The Saga of Ashley the God-Butcher

Apparently, it took John Jonah Jameson Junior Junior a long time to explain things. It'd been like, twenty minutes since I'd bamfed away from Doverton and Thor hadn't caught up with me yet.

In that time I'd gotten to San Franciso, slurped up a big chunk of Grendal that Carnage was using as some kind of control tower and a few hundred codices from homeless people, rats, pigeons, and stray dogs. A man who didn't have any legs hugged me and thanked me for freeing him from that monster and that he didn't care that I was a scary dragon lady in scary armor, I was a hero.

I didn't know how to feel about that. Like, that's the kind of thing that I want to do, helping people, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel like accepting praise for what I'd done was wrong. It was a feeling I couldn't shake so I just stopped thinking about it and moved on.

Except, well, I couldn't figure out where to go. There were a bunch of codices near the New York area... And a bunch more in NYC proper. And a bunch of them, and some weak mindless symbiotes, somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. And a handful of individual symbiotes across the continent... And I think some codices in Europe? And... Wait, a codex I could feel in the Virginia area vanished, and...

So mostly I was just sitting there high up in the sky, trying to figure out what to do next. And why I was so itchy all of a sudden, I thought while trying to scratch my arm...

Wait, I just felt another codex disappear. What's going on and...?

A big flash of light, rapidly cycling through all the colors of the rainbow from red to violet and back before clearing away and revealing Thor in all his glory...

Oh my gosh, that was The Bifrost. That was so cool. This was pretty bad for me, but it was so cool, and—Mother fuck a whole bunch of codices from the New York area just vanished all at once! What's going on!?

"Look, your Highness, can we not do this right now? There's something really freaky going on and—"

"Hold," he interrupted. "Child, I shall grant you once final chance to relinquish All-Black the Necrosword."

"N~o!" I shouted. "I Need it! God is Coming and I have to kill Him!"

"Then I am afraid that we must have most unpleasant words," the God said gravely with narrowing eyes. "I hope only that you live to forgive me."

Behind him, from nowhere, appeared clouds as black as pitch as far as even my eyes could see which rapidly formed three large funnel clouds that were each illuminated by persistent streeks of white lightning that danced across every inch of their surface while hurricane-force winds blew in every direction causing his and my hair to flutter wildly.

With a boom like a crack of thunder that made my bones rattle, Thor charged me and it was all I could do to call up All-Black and block the blow from Mjolnir, the metal-like element of the hammer and the similarly infused living abyss clanging on impact so loudly that I could see people miles away on the ground reacting to it.

I pushed back against the hammer, trying to free up some space for me to fight back when that big bunch of symbiotes up in Canada suddenly vanished. My concentration was broken, my grip slipped, I stumbled back, and Thor was able to hit me again and send me flying down.

I stabled myself a few miles down, only to be surrounded by the electrified funnel clouds which all converged upon me and...

Pain. Pain, pain, pain, pain, PAIN! All I knew was pain, pain and the agonized, echoing voices of my symbiotes. My nerves were on fire and it felt like every cell in my body was being shredded to billions of pieces and...

After what felt like an eternity, I started to twitch and sit up and the blackness in my mind's eyes starts to clear up. I was in a crater somewhere in... I don't even fucking know. I blink my mighty eyes and... Oh, now my Spider-sense goes off and—

Hammer. Upside the head. Thor's feet. In my torso. Lightning. Fucking everywhere.

My life. Pain.

I didn't think. I didn't know what kind of blasts I was setting out. I just put everything I had into blasting everything around me.

When the red cleared, I got up on shaking legs and noticed Thor laying face down at the edge of the now much bigger crater.

"Finish him!" All-Black whispered in my ear. "Slay him and take his power for our own before he rouses and continues his assault against us."

"...No," I said with a blink. Honestly, my head was a little fuzzy still. "I... I don't need power that badly... and, Thor..." And hurt. everything still hurt. "that'd be wrong."

"And devouring the soul of Kassady wasn't?"

"That's different. That was... Carnage was evil, this..."

"You believe that people with power have the responsibility to use it for the benefit of others? If Thor is so good, why does he allow droughts to happen? Why allow storms to kill people or destroy cities? He's just an arrogant blowhard who throws his power around and demands praise, no different from any other god."

I didn't have an answer for that. Slowly and with shaky legs, I stepped forward and... There was a glowing circle surrounded by golden runes. I turned to face it and saw a landscape on the other side as Doctor Strange stepped through it and then it vanished.

I raised my sword. "If you're here to try and stop me then..."

He raised a hand and waved it. "No, I'm not here to stop you. I'm just here to make a bargain."

"What?" Everyone else had been trying to stop me.

"Ashley, I looked upon you with the Eye of Aggamotto," Doctor Strange said as though he was telling a five-year-old why leaves were green. "Past every illusion, every lie you tell even yourself, I've seen your core nature, the truest form of your very soul. You're one of the few people in the universe who can be trusted to use this kind of power responsibly. I just want to make sure you don't get hurt."

He pulled out an iron flask and... That's where all the symbiote stuff went over the last few minutes. I think? Maybe the Sorcerer Supreme just had a flask full of symbiotes.

"I have here five of the Venom symbiote's offspring, one of which is willing to share a host and four of which are sadly comatose after a traumatic experience. As well, several dozen mindless synthetic symbiotes, the codices of those soldiers, and several hundred other codices. Victims of Carnage, the soldiers and civilians possessed by the clone of Venom that became Mania, the sadly no-longer surviving hosts from the Symbiote invasion, the bio-mechanical constructs that were made by the people who experimented on you..." He shook the flask."I even took the liberty of grabbing a few you wouldn't have been able to get, like the elderly version of Wolverine who wore a version of Venom that was a Horseman of Apocalypse, Hercules, Drax the Destroyer, Groot, Rocket Raccoon, a couple of Skrull soldiers, a Ghost Rider down in South America, a former sorcerer supreme from ten thousand years. Did you know that Conan of Cimmeria wore a symbiote while traveling through time? I went to the effort of figuring out where his body was so to get his codex. And then there's Iron Heart, the Cosmic power of Nova, Valkyrie, and a few other heroes..."

I narrowed my eyes. "...You said you want to bargain. You're not just gonna give me enough power that I'll never be hurt again. What do you want for it?"

"Its a trick, kill him!"

"I just you to take a little break," he said gently. "Get some rest. I'm a doctor, I've only got your best interests at heart. I crashed a Maggia funeral for you," he continued. "I almost got caught desecrating General Ross's grave at Arlington." Wait, did he have his symbiote before, during, or after the time he was Red Hulk? "I'm not going to go to all of that effort and not follow through."

"You're lying, Doctor," I said while stepping towards him. "No one, no one would just give away that much power."

"Kill him! Eat him! Then you'll be Sorcerer Supreme. Doctor Ashley!"

"Doctorates don't work that way," I dismissed out loud. "and you can't get someone's job by eating them. That's stupid."

"Well, technically..." Doctor Strange started. It seemed as though he thought better than what he was going to say, though, because he changed the subject, "I'm a doctor. I've sworn the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm and everything that entails. I'm not allowed to lie about these things or try and trick you, or I'd go to jail, probably lose my medical license, and then I'd just be Strange."

I didn't laugh.

"Look. No tricks. I vow upon my life and my magic that I am acting only for your own Good and may Hoggoth, Oshtur, and Aggamotto strip me of both if I'm lying!" Doctor Strange swore with complete authority in his voice... He was a Magic Man. Oaths and Vows like that actually meant something when Magic Men said them.

"Okay. Fine. Give me the flask and I'll take a break once I take those codices..." I'll be honest, I could feel the cosmic power and magic in some of those codices and... My fingers twitched.

Doctor Strange tossed it to me underhanded and I popped the lid off and poured it out over my open mouth and... How the hell did that much fit in such a small bottle? It took a good ten minutes to get every last drop and then it all came at me all at once.

There were the memories of the Scream symbiote, whose first host was severely bipolar and periodically went murderously insane because of it... That can't possibly have been good for it. And there were its brothers and sister, whose firsts hosts had been murdered horribly by scream's host during a manic episode. They all merged together into one super symbiote and bonded with a security guard, they tried to do good and be heroes... and then he got murdered horribly by Anti-Venom and the whole thing traumatized them so badly that they went Catatonic and had been like that ever since, even after being upgraded by the US Army... Then their most recent hosts got murdered horribly. Poor babies.

I could feel traces of Toxin and two other symbiotes that didn't have names, I don't think, and a crapload of Chthonic magic between them... And, vague memories of a Skrull soldier wearing something called Sleeper, and Huh. I think I had the powers of Venom's entire family tree now.

There were more symbiotes, Divine Power, Demonic Power, Cosmic Power, Psychic Power, Magical Power, and Ungodly levels of military and martial skills and scientific knowledge and... Burning!

Anti-Venom killing Hybrid from the other side. Agent Anti-Venom healing a man's arm after it was ripped off by the Goblin King, and Klara... My friend Klara and her friend the clone of Groot saving those two little kids from some scary bikers like what was on the news. There were Anti-Venom codices in the mix and they burned and... The burning passed. Never mind, that wasn't so bad...

Though, now I had to research what happened to Klara's parents and her husband. See if I could go back in time and kill the fuck out of them without changing history because seriously what the shit? I was gonna give her an extra big hug the next time I saw her.

Nothing else was really that distinct and I figured the rush of memories was gonna end and—

"No. No! I kill your true love, you fall in love with someone else. I destroy your life and you build another! Why won't you fall down and die?!"

"Because then, Norman, you would win. And I will never give you the satisfaction."

"This fight ain't over yet-not by a long shot! Ya only won on a technicality! Ya didn't really beat me! Ya'll never beat me! I'm just too stupid… and ugly… ta know when to quit!"

"You are not a freak! You are as good and decent a man as I've ever known! They can't corrupt your love for Michael with their lies… They're the disease!"

Spider-Man. The Thing. Captain America. The three greatest heroes on Earth. The three most good people in the universe.

Three people who always did the right thing.

"I'm loyal to nothing, General.. except the Dream."

People who didn't need phenomenal cosmic powers to do good.

"My point, an' I got one, is this: Safety ain't all it's cracked up t' be. Not if ya live a life worth th' risks. Sure, I coulda wallowed over one lousy break instead o' facin' th' world. An' some days, I still do. I backslide. And yer gonna do that, too. It's hard not ta. Yer gonna get lost in th' bad. But so long as ya got folks around who love ya, ya gotta remember tomorrow c'n always be better."

"You know what comes with great responsibility, Ezekiel?" Spider-Man said to the older man.

"What?"

All that," he said with a gesture to New York City. "Good night, Ezekiel."

What am I doing?

"Ignore it!" All-Black screamed in my head. "It's a trick. False images conjured by the Sorcerer to trick you. Strike him down, slay him, you need this power—"

"NO! Shut up, I don't want to do this anymore!" I clutched my head. Why did it hurt so much?

"God is Coming, Child. Will you sit back and let him slaughter the Earth?"

"Get out! Get out, you're not welcome in here anymore!" Right now, the only thing I wanted was All-Black out.

Suddenly, I found myself grabbed from behind and held in a Full Nelson. I opened my eyes and other senses and... Thor was holding me, without a scratch on him... He'd been faking it?

Slowly, Doctor Strange walked up to me and placed a hand on my forehead. "It's time to take a nap, Ashley."

Snuggles The Symbiote

The next thought I had was that I had a killer migraine. Like... I hadn't had a headache this bad since the last time I had a sinus infection.

"Ashley? Are you okay?"

"...No," I said slowly. "I screwed up big time, Mister Snuggles and... Mister Snuggles?"

"Yes, we're here. We're sorry, when you took the Codices from Archangel it made our connection to the Klyntar Hivemind strong enough for All-Black to suppress our consciousness and manipulate you... We knew it could happen but didn't warn you."

"What?"

"We can't be sure, but we think that the consciousness of All-Black was awoken within Thor's Codex as a side effect of our taking the codices at Avenger's Mountain and it latched onto us as a potential means of recreating itself. We should have said something... Should have told you not to take more codices and explained why instead of... We've failed to protect you."

"No you didn't, I screwed up. It's not your fault and... Wait, 'we?'"

"It seems the most appropriate pronoun to use now that we have dozens of sub-minds and several subservient symbiotes within a gestalt—"

"We are NOT subservient to you!" came a sudden, feminine shriek that made me bolt up in shock.

"Who the Hell is that?"

The flesh on my neck bulged and out jutted a yellow and red-orange cord-tumor thing tipped with red symbiote face with a jagged framed by ridiculously long and puffy hair, yellow with an orange skunk stripe.

"We are Scream. The Sorcerer collected symbiotes for his trap, found us. We agreed to help in his plan if he protected us from Knull's influence and provided us with a host." Its eyes kind of narrowed and one raised up. "Our impression of you isn't good. The Benton woman would have been better, but our parent's clone wasn't willing to share."

Another neck-tumor, this one gold and blue and topped with Mister Snuggle's face popped out on the otherside."Remember, Scream, it is only our psionic resistance that is protecting you from Knull's control. The spell of protection that Strange cast upon you won't hold without the foundation that we provide. We can and will expel you, Kinslayer, if you do not behave."

The Scream tumor retreated back inside me. Mister snuggles rolled his eyespots.

"So, now I have two voices in my head and one of them doesn't like me?"

"Unfortunately, yes. It's just something we'll have to see where it goes. We're already considering people to dump her off on if this relationship proves unsustainable but for now..."

I pointed to his weird curved tumor neck. "How long have you been able to do that?"

He sort of curved like he was shrugging. "We honestly have no idea. Scream did it so we figured we could."

The room I was in was like, a fancy giant-sized bedroom with lots of decorations and I was lying in a huge bed. There was a mirror in the room and I could see that I'd been shrunk down to my normal size and all the dragon stuff was gone.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"The Sanctum Sanctorum," Mister snuggles answered. "Once his sleeping spell took effect, Doctor Strange brought us here and exorcised All-Black's consciousness as well as that of the Grendel, then preformed a psychic surgery to temporarily cripple our connection to the Klyntar hivemind as a precaution. He also, with my blessing, sealed the majority of our power."

"What!? No!" It was then that I realized that I only had normal vision, not literally every kind of super-vision in every direction. "Why?"

"He compared it to the process of detoxification," Mister Snuggles explained. "He stressed that it was not a punishment. You were, to use his terminology, Drunk with power. For the next amount of time, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, other than a few minor abilities for your protection, you are physically an ordinary girl. Afterward, our power will unseal to something that you can handle and we'll get more over time as you acclimate to it and gain the skill and maturity to handle it responsibly."

I was breathing heavily. "But, but... So much happened... It keeps happening, what if people get hurt becuase—"

"If you absolutely need it, you will temporarily get some of that power back. But only for as long as you need it, and only what you need." I hadn't even noticed that Doctor Strange had come in. He was holding a bunch of like, cardboard posters under his arm.

"But—"

He held up a hand to cut me off. "First, I'd like to apologize. When I first looked at you under the Eye of Aggamotto, I saw that you had some... Issues, if you will. I should have seen that they could lead to exactly this kind of situation and acted accordingly. Second, Ashley, it is perfectly understandable that you want to be strong enough to protect yourself and others after everything you've been through, but it's also important to maintain a healthy understanding of your limitations and to gain that strength in a healthy manner."

He conjured a comfortable looking chintz chair from thin air and sat in front of the for of the bed while holding up the cards. "Becuase of that mistake that I made, I am going to talk with your guardian and the people in charge of young heroes in your adopted homeworld and arrange for you to get therapy for those issues, and to learn how to become strong properly."

He held up one of the posters. It looked like a couple of silhouettes of me with a bunch of notes around it next to a drawing of a brain with lines between a couple of parts of it and the word "dopamine."

"And now, I'm going to talk to you about something else I should have realized was possible: Addiction. You see, when you took in the codices from Doctors Richards and McCoy, each time it caused a spike in dopamine and this... Well, in hindsight, I should have had you consume the Spider-Elf codices one at a time under observation. Now, this is partly becuase you're young and not fully developed in terms of neurology, so it might be something you grow out of but it might also be something you have to deal with for the rest of your life..."

Snuggles The Symbiote

"And of course there's a psychological factor to addiction, which isn't really my specialty, but I imagine that the issues that lead to you craving power have something to do with it in your case, and there's variation in behaviors. Some alcoholics, for example, are able to limit their drinking to times and places where drunkenness is acceptable and manage it and remain functional when not drinking even though they lack the ability to stop once they start," Doctor Strange finished as he led me into a foyer an hour later. "Others can't have so much of a taste of the stuff without spending the next month or so alternating between blackout drunk and scraping every penny to buy more liquor and so it's best if they don't drink at all. For now, I'd strongly suggest that you don't consume any codices under any circumstances but if you do, contact me. I promise I won't yell at you for it."

"...How did you find me?" Don't get me wrong, I was grateful that he was taking the time to explain it to me and not talking down to me, but after an hour I was kind of sick of talking about how I'd accidentally gotten addicted to alien cannibalism and it led me to do a bunch of dumb stuff, hurt people, and leave myself open to be exploited by an ancient murder-sword.

"Well, Magick decided that a power-drunk Godling with reality-warping powers and the knowledge of Limbo's Sorcerer Supreme was something that Earth's Sorcerer Supreme should know about, from there it was a simple as using a tracking spell to trace your steps. I caught up with Thor in Doverton and between what Magick had told me and what he knew we put together most of the story and then it as a simple matter of collecting enough powerful codices to tempt you with. A little Anti-Venom to negate All-Black's Rejuvenation, and slipping in exactly the right sets of memories to snap a little girl who admires heroes back to her senses." Doctor Strange smiled. "It does my ancient heart good to know that, for all the codices I had to steal from graves all the live ones came from people willing to donate them to help a little girl."

"You're not ancient. You're barely middle-aged," I said with a laugh.

"I was barely middle-aged in July of nineteen-sixty-three when I first sought out the Ancient One in hopes that magic could heal my hands," Strange said seriously. "Part of being the Sorcerer Supreme is that as long as I bare the title, I do not age. Between occasional time travel jaunts and trips to alternate realities with different flows of time, I'm well over five thousand years old."

"Wow."

"Incidentally, if you ever need help coping with the prospects of an indefinite natural lifespan..." He added.

"Yeah... Thank you and... Wait? You called me a Godling. I'm not a God." Even if I was ridiculously powerful to a degree that it took the Sorcerer Supreme and the All-Father working together with a bluff that didn't mean I was a God.

"You are now," Doctor Strange said casually. "At least insomuch that Hrothbart Hrothbartson, Blacksmith of a Random Village in Asgard is a God. You took in a lot of Godly Essence and Power during your rampage, so metaphysically you're an Elder God now."

I blinked. "Elder God? Like, 'Ia ia Cthu—'"

"Don't say that, please," Doctor Strange said suddenly. "Even without a divine mantle and your powers sealed as extremely as they are, someone in your state of being even saying his name could wake him and I do not want to spend a weekend in R'lyeh beating him into a coma again."

"That's all real!?" I think my jaw hit the floor. "And... Wait, what do you mean 'again?'"

"Let's just say that handling you was a relaxing break from my day job," He said like... Was he joking, I couldn't tell. "I do hope that Lisa is prepared to be her world's Sorcerer Supreme."

"...No." I said with certainty.

"No?"

"No. I'm not a God. You did not just say any of that. It didn't happen," I said.

"Ashley, I don't know what you were expecting but you basically just mainlined a small sea's worth of the essence of an ancient alien God of Darkness and Madness, much of which was modified with other, similarly powered essences. You're lucky that you can still pass for human." He sounded like a TV doctor trying to warn someone that they were killing themselves. "You don't have to worry about becoming a demon under the effects of the Hell-Mark anymore because your soul ate it. Which is concerning for several reasons, but one thing at a time."

"I reject your assertions and substitute my preferred reality," I said with more certainty. I was not a God. I was not dealing with that.

Doctor Strange pinched his nose. "...I sincerely hope that the people you work for will accept Doc Samson's credentials. It's looking like he's the only one qualified to handle your case."

After a bit of walking down a really long hallway, we finally got to the foyer. Taylor was here. And Grace. And Lisa. Grace was looking like she was desperately trying not to touch anything.

Taylor came up to me and I found myself looking at her feet. "I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

"Legally no," Taylor said. "I've been told to tell you that you're still welcome on Krakoa and you're allowed to punch Mister Sinister in the groin if he starts anything with you. And Doctor Strange said he explained what happened to everyone you attacked while you were out, but..."

"I'm grounded, aren't I?"

"We'll talk about that later," she said. "For now, I think its best that we just go home."

"Yeah." But then something occurred to me. I didn't get to say it right away though, becuase Lisa spoke up.

"Before we leave," she said, "I'd like to talk with Doctor Strange. In private. There are a billion rooms in this noneuclidian mansion, it shouldn't be too hard to find a secluded room."

"Of course," the Sorcerer agreed and then they left back the way he and I came from.

"Uh, Taylor, before we go home, I... Uh, I kind of feel really, really bad for not thinking about this until now, but before we go home..." I swallowed. "Never mind." I wasn't really in a position to be asking to do things.

"What is it?" Taylor pressed. I didn't know what kind of expression she had. I was still looking at her feet.

"It's just... I just realized that in all the time we've been here I never once thought to try and find my parents' graves..."

Taylor came down and hugged me. "Yeah. We can try and find them before we go back."