xXx
"Who are you?" Strange asked.
The figure lounging on the throne chuckled. "I am Essex, if you must have a name. I am the infamous Dark Lord you've heard so much about. I sense each of you has a question on your heart. I will answer your questions," he said with a wicked smile that triggered every instinctive alarm his guests had. "I find that answering questions leads inevitably to more questions, but never to satisfaction. I count on it. I thrive on questions. It is too soon to fight, I haven't had a good conversation in ages." He settled back on the throne with a content sigh. "You may begin, Strange."
"What are you trying to accomplish?" Strange asked.
"Ruling the world, as simple and mundane as that may be," Essex replied with a derisive curl of his lips. "Not as a figurehead or centralized figure myself, of course. From the shadows, as it has always been. Primus was going to be emperor of the world, long lived and powerful and free to move in sunlight. Instead he chooses to be a cripple and a beggar." Essex shrugged elaborately. Primus, Scott, flinched.
"We all have decisions to make. Alex was to make him stronger by opposing him, so Primus could destroy him or keep him around as a sharpening stone. But Primus couldn't even kill his brother," Essex said, shaking his head.
He smiled at Strange. "You're familiar with the method, I observed the Ancient One honing you with Mordo. Just as Mordo was furiously jealous and bitter, so too was Alex. However, you overcame Mordo. Scott lacked the skill and the nerve."
"Not exactly the same," Strange said, unsettled.
"No?" Essex replied, his face an amused question. "Have it your way."
"Why?" Strange asked. "Why are you doing this? Love of chaos?"
"Oho," Essex chuckled. "I do not love chaos. It is merely a tool. No, when I am finished there will be order. In creating powerful people with no emotional cushions, releasing them into public life, the world is made to be more dangerous. Peter knows all about that." Essex smiled patronizingly at the spider ghost. "He's stopped many an interesting conflict before it could really get going. I needed monsters, lots of them, before I could rule the world."
"People will not let themselves be conquered by beasts," Valeria said clearly.
Essex chuckled, trying to be polite and not laugh in her face. "How charming," he said. "You are right, of course. To try to take people's rights from them, you must be ready to kill most of the people. But instead to strike at them through their rights, to show them how dangerous it is to be free… why, once you've taught them the perils of freedom they will beg for walls and call it protection instead of oppression. Teach them the safety of confinement and they will stream into your lightless coffins for the living. Tell them they must allow one another to be free and they will beg to surrender their rights if only to restrain their more bold cousins." Essex's smile reeked of cruelty.
"So you make the world full of fear and then quell that fear," Strange prompted.
"Precisely," Essex nodded. "Time is on my side," he said. "Technology and paranoia are both improving all the time. I feel that in forty years or so everything will be primed if I use that time to insinuate my agents once more, rebuild all I have lost. When the time comes, I will be in readiness. This time, you lot and Stark and a handful of others blocked my every turn, for I moved too swiftly. No matter. I will vanish, and your children or grand children or great grand children will have to deal with me." He chuckled. "I have all the time in the world, and it is turning in my direction. I cannot lose. You can, at most, delay me for a few decades."
"I don't want to live in your world," Illyana snapped unsteadily.
"Hm," Essex murmured, distracted. "More guests to the party. All is still well." He turned his crimson gaze on Illyana. "You wish to know about your grandfather," he said as she visibly paled. He chuckled. "Very well. He was a lovely man, a master of monster making. He was Russian, chased out of his country by fearful peasants who learned the hard way what he was capable of. He found his way to the Nazis when the time was right, and he strove to bring about the end of the world in darkness and chill and flame. All those in his bloodline carry the taint of what he did to himself in his efforts. The Russians, bless their naive souls, thought they slew him."
Essex shook his head in mock sadness. "The KGB knew enough about what happened that when they were formed, they infected his entire bloodline with Tymaz Nine. The Second Directorate, the division in charge of internal affairs, made it a point to prime your family for assassination if need be. So if any of you followed in your grandfather's footsteps they'd have an easier time executing you." Essex watched her for a moment as she glanced nervously at Strange. Strange seemed oblivious.
"When Rasputin escaped, Belasco came looking for him," Essex continued, and Illyana stared into his eyes. She felt bloodless under his stare. Essex smiled. "Belasco and Rasputin had a deal, you see. Or maybe you don't see." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter. But the really fabulous question is, why did your Tymaz Nine activate? Was it truly an accident? Or did you do something to betray your potential? Were you being watched all those years, or did someone find you purposefully? I do love questions."
Illyana was trembling, white to the lips, unwelcome ideas beginning to swirl in her mind half formed. "Stop it," she said breathlessly.
"Leave her alone," Peter said, stepping forward.
Essex moved his chill stare to Peter, who took half a step back. "Ah yes, Peter Parker. What is it you can't remember?" he murmured. "You were fourteen years old," he prompted. "August of ninety three. Such a sad funeral. Such a tormented lad. Do you know why you are driven to be a hero?" Essex asked as he leaned forward in his throne, his fingers interlaced. His smile lodged itself in Peter's nightmares as he struggled against the unearthing of the secret Essex prodded.
"Stop it," Peter said. "Shut up." Rage sang in his blood, but it was not his rage; the spider ghost desperately threw itself against a door in the back of his mind that had been shut for a long, long time. Cold fear trickled in Peter's blood.
No more don't want to hear this don't want to talk about this no more dithered the spider ghost in the back of Peter's mind, like the tuneless hum of the wind through cables.
"It was an accident," Essex said, tasting each word before saying it. He leaned back in his throne. "Uncle Ben, another argument, you had gone off without telling anyone and he wanted answers. Wanted obedience. You… pushed… him. Harder than you meant to. Harder than you knew you could. The old man flew back," Essex said, his eyes glittering as the door in the back of Peter's mind came off its hinges and he saw memories that were his that he did not own, bundled in mental web cocoons. One peeled open.
Peter's eyes stared as he saw the old man in his stupid windbreaker, flying back with a speed too great for a fragile old form to withstand; the brick wall, that sound, that sound that made it real, as bone snapped in its meat, slamming off the immobile wall.
"You killed your uncle," Essex purred, "the closest thing you ever had to a father. In a fit of rage. And Peter Parker could not bear it. So he retreated, and the spider ghost did what must be done. Beat the old man's head in with a pipe. Took his wallet. And let Peter Parker forget, exonerated."
Peter swooned on his feet as he felt the memories thud into his mind; in prying open ancient cocoons he found the tiny skeletons of memories the spider ghost had long since hidden where he would never, ever find them. Hot liquid shame splashed through him, leaving his knees weak and his tongue foul-tasting; he wanted to die. He wanted Essex to be lying. But the truth blazed, a glowing iron searing a brand on his mind of one simple action he would never be able to take back. Peter stumbled as he thought of Aunt May; how could he face her again?
"Questions," Essex said, snuggling back so his steel rasped on his throne. "I love questions and their answers and the questions beneath the answers. Don't you?"
Illyana blinked, feeling a flash of the flurry of ninja above, entering the house. She glanced at Strange, who looked bemused. She let her astral form drift just slightly out of the back of her head, like a runner leading off a base.
Her surroundings rippled and coursed with undead energies, smearing across her astral form. Strange too was just out of his form, close enough to snap back in with the foretaste of a thought. He glanced over at Illyana.
"Can you see his escapes?" Strange's astral form murmured. Illyana looked around the room again, and saw that each of the black silky ribbons that sprang from the shoulders of Essex's outfit was tied into an escape route. The entire room was like a sieve, and he was fully equipped to escape a hundred ways.
"What do we do?" Illyana said.
"We wait for the ninja," Strange replied. "Then we try to trap him here and do battle. Better to die here than to allow him to pick us off at his leisure, which he'll do if we hurt him badly enough to be worthy of his notice."
Essex chuckled and snapped his pale fingers, so both Strange and Illyana dropped fully into their bodies.
"As it must, our conversation ends with regrets," Essex sighed. "So many secrets, and we're just scratching the surface. I know everything about all of you. It's so… so satisfying having a little chat with you in person; sometimes I forget that today is the first time we have met in person. But alas, everyone is here now, so it's time to start our little battle." His smile spread like a stain across his pallid face.
"Valeria," Strange said tersely. "Get the door."
With a wrenching snapping boom, the huge steel door ripped out of place and whooshed up into the air in the middle of the cavern, bourn aloft by a slim woman with her fingers embedded in the slab. Shadows flitted behind him. They scattered into the room as Essex rose from his throne.
The shortest ninja bowed to Strange. We know the shadow and the dark, he said in the Silent Speech. Use us.
Meanwhile, Valeria flung the steel slab at Essex. It pounded into him and bounced, awkwardly tumbling through the air trailing shattered glass from the monitors at Essex's station. Valeria was startled to see him standing unaffected. She charged down and unloaded a hit on him, zipping with incredible speed to add momentum to the train wreck she unleashed on the pale man.
His jaw whipped to the side as her fist slammed it, but he was unmoved. Three of his tendrils slithered out from his arms and punched into her, slicing easily through her flesh. She let out a shaky gasp as her vitality flowed into the dark and pale creature before her.
Essex felt his eyes grow large. "Wondrous," he breathed as her energy flowed into him.
Strange bowed his head, reaching out, resonating with the ninja. He focused through Stick, and he felt his mystic might spread across the shadows by that ninja like a paper towel over holes in a sieve; then the others, and finally Blade, Blade who knew the shadows, who was part shadow himself. Blade. Strange hardened himself to what must be done, then he touched Blade's energy to the pulsing energy web of the place.
As Blade screamed, raw power flowing into him, Illyana sprang at Essex.
"Ashia Faltine!" she invoked, lashing with her hands. Refined flickering fire rushed from her, splitting apart and bursting as Essex glanced her way. He chuckled, and black blade ribbons like the ones in Valeria punched out of computer equipment by Illyana; one of them rebounded from her mystic soul armor, the other slid in between her hip and ribs. She went very pale, gasping as she doubled over in exquisite searing pain.
"Now you," Stick murmured. He had dragged Scott with him, and he grasped him. Touched his chi meridians.
With a hoarse shout, Scott was plugged in. Scott became Primus. His eyes began crisping his eyelids here, in the heart of the web of shadows. He could not keep his eyes closed.
The blast tore across Essex and punched deep into the opposite wall. Essex spun away, startled.
"Goodbye," he said with a wicked grin. "Be seeing you."
He did not vanish. His eyes widened in alarm.
Strange dropped to one knee with the strain of holding each escape route separately and guardedly in his mind, feeling his sanity starting to creak under the strain. "Now," he whispered, for the ninja instinctively knew his plan as he tied them together with the shadowmagics that underlay the undeath of the lair.
Under his mask, Stick smiled.
Valeria felt a touch on her mind, and Strange gave her the plan full formed before he focused the whole energy of his sorcerous might on sealing Essex in the room. Valeria tore free, zipped across the cavern, swept up the steel plate, and whooped a war cry as she slashed through the air at Essex. Another blast from Primus tore him, bursting some of the steel he wore and revealing pale charred flesh beneath. Then Valeria slammed into him from behind, lifting him in the air, the vast steel door like a catcher's mitt as it was dented in a crease in the center. Valeria tucked herself, ready for the pain.
As Primus unloaded his fierce rage into Essex, the steel sprayed out from the hit, molten with the energies that blazed at it with the fury of the surface of the sun. In that blast were a hundred thousand missed sunrises, the laughter of a lover and a child, the warmth of a brother who was an ally against a cold world. All things that were gone, all things that had vanished into the web of shadows and fed this glutted thing at its center.
Valeria felt the plate giving as she pushed against insubstantial air to hold it against the blast, pain streaking her muscles.
The ribbons that held Essex to the earth and to his escapes whipped in the wind the heated steel gave off, twirled under the force of Primus's onslaught. They held, for they were more than physical material. Blade tumbled beneath Essex and swept his sword; he was one with the network, he was an aspect of the shadows of this place, and he bade them part beneath his razored blade.
Essex's scream was audible over the sound and fury of the blast that shoved him into the molten steel. He twisted clear, shimmering with heat and glowing with superheated metal. Springing from the plate and out the side of the blast, he managed to get clear and he landed gracelessly, rolling and popping up. His boots were intact, and his belt, fragments of his pants. His arms were streaked with cooling steel, his face a blasted horror as he gasped; ribbon fragments dangled and stuck out of his back. He was not recognizable.
Strange held nothing back in keeping the room sealed; he was not aware of what was happening, so fierce was his determination that this thing should not escape.
With a whisper of cloth, Stick tumbled up to Essex and touched him, here; there— He left himself too open, so eager was he to succeed. Essex plunged a hand into his torso, tearing out his heart in an effortless gesture. The old man stumbled back, legs suddenly stupid. As the small ninja collapsed in a heap of cloth and meat, his students closed in.
Primus fell back, howling as Essex was very nearly disconnected from the network and excess power surged into him.
Blade went airborne, and as he dropped he rammed his sword through Essex. The pale creature looked at him for a moment, face fixed in a snarl.
"Thank you," he whispered. Essex snatched Blade before the ninja could escape. Primus regained his feet, his head quivering with the energies it barely contained. Essex closed his eyes, and Blade knew he had half a second to earn his life. Not trying to strike Essex, he twisted and focused, and managed to slip clear of that deadly grip. He flung himself to the side, a bare fraction of a second in time.
The blast that tore from Primus burst the blind man's eyes, tore the skin of his face, seared strips of energy from his skin, and roared through Essex. The stone behind Essex was shattered, melted, thrown away as Essex bore the full brunt of the blast and was riven, disintegrated.
Just like that, the center of the web of shadows was plucked loose, and the strands began to drift and float as their tautness and purpose evaporated. Primus keeled over, smoking, flame flickering on his charred clothing.
For a moment, everything hung in space; deafened and shocked and unbalanced, everyone in the room simply tried to remember to breathe.
Then the cavern trembled, thudded. "It's merging with Prime again!" Strange shouted. "Everyone out!"
Faced with a clear need for action, Peter sprang forward. He scooped up Illyana's heavily bleeding body and glanced around. Valeria had swept the still-steaming Primus into her arms, the four ninja darted for the exit under their own power. So he turned and bounded towards the exit, scooping up Strange and whirling up the violently shaking stairs, his spider senses finding him footing and propelling him upwards inexorably.
He shot up through the trapdoor with Valeria on his heels, and as they madly propelled themselves out the front door and away from the house, ninja burst through the windows and bounded from the porch.
The ninja slid over by Strange as the entire world began to fall apart, and with a gesture he whipped a protection around them. Time made no sense, motion made no sense, then it was over. The protection faded, and Strange looked around.
A fitful breeze washed over them as they lay on the ground in a cornfield, a dozen yards from the road. They saw that the farmhouse had collapsed into a small crater, burying the chamber beneath.
"D-did we do it?" Illyana asked, her jaw trembling and her face pale. A trickle of blood slid down her cheek from the corner of her mouth. Valeria dropped to her knees, gently laying Primus down. His whole body steamed in the chilly air. The ninja stood impassive.
Strange looked over at her. "We stopped him," Strange said. He shook his head. "I think he was slain."
"This place still feels haunted," Peter murmured.
"Always will," Strange said, closing his bloodshot eyes. "It is haunted. Who knows how many thousands, millions of lives have had their energy drawn here."
"I've paid my penance," Scott said in a quavering voice. "Let me die," he begged.
Strange touched his shoulder, sensed his life and his energy and his wounds. "No," he said simply. "You will live." He eyed the blind man with the bloody sockets and the torn face. "There is good before you in your life," Strange said quietly. "Even if you can't see it."
"I'll fly him to New York," Valeria said, exhaustion in her voice. "I'll bring him to the Sanctum."
Strange nodded. "How is your wound?"
"I've had worse," she shrugged. The razored ribbons of dark energy had left slits in her body that still leaked slightly. "Give me some time and some sunlight and I'll be fine. They might scar, though."
"Where did the ninja go?" Peter said suddenly, looking around.
"Hopefully the same place we'll go, once I catch my breath," Illyana managed. "Home."
xXx
Peter stood in his apartment. He held the mesh in his hands. Quietly, he folded it—
Such anger in the old man's eyes, his feeble hands grabbing Peter's shoulders—
Peter flinched. He deliberately threw the disintegrating mesh in the trash can, his eyes haunted.
"We gotta talk," he said to the spider ghost. "About what we hide from me and what we don't hide from me. Because that's not funny. That's not okay."
What would you have said to Aunt May if I had not handled it?
"That's my problem, not yours," Peter said, his voice quaking with anger and fear and disgust and other emotions he could not name. A chill rippled through his bones as he realized he had no answer for the spider ghost's question.
Your lies are more convincing when you believe them.
"So now I think I'm a hero, I think I've got my life pretty balanced. Are you just letting me keep that impression in my mind to? Am I nothing more than camouflage? Was Kravinoff right all along?" Peter didn't shy away in time as the idea occurred to him that perhaps he wasn't using the spider ghost. Perhaps he wasn't as dominant as he thought he was.
"Anything else you're not telling me?" Peter asked, his curiosity hindered by the deep fear there might be.
The spider ghost was silent, and Peter twitched with a ripple of horror.
"Questions and answers and questions," he whispered to himself.
Peter thought of Mary Jane. Then he decided to carry the burden of his secret alone.