Unfinished Business

by Nimbus Llewelyn

Spinoff of 'Ghosts of the Past'. When a school trip takes them to New Orleans, Carol Danvers is expecting trouble and Peter Parker is hoping to keep up his façade of normality. One's right, and one's deluded. Now, the future awaits, the past refuses to remain buried, and the fate of the world is in the hands of two teenagers who only kind of get along. What could possibly go wrong?

8. Chapter 8: A Fire Shall Be Woken

SORRY ABOUT THE UPDATE FLUB: I accidentally put up the 8th chapter of Children of the Stars on here instead, and it took a while to fix, because I was on my phone when I realised (I had to rush out, which is why I made the flub in the first place). Also, this chapter is 18.5k, or thereabouts, not 2.6k.

Okay, so, new chapter. And the first of 2022! I have officially been writing this series for… well, in August, it'll be 10 years. Good god. For those worried about the main story, I have no shortage of material and ideas for the next stages of that, I'm just holding off on that for the moment (though I might post something on that to let people who missed this know I'm not dead…).

Anyway, this isn't the last chapter, but it was getting cumbersome, and, uh… I may have scaled up. Look, I wanted to do Pegasus and the inevitable fall-out justice. Suffice to say, a clash between two Lanterns like this, even a relatively indirect one, isn't going to be minor. So, um, it isn't. Also, I wanted to write a lot of action. And in case anyone was wondering how the hell Harry doesn't notice any of this, that's answered towards the end of the chapter – he's a bit occupied.

Anyhow, also on the upside, it means that the last one should be much shorter and neater.

Carol soared upwards like a rising star, the whole world shifting as she rose like dawn had just broken.

She breathed the clear air, and the world breathed with her.

She closed her eyes, and felt blood thumping in her veins, as power ran through her like a livewire. A livewire hooked up to the universe.

The last time she'd worn the Ring, she'd felt that immense power, but at a remove – a very, very long remove. The Ring, she now realised, was as much a restraint as it was a channel. Because now, she felt… everything.

A mangrove's first buds opened before her in India.

A butterfly's flapping wings fluttered by her ears in the Amazon.

A flurry of snow brushed her cheeks in Lapland.

Vibranium mountains hummed at her from Wakanda and Scotland, and satellites beeped and twinkled for her attention in the skies above. Forests matched the rate of her breath, while oceans ebbed and flowed like the blood in her body. Cities brushed against her like jewellery, and continents shifted like muscle beneath skin. The light of moon and stars carried songs of welcome, of it-has-been-too-long, and the world beneath her pulsed to the beat of her heart.

And throughout it all, magic, streams and streams of magic, now pouring from below like a cracked dam, reaching out into the universe in a seemingly infinite array of roots and branches through space and time and into imagination itself, tying the world to countless connected realms; Asgard, Olympus, and beyond. One stream even flowed into deep space, and part of Carol's thought followed it curiously, awareness chasing it to where it branched out into a vast delta and – no. She reeled her thought back in. There was no telling where it would have ended up.

Instead, she looked down at the world. She looked down and knew, just knew, that if she willed it hard enough, she could do whatever she wished.

She could reshape the continents, sink them, raise them, or create them anew.

She could shatter the fragile atmosphere, or purge it of all its impurities.

She could take the Earth's girdle of ruined satellites and rain them down in fire, or reshape them into an omnidirectional city in the heavens.

She could spin the Earth backward should she so wish, turning night to day and day to night.

A billion summers and a billion winters lay at her command, one becoming the other the moment she desired it.

History stood open to her, moments arranged like a book for her perusal, or rooms to enter and rearrange to her liking.

Death folds into Life, and Life folds into Death, and they await her too.

She looks up at the Moon, and thinks, "I can make you my jewel."

She looks up at the stars beyond, and thinks, "I can make you my crown."

Carol Danvers looks down at the world and up at the stars and she reels.

A small part of her, distant and detached and containing most of her common sense, knows that this is not true omnipotence. It screams at her that this might, this overwhelming power, is the product of a mote of dust in a sunbeam. A very, very bright mote, perhaps the brightest of them all. But still. Just a single mote, in a single sunbeam, in a very, very big universe. The rest of her knows that right here and now, in this context, that does not matter in the least.

For a moment that is an eternity and picosecond, she does nothing.

Then, she drew herself back in, closing her eyes and focusing as hard as she could.

How could Nimue stand this? How could anyone stand anything like this? She shook her head. She knew that it could be stood. Nimue was proof of that. Hell, Harry was proof of that, having gone cosmic more than once – and proof that you didn't need to be an ancient immortal super sorceress to manage it.

More to the point, though, she needed to manage it.

So she looked inwards, listening to the beat of her heart, shutting out distractions. The chatter of a world of magic eager to greet its new champion faded as Carol focused on what she really wanted to do. Eventually, she opened her eyes, and looked upon the world not as a goddess, but as a person with shit to do.

"Okay Carol, priorities," she said to herself. "First, save the city. Second, stop Pegasus. Third, find that absolute bitch and punch her face in. Fourth…" She paused, considering, then sighed. "Ugh. Fourth, get some fucking sleep."

OoOoO

The students of Midtown High had been expecting relatively little out of their trip to New Orleans, especially once they'd been given an itinerary that put 'interesting' at the bottom of its priorities.

Now, the itinerary was out the window and everything was very interesting indeed. The phrase 'be careful what you wish for' was entirely applicable.

For one thing, one of them was now covered in the guts of an inexplicably four-legged shark and sobbing hysterically. Since the one in question was Flash Thompson, no one was particularly inclined to feel sympathetic, either about that or the fact that he'd been very firmly scolded by a giant crocodile man (the one, in fact, who had saved him by ripping the land-shark in half) for exposing himself to danger for the sake of Youtube views.

For another, the city had gone mad.

"You know, all those times I said I wished I'd seen what it was like at the Battle of London," Ned said. "They were a total lie. I absolutely don't want to see it."

Gwen sighed. It had been a long night, and neither of them had been able to sleep. Finding out that their best friend was part vampire and had been enlisted along with one of their other classmates by a magic ring to sort out something supernatural and messy had left them worried, to say the least.

Now, they were under a table, Mister Harrison having apparently decided that not only should they stay inside (it was very hard to ignore the advice of a seven foot tall crocodile man, even if you had to stop to parse the Cajun accent), but earthquake response was the only way to go. Not many of the students were particularly convinced that this was the way to go.

For one thing, not only were many of the buildings transforming before their very eyes, the hotel itself was among those affected. In this case, the bar was full of alcoholic spirits. That is to say, spirits in the form of alcohol, spirits that really wanted a goddamn drink, and spirits that really, really did not want to be drunk. The result was history's most philosophically bemusing barfight.

Meanwhile, the tables themselves were showing worrying signs. Half a dozen had taken root and sprouted, producing glowing fruits that several of the hungrier students would have eaten, had another guest not done exactly that and transformed into a very confused chicken. Others, meanwhile, had decided to quite literally leg it and head for pastures new, while one – apparently renowned for biting fingers when it was being set up – had snapped up a guest's Chihuahua on the way out.

Of those that remained, some were holding forth in conversations remembered in the grain of the wood, which were a fascinating mixture of the entirely mundane, the curiously criminal, and the downright pornographic. Mister Harrison had tried to quiet the whisperings of that one by flinging a tablecloth back over it. Unfortunately, all that did was give it several stains and a suggestively muffled quality, meaning that a couple of dozen hormonal and very keyed up teenagers were now listening attentively, intelligent minds and active imaginations filling in the gaps.

Gwen and Ned had settled for one of the rooted ones, on the grounds – well, hopes – that since it had transformed, it was unlikely to transform again. This was logical. It was also wrong.

"Well, we're seeing it now," she said. "And… oh, come on."

Several very busy minutes followed, with the Midtown High contingent forming an increasingly wet and nervous bundle outside, as part of the hotel burned merrily. The rest of the guests were, mostly, with them, though a few had decided to take their chances elsewhere. Some were nursing burns. Magic interacted with place memories in funny ways. One of those place memories was a small child playing 'the floor is lava' in the dining room. As above, so below. So it had been imagined, so it now was.

This little piece of metaphysics was of little comfort to a group of teenagers who were now in a very literally magical city. What was heartening was the light, a newborn star shining emerald green in the heavens, heralding a defiant response to the madness from the very bones of the city.

Boom. Boom. Clap.

Boom. Boom. Clap.

"Is that… Queen?" Gwen said in disbelief.

"You're hearing it too?" Ned asked, around a shrill laugh. "Man, that's a relief. I thought it was just me." He squinted up at the green star. "Does that look kind of familiar to you?"

"Now that you mention it," Gwen began, before her eyes widened in horror at what she beheld. It was huge; eight foot tall, with blank burning red eyes, made of twisted plants, mulched flesh, and wooden bone, with the approximate mass of a Kodiak bear. Despite the rain and its muddy flesh, it somehow exuded heat and predatory intent, homing in on the fear of the guests, many of whom were quite understandably screaming.

That scream was like ringing a dinner bell and the monster charged.

It never reached them.

A thunder of footsteps cut through the storm and mysterious surround sound, and something large and dark intercepted it, a flash as bright as lightning sweeping up from below in a vicious swipe, followed by a hum that almost everyone present subconsciously recognised.

The giant let out a buzzing cry of distress, like an aggravated wood-chipper, waving a smoking stump that was rapidly being overgrown and replaced by some warped mimicry of its predecessor.

"No. Way," Gwen breathed.

"Way," Ned replied, voice strangled by an odd mixture of awe, glee, and pants-wetting terror.

Their reactions were understandable: a towering figure stood before them, swathed in a whirling and billowing black duster coat, dark staff planted like an oak tree, a pale long-featured face framed by shaggy dark hair and set in a snarl of challenge. This forbidding sight was illuminated like stills from a black-and-white film by an incandescent silver-blue bar of light, emerging from a short metallic rod in his right hand.

Before they could do anything more than drink in this sight, their saviour swept a lumbering blow aside with a wild blow from his staff-wielding left hand and swept his blade upwards in a savage arc, cutting through the monster like a laser cutter through marshmallow. Just as a monster had come to slay them, so their prayers had been answered and they had been saved.

As to who by, well. Even over the storm, the unmistakeable hum emitting from it could be heard loud and clear, another layer of evidence to confirm the impossibility before them. As the monster fell in two neat pieces, bisected from non-existent crotch to empty skull and their saviour turned, their conclusion was – given both evidence of the impossible and the stress of the circumstances – entirely understandable.

"Oh my god. Gwen. Gwen, look. Someone turned Aragorn into a Jedi."

Entirely understandable, and entirely ridiculous.

Well.

Perhaps not entirely.

OoOoO

I watched the Chlorofiend fall in two cauterised pieces, probably at least as shocked as it had been. It, or whoever had been controlling it. The last time I'd run into a Chlorofiend had also been the first time, when I'd immediately decided that I was calling it a Chlorofiend. Why? Because I was a Wizard, one of the Wise, and a master of arcane lore and I was damned if I was going to go around calling it a plant monster.

Anyway, on that occasion, it had been a puppet for a psychotic Faerie Queen. This time… this time, I wasn't sure. It could be a puppet for whoever had successfully cracked Pegasus, but somehow, I doubted it. Maybe it was a golem, set loose to cause destruction? Or perhaps it was just something else that Pegasus had created, or had been born during its fall. It didn't really matter: it was big, it was mean, and it was pretty definitely dead. Oh, and more importantly, both my new Vibranium alloy blasting rod and my lightsabre spell worked like a literal charm, even in the rain, with the torrential downpour drawing only a faint hiss from the burning blade.

I glared upwards at the brightest flashes of light, high in the skies. Wanda had said that most of the raw magic was converging in the skies, presumably on whoever was responsible for this. Whoever they were, they were also apparently capable of fighting Doctor Strange to a standstill, while still doing all of this, which meant that they were stupidly far out of my weight-class.

That was fine. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd actually picked a fight in my weight-class. Besides, if it came to it… I hefted my rod, the blade humming. I'd faced a stupidly powerful sorcerer with an army of monsters before. I'd practiced my current trick on him, and he hadn't liked it very much. If this one was stupid enough to let me in close, then I'd be happy to demonstrate how much I'd improved.

In the meantime, though, I had other problems.

"Okay people," I began as I turned to the people I'd just saved, and really took them in for the first time. As I did, I realised with a jolt that most of them were kids. Freaking kids, most of whom looked scared of their goddamn minds – though a couple, especially an excited looking chubby Asian kid, looked like all their Christmases had come at once. Part of me wished very much that I'd asked Wanda for flying lessons, so I could go up and demonstrate my displeasure to the sorcerer responsible for this insanity in person. The rest of me knew, however, was thinking rather more clearly and knew that I'd last about two seconds, and that I'd hit on the jackpot. I had things to do, and one of them was find this crew.

"Midtown High?" I asked, half-shouting over the storm.

"Who's asking?" a petite blonde asked, eyes sharp and suspicious. She reminded me a little of Murph, minus a decade and a half and twenty pounds of muscle.

"Harry Dresden," I said.

"The Wizard?" one of the adults, a black man with the build of a football player gone to seed, asked. He looked wary, as people sometimes do when I've opened up a monster like a burger bun.

I rolled my eyes.

"No, the Gardener, here about the weed problem. Yes, the Wizard! Look, SHIELD sent me, we're evacuating Downtown!"

This was true, but only up to a point. I'd been sent to look for Carol Danvers and one of her friends, Peter Parker, on the chance that they might have fallen back – or, given Strange's involvement, been sent back – to join their class. A quick scan revealed that neither was present, and I wasn't going to draw attention to their absence, not when I was trying to chivvy the lot of them down towards the nearest public shelter.

Like most storm shelters in cities across the US, it was a solidly built public space. Unlike most, it was also beefed up by a magical circle to make sure that it and its inhabitants stayed the same shape, and guarded by a lot of very serious people from multiple magical and mundane organisations to make sure that nothing and no one breached it.

Unfortunately, this meant running the gauntlet of the stuff on the streets, while keeping an eye on a couple dozen teenagers and two chaperones who were both way out of their depth. For that, I couldn't blame them. All they'd been expecting was to have to keep their charges to a basic itinerary and make sure the kids didn't go behind their backs for extracurricular exploration of the city or, for that matter, each other.

Now, the kids were freaking out, except for the Asian kid and the blonde. The former had introduced himself as Ned, geeked out at my lightsabre, and all but snapped to sloppy attention when I had told him to hustle and get everyone else to hustle too. His exact, rather hurried words had been, "Yes, Master Aragorn!" I'd done my best not laugh, but I hadn't been able to hide a grin. What the hell. On a night like this, you took your laughs where you could get them.

The latter, meanwhile, had already got a jump on her friend and, indeed, her teachers, by getting everyone in rough order behind me. I was pretty sure she was the daughter of a cop – she had a definite cop voice. At this point, it was very helpful, since the teachers were in shock.

This was understandable. Their hotel was half on fire, while the other half was picking fights with itself, and the city had gone nuts, with even the appliances coming to life. On the way, I'd seen a Warden in pitched battle with a wolfpack of motorbikes, and I'd had to hex someone's phone to stop it sucking them in via the screen, which I'm sure was some kind of metaphor. Either way, it was the first time I've ever been thanked for frying someone's tech.

All told, it was entirely out of their realm of experience. It was not, however, out of mine. Sad as it was to say, this was not my first rodeo and it wasn't my worst, either. Hell, it wasn't even close.

Of course, that didn't mean it was easy. My friend Butters is a gamer, and he always complains that 'escort missions' are the worst. Not only do you have to stay alive, you also have to worry about someone who, frankly, is usually an immediate magnet for any and all bad guys, has the constitution thinner than a politician's skin, and all the survival skills of a suicidal lemming.

I've done a bit of bodyguarding work, and it usually isn't quite that bad, though it's still not my favourite activity – I have enough trouble keeping myself alive when something comes slobbering out of the darkness, let alone someone else. But then again, I'd never tried it in a city infested by the finest Frankensteinian horrors your tax dollars could create and so full of wild magic that it was a wonder my stray thoughts weren't coming to life.

In retrospect, that would probably have been a more pleasant prospect.

OoOoO

Gwen scurried after their unexpected saviour, at the head of a bunched up crocodile of disoriented teenagers. The teachers weren't much better off, either. Mr Harrison was nominally in charge, but he had gratefully pounced on the prospect of someone who actually seemed to know what to do next. It didn't matter that that someone was almost seven feet tall and apparently a Jedi Knight – in fact, it might have helped. With the city being the way it was, a giant wizard wielding a working lightsabre was someone you wanted on your side.

Gwen, for her part, had been a bit reassured when she'd heard his name. While she wasn't as fascinated with superheroes as Ned, much less Peter (and she certainly didn't have Peter's insight), she'd heard of the so-called Wizard of Chicago. It was, after all, quite hard to miss a giant demon being blown up on the evening news, especially when large parts of the blowing up had involved what was at the very least bending of the laws of physics. Her dad had also mentioned him with something that approximated approval. Here, he'd said, was a superhero who actually had a strong track record of working with law enforcement, rather than around, or even against it.

Gwen had been more interested in the quantum physics behind the pinpoint drop of a piece of space junk on the demon, and the woman who was probably responsible, the 'Scarlet Witch', but she'd paid attention. If nothing else, a wizard with sufficient understanding of physics to figure out how to redirect the electricity of a major city power line into a giant monster via a large puddle of water was interesting. One crazy enough to use himself as a conduit was even more so.

Now, said crazy wizard, said crazy Jedi-Wizard, was leading the way, giant strides eating up the ground fast enough that she had to jog to keep up. It was a nauseating mixture of pitch dark and psychedelically bright, so he was lighting the way by means of an apparent lightsabre that had now turned into some kind of burning torch, a constant star to follow. It was all a bit overwhelming.

"Mister Dresden," she said, half-shouting to be heard over the rain and Queen's masterpiece, which was beginning to taper off. "A couple of my classmates – "

"It's in hand, kid," he said, catching her drift immediately. His gaze was roaming all around them, looking for any sign of danger. So far, there was none – the buildings around them were warped and transformed, some into grotesque parodies that looked like they had more dimensions than the human eye could perceive, while others seemed to have turned into alluring miniature palaces, and still others were a scrambled mess. In general, however, it was as if they had passed into the eye of this magical storm. "Carol called her grandma, who called us in."

Gwen blinked. "Her grandma?"

"Alison Carter, Deputy Director of SHIELD," came the clipped reply.

"Wow. Okay, that makes sense," she managed, processing this. "They're okay, right?"

There was a pause, and the wizard's long, sharp features shifted in the shadows cast by the piercing silvery blue sabre-light, expression conflicted. "Your dad a cop? Or your mom?" he asked abruptly.

"Dad," Gwen said, surprised.

"Figured," he grunted, then glanced up at the sky.

Gwen's gaze followed his and her eyes widened as she spotted the emerald comet and realised its potential significance. When she looked down again, she saw him reading her expression, and give a slight nod, understanding that she'd got it.

"I can't say for certain," he said quietly. "But I was there last time your friend used that Ring, and it got her through the worst trouble I've ever seen, all in one piece, her friends too. And last I heard, they'd got some decent back-up. So I think so. I hope so."

Gwen nodded. "Thanks," she said quietly.

Dresden returned the nod, then resumed scanning the streets.

The only warning they got was a gleam of storm-light off of black metal and rush of wind, immediately followed by an unholy ululating shriek. Most times, that's the kind of noise that starts in the back of one creature's throat and ends up in the back of someone else's, and Gwen felt her own scream rising. However, this was not most.

Dresden was already prepared, his hand snapping up with the ease of long instinct and an argent quarter dome flaring into life, and not a moment too soon. An instant after the shield appeared, a creature, something huge with wings like a light aircraft, an inhumanly wide jaw full of fangs and a whip-like tongue, came slobbering out of the night and hit it at the kind of speed usually associated with F1 cars.

It looked paper-thin, like it shouldn't have held, but it did – and then some. Instead of potentially bursting through and turning the wizard into chunky stew, and Gwen herself most probably into afters, Dresden merely grunted at the blowback. However, physics was a cruel mistress, and the forces had to go somewhere – in this case, to the winged monster that caromed off in a shower of sparks and slammed into a nearby building with a roar of collapsing brickwork and shattering glass, its shriek becoming a screech of pain.

That shriek was answered by two deep chested bellows, one from the street behind, and one from the nearby roof. Everyone peered up through driving rain, looking around wildly as they huddled in on themselves, while Dresden swore viciously under his breath. He didn't look afraid, or shellshocked, or even particularly fazed. Instead, he had the look of someone weighing odds. After all, Gwen thought, he probably did this all the time. She certainly didn't, and the more she saw, she was glad of it.

Both of the creatures were huge, bulkier than their winged companion, who was easily as tall as an SUV, and built like a linebacker. It was also shaking off the crash with alarming speed, flexing taloned fingers and prehensile wings in disturbing synchrony.

One was at least ten feet tall, deep-chested in the way of carthorses and other draft animals, with long, low-swinging arms tipped with long, sharp claws, the whole covered with reddish-brown flesh that rippled like viscous liquid under her gaze. As she watched, tentacles extended from its back and spread in an array that seemed less like a threat, and almost like it was using them to scent them, somehow weighing them up through senses beyond the obvious.

The other was, if anything, even larger. Low slung, broad as a tank, with five thick limbs that lent a strange scuttling aspect to its motions, its limbs and bulbous body were covered in what she initially assumed to be some kind of chitin. However, a longer look and a flash of unreal light revealed that they were shaped metal, probably from some large van or small truck, which this creature had slithered into before repurposing it to its liking, like some kind of deranged hermit crab or a demonic Transformer.

They were monsters out of nightmares, with lolling open jaws, slavering tongues, and blind white eyes. And all of those eyes, Gwen realised with mounting horror, were focused on them.

"Oh god," Ned whispered. "Ohgodohgodohgod, this is not happening."

Gwen swallowed, heart beating like a jackhammer. "I think it is," she managed, and darted a glance up at their escort. Did lightning strike twice? That had been one monster, and this was… more, but… she shot him a look of silent pleading.

He didn't return it, but his actions were answer enough. His gaze slid over the creatures and he set his jaw. Then, moving slowly, he moved as close as he could to an equidistant point between all three monsters. As he did, he dimmed the rod and slipped into a loop on his belt, before drawing a large custom-built pistol of a kind that Gwen had never seen before, ribs on the barrel lighting up with a hum and an ominous orange glow as he primed it.

He swept his gaze across all three creatures, meeting their blind gazes one by one with a hard glare, making sure he had their attention. Then, suddenly, he slammed his staff into the ground with an impact like a crack of thunder, silver-blue light bursting from the carvings on it like a traffic flare, the sheer power literally shaking the street. Then, he spoke, baritone voice echoing across the block, full of threat and menace in a way that made Gwen's hair stand on end even though she knew it was not directed at her.

"All right. I've only got one question. Who's first?"

OoOoO

Carol arrowed downwards, an emerald missile with air molecules almost vanishing in their eagerness to part from her path. Her immediate intention had been to laminate Nimue's face to the back of her skull, but that was much easier said than done. For one thing, the witch was fighting Strange, and as Carol knew better than most, when sorcerers that powerful threw down, shit got profoundly weird very quickly.

While she wasn't currently too worried about the detrimental effects this might have on her (for once), she recognised that what it would have was a profoundly detrimental effect on her ability to pin Nimue down and punch her in the face. Or possibly through the face. Both were tempting prospects.

Given that the weird magic fight looked fairly even, with Nimue unable to make her supreme advantage in power tell, and given that she was probably getting extremely annoyed for that exact reason, Carol had reluctantly turned away and left Strange to do what he did best. Which, in this case, was annoying the living shit out of someone. She'd come back to Nimue later.

Looking on the bright side, though, there wasn't any shortage of targets to occupy her in the meantime. And, since Carol was quite nearly as dramatic as her boyfriend when the mood took her, she had decided to make a statement. Specifically, by taking out Nimue's biggest monster at the head, sealing it with a huge burst of power that not only removed its hill sized head, but the upper half of its chest, its arms falling away in burning ruin.

Carol righted herself, somewhat satisfied, and grinned up at the mountainous Champion of the Parliament of Trees, a literal ghost in the machine – albeit a machine made of long extinct plant elemental things – which had now emerged as a God of the Green, something eons old and yet hours young. It was a commentary on her life, she thought, that not only was she fairly unbothered by this, but she also felt quite comfortable referring to the resultant being as 'Alec'.

"Look, ma! No hands!" she crowed.

Also, saying things like that.

"An impressive feat," Alec said mildly, in a rumble like the groan of a forest in a storm. "But not without consequences."

Carol looked puzzled, then glanced down at her hand. The rain was different, all of a sudden, darker and slightly different in texture. When she looked around, she saw that it was different for at least a good quarter of a mile around. She raised a hand up to her nose and, cautiously, sniffed.

"Wine," she said, then blinked. "Wait, I did a Jesus?"

"The very air is full of magic," Alec intoned. "It pours forth from the opened Earth." He seemed to focus on her, something quite impressive for a being with blank red eyes that were currently the rough size of bungalows. "Meetings between raw forces can have unpredictable results."

Carol grimaced and glanced down at the Ring. "Handle with care, got it," she said. "Thought I didn't need a reminder, but here we are."

She turned and eyed the writhing, burning remains of Woodrue's gigantic form. While a creature like that should not have been so crippled by even so brutally powerful a decapitating blow, Woodrue's mind (what was left of it) was in charge, and it was still thinking like a human. That is to say, it was of the opinion that heads are important. As a result, while it was extruding new limbs by the second, which thickened and thrashed furiously, each blow powerful enough to level a skyscraper, it was doing so blindly and ineffectually. Moreover, Alec had been multi-tasking, and had taken advantage of Carol's attack, reaching out with vines and earth of his own, swamping, muffling, and inexorably strangling the remains of the Giant-Sized Man-Thing.

"You got this?" she asked.

"I do," Alec said, before looking at the city. He did not turn his head to do this. That, Carol felt, would have been much more comfortable than what he actually did, which seemed to be absorbing his features into his face, then reforming them on what had been the back of his head. "Have you got that?"

Carol followed his gaze, as the wine-red rain was swirled around them at every conceivable angle by the memory of a hurricane. One that she could see with senses that did not even vaguely correspond to sight, and barely paralleled human experience, was particularly vicious around New Orleans. Of course it was. That was where it was most remembered.

Through echoes of perceptions that she recognised, only now experiencing them for herself, she felt the thoughts of the city. There was fear, anger, disbelief, grief, despair… and awe. Wonder. Passion. Relief. Excitement. Defiance. Emotions poured forth from the city as much as any magic, each amplifying the other, each ready to be harnessed.

The sky above the city matched its collective psyche; dark with storms, split bright with lightning and shining rain. Or it would have been, had that been all there was to it. Instead, while the city's electric lighting had been hexed as thoroughly as in any heart of enchantment, light ran through the city like a ribbon, like a mist, like a cascade of rising and falling stars, like a faded spotlight. It threaded through the encroaching magical plant-life, shone from the warped buildings, and, in the form of an eerie corpse-light, from the graveyards themselves.

The skies themselves were full of swirling predatory shapes, of which the choirs of Archangels were by far the least disturbing, and certainly not the most dangerous, while countless creatures stalked and swam through the streets. And all the while, the primal forest swallowed it up, bite by bite, transforming what it did not consume entirely. As it did, a giant pillar constructed of nature and living magic arose in the very heart of the old city, one where instincts Carol could not name told her that Woodrue's remnants had fled to, that Nimue was using to exert her will.

Magic raged through New Orleans, wild and out of control.

Carol clenched her fists, her eyes blazing solid emerald as her hair rose in a twisting updraft of emanating power.

Here and now, she was Magic's Champion.

And she was going to bring it to heel.

"Just you watch me."

OoOoO

Tony had expected a number of things. One of them was that he would, inevitably, catch-up with and then far outrun the SHIELD Quinjet, be it ever so super-charged. One of them was that, when he arrived, the city would probably be in chaos, because that seemed to be the trend these days. New York, London, now New Orleans… well, the monsters had gone after the people, wherever they lived, right back to Troy and before. So maybe it wasn't a surprise that they were doing so again.

Part of it was probably predators looking for prey, or power players making a statement in the most primitive but, let's be fair, damned effective way possible. A fair bit of the cross-reading of analysis from both the magical and scientific ends, and discussion with Asgardians (who tended to treat the two as exactly the same, and, frustratingly, he had yet to be able to entirely prove them wrong) indicated that there was another reason. People tended to congregate around certain types of locations; river deltas, high crags, ocean coasts… whatever offered safety, food, and easy transport.

Tony recognised it, seeing the same impulses in business. He also recognised that things hadn't changed much. The mechanisms might have done, yes, but the motives hadn't. And apparently, consciously or not, settlements tended to congregate and grow, really, really grow, around places that weren't just 'ordinary' travel nexuses or 'ordinarily' fertile. They congregated around ley line nexuses. His impulse had been to scoff, but he had to admit that when he saw the numbers, the locations, the maps, it made sense. A ley line nexus represented many things, all of those that normally attracted people and more.

Right now, though, it represented a giant clusterfuck, because Project Pegasus had decided not only that it believed in ley line nexuses, but also that it would be a great idea to treat one like a metaphysical oil well and rip the damn thing open, hoping to bottle lightning. Now, whichever lunatic had managed to actually get some degree of control over it had decided that not only were they going to tap into it, but they going to open up the throttle all the way, across the entire world, if the satellites were any judge. Why, Tony didn't know, though images of Emperor Palpatine going "UNLIMITED! POWAAAAH!" kept coming to mind.

That, Tony thought, was the kind of thinking that had got a later iteration of the same project comprehensively imploded by Loki when it had decided to treat an impossibly powerful and at least semi-sentient cosmic artefact like a battery. From everything he'd seen, heard, and worked out about the Tesseract since, it was a miracle that the damn thing hadn't ripped the galaxy in half.

So, insane city? Expected. Random reality-warped landscaping? In new and alarming flavours, but not unexpected. Laws of nature out for lunch? Less than usual, surprisingly. Monsters? Likewise, this time with a lot of them registering as formerly human, experimented upon, or cybernetically enhanced, or all of the above. Or plants. Evil, killer plants. Magic readings off the charts? Duh. That was why he was wearing his Prometheus suit, now completed, because he was not going to go down as the superhero who went out by turning into a jar of petunias ten thousand feet above the Big Easy.

He'd even half expected the damn hurricane, because all these dramatic magic types liked to whip up a hellstorm of some kind. Hell, it usually turned up as a side-effect of all those quantum disturbances, a giant fucking metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings like crazy. Given that Strange was going pedal to the metal with whoever was behind this, it made sense. It also both confirmed the insanity and the power levels at work, as well as the fact that there was a real mind behind this, one on an at least functionally even keel. Insanity, in his experience, was not a good survival strategy when dealing with Strange. Stupidity, even less so.

Part of Tony considered the thought that Strange might be drawing this out, but dismissed it. Kids were involved, and if there was one thing consistent about Strange, other than his inability to lie, it was that he was very protective of kids, in his own weird way. Their kids in particular. And while Tony was no mage, he worked with some very good ones and had a very powerful AI. That meant excellent analysis. Excellent analysis that told him that Strange, who normally didn't take the gloves off, was not just fighting, but doing to his best to pound the shit out of whoever was behind this and make it hurt. It might have been the dad instincts at work, but Tony found himself very much okay with that prospect.

The soundtrack, which was petering out, less so. Though, again, Strange was involved. Not surprising.

He wasn't even really surprised that Carol had taken up the Ring of the Green Lantern, because if any situation was made for it, it was this one. Besides, she'd shown she could handle it at the Battle of London. She was no Alan Scott, but he'd had decades to master it, with the kind of combat training that only one on one death matches with an enraged Magneto could provide.

Scott had been able to not just conjure up constructs in all shapes and sizes, but teleport, heal, shift size, manipulate the weather, and do all sorts of incredible things that probably only scratched the surface of the Ring's potential. Carol's use had been effective, but very, very limited – flight, energy blasts, some constructs, all under very careful control. Both understandable and sensible when dealing with something she didn't understand that could probably destroy civilisation as they knew it. He'd expected more of the same.

As it turned out? Not so much.

His HUD picked her out almost instantly as he arrived over the city. The size of her power signature and the amount of light she was emitting made it quite easy. That meant that he could keep half an eye on her as he demonstrated to swarms of biomechanically and magically engineered monsters just what a professional did with fire stolen from the gods. For starters, it involved way fewer bodily fluids.

As soon as he got a breather, he jinked into the eye of the storm and focused on her. As he did, he saw more or less what he'd expected: human comet impersonation, massive energy blast, very dead enemy. In this case, a giant plant-monster the size of a small mountain, which had been wrestling another giant plant-monster. Once she came to a stop, he gave her a quick once-over.

"JARVIS?"

"Miss Danvers' vitals seem to be in normal ranges, allowing for adrenalin and magical interference, sir. However, I must stress that scanning from range under such conditions is not the most reliable course of action."

"Yeah, I know," Tony said. His less scientific look said that she looked fine. More than fine, in fact. She was clad from head to toe in tight fitting metallic armour, which shaded from deepest emerald to golden-green to searing white, especially around the five-pointed star on her chest. There was something odd about it. "JARVIS, what's with that green suit she's wearing?"

"It seems to be consistent with manufactured Uru, sir."

"Like the kid's shield."

"Exactly, sir."

Which probably, Tony thought, meant that it somehow was her shield. It wouldn't surprise him. It wasn't like he hadn't seen Asgardian armour manifest from apparent thin air on use of their more powerful weapons. Equally, it wasn't like nanotech was beyond them.

"Also, JARVIS, is it just me, or are her power readings way up on the ones we recorded at London?"

She seemed to be talking to the giant plant-monster, and, oh that was creepy, it had grown a face on the back of its head to look at the city. It said something to her, he wasn't sure what. Before JARVIS could answer, Carol finished her conversation with the non-hostile plant-monster. 'Just you watch me', said the lip-reading software.

Then, she clenched her fists.

And everything stopped.

"JARVIS…" Tony said slowly, looking around. He reached up brushed at a raindrop. A raindrop that seemed to have fixed itself in midair. "What just happened?"

"Unknown, sir. However, I am detecting an energy field spread across the region, encapsulating all atmospheric disturbances."

"Okay, try the magic imaging, I want to look at this myself."

The result was a psychedelic riot of melting fractals and inverted colours that Tony had last seen when he'd mixed LSD with magic mushrooms for a weekend. Like then, he believed he was seeing something profound. Like then, he also felt like his brain was about to dribble out his ear. He closed his eyes tight and grimaced.

"Okay, let me rephrase that. Display the Green Lantern energy signature only, overlay it on normal spectrum imaging."

When he opened, the image had changed, and Tony took it in, swooping up and around to get a better look at the whole panorama. Then, he let out a long, low whistle.

"Tony?"

"Yeah, Steve?"

"We're getting some odd readings over here, and Agent Lupin is feeling…"

"Weird?" Tony supplied, idly noting that Carol was now flying straight into the city and targeting the biggest monsters she could find, and disposing of them in the most elemental fashion possible. As Tony knew from personal experience (and from detailing Rhodey's armour after the Battle of London), the whole human cannonball impression could be disgustingly effective. With the emphasis on the 'disgusting' part.

"… yeah."

"Yeah, that would be because our newest Green Lantern just grabbed every air and water molecule above the third floor in New Orleans."

"Define 'grabbed'," Steve said flatly.

"As in they're staying pretty still and she's responsible," Tony said, in a nonchalant tone that came easier and easier to him these days. Ah, coping mechanisms. Where would he be without them? "I'd hustle on down, Steve. Ali's grandspawn just told a hurricane to sit down and shut up. If she keeps going like this, there might not be much fight left once you get here."

"What's the situation otherwise?" Steve asked, naturally ignoring his sally.

Tony surveyed the city, enjoying the luxury of adamantium armour-plating that allowed him to plough straight through a formation of disturbingly insectoid and squid-like semi-organic drones, letting JARVIS use the shoulder cannon to pick them off, and grimaced.

"It's Monsters Inc meets The Island of Doctor Moreau with a side of Escher out here," he said. "Captain Planet could probably clear most of it out, but she's busy holding the storm in check."

Indeed, that was exactly what she was doing by the looks of things. Her power output was consistent and high even by the standards of her jacked-up power levels, and her expression, recorded by JARVIS when she stopped for a moment, was locked in intense concentration. Also, he could have sworn that he'd just seen some of the raindrops nearby tremble.

"We've got another problem," he said.

"What?"

"I'm not sure," Tony said, changing the overlay on his HUD. "But I think we're not just dealing with one Lantern."

"Pegasus was trying to replicate it?" Steve said sharply.

"Someone there was. And someone else has figured out how to make it work," Tony said grimly.

"They have," a voice said suddenly, cutting in, apparently ignoring the fact that its owner didn't have an ear-piece. "Tony, Steve, this is Wanda. Tony's right – we've got the equivalent of a rogue Lantern on our hands, one that really knows what they're doing. Some of all this is improperly contained magic, but only some. They're laying enchantments across the state, as well as pumping power back into the Ley Line convergence, cracking it open wider. Through that, they're opening up every Ley Line and Convergence on Earth. Whoever this is, they're soaking the planet in magical energy."

"And covering it in plants," Tony noted, dodging a choir of Archangels that had finally come up to investigate, strafing their flank in the process, as JARVIS supplied footage from around the world. It was mesmerising, though not always in the best of ways. "Among other things."

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Wanda was up, and turning the frozen raindrops and apparently stopped up wind to good use, creating her own flechette storm, a hurricane force blender that started ripping through almost everything above ground level.

"Good news is," he continued. "My scanners say that they're still on some kind of magical wire, attached to Pegasus – probably channelling right up from the hole that Pegasus made in the first place. If we can cut that, or seal it up, we can cut their power."

"That," Wanda interjected with absolute certainty. "Is going to be much more easily said than done. Whoever this is, they're a pro. And the style… it's very old, and very familiar. It doesn't tell me who they are, but it does narrow it down. It also confirms that they are very bad news."

"Then we're going to need a Lantern to match a Lantern, or at least hold everything in check," Steve said. "Wanda, can you take the weight off her shoulders and do something about the hurricane?"

"Hurricanes are weather patterns, Steve. Guess what I do to patterns."

"Good. Tony, find our Lantern, get a debrief."

"Sure," Tony said, watching as Carol performed a balletically graceful spin in mid-air, unleashing a flurry of energy bolts that punched holes in a group of the predator angels, things that Tony knew for a fact could tank some of his better repulsor blasts, like they were made of wet paper, before accelerating downwards like a laser-guided meteor and vanishing into the warping forested morass of the streets. "I'll get on that."

OoOoO

I was outnumbered. Okay, so technically, I wasn't, given that that the odds in raw numbers were about ten to one in my favour. However, out of everyone on my side, I was the only one with the power and experience to handle this kind of fight. I was also up against three creatures that were disgustingly large, probably disgustingly powerful, and generally disgusting – and, to make matters worse, smart enough to manage some degree of coordination.

Now, I wasn't exactly new to being outnumbered, or facing giant monsters, and I'd learned how to compensate. One monster is a problem. Three monsters are a problem, but they're also an opportunity, if you can avoid being eaten. Plus, there was so much raw magic in the air that it was practically crystallising around me, stirred up into even further potency by the wild cocktail of fear and anger that had flooded the city. How potent was it? Potent enough that I could feel it, and my passive empathic abilities just about compare favourably to those of a cucumber.

Power wasn't a problem for me. Power has rarely ever been a problem for me. As far as mortals go, my raw muscle is easily in the top 40 or 50 wandless practitioners alive, and probably in the top 100 if you included wanded. When I cut loose, city blocks – sometimes plural – get flattened or burned down. Even so, normally, I'd have been wary of taking these things on any more than one at a time.

This was not normally. Not by a long shot. Here and now? Out in the open? Even if these things were souped-up super-monsters from Pegasus, odds were very good that I could paste all three of them.

On some level, I was pretty sure they knew it, because they were hanging back, watching for a moment's weakness and inattention to exploit. They'd already found out the hard that going at me head on was not a winning proposition, after all. Of course, it only took one of them to work up the courage, or one of the kids to scream – and it was absolutely miraculous that they hadn't – to break the tension. And then I'd be in trouble, because unfortunately, it's not just about raw power.

I had a couple of dozen kids to look after, kids who were probably what these things were really here for, and odds were not very good that I could take out all three before at least one of the kids got killed or worse. And I've always had a few problems with control. Crossfire would be a problem at any time. Tonight, with magic at its most potent in centuries, emotions in the air so strong that I couldn't fail to feel them, and a storm that would play havoc with any attempt to concentrate a blast? I could just as easily carbonise the same kids that I was trying to save.

But like I said: I'm used to being outnumbered. And when it comes down to it, I'm a Wizard. We cheat. So when an opportunity came, I snatched it with both hands.

All of a sudden, the wind and rain stopped, like someone had switched off the storm, leaving the droplets hanging in mid-air like they'd been glued there. In fact, I was pretty sure someone had – I could feel serious forces being worked, a vaguely familiar edge to the power behind it. I shoved the speculation aside, to join the vague gibbering at the sheer amount of power required to do something like that, which said either 'Greater God', 'Grey Twin', or, very possibly, 'Wanda'.

I had noticed that the three predators were now looking up and around, communicating in strange, low hissing calls, ones that carried a clear hint of uncertainty – and, perhaps, fear. It didn't take much brain to realise that something very big and very strong was making its presence felt. Personally, I was worried about that too, but I also spotted an opportunity. One potential problem could help solve another.

I slowly raised my pistol, levelling it at empty air, then, just as slowly, began to bring my free hand around clockwise.

"Mr Dresden?" one of the kids, the cop's daughter – Gwen, I think – asked in a whisper. She looked terrified, but she was keeping her cool better than most: both teachers looked like they were about to start gibbering, and a jock type covered in some kind of strange stains looked much the same.

"Stay frosty, kid," I said. "No questions."

Credit to her, she did exactly that, subsiding – though her eyes widened when a small ring of orange sparks opened in the air at my eye height.

Wanda had been teaching me a lot. One of the first things she'd taught me was how to use a Sling Ring, and I couldn't deny it was useful, even if I was still kind of wary of using it for transport – old Nevernever anxieties at work. But I'd come up with other uses for it. The creatures, their attention finally caught, responded with challenging shrieks, no doubt thinking I was preparing a magical offence.

Boy were they in for a surprise.

I pressed my Destroyer-pistol up against the portal, about five inches beneath the soft underbelly of the armoured monster about fifty feet away over my right shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

The original Destroyer was an Asgardian super-weapon, one that nearly levelled a small town as an after-thought, and took Thor himself to, well, destroy. SHIELD scavenged the remains and bolted together a prototype hand-cannon that had, according the friend of mine who'd been wielding it, briefly flattened Loki.

They'd improved their designs a great deal since.

Six crackling orange bolts of heat and concussive force powerful enough to pull a through-and-through on a battleship struck the creature's oil-slick flesh at point blank range. Each hammered their way through its body, blasting their way through flesh and bone like they weren't even there, boiling bodily fluids in a fashion not unlike an exploding hot pocket, before erupting through the crude armour on its back, twisting and tearing it apart like wet cardboard as they screamed up into the night.

The monster let out a high, wailing, tooth-jarring scream of agony, and not just its hair, but its entire body stood on end, tentacles and other miscellaneous limbs erupting out of the stricken core mass, as if trying to get away from the pain. Some of the oil-slick flesh recoiled away from the entry wounds. These things weren't just crude shapeshifters, I realised with a surge of revulsion. They were parasites.

A better man might have at least hesitated, moved by its pained scream, or the plight of the creature it was using as a vehicle. I just saw that the damn thing was about the size of a small elephant, and kept shooting. Besides. I'd seen body-controlling parasites before. I'd come far closer than I'd like to becoming the host of one. Less physical and more spiritual, perhaps, and infinitely more sophisticated, but it came to the same thing. Whatever creature this was or had been, I was doing it a favour. Even if it did involve shooting it until it was nearly ripped in half.

After a moment of shock, the creatures demonstrated the usual supernatural reaction time of nothing verging on negative. But, again, Wizard. We think ahead. Even if it is by about thirty seconds and the seat of our pants. So when the predator angel exploded into the air, I was already crying havoc as I brought my staff, runes burning silvery-blue, down like the wrath of God, turning my usual favoured force-magic spell into a giant fly-swatter. Normally, it was strong enough to do things like pulverise stone pillars and flip SUVs onto the heads of terrifying Warlocks (a trick I'd only pulled once, as it had mostly just pissed said Warlock off).

Tonight was a different matter. That much I knew. However, I didn't realise how different. I'd expected it to hammer the demonic angel into the street, driving it into the tarmac like a squishy piton into mud. Instead, it smashed into the street, through the street, and through the water mains below, pulverising a rough cylinder of tarmac, concrete, and steel roughly twenty feet wide and forty feet deep with a roar like a landslide. If the goopy parasite had survived that, it'd be looking for a new host.

The sheer power was heady to the point of being terrifying, surging through me in a rush, an eagerness to be used that I'd never felt before. I wanted to scream and howl my defiance and glee, to boast my power. I was in shock, at the sheer power and ease with which it had come. And suddenly, I was very, very afraid. Then, the screams began, snapping me out of my stunned reverie, making me whirl.

The second monster was still down, perhaps dying, perhaps not, but mostly just making bubbling-keening noises as it hunched around its wounds. The third monster, however, was charging like a freight train, thundering off the roof to land in amongst the group, tentacles shooting out to grab any kids in reach, reeling them in at blurring speeds. As it saw me turn, it jinked away with astonishing speed for something so large, more, thicker tentacles shooting out behind it and snapping it back in and away like bungee cords, flying back approximately sixty feet.

My heart stopped for a second, before surging with an almost blinding fury as I realised what it was doing. It was using them as shields, keeping them between me and it. Its unnaturally wide mouth spread in a mocking smile, full of wild clusters of needle-tipped fangs, a giant whip-like tongue flickering out to taste the air – and then, very deliberately, to slurp up against one kid's cheek.

I glared at it, looking it in the eye, and for a brief, terrible moment, I nearly lost myself in rage. Nearly.

Instead, I very deliberately flipped the pistol in my hand and held it out to Gwen. "You can shoot?"

"Y-yeah," she stammered, and no surprise, since my clipped question came out more as a raw snarl through bared teeth.

"Keep it, get to cover, and look after your friends. If anyone tries to take it off you, they answer to me, teachers included. If the big one looks like getting up, shoot it somewhere soft. If the winged one does, shoot it before it gets in the air. And if anything else comes that isn't human, shoot it in the fucking face," I growled.

She took the gun. "Yes sir," she said, voice steadier than mine would have been under the circumstances. I nodded at her, then, I drew my blasting rod and strode forward, trying to think past my rage as frozen droplets brushed against my skin. I felt like I was burning from the inside out I was that mad.

As I passed the wounded monster, half on its side, it tried to shrink away from me, keening becoming interspersed with submissive whines. Maybe it was smart enough to recognise that I'd somehow hurt it, or maybe it just recognised a threat. I didn't particularly care.

I raised the rod and unleashed a blast of silver-blue flame into its belly from six feet away without turning my head or breaking stride. There was a hollow boom and a scream of super-heated metal as it shot into a nearby building like a molten cannon ball, followed by a roar of collapsing brick work. The keening stopped. One less problem for the kids to worry about.

I stopped about twenty feet from the final monster. It was vaguely humanoid, ape-like behind the fangs, half my height again, three times as broad, and maybe five or six times as heavy, all of it the thick, bulky muscle of a beast of burden. This one seemed more intertwined with its host than the others, I noted idly, more like a merger than a mere meat-suit. Maybe the host was sentient. The angels looked like people, but they acted like little more than feral animals, if smart ones, and whatever monster the now fried monster had possessed was definitely non-sentient.

There was something about this host that suited it, despite the fact that it was neither the largest nor the most mobile, and I was definitely willing to bet it wasn't just size. Certainly, this one was acting smarter, showing actual strategy – human shields, luring me away to a preferred location, even gagging the three terrified hostages and sticking them to – no, partway into – its oozing chest. It was using its abilities intelligently. That meant that there was a mind at work here, a smart one. And there wasn't any shortage of sentient beings that size to work with, either.

Whatever. The only difference it would make was how long it would take me to kill it.

I grounded my staff and glared.

"Get your hands off them, you damn dirty ape."

That finally drew a verbal response, a deep, gurgling, gravelly laugh like a giant cement mixer. "We're not using our hands," it said mockingly.

"Let them go. Or 'we' won't have any hands left to use," I said, voice made harsh and cold by the rage boiling within me, scouring my throat raw. It felt like it was going to boil me dry, but, God… part of me enjoyed it.

"Human. Wizardling. You are a child, making sparks with rocks."

I narrowed my eyes at it, and cautiously reached out with my senses. What I found didn't change my expression in the slightest, but only because I was still too angry to contort my face out of a snarl. However, a sudden surge of fear ran through me. It noticed.

"Ah… intelligence. Intelligence enough to understand. Intelligence enough to be afraid."

"Your host is one of the Forest People," I said, as much to keep it talking as anything else. I was trying to do that, too – monsters tend to like talking when they feel they've got power over someone, and the more sadistic they are, the more likely they are to do it. It bought me time to strategise, to process what I was dealing with, and, maybe, hopefully, for back-up to arrive. It was an outside chance, but I'd been due back at the shelter by now, and if anyone could be spared, they might come looking. Might.

If they did, they'd need to come fast, because suddenly, I was not too confident.

The Forest People are pretty well known, albeit by other names: Bigfoot, Yowie, Yeti, Sasquatch, Mawas… even maybe some depictions of the Wendigo. Oh, and Grendel, who was apparently deep enough into the dark that it altered his biology and spawned a psycho serial killer subspecies, the Grendelkin. There's even some speculation that European Giants are relatives.

Either way, if there's a story about an elusive super-sized hairy humanoid, then it's probably them. One of them, guy by the name of River Shoulders, had actually hired me as a client a few times. Nice guy, the sort you wouldn't mind buying a couple of beers for. I mentioned that to Wanda, because hey, how often do you get to boast about meeting Bigfoot.

Turns out that the Forest People aren't just magical beings that can tank powerful magic and crush cars like a beer can with their bare hands, as I'd assumed. Oh no. That would be far too simple. They're also immensely powerful practitioners with a lifespan measured in millennia, wielding and relating to magic on a level that humans just don't (Doctor Strange presumably excepted – it was usually a safe bet). Hence the height, the lifespan, and also the body hair (no superpower is perfect). Also, probably, hence Grendel – if dark magic warps human practitioners, god knows what it'd do to something like a Forest Person.

So, I was faced with something I wouldn't want to fight even before I knew it was a probably centuries old super-wizard. And then there was the whole 'possessed by a shapeshifting horror-show parasite' thing. Yeah, I had good reason to be worried, just as it had good reason to smirk. Or at least, I think it was smirking. It's toothy smile mostly just gaped a little less.

"Intelligence," it repeated. "Is a gift. One that, thanks to my host, we share."

"If you knew anything about me, you'd know that taking hostages – taking kids – was about the least intelligent thing you could have done," I said. "Am I afraid? Yes. But fear turns to anger. I'm good with anger. I have not fought your kind before, but I have fought mightier." I ignited my rod, the humming-hiss and actinic glare emphasising my next point. "Thrice I say and done, cuddles: release them."

The smile widened.

"No."

Crap.

While I had technically fought mightier, with the prototype of this very sabre (a.k.a. my blasting rod), and under what were technically much more adverse conditions against a psychotic necromancer who moved like a meth-addicted Jackie Chan on fast forward, I had also got insanely lucky. For one thing, thanks to a hefty piece of luck on my part, he'd been afraid of me. Enough to hesitate.

Guess what this guy wasn't.

The first dozen spear-tipped tentacles – sharp as razors, hard as diamond – came as soon as the word was spoken. Each one struck my shield with the force of a low speed car crash, as the ones that followed were twice their number and twice as hard. Worse, where they struck, my shield's energies were flickering, their defensive framework disrupting like dodgy lights, which confirmed the 'stupidly good at magic' theory.

My shields are damn good, and against a purely physical barrage, there's not much they can't stand off. They're a lot better at energy attacks these days, too. None of which matters one bit if there's about thirty odd spells breaking it down piece by piece, so their caster could rip through my defences at leisure.

Worse, there was no way I could lower it to counter, not without being impaled and torn apart like a cheap cocktail weenie. Which meant that I had to change things, fast. So, Nevernever related paranoia be damned, I got out damn ring, whirled up a portal and let myself fall through.

Unfortunately, I'd been thinking a bit much about my immediate situation when I conjured it, so when I did, I found myself about ten feet above the goo monster. No, I was going to need a better name for this. Hmm. Symbiote. Technically, Parasite was more accurate, but I'm pretty sure it was already taken, so symbiote it was. Anyway, whatever its name, I found myself ten feet above it.

This had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were surprise, and, as I landed on its shoulders and upper back, a perfect sucker punch position. The disadvantages were the fact that I was I was landing on something that was both as hard as concrete and tackily yielding as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and, oh yeah, I was every bit as surprised as it was. That meant no headspace for complex spells, such as a 'unravel the Symbiote Sasquatch to make it drop the damn kids' spell. On the other hand, I've long silence learned to be flexible. To adapt my spells to the situation. And, where appropriate, to take simple solution.

Long story short, I shoved my rod-sabre in the Symbiote's ear and ignited the blade.

The screaming was horrendous. The smell? Even worse. The mix of pure satisfaction with guilt at the fact that I'd probably killed the innocent host? Unbeatable and somewhat nauseating.

I found myself spat out of its back, dropped, and rolled on instinct, narrowly avoiding being seared by my sabre or stepped on by a thousand plus tons of tentacled, writhing, Sasquatch, but not avoiding being smacked in the face by my own staff. Ignoring the pain, I sprang up, lurched parallel to my enemy and thrust out my staff.

"Forzare!"

A thin blade of force shot out, slicing through the tentacles holding the human shields, who were understandably freaking out. Mercifully, this freaking out took the form of taking to their heels, in roughly the right direction. I prayed they would go the right way and find the other kids – and that those other kids were okay. In the meantime, I had unfinished business.

The symbiote was still screaming, but the tone had shifted from agony and unaccustomed fear to rage, a tea-kettle shriek as the creature collapsed in on itself like very single bone had dissolved, coagulating around the smoking burn wound, a pool of sentient glop. Before I could deliver a fatal strike, it lashed out, a massive set of jaws set on a misshapen bulky torso with a mismatched assortment of arms, tentacles, and all sorts of shapes formed out of its biomass as it howled for blood, all of which crashed against my hastily raised shield. I hadn't killed it, but I had hurt it. Good for me.

The rest of it followed, with only a blackened, smoking hollow in its side where pieces of its burnt flesh flaked off, to show. So, it had moved the wound around. That was smart, and not something I'd thought shapeshifters could do. How it had retained enough brains to do it, I wasn't sure, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was half Forest Person, half Evil Goop. All of which was a fascinating insight that would have been more useful if it had come before the damn thing had practically enveloped my shield, attacking me from every angle possible.

"Man, I should have cut your head off," I muttered, before raising my voice. "Look, Yetrigar, hostages are gone, and so are your chances of beating me."

And if I said it loud enough, maybe I might believe it. It too.

Unfortunately, it didn't. And despite the furious shrieking, now shifting to bass-deep roars, it was thinking. It had enfolded me entirely, cutting off all natural light, and this time, when I tried to spark up the sling ring, it spat a few sparks and comprehensively failed to work.

"Okay, that is not supposed to happen."

To make matters worse, my shield bracelet started producing a few sparks of its own, as the physical pressure increased. That, by itself, I could have dealt with. But the enfolding wasn't just a psychological tactic, or even some kind of binding circle – no, binding dome, I realised, as it started forming those staring, hateful white eyes all over its widespread body, the largest staring down from above.

My shield was flickering. All over, the spells were failing. It was pulling the same trick it had before, water magic of some kind, entropy based on unravelling. I'd seen a similar trick pulled once, created by one Queen of Faerie and used by another. This wasn't in that league, but it didn't have to be. Not to get through my defences and… well. The reputation Forest People have for eating people is a horrible mischaracterisation.

Mostly.

And the Symbiote threw everything out the window, opening doors to many, many worse fates.

Fortunately, though my blasting rod wasn't the only piece of equipment I'd upgraded.

Turns out that you only need a little tweaking to turn an enchantment designed to absorb excess kinetic energy generated while moving into something that almost entirely neutralises kinetic energy attacks.

My shields had faced a lot of kinetic attacks tonight.

I looked the monster dead in its biggest set of eye as I let my shield flicker and fade, and as it lunged downwards, I raised one solitary finger.

"Smile, you son of a bitch."

OoOoO

Steve had expected to see signs of a fight. Half the city was a battlefield, and magic was running so wild that even he could feel it, almost taste it. More to the point, he knew enough about Harry Dresden to know that the man wouldn't go down without one hell of a fight. He also knew for a fact that he would rather die than let kids get hurt.

What he had not expected was to find what looked like a piece of London at the height of the Blitz – literally, in fact, the very architecture warping into something like Wartime London as he looked around, almost as if it was responding to his thoughts. This was, he realised uneasily, entirely possible.

Architecture aside, the area looked like a bomb had gone off, one of the big ones, totalling the best part of two blocks. One of those blocks was riddled with craters and damaged buildings, one of which was more or less collapsed in on itself – a set of giant, crispy, mismatched bio-mechanical legs, curled in on themselves like those of a dead insect and sticking out of the rubble gave a hint as to why.

"Quintaped," Lupin said, surprised. "Human-level intelligence, lethally dangerous, and while not quite immune to magic, they're near enough – even before whatever was done to this one." He frowned, amber-brown eyes picking out something about its skin, a faintly oily texture. "Before whatever it became," he murmured.

"Looks like it met something it couldn't resist," Steve said, glancing around, and noting a hole large enough to swallow a school bus in one go. There was something at the bottom of it, the crumpled ruin of a humanoid shape half-buried by the rubble. Even in the gloaming light, blood-stains were visible. Lupin followed his gaze and grimaced. Steve couldn't blame him.

"Quite," he said, before joining Steve in looking around. It didn't take them long to find what they were looking for.

Through the window of one of the more intact buildings, Steve saw the tense, frightened faces of the Midtown High tour group, a small, slim blonde incongruously up front with a SHIELD issue Deity class pistol – Dresden's, almost certainly, left with someone who could handle a gun while he went after whatever had gone after them. A quick glance told him that Dresden had almost certainly managed to keep them safe, and a few gestures and snapped commands had a SHIELD team shepherding them down the street towards the shelter. Lupin stayed with Steve as he went the other way, towards the heart of the destruction.

The next block over was now mostly a large crater about half as deep again as an Olympic swimming pool, one rapidly filling with rain, floodwater, and what was probably (hopefully) water from the city's water supply. The alternative didn't bear thinking about. At the heart of that crater was a tall, bedraggled figure, propping himself up on a battered wooden staff and swaying slightly from either the wind or exhaustion, giving the effect of a gothic scarecrow. He was looking around warily, and Steve and Lupin both mirrored him. Anything that could make a wizard that powerful cut loose like this and still leave him jumpy was worth watching out for. Besides – it wasn't like there was any shortage of monsters on the street tonight.

"Cap," Dresden greeted as the two waded out to him. "Shoulda told me you guys were coming – I'd have saved you some of the party."

Steve smiled at the tired quip. "I think there's plenty of party to go around tonight," he said.

"Ain't that the truth," Dresden grumbled, pushing himself up into a more upright position and groaning, before looking around with mingled satisfaction and disbelief as he began to wade out with them, the water now coming up to Steve's thighs. "Man, I didn't think that would pack that much of a punch." He winced. "Or take that much out of me. Guess the design needs some work."

"Design?" Steve asked.

"My shield," Dresden said. "Figured all that kinetic energy everyone was throwing at it was just going to waste."

"You made it an energy sponge," Lupin said. He had been casting spells, presumably, Steve thought, ones to detect any sign of trouble. So far, they hadn't picked up anything, though tonight, that might just mean they couldn't pick out any single thing in particular. "In one stroke, making it significantly more resilient, and providing you with the energy to do… this."

"In fairness, I was going for something more like a concussion grenade," Dresden said. "It got a little out of hand." He looked around again, scanning, suspicious. "Either of you spot anything?"

"Like what?" Steve asked. They were getting closer to swimming territory and while they weren't far from the edge in absolute terms, it was more than far enough to be wary.

"Like Bigfoot meets the Thing." At Steve's puzzled look, he sighed. "It's… basically Bigfoot. Bigfoot is real. Bigfoot is a wizard. In this case, Bigfoot is real, a wizard, and kind of merged with shapeshifting psychotic goop."

Steve stared at him for a moment, then glanced at Lupin, who was looking troubled.

"One of the people of the Forest?" the older wizard asked.

"Yup," Dresden said. "A water-magic specialist."

There was an instant's pause, then by common consent, the three of them started moving rather faster.

"You think it's still around, even after this?" Steve asked.

"It was spread on my shield before I detonated it, but I also stuck my lightsabre through its head and all that did was hurt," Dresden said candidly. Steve did a double-take, before memory informed him that Dresden had, somehow, managed to conjure up a lightsabre from his wand. Going by the metallic nature of the rod hanging from his belt, he seemed to have refined it.

"It is perhaps safest not to rule it out," Lupin said. "Some of the Pegasus files I read on the flight over said that they were experimenting with semi-ectoplasmic creatures from the near-reaches of the Nevernever. They were intended to act as a symbiotic organism, intuitively controlled body-armour, even prosthetics. Given the energy requirements, it often didn't end well for the test subjects. If I had to guess, they either absorbed a little too much of their hosts, or when Pegasus fell, they took on a life of their own." He paused. "They also didn't have a single central brain, meaning…"

Steve tried to step forward and found his feet unable to move.

"… meaning that it's still alive," he said steadily. "And it's in here with us."

Looking over his shoulder, he saw every part of the small lake rush drain towards the centre, a twisting whirlpool that only exempted them, the water around their feet turning in an almost perfect counter-spin. As he watched, he saw pieces of oily flesh worming their way out of the rubble around them, dropping into the whirlpool and being whipped along, swept into the heart.

"Lupin; apparition?" he asked curtly, raising his voice over the roar of the water, but before he could finish the sentence, the other man had already done it, figuring out how to spin with the pull of their own whirlpool and vanishing with a crack and reappearing on the shoreline with another. He swished his wand and shouted an incantation, sending both him and Dresden flying into the air, before another yanked them by the front to send them flying into the tarmac beside him with a jarring crash, drowned out by an enraged howl like the sea in a storm that emerged from the heart of the maelstrom.

"Sorry about that," Lupin said, already batting away reaching tendrils of water with flicks of his wand and whip-like cracks. For all that the man looked like a down-at-heel scholar (which, in fact, was exactly what he was – or, at least, had been, if you added the complication of being a werewolf), he was one hell of a fighter.

"Any landing you can walk away from is a good one," Steve said, flipping to his feet and blocking any that got through Lupin's guard. "Thanks."

"Yeah," Dresden said, poling himself up somewhat more groggily. The brief flight through the air had not done the towering wizard's equilibrium any favours, and he looked even paler than normal, but his shield flared into life no less brightly. "So, we're fighting an evil swimming pool. Any ideas?"

"I hear chlorine works," Steve said, grunting as he blocked another blow.

"We need to separate the symbiote from the host," Lupin said, indicating the heart of the pool, where something huge and indistinct was taking shape. "The host may not be hostile, and even if they are, the two will still be much less dangerous apart than they are together."

"Water magic is all about disruption," Dresden said. "It'll see us coming a mile off. Besides, it's almost certainly got more practice than both of us put together, five times over."

"Can you keep it still?" Steve demanded. "Bind it?"

Both men wore looks that said quite adequately what they thought of this suggestion, and Steve sighed. As he did, though, the wizards shared a look.

"You're not thinking what I'm thinking, are you?"

"I'm thinking what James or Sirius would think, which is quite bad enough."

"The storm?"

"Too easy to disperse, and that much power? Too dangerous to channel, you're too tired."

"Heat?"

"Too much water to boil, even for both of us."

"That's not what I was talking about."

"… that is insane."

"Insane enough to work?"

"We can only try, I suppose."

"Anyone care to fill me in?" Steve demanded, feeling quite reasonably irritable. Not only was he being left out of the tactical discussion (if you could call it that), he was now bearing the brunt of the tendrilled attacks, which now less tendrils, more sentient and malicious waves.

"We're going to try something," Dresden said. "It's completely insane…"

"… and almost certainly won't work," Lupin finished dryly.

"What are the odds?"

Both men shared a look.

"Three percent?"

"Two. At best."

"I'll take those odds," Steve said. "Get to work, I'll cover you."

He wasn't aware of much of what followed. It was all water, vast, pounding, foul-tasting, overwhelming water. He'd nearly drowned once or twice before, but then, it had been almost impersonal – the sea, the river, whatever, it had never been out to get him.

Now, though, it was different. There was a malice behind it, a distant cruelty, and an utter impatience, wanting to get rid of him, to wash him away. Every droplet of water trying to reach up his nostrils or down his throat, to cut off his air, to choke him, to drown him or, failing any of that, to tear him apart from the inside out. And all while it was doing that, it hammered away at him like the leading edge of a hurricane at sea, trying to pound him into the ground and brush him aside, to make him stay down.

Steve was never very good at that.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, but was in fact probably only about twenty seconds, a shining star shot over his shoulder, radiating cold like a piece of winter's heart, chilling him to the bone. Simultaneously, the frost that rimed over him turned to steam as he was hit by a weight of deep damp summer heat, like a mattress made of steam baths, one that knocked him flat on his backside, followed by a sudden roar and another wave of heat, like someone had just opened a blast furnace, and a flash of light that lit up Downtown New Orleans like a midsummer's day.

When he sat up, he found himself staring at the latest wave, one which he had just blocked. It was frozen, perfectly captured as it coiled to strike again. In fact, he realised, the entire lake was frozen, even down to the huge figure in the heart of it, like an emaciated bear twenty feet tall.

"Heat," he realised. "You took all the heat out of it."

"I flash froze it, as Harry removed as much heat as he could," Lupin explained, in lieu of literally steaming colleague. "It might have countered one of the spells, but not both."

"Smart," Steve said. "Where did the heat go?"

"Up," Dresden mumbled.

"Probably just as well," Steve said. "Good job." The other man visibly perked up, then just as visibly tried to hide it, flushing. Steve shot him an amused smile, then, as he was about to look away to give the man some dignity, paused as a loud crack emerged from the heart of the lake. "That's not the ice just settling, is it?"

The grim expression on Lupin's face and the loud and thoroughly disgusted groan from Dresden were answer enough.

Before either could say anything more, something large erupted from the heart of the frozen lake, shattering the bear-like sculpture into fist-sized hailstones that went flying, landing with a scrabble of nailed claws on the ice, before setting itself and glaring at them with hateful, enormous blank eyes, now jaundiced yellow. The entire thing looked unhealthy, Steve realised. It had got out, yes, but everything that had been thrown at it had taken a toll.

It was no longer able to hold a consistent shape, its entire body in nauseating flux, a claw becoming a tentacle becoming a wing becoming a tail, becoming who knew what. It was even thinner than before, even after compacting back into something half the size of the giant it had been at the heart of the maelstrom, having cannibalised most of its body mass for the energy to break free and remain intact. And while Steve wasn't usually a betting man, he was pretty sure that it wasn't going to try working any major magic any time soon.

None of which was particularly reassuring when it blurred across the cracked ice, going from nought to sixty in a measure of time so short it was practically negative.

As Steve set himself, he heard an aggrieved comment that pretty much summed up how he felt.

"This is the last time I am ever taking a phone call from, or about, Doctor Strange."

Before ten feet and approximately eight hundred pounds of regret could hit them and approximately half the speed of sound (while still accelerating), something hurtled across the ice. Small and swift as a fired arrow, it darted unerringly from crack to crack, moving with inhuman grace and surety, anywhere a break in the surface could give it clear footing, balling itself up for a final leap. It hung in the air for a moment, travelling in utter silence, before uncoiling with ferocious speed, lashing with tremendous force.

By all rights, it should have bounced off or been brushed aside like a leaf on the wind. Instead, it – no, Steve realised, as the figure caught the light, they – hit the symbiote like cannonball, blow landing perfectly on its jaw, sending it spinning on its axis as it spun through the air. The slight figure landed gracefully, performing a neat forward flip and an extraordinary twist that sent them both sliding away from the monster while facing back the way they had come, crouched and ready to move in an instant, a pair of enormous watchful silver eyes gleaming in the eerie light.

The instant they'd leapt away, a series of airy thumps Steve recognised began, and grenades began to fall on the stunned symbiote with accuracy that only great skill and long training could provide. Steve tracked the trajectory on instinct, looking for the source of his new back-up, and what he saw was… well. Unexpected.

The gunman, a tall man in a red and black masked variation on the standard SHIELD tactical suit with blank white eyes, was familiar, in passing. While Steve had never met the man who preferred to be known as Deadpool, he'd spent enough time reading up on (or 'doom-scrolling' as Tony had called it, when he'd blocked Steve's access to the relevant files for a week) global continuations of the super soldier project to be familiar with one of its more infamous surviving members. The so-called 'Merc with a Mouth' (mainly so-called by himself) had emerged from one of the cheapest and most brutal versions of the program, focused on X-Gene activation.

He was both genuinely nuts and genuinely lethal, and, apparently, genuinely on their side. According to Alison, she'd called in a favour, and traded another, to get him to drop a hit on Gambit and instead protect the kids. If he gave his word, she'd said, he was good for it and if Steve hadn't trusted his daughter's judgement (which he did, absolutely and implicitly), the proof was in the pudding. Remy LeBeau was standing next to him, touching the ice and directing a charge through it with a precision Steve hadn't known he was capable of, collapsing the ice under the symbiote in a muted implosion of purple energy.

Both looked surprisingly well-groomed for two individuals who'd been through the horrors of Project Pegasus, and they were accompanied by a third individual, a young woman with tightly braided dark hair, dressed in a close-fitting combat suit that mixed white armoured material like his own gear, with what looked like sections of a clear midnight sky. This even included her mask, eyes staring out of it like gleaming stars, which neatly concealed any sign of who she really was as she met his gaze. Her eyes seemed to widen, and she conferred with Gambit and Deadpool, before the three of them made their way around towards them, Gambit making sure to stand between her and the edge of the ice, and Deadpool following at a surprisingly measured pace, intermittently firing off bursts of gunfire to keep the symbiote preoccupied. And it most certainly was that, with the fourth member of that little group darting in and out, feinting and striking whenever he could. This should have been lethally ineffective, given his size, predictable rhythm, and only very basic knowledge of how to throw a punch. However, not only was he extraordinarily fast and impossibly agile, he seemed to have a knack for avoiding blows and blasts by a hair's breadth.

"Hey, uh, Captain America," the young woman said. "I'm… well, I'm a friend of, uh, Carol's."

Steve frowned at her, then glanced over at the dancing figure on the ice. "And of Mr Parker, I assume?" he asked, nodding at the remarkable figure, while wondering how the hell that had happened. He knew that the kid had retained some traits from his brush with vampirism, but this was something else. For one thing, unless he was much mistaken, he was punching like a teenage Asgardian.

"Uh, yeah," she said, and reached up, fumbling with the mask. "I'm Monica. Monica Rambeau. And I have no idea how I ended up in this gear, sorry."

"Blame Doctor Strange," Dresden grumbled. "It's usually his fault."

"Almost always, these days," Lupin agreed tiredly.

"Probably," Monica said, in a way that said she had, in fact, met Strange, and ran her hands through her hair. "Though I'll say this: for an old white guy, he really knows how to braid."

"Doctor Strange is a man of many talents," Steve said. "He sent you to us." He looked up. "Is Carol okay?"

"She is now she's got the Ring. Actually, she sort of is the Ring," Monica said. "I think. It got weird. Er. Weirder."

"De Lantern," Gambit corrected. "She's de Lantern – Nimue broke the original. Her shield, it morphs – it a suit at de moment."

"And it absorbs energy," Steve finished, nodding. "Nimue?"

"The Nimue, apparently," Monica said. "Which is meant to be incredibly significant. All I know is that the bitch is scary."

"That would explain what Wanda's been saying about the magic style," Dresden said. "Oh, this is not good."

"How bad?" Steve asked.

"She fought Merlin," Lupin said grimly. "What happened next is unclear, but…" He looked at Steve. "Nimue was an infamous Dark Lady, albeit one mainly overshadowed by Morgana, a generation later. She was not renowned as a duellist, but clearly she survived Merlin's wrath, which is not easily done. She was also a High Priestess of the Old Religion – earth mages, closely tied to the magic of the natural world and the control of supernatural creatures. Which, in fact, explains most of what is going on right now – and, I suspect, a lot of what happened at Pegasus."

"SOME HELP! HERE! PLEASE!"

Steve realised to some embarrassment that he had almost forgotten the agile Mr Parker, and drew breath to bark orders when Gambit laid a hand on his arm. "Y' mind?" he asked. "We've done dis before."

Steve eyed him, then nodded. "What do you recommend?"

"I need to get close to it," Monica said. "I can get those things off people."

"How close do you need to get?" Dresden asked.

"Touching distance. Then I need to get clear, immediately."

"No problem."

"Then, if ah may, I'd like t' borrow dis, t' make sure de goop stays down," Gambit said, tapping Steve's shield. "Ah could use anythin' – one o' Deadpool's grenades, f'r instance – but it takes more charge." He cast a glance over to the increasingly annoyed monster, which was, slowly, recovering. "An' I think there's no sense in bein' conservative."

Steve handed over his shield before he finished his sentence. "Good enough for me," he said. "Okay, Mr Dresden. Open a hole."

In every respect, what happened went smoothly. The only slight glitches were the hurried summoning of Peter Parker by Lupin out of the blast radius, meaning that Steve had to hurriedly catch 130 pounds of twitchy teenager before he hit Lupin like a cannonball – 130 pounds of twitchy teenager which immediately clung to him like a startled cat – and a near miss with a hastily formed claw lashing through Dresden's quickly closed portal.

Otherwise, they caught the monster entirely off-guard, the separation happening in a flash of rather familiar blue light, before Gambit spun like a dancer and hurled Steve's faintly glowing shield like a rogue bandsaw, soaring over the slumped host's right shoulder and into the central mass of the writhing symbiote. Even the sound of the explosion, like the chime of a vast bell, was somehow smooth.

Unfortunately, as Steve realised when he went to help haul an exhausted, emaciated, and surprisingly dignified Sasquatch out of the ice, he somehow doubted that they would be so lucky with the rest.

OoOoO

Steve might have been gratified to know that he wasn't the only for whom things were not going smoothly. Namely, Nimue.

As she was being unhappily reminded, magical combat was a matter of creativity, knowledge, and insight as much as raw power. While she didn't lack creativity, her insight was hit and miss, and her knowledge – in this particular area – was sorely lacking. The simple fact was that she wasn't a duellist by nature, and never had been, and had thus never really polished her one-on-one combat skills against a fellow sorcerer. There simply hadn't been much call for that sort of thing in her day: most combat was against rogue magical creatures, or non-magical soldiers. While there was some overlap, they were by no means the same thing.

This would be unfortunate at any time, but not insurmountable, especially not with the raw power at her beck and call. What need did one have for mastery of the duelling arts when the very world bent to one's whim? When the Moon itself spun on its axis at her will, from almost waned to freshly full, and forests flourished on Mars, what matter a lack of some sorcerous sleight of hand? When raw magic raised lands long sunken into sea and sand, resurrecting kingdoms long lost at her subconscious command, who could impede her will?

The answer, at this point, might be a little obvious.

Nimue had much she wanted to do, much that required her full attention – or, at least, most of it. She was also wise enough to know that turning her back on Stephen Strange was a very bad idea. For one thing, it was usually the last very bad idea that people ever had. And that was when they hadn't purposefully enraged him. She had hoped that the latter would throw him off his stride and, more to the point, make the bastard suffer. Perhaps even, a part of her thought, it might make him understand.

But it had not. The fury of Doctor Strange had frozen into something far more deadly than the wildest rampage, drawing out a smoothness in his spellwork that verged on artistry, a range of skill polished over millennia, employing magics both that she knew and that she had merely heard of, as well as some that she had never even imagined. For instance, she had heard of the Mirror Dimension, even done some experiments regarding its properties.

She had never imagined, however, that those properties could include fracturing the world like glass, no, like a vast crystalline matrix of infinite complexity, dismissing and dispelling vast amounts of the magical power that she brought to bear, so that only a fraction of a fraction of a percentage reached Strange – and even that should have vaporised the man, yet it was dismissed like a mote of dust. That same matrix was turned against her, ruby-red energy that both smashed and burned to the touch being poured into it, so it didn't merely come at one angle, or even two, but apparently from every direction at once – even from inside her very physical form.

Another spell spread all her history before her, splitting her into countless aspects from birth to rotting crone, each gazing at one another in mute horror, her awareness shattered across each of them like a boulder turned to dust, each molecule certain that it was the true boulder.

Eldritch sorceries, invocations of gods and demons she had never known, the powers of heavens and hells alike, rained down upon her in the form of blasts and bindings, ancient and terrible. They slipped around her defences, diverted her powers, and mocked her might over the natural forces with the very unnatural nature.

Gleefully outside of her frame of reference, she had to think as she had never had before, using the greater part of her vastly enhanced awareness to understand them even enough to block them, never mind beat them. None of them was individually nightmarish, and each was merely a spark as compared to the firestorms of her own spells. Yet their precision, their placement, their always seeking the umbilical cord of power that she had built, meant that she could never slack off.

Worse even than those, though, was the whispering in her ear, a voice that was always behind her, one that poured soft, cruel words into her heart in a tongue that only they understood, one that only a handful of mortals still spoke. The inexorable whispers, impossible to deafen, impossible to ignore, carried dreadful knowledge. They spoke of crimes and failures, of past mistakes and present incompetence, each phrase as artfully constructed as any spell, and far more deadly, slicing into the listener's soul. For those whispers were in the voice of Doctor Strange, and as all the world knew – the Doctor never lied.

Even Merlin had not been as terrible, not even when he had shown his true face and, with but a thought, poured fire from the sky and burned her to atoms. Merlin, after all, had been young, righteous in his anger. Strange, though, was ancient, enraged at a pain eons old, and vicious with it. His raw might was nothing to Merlin's even then, and certainly not to hers now, yet he was both no more than a shadow and a thought, and as ever-present as the fiercely shining moonlight and pouring rain, and he never, ever stopped.

But she fought. She fought and she fought, and she never relented. Sometimes with counter-spells, sometimes with stratagems, sometimes with gambles and guesses, and sometimes with sheer blind stubbornness. She would save this stupid, ungrateful world, whether it wanted it or not. All she had to do was hold on, for while in this battle, Strange held the mastery, the war was quite another matter. So far, he had called the tune. But she, and she alone, would be the conductor.

OoOoO

Carol was vaguely aware of Tony at her back as she plunged into a forested maelstrom, where every plant was trying to kill her, eat her, or transform her into something horrible. There were probably sophisticated responses and counters to all of these things, but Carol had decided that given the circumstances, she would make like Alexander and cut the knot.

Strangling tendrils, poisonous gases, treacherous footing, and monstrous flora-fauna-machina constructs swarmed her at every turn, illusion mazes trying to alter her path, but Carol simply charged straight ahead, running on earth, water, and air, letting a bow-wave of power slice through anything in her way like the reaper's scythe. Other attacks came from around and above; giant monsters like smaller versions of the one that had tangled with Alec, and humming drones made of glowing flesh that was neither plant nor animal and armoured in articulated metal that fired beams of deadly energy in a whole strobed selection of colours, to name but two. But none came close, with the characteristic sounds of repulsor blasts and Destroyer cannons, interspersed with the smacking sound of adamantium encased fists turning their target to pulp, picking them all off with systematic brutality.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only a couple of minutes, Carol reached a clearing, at the start of which stood what looked very much like a tree. A familiar tree, in fact.

"Just like that one I saw when I was a tree," she murmured. "But… different."

"Excuse me, when you were a what?"

Carol startled, whirling round to see Tony. "Uh. Not the time," she said. "Hey, is that the suit you wore in London?"

"Completed and improved. Kind of like yours," he said.

"Yeah, about that…"

"It's your shield," Tony said. Carol gaped. "Uru has a pretty specific signature, and considering all the weird crap that Mjolnir can do, I figured it'd be more than just a magic frisbee."

"… You know what, fair guess," Carol said, before looking up at the tree. It looked almost… designed, a spire reaching up like the Tower of Babel into the heavens. "Speaking of which, this isn't just a tree."

"It's broadcasting," Tony confirmed. "And it's some kind of amplifier."

"Yeah, for Nimue's spell," Carol said. "Well. Spells."

"Nimue. As in, Lady of the Lake, and all that King Arthur crap?"

"Not sure about the Lady of the Lake stuff, but she definitely knew Merlin," Carol said. "Short version, she pissed him off, he roasted her ass. She survived, as a sort of ghost. Pegasus stirred her up when they were looking for magic toys, she came back with a fraction of her powers, infiltrated Pegasus, and blew it up as part of a scheme to get her powers back. Which, as you can see, worked. Eventually."

"Better late than never," Tony quipped.

"I'd go with better 'never', but yeah," Carol said distractedly. "Okay… I'm no great shakes at this magic stuff, but if I do this…"

She reached out, pressing hands and mind against the tree and into it, bulling her way through the initial resistance, piggy-backing on the broadcast. As soon as she did, a whole panorama opened up before her.

A crackling blur of golden lightning criss-crossing the city, covering water and land with equal ease; Jean-Paul, appearing and disappearing in a literal flash, removing people from danger.

Wanda floating imperiously on high, wreathed in crimson red power, hands weaving through liquid movements so fast that instead of two, there seemed to be four, no, eight, each casting their own spell. With each flickered gesture, wedges of spell-work struck out with methodical, workmanlike precision, striking at gathering clouds of wild magic, scattering them to the winds.

Tony – no, the Iron Legion, his drones, directed by him and controlled by JARVIS, spread across the city; escorting, emergency engineering by reshaping themselves into structural reinforcements, and engaging archangels and drones as appropriate.

A red and blue streak on the streets, following Jean-Paul's lightning bolt; someone she didn't recognise, someone who to magical eyes shone like the sun at midday.

A tidal wave bearing down on the city, howling shapes contorting within it as it curled up and over the battered tidal defences; a huge green shape, leaping and brachiating from roof to roof, bounding to the forefront, bellowing a battle-cry, before bringing together open palms in a thunder-clap, one that unleashed a shockwave that shook the city and proved that the Hulk was no Canute – for he was the Strongest There Is, and the sea would obey him.

Gambit, Monica, Peter, and Deadpool – all much cleaned up, and in fancy costumes, no less (Strange, probably). In a sort of rendezvous with Steve, Lupin, and someone she vaguely recognised as Harry Dresden, Wanda's boyfriend. A spike of fear; they were back to back, up against a ring of withered looking corpses, as frail as scarecrows, only given bulk by crude armour plating, covering half their faces, and in-built weapons. Despite their appearance, each was a deep pool of vile, empty power, darkness and decay and cold hunger in animated form.

Maddie and Jean, sculptures of energy rather than living beings, beacons of psychic power, both scorching their way down the coast so fast that the air itself screamed in their wake.

Harry, fighting a grinning angel of rune-scribed bronze in the skies above a ruined fortress, the very world shattering and warping around them, and a distinct feeling of exasperation because couldn't she leave him alone for five minutes?

The images carried her away before she could focus further, flickering faster and faster, like the frames of a film, except that each image was different, each containing a different perspective, a different sense. The smell of flowers on the Moon. The groan of forests on Mars. The steady boiling roar of water banished from long buried lands in cold and distant seas as they rose once more. The eerie song of the planets, waltzing into a neat and harmonious line.

And people. People of all ages, sexes, colours, and creeds, suddenly manifesting powers they had little hope of understanding; a little old lady accidentally summoning a demon and chasing it out the back door, a small child transforming into a dragon and taking flight, a middle-aged goth gazing in horror at now transparent hands and a comatose body, it went on and on. All these people, all that dormant potential, now ignited. Ignited by magic pouring up and down and all around from a brewing storm fit to reshape a galaxy.

Fit, in fact, to tear open a world.

Carol's eyes widened in horror.

"No," she whispered.

And this time, she did not merely piggyback on the broadcast, letting her mind flow with it. Instead, she stood against it, planting herself like a tree against the flood, bringing all the power of the Green Lantern down in a mystical piledriver against the root of Nimue's spell, pitting her will against the witch's in a clash of titanic powers as she tried to do what Alan Scott had over twenty years ago.

In other words, she did exactly what she shouldn't have.

For a moment, nothing happened, as two equally matched forces hung in an instant of perfect balance. Then, the balance tipped, by a tiniest fragment of a thought, in the smallest fraction of an instant.

A second after the act, no, a second before, a bubble expanded, engulfing the city, simultaneously electric blue and emerald green, and purest white, expanding like a blast field. Then, abruptly, it collapsed. And the whole world, from pole to pole, antipode to antipode, rippled.

And then, there was silence. Purest, most absolute, silence, the kind of silence that had reigned before creation, when all hung in the balance and everything was still to be decided.

Later recollections would agree that first, there was light, a pale lambent glow emerging from ley lines and convergences, subsuming all previous auras and auroras.

Then, there was a word. A few, in fact, only heard in New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, and recorded for posterity by those who – on later being interviewed – couldn't quite believe their ears.

"C Minor. Put it in C Minor…"

Yes. That reference is to exactly what you think it is. Strange's sense of humour is exactly that warped – though it also has a hidden meaning or two, because let's face it, the man's got so twisty over the years that he can hardly brush his teeth without adding complexities to it.