It was like stepping into the void. He had taken Aristelle's hand, and with no small amount of apprehension, stepped into that fold between worlds and was surrounded by endless black. And then he was falling. But was it falling if there was no horizon in this place that existed between existence?
And just when he thought he might go mad from the feel of it pulling at his skin, his bones, the very atoms of his makeup, his feet touched solid ground. Glass scrapped beneath the soles of his boots as he took a staggering step. His head swam, but as his vision cleared he could see Miranda several feet ahead of him.
He watched her shoulders rise with one great breath, and then every bit of vehement seemed to exhale from her body. Her hands fell to her side as her shoulders collapsed in on herself. She fell to one knee, then the other touched down, hard.
Aristelle drew in sharp breath beside him, and the room around him took shape. Desolation. It had been torn so far down to the barest of bones that Bucky wasn't even sure how it had looked when it had been whole.
It was a massive stone cavern, carved so jaggedly from the rock it looked like something very old, and very large had clawed at the earth. Cracks broke across the floor, and at several points it looked as though something had emerged from the stone, pushing up and out from the darkness that lay beneath.
But worst of all, was the blood.
I coated the floor like an abstract painting, a depiction of the horrors that had occurred here hours before.
"Mor!" Her name was little more than a broken sob.
A gangly, dark skinned girl staggered toward her, pushing away from a small clustered group of girls. The bright blonde of her curls had been stained red near her temple. She clutched at Miranda, dropping to her knees beside her. Bucky watched Miranda take in the room. The chalked lines etched into the floor that converged in a single raised dais. But her eyes caught on the bodies on the far end of the room.
"No." That single word from Miranda was little more than a whisper. But Bucky heard it, could feel it hit the bottom of his stomach like a boulder.
Miranda pulled herself to her feet, tears on her cheeks. "No."
Set slightly apart from the others was a petite Asian girl. The skin across her throat was torn, the muscle and tendons pulled out over dip between her collar bones, and the sight of it stuck Bucky hard. Even after all these years, seeing someone's insides on their outsides grated hard against his senses with the sheer wrongness of it.
Miranda grasped the girl's slender shoulders and dropped her forehead down to her chest. She was shaking, and Bucky ached to go to her, but could not bear to step inside such a private, brutal moment.
Sitting back on her heels, Miranda pressed her hands over her mouth and took in a shake breath. "What happened here?"
"You weren't here." A dark haired girl seethed from where she stood huddled amongst her shell shocked companions. "That's what happened."
"Dom!" Someone hissed.
"It was Olcora." Aristelle said. She sounded exhausted. "A demon attack. But I have no idea how they got in here. I wasn't here when it all started."
Bucky moved forward slowly, stepping toward one of the ruptures in the ground. Every muscle in his body clenched, fighting to pull him back from the edge as he started down into the bottomless tunnel.
"I think I have an idea," Miranda said quietly, and she settled her fingertips on the dead girl's chest.
Every eye narrowed its focus to her as she spoke.
"Wake."
Her voice felt otherworldly against his skin, as though it were a sound his ears had never heard. It filled the entirety of his body and he felt something deep inside himself strive to answer its call. He could feel his soul straining towards her, promising itself to her every whim if only it could separate itself from his body. The air pulled tight, and perfect silence settled against its surface.
And then she was screaming.
Bucky jolted forward a step, thinking at first that it was Miranda. But it was not. It was the girl on the floor in front of her. The dead girl. With her throat ripped out. Slender hands reached up to grasp the column of her throat, blood and tissue welling between her fingers, and she turned her head towards Miranda, wide eyes ablaze with fear.
Impossible.
"Sh," Miranda soothed, brushing her fingers over the girl's forehead, tucking back a clump hair matted with blood. "It's alright."
Tears cut a path through the grime on the girl's face. "I'm so sorry."
"It's alright, Eiko."
"You told us to take it apart." A sob bubbled up. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. "We should have listened. We didn't listen."
"She came through the portal didn't she?" Miranda asked, her voice gentle.
"She shouldn't have been able to come through the portal? How did she come through?"
Miranda picked up a piece of glass from beside her. It was scattered across the room like whatever it had once been had been very large, and it had exploded.
"The glass." Aristelle's voice shook slightly. "That's what's left of the portal?"
"I think...I think we gave her a very long time to think. Alone in that endless dark." Miranda said. "I think I should have settled this with a more permanent solution."
"Miranda," Aristelle stepped towards her. She was hugging herself, knuckles white with the force of her hold on herself. "You can't mean that."
"She has no regard for human lives, Aristelle. As long as she lives, this will never stop." Miranda laid her palm on the girl's heaving chest, quieting her sobs. "Go now soldier. You have served us bravely. And now, I bid you farewell."
"No. Please." The girl begged, gripping Miranda's arm with a bloodied hand. "
"I can't go back there. I...I'm afraid."
Miranda's smile ached with a thousand losses, tears glittering in ethereal blue light of the space. "Don't be afraid. I will see you again one day, my warrior."
The girl gasped one final ragged breath and then lay still. Miranda crumpled forward, her fingers curling into fists.
"This is your fault. All of it!" The dark hair girl from before broke from the group. Her accent was gruff. Russian. Bucky would have recognized that sound anywhere. "You should have been here."
The sound that ripped from Miranda was inhuman. He wasn't even sure it was a sound meant for this world. Miranda unfurled and got to her feet with an unearthly grace unbefitting the human body. Her eyes were wholly black, fingers ending in blackened, smoking talons, as though they had been dipped into fire. Razor sharp teeth flashed, her jaw more square, more powerful than it had been moments before. Bucky took in a breath, stepping back. And then it was gone. A ghost of a memory, as though it had never been. Had he imagined it? In its place was Miranda. His Miranda. The rage that cut every line of her body was palpable.
She thrust out a hand and the young Russian was flung back, her body parting the shaken girls like the Red Sea. They stumbled back, crying out as the girl's body connected with the stone wall behind them.
"Miranda," He called out to her, sharp and warning. But she did not hear him. Could not hear him over the roar of hurt and anger and loss.
"You were nothing when I came for you. Less than nothing," Miranda roared. The girl clawed at her throat, screaming in frustration as her body writhed, fighting to free itself from invisible hands. "You begged for this job. To be a part of this world. Don't think I don't know it was your own fear that strove you to strike that bargain and sell your soul to me."
"I am nothing like you," she spat.
Miranda's smile was a knife to the throat. "We are all sinners here. Don't think yourself clean just because we can no longer see the dirt. I know what you did in that place. That room with walls painted in blood. What they made you."
"Go to hell."
"Oh darling. I was born there." Her grin was fiendish. "I'm going to make this offer once. And only once. We have stepped into the 11th hour now, Dom. What needs to be done cannot happen if I have to keep an eye on Judas. You know what the position offers, what it means to be a Watchmen, and you know what the alternative is."
Miranda opened her hand and let it drop her side. Dom fell, gracelessly, to the floor. None of the other girls made a move toward her. Dom pressed a hand to her throat, gasping.
"I will stay," Dom rasped, looking up at Miranda. "But not because of you. Because Eiko. Because those girls did not deserve to die like that. Not for some family feud."
"No they didn't," Miranda wiped Eiko's blood from her fingers. "On that, we can agree."
Something fizzled and popped behind Bucky, and he turned. It was as though someone had struck up a sparkler and held it out into the air. He stared at it for a moment, his mind entirely overwhelmed by the events of the past twenty four hours. And then it began to spiral out in great circles. Dr. Strange. The image at the center of the sparks shifted and dissolved until he saw the dark interior of the sorcerer's home.
Beside him stood a woman. Wanda Maximoff. She was bruised, and blood had dried on cheek where it had seeped from a cut there.
"I had hoped, maybe," The sorcerer said, stepping through the portal and onto the broken shards scattered across the cavern floor. "That you would be able to handle this on your own. I'm afraid we have nearly reached our quota one world ending for this century, dark one."
Miranda let out a long, slow breath. A smoker's exhale. "I know you have been tracking the progress, Merlin. I can feel your power poking about. And its good to see you out of your cage, witch."
Wanda bared her teeth in sneer, "You kept me captive for seven days."
Miranda shrugged a shoulder, "I doubt you made it twenty four hours in that pentagram before Eiko let you out. She's not a great one for prison guard duty."
"That's beside the point."
"You were where you needed to be, Wanda," Miranda sighed. "You were too powerful a pawn to let go before Olcora made her first attempt at the Convergence. But you would have never stayed if I asked."
"You don't know that."
"You have empathic abilities, Wanda. What I am, what I can do, it will never feel good to you. You would never trust me. But Eiko, she's a good soul. And you knew that from the beginning."
"And me?" Dr. Strange asked. "Did you have some grand scheme to wrap me up in this."
Miranda shrugged a shoulder. "Nah. I really just don't like your face. It's a little weasley."
His eyes narrowed on her, and Bucky stepped between them. "Okay, guys. The fact remains that Olcora is still at large. She's already made a play at this place once. The Convegence?" He said slowly, questioning himself. "What is this place? Why does she want it so bad?"
Miranda's eyes moved to the dais at the center of the room. "It is one of the few things powerful enough to open the doorway to Terra's prison. And she will be back for her. She won't stand a chance without her."