"Alright, um…let's not freak out…" I muttered as Dan, Peter and I groped for each other's arms in the pitch blackness. I tried to flick my wrist to summon up another golden mandala shield but as soon as it winked into view, the darkness seemed to snuff it out again.
"Let me try," Dan said, determined. The same happened to him and I felt a finger stab into my chest.
"Ow!" I protested, smacking the hand away defensively.
"Sorry, I was gonna say, try to summon the Time Stone and see if that glows." Dan said. I felt around on my chest for the invisible Time Stone and I moved my hands in front of myself as I'd done before. I could feel a dull burn of the Stone's built up power, but not so much as a spark of green could be seen in the suffocating dark.
"I can't even see with the suit!" Peter said, exasperation sounding in his worried voice. "Mr. Stark had night vision and everything put into this and even that's not working! I'm relying on my spider senses but that's not going to be good enough for all three of us."
"Did either of you see anything at all before that secret door shut?" I asked hurriedly, feeling around the blank space with my hands.
"No, the doorway was so narrow I could only see the back of your head." Dan said and I could feel his elbow bump into my side as he too felt around wildly with his hands.
"We've gotta move around, see if there's a switch or something." Peter suggested hopefully. I shook my head, unseen in the darkness as we stayed close together in our searching blindness.
"I really doubt there's just going to be a light switch hanging around in here." I said under my breath.
"Well there has to be something." Dan said unsurely.
"This wasn't in your visions for today, huh?" I asked him loudly as the three of us fumbled around, tripping over each other's feet because we were too afraid to drift too far away from each other.
"Visions?" Peter's confused voice sounded from a few feet away. "This place causes you to have visions? I don't know if I'd be sticking around here too long if I were you guys…"
"No Alex, I didn't see this happening." Dan said almost bitterly from my left. I turned in his direction and walked forward a few steps with my hands held out in front of me.
"I was just asking, man. We're kinda stuck here until we find some –"
My face collided with a very solid wall as I turned to follow the muffled footsteps of one of my colleagues and I let out a startled curse as I reached for my nose where a sharp pain was pulsing throughout my face.
"What happened?! Who was that?!" Dan asked quickly and I heard scrambled but careful footsteps move slowly in my direction. I pressed my hand against my face, squeezing my eyes shut against the easing pain and then reached my other hand out to brace against the unseen wall in front of me in the darkness.
"It was me…I…found a wall over here." I said, massaging my nose which thankfully hadn't started bleeding from the sudden abuse. Both Dan and Peter were there by my side in seconds, and I heard them feeling around for the wall in front of them too.
"Great!" Peter said lightheartedly, nudging me in the other direction. "Now all we have to do is walk along this wall here until we reach a doorway or a curve or something. I think I can sense a bigger space a little ways down that way."
"Right." I agreed unsteadily, suddenly hating that they were making me lead the way along the wall. Beneath my fingertips the wall just felt like any regular wall, not stone like down in the underground tunnels, but not the polished wood like the interior of the Sanctum had either. As we inched a few yards further, I frowned in the darkness as I tried to place the texture of the surface.
"Is this…wall paper?" I called quietly over my shoulder.
"Kinda feels like it…" Dan said from the other side of Peter who was silent behind me.
"Have you seen wallpaper on any of the walls since we've been here?" I asked again.
"…No…I don't think so. Why?" Dan sounded a little nervous.
"You guys haven't seen the whole mansion yet have you?" Peter suggested in my ear. "Maybe this leads to a secret room where Strange goes to meditate or whatever."
"Hang on." I hissed, stopping in my tracks as my hands felt a protrusion from the wall. I cautiously crept my fingers over the surface and felt a doorway. I ran my hand along the wooden surface of the door and reached for the point where I imagined the doorknob might be.
"Is it a way out?" Dan asked, having pushed Peter closer to me so that he could feel the door jutting out of the wall too. I frowned again as I noticed that the door was apparently missing a handle and I knocked on the wood to see if it was even hollow. When the echoing sound of a space on the other side of the wall confirmed my confused speculation, I turned back to the two people accompanying me in the darkness.
"What's that sound?" Peter asked suddenly before I could say anything suggesting about ways we could try and get into that room. Dan and I went silent again listening for what he was referring to. "Do either of you hear it? It's like a high pitched twinkly sound…"
"A…twinkly sound?" I repeated slightly amused, but confused. I felt Peter step by me, moving me out of the way of the section of wall that was supposed to be a door.
"It's coming from in there, I think…or somewhere nearby…" Peter said and I heard him tap and knock on the handless door a few times before he stepped back with both arms spread out to push Dan and me back as well. "I bet I could break through this…"
"Wait! There's gotta be another way in…we might not want to mess around with stuff in here. If we break something, there could be some bad voodoo that gets released. I don't know about you both, but I'm not too eager to take that chance. Let's keep moving until we find some other way in." Dan suggested quickly.
I moved forward once more to rest my hands against the wall and we continued our haphazard shuffling along in the pitch black space. When we came to what felt like a corner, I paused to tap my knuckles along the surface of the wall.
"Do you still hear that noise, Peter?" Dan asked quietly from behind me.
"It's faint, but yeah. It's like it's coming from the other side of this wall we're walking along..." Peter answered slowly.
"There's a corner up here, guys. Just a heads up…" I said as I proceeded forward a few feet and rounded the curve.
"You know…I don't think this passage is following the structure of the hallway outside. I've been thinking that for a little bit now…" Peter said thoughtfully. I frowned to myself as I considered his speculation.
"Again, this place doesn't really follow the rules of physics…" I said, once more trying to summon up a golden shield in an attempt to bring forth some light in the blackness. When it unsurprisingly still didn't work, I summoned up a blast of telekinetic energy and fired it straight in front of us to see if it would even work. No light was produced from the action, but I did hear a sudden crash from several feet in front of us.
"What did I say about not breaking things?!" Dan exclaimed in surprise from behind me. Peter muttered something to that effect under his breath and then tapped me on the shoulder.
"Whatever you just did…you blasted through some sort of room up ahead!" He said excitedly. I squinted through the darkness in even further confusion, seeing no change it whatever had just happened.
"How can you tell? I thought you said that your suit was malfunctioning." I said.
"When you blasted through there, it's like the system in here rebooted. I can see everything now…and the twinkly sound is super loud too!" Peter said. I felt him move past me to walk forward and I reached behind me to grab for Dan's arm so we wouldn't lose each other in the dark.
"Wait up!" I called quietly after Peter.
"It's just a few yards further, keep coming straight ahead." I heard him call from in front of us. Dan and I walked hesitantly after him, not wanting to be left behind. "Okay, now…just watch your step right here, there's a–"
Just as Peter uttered the warning, Dan and I stumbled past where Peter stood near the hole I had blasted in the wall. Still unable to see anything, I frantically grabbed for Peter's arm or even the broken wall on the other side of me to steady my lost footing but when my hand fell through open air, I felt myself lean forward uncontrollably as if I'd been pulled. Expecting to hit the floor on the inside of the hole in the wall, I threw my hands out beneath me but the impact didn't happen.
"Alex!" I heard Dan cry out as his grip on my good shoulder loosened and then released me. I felt like I was floating and falling at the same time, but no air rushed by my face in the darkness to signal that I was moving.
"Dan…what's happening?! Peter?!" I exclaimed as I kicked around in the odd floating space, feeling for anything I could grab onto to pull me back to solid ground.
"Hang on you guys!" I heard Peter yell from somewhere far above us. I tried to look up in the direction I'd heard him, but there was still nothing in the stifling black that surrounded me.
"Please hurry! I think I'm gonna be sick…" Dan said from a little ways above me. I waved my hands away from him as if trying to swim through the air away from him.
"Not while I'm below you!" I shouted up to him seriously.
"I don't like this…Why did we – ack!" Dan was suddenly cut off in midsentence and I looked up through the darkness hurriedly thinking that the worst had happened.
"Dan?! What – ugh!"
I was jerked upward roughly and my breath and stomach seemed to have been left down in whatever space I had fallen into to begin with. The next thing I knew, I collided with the floor and I quickly scrambled to my feet, hearing Dan complaining somewhere to my left.
"What- what was that?!" I blurted out once I had braced myself against a wall carefully.
"I tried to warn you guys…" Peter said sheepishly close by. I felt him push me around and a forceful jerk on my upper back as he yanked what I assumed was his artificial webbing that had pulled us back up to the hallway. "You broke through to some kind of weird elevator shaft…"
"This place doesn't have an elevator." Dan said, feeling around to make it over to Peter and me against the wall.
"Were we falling? Because it felt like it, but then it also…didn't…" I said thoughtfully.
"It was like you were floating downward slowly. I also found this…" Peter took my right wrist and made me run my hand over some weird inscription etched onto the wall. I felt around trying to make sense of what it said then finally frowned in frustration.
"What does it say?" I asked him impatiently.
"Well, it's in another foreign language. It took me a second, but my online sources finally translated it from Latin to read 'Death to Magic'…I think this place has a magic-free border, which would explain that weird sound i keep hearing. That elevator shaft you guys fell into was like the entryway to a prison for magical beings I think…" Peter said thoughtfully, sounding like he was reading something.
"…Your suit told you that much?" Dan asked, breaking the odd silence that followed.
"Well yeah…it's basically an artificial intelligent suit…" Peter said slowly. I looked in the direction where I had been pulled up from the hole in the wall, still unable to see through the never-ending darkness.
"So…when I blasted that hole through there, does that mean that those magical prisoners will be able to escape?" I asked, not really expecting that Peter would know the answer to that.
"No."
The three of us jumped back against the wall in surprise as Wong's voice loudly emanated from a few yards away.
"Wong?!" I called hesitantly, trying to summon my shields which still didn't glow or light up the space in front of me.
"What are you three doing in here? How did you find this place?" Wong said, his voice once more calm and collected. I could hear his soft slippered footsteps growing closer as he walked over to join us. "I thought we were in agreement that you still need preparing for the coming intruders."
"You keep an endless floating prison in your own house?!" I exclaimed, pointing in the general direction where I thought the hole in the wall was. In the process of gesturing in that direction, my elbow bumped into Dan's chin and he protested, irritated.
"Watch it…"
"Sorry. But is that really what that is?" I asked Wong again.
"First of all, the wall you recklessly damaged is in that direction," Wong's hand grabbed my wrist and moved it so that I pointed the opposite way. "And yes. The Sorcerer Supreme has access to the punishment of misusers of magic. I can assure you that you boys would definitely not want to find out what lies at the end of that endless fall."
"I'll take your word for it." Peter said lightly from my right.
"Come on, let's get you boys out of here. We don't have long now." Wong said hurriedly and I heard the swish of a portal sounding from in front of us.
"How? None of our magic is working in here, how can you see to do that?" I exclaimed as Wong ushered the three of us forward. He paused and I heard him chuckle in response.
"A simple nocturnal vision spell does the trick. You must apply it before you enter this space however, because even in the passageway leading to the shaft the borders dull the ability to conjure spells. I would highly suggest you refrain from coming through here again however, because undertrained beings like yourselves would have to wander around here in the dark until you either find your own way out which is doubtful, or you meander into something you won't be able to get yourself out of, almost like what Peter here helped you escape from." Wong said lightly. I slouched my shoulders sheepishly in the pitch blackness, knowing that Wong would be able to see me.
"That hole in the wall won't be a problem, will it?" Dan asked again as Wong continued ushering us forward, where I could hear the swish of the portal Wong had conjured in the darkness.
"No, it won't. Anything that may be able crawl all the way back up out of there will have to face the same things you boys just went through. But to escape would be impossible, so there's no worries there." Wong said. "Mind your eyes…"
I cringed as I went through portal first and blinked at the sudden light that met us. We had reemerged back in the hallway we had originally been in, and I noticed the picture that Peter had straightened to reveal the passageway was now once more off kilter on the wall up ahead.
"Well, that was fun while it lasted. A new lesson everywhere we turn, right guys?" Peter said lightheartedly as he retracted his mask to reveal his wide surprised eyes and honestly freaked out expression. Dan and I exchanged glances and then I shrugged with a sigh.
"I just hope that –" My words were drowned out as a low rumble shook the building followed by an ear-shattering explosion towards the front of the Sanctum. Wong's face was an instant mask of defense and he rushed down the hallway toward the stairs, with the three of us tailing him. As we reached the top of the staircase, I paused alongside Dan and Peter, watching as Wong spread both of his hands above his head and quickly threw some sort of rejuvenating ward to aid in the damaged spells that had been hit outside. A large shadow fell over the extravagant window in the ceiling and I cringed as yet another explosion shook the Sanctum. The wards thankfully held once more and I turned to Dan as Wong and a large group of sorcerers on the ground floor below prepared for the next blow. Dan met my gaze, suddenly crestfallen again as he confirmed my suspicions.
"This is it."