modulated into a muffled scream as the Hulk began to squeeze.
"No!" said Strange, stumbling forward with palms out. "Why kill it? We don't know what it is, or if it can help us—we certainly don't owe it an execution without reason."
The Hulk looked down at Strange coldly and composed—then crushed the creature's skull into pulp. The body oozed to the ground. Over it, as a final sacrament, the Hulk, with a show of contempt, whipped the sticky fluids from off his hand.
"The Hulk has done right," said Namor, looking on as Strange trembled in place. "That thing would have killed us had we taken up camp here as you suggested."
"But we could have learned from it," said Strange, regaining his composure. "The smallest lead could uncover where exactly we are. It's all a matter of the right teleportation spell from there to be back where we belong."
"You still have most of a specimen," said Namor.
"A living being bears ties to its surroundings. A dead thing just rests on it. I might be able to glean something from what's left of the body, though. Ideally, I need to find another living being. Or, better yet, many—"
Strange froze. His eyes followed a rustling turned shadow turned creature. He looked in another direction then another, slowly backing away—finding, wherever his eye landed, another set of shifting eyes.
The Hulk and Namor had made similar discoveries of their own, turning this way and that in the hope of same lapse in the creatures' enclosing parameter. Their vain search ended, they too stepped backwards defensively, meeting up with Strange.
The eyes of Doctor Strange and the Hulk met momentarily. Not a single word passed between them. The former gave a worried nod; the latter a grin. Neither would know this peace for a while—for this was the unlikely prelude to violence.
Doctor Strange produced a comet's tail of mystical energy, which he flourished in a horizontal arch. This scattered half of the encroaching creatures. The other half was thrown an equal distance—but from the Hulk's brute force. Having handled the nearest creature, he used it as bludgeon, knocking the bulk of his attackers too far away for these to do any damage.
There were, of course, a few cunning creatures mixed in the bunch—those who were able to dodge Strange's or Hulk's volley and moved in rapidly to counter. These never got their chance to strike, however—for Namor, with a speed, a fluidity, and a fierceness unmatched, flew upon any attacker with a wave of punches and kicks that those who fell at his merciless hands and feet believed it better to be scattered by Strange or by the Hulk than to face their backup.
Their numbers retaliated, but the swiftest of the three in fight, Namor and the Hulk, were there to beat them back and kept them there. Strange fell back into a protective position—generating mystic defenses that saved Namor or the Hulk from the few lucky attacks that crept up on them.
Those creatures who fell, quickly rose—and those still standing stepped back to hold their position as a unified body. A single creature, seemingly no different from the pack, alone stood in the abandoned area between the three earthlings and his brethren. It let loose a roar sounding like a reverse echo—a grand, reverberating sound that receded into the creature's throat. It was mid-roar when it flashed bodily from head to foot, a flare that when it faded revealed not a creature but a man. His body drooped at the shoulders and the neck with old age—although a startling fire glared from his dark, thick eye-browed, bag-lined eyes.
"Physical force is their main attack," he said, finishing the thought began in the guttural animal language. "Use all magic to your advantage."
At his command, there were flashing lights now emitting from every bestial form—revealing an army, not of monsters, but of amuleted, long bearded, robed men.
This phalanx of wizards broke into thirds and dispersed. Those that crowded Strange came at him with relentless hex bolts, the first wave of which Strange evaded thanks to his Cloak of Levitation—but there were far too many to elude one at a time through maneuvers. As they closed in and as their bolts never let up, Strange took to using the Shield of the Seraphim. Boomeranging their bolts back at them, Strange felled this first round of assailants. Coming in behind those slain few, were many incensed more—and those that reached Strange now, did not do so with bolts or spells, but with swiping arms, sharpened claws and furry fists.
Another third worked conjointly with the last for a time. Each buried either Namor or the Hulk with bolts until these two allies were corralled apart. Namor could get no traction in the fight. His fists surfed the air left vacant by teleporting foes, and where he expected to connect a hit, he received one instead. He had to abandon the offensive altogether, blocking the bolts as they came. A gentlemanly pursuer would ease a barrage at this juncture and ask for surrender. These wizards, fueled by what manic sense of revenge Namor could not say, however, took no prisoners. Their powers, in fact, were joined. They fired at mirroring angles, so that their bolts met and melded. Bolts of twice the size of the others—and, as Namor discovered, twice the burn—now hit Namor one after the other. He was pushed, farther and farther into the shallow swamp, into thick, trapping mud. When he fell, the bolts still came—pushing him now not outward but down, down into the malleable ground, the ground that sloshed back into place over his head.
Meanwhile, the Hulk faced wizards from all sides. He was taking the brunt of their well-aimed attacks, gaining little for himself. They were too unpredictable and he to beleaguered to help himself to safety or to victory. He stomped, and succeeded only in burying his leg down to the knee in mud. He attempted a leap that on Earth would have left his opponents miles back—and landed no more than a few feet away, still in the thick of the fray.
His frustration was overwhelming his thoughts. Soon the green smoke rose off his skin in curlicues and wisps. Those incoming bolts grew as they passed through this pollution, exploding in a firelight nearly blinding. His pain and rage and helplessness only generated greater clouds—until all bolts entering even his vicinity rocked him with double their usual firepower.
"My lord Calizuma," said a red-robed wizard to their leader. Strange, his eyes focused on the claws at hand, listened in. "The ogre produces that emerald wind you see, which reacts with our bolts in an augmenting way.
Calizuma, the wizard's leader, watched enthralled, wetting his lips. "Yes. The queen is indeed foolish if this is her idea of an attack. A magic-focusing monster? All of you," his bellowing cry went out to the wizard army at large, "blast the ogre!"
Wizards filed in with others, adding their bolts to the blitz, which now covered the Hulk from sight. As Strange's own attackers fled, he threw a series of bolts himself, grounding only a few—the remainder adding their strength in their ordered maneuver.
"You're wrong to attack us," said Strange as he floated toward Calizuma, watching the burial of the Hulk. "We don't know any queen—we certainly don't take orders from any. We're strangers here only looking to return home."
"If you are here," said Calizuma, his fists illuminated, "then you are trespassing on my people's land, where you're presence will not be tolerated. We will not be subjected to you, nor will we be subjugated to Castiolena. We will be free!"
Turning first to the castle, the target of his vow, Calizuma slowly turned next back to the Hulk as an amused spectator. It was to his back that Strange lifted a spell-casting hand. But Calizuma would soon see that he was not the one Strange meant to manipulate.
The Hulk, whose howls of pain never reached a listener's ear, overcome, as they were, by the relentless attacks of the wizards surrounding him, still held his ground—although with every bolt struck, he slipped, like Namor before him, into a muddy grave. This was the Hulk in one instance. In the very next, however, his form turned transparent. Those bolts meant for him missed—and those wizards ringing him around, comfortable on their higher ground, fell.
Calizuma faced Strange promptly. He rose, floating menacingly just above Strange's head. "For that—" he said, growling. He shot bolts at Strange from either hand—bolts of such unique color and light, Strange did not know what alien substance they might be. Neither did he wish a more intimate encounter with them for further study. He blocked the never-before-seen bolts with the Shield of the Seraphim. No sooner had he felt the force of this, Calizuma's first attack, against his shield then the creature form of the old wizard came ripping through it. Strange dove backwards. Calizuma charged, his claws swiping downward to rend. From Strange's palms unraveled the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, wrapping themselves around the budging arms of Calizuma, from armpit to wrist. The creature roared, with a flash of teeth.
Strange stepped onto shaky ground. He looked to it. The creature's vocalized frustration could not alone have made the tremor he had felt. There passed a second of confusion Strange spent in pondering—which worsened as in the next clear water rose gently to the surface of the ground, then stopped eerily. Strange then felt a deeper rumbling, one he could hear but, moving as if in a dream, too slow to respond properly, could not evade.
A geyser erupted, rising like a second mountain out of the ground. Every pair of eyes looked up at its magnificence—seeing, swimming through its center, Namor. He flew out of its top like a volcano's magma. "Imperious Rex!" he shouted, his voice the voice of rushing water.
He punched at the air, as if fighting an invisible enemy. But the water reached out when he did so, an extension of himself. Heavy, gripping, sprawling waves struck out, seizing the wizards. No matter to where they ran; no matter to what height they levitated; no matter what form they convulsed in or out of, they were at the complete mercy of the waves. The flailing and the floating, likewise, were the water's playthings.
Strange felt the surprise, that he, Namor's own ally, had to struggle with such strength to stand his ground. He attempted shouting at Namor, something about control before they were all swept away. As no reply came and the waves came on as hard-hitting and as indomitable and as life-snuffing as before, he saved his voice from further strain. He looked, instead, to the Hulk, who shielded Barbara, still safe from all that went on around her. Strange saw his own vain struggle for air and life in the Hulk's slumped form upon which the waves pounded. The Hulk breathed heavier and heavier. He could not stand straight, not after the wizards' barrage. No would he let himself move to dryer ground, if any were to be found, away from Barbara, at whose side he would remain, obviously, unto death.
Then he was gone from sight. There was only rushing water where he had been standing. Strange gasped. He shot himself though the air and through the water, concentrating his bullet-like body on finding the Hulk. He reached him, holding out one hand, while the other held a row of reeds linked together through a spell, which Strange used as an anchor. The Hulk's attention was still on Barbara before him and not on his would-be savior. Strange pulled the Hulk, who helped very little, to the precarious surface, which was threatened every second of becoming another ocean's floor.
"Never mind her," Strange said to the Hulk when he's mouth and the Hulk's ears were momentarily free of water. "I still have her." Strange closed his eyes and grit his teeth. Barbara, still sleeping and unaware, rose ghost-like to the surface. As the waves pummeled them, Strange flinched, with one hand on the reeds, the other on the Hulk, and his mind on Barbara. One heavy blow made him lose his spell over Barbara, however, and in that fraction of a second he lost control, and she floated a number of feet away.
"You won't live if you let her go!" the Hulk said.
Strange possessed neither the strength nor the ability to reply. He looked away, looked toward Namor, his lips still, his mind blank—the water stinging his eyes.
Namor slowly floated downward. As he did so, his arms pushed outward, casting away the majority of the waters drowning the swamp—and with them, fading out of sight, wizards and beasts alike, the still splashing and the motionless alike. What water remained swirled centralized around the caged Calizuma. Namor touched down on the soggy ground. The pillar of water drained into a pool. There, no longer floundering, longer struggling, no longer moving save for full-chested breathing, was Calizuma. He did not return Namor's look, as the other regarded him with much disdain, arms crossed, eyebrows inclined. Nor did he look up at the Hulk's heavy approach.
"Go on," said Calizuma after several silent moments, "kill me. You have already taken all that made life worthy. My father's land—now the queen's! My brothers—drowned, as unwanted animals! You would do me a great service by granting me oblivion." He finally craned his neck to look, to stare his death it the eyes—but the Hulk did not move.
"Then live," the Hulk said, returning to sit by Barbara's side.
Namor looked with confusion, displeasure, and with scorn at the Hulk. Then, Calizuma's voice, reverberating in his head, called his attention over. There was anger and sadness in his looks—but more than these, there was nobility. Namor heard nothing more from Calizuma, only saw his raised hand, saw a yellow aura glowing around it—then felt a tingling in his own. He looked down. In his grip was a dagger, comprised of the same colored light. His surprise waned quickly, melting into hard acceptance. He palmed the old man's head firmly, plunging, without ceremony, the dagger into his chest. As the body beneath him convulsed in weak spasms, he looked to Strange and the Hulk, at a distant from each other but both watching mournfully over Barbara. But soon all life's fight was gone. The old man fell face-first into the water that Namor had recede, taking the body with it below ground. His work done, the dagger dissipated, and Namor bent forward stiffly to wash the heart's blood from his hands.
