Chapter 11: Meeting of Minds
Already I wounded me in
the thorn of that flower Already
I gave kisses to it that had
marked our love Wanted
to be Romeu and Julieta
in the past an epic dream
that raises the loved being
my good never I loved nobody
but you he is who?
I that I never walk creating
in my dream sand Castles
loved nobody, but you he is who?
It drowned me in an illusion
sea I am its sereia Already
I gave flowers, flowers, flowers
to it that had sprouted in my
garden You played of well-me-want
and badly it wants to know of me
~anonymous
Though she had seen them in paintings hung in churches in another Earth, and in the twisted memories of Dr. Mills and Felipe, Wanda was unprepared for seeing the demons—or whatever they were—with her own eyes.
They were various sizes, ranging from as small as a cat to three times the size of a man. Their shapes were hard to distinguish, but seemed to be some combination of the hard lines and angles of an insect, the twisting curves of tentacles, and too many clawed graspers. She could see through them. Their visibility consisted of an almost ultraviolet glow and a distortion in the air. Their faces were a tangle of symmetrical lines, bulbs for eyes, and a narrow funnel for a mouth.
Wanda wasn't sure how many there were. Even as she turned to face them, more were rising from the ground and emerging from solid rock.
She lifted a rock and propelled it into the largest one, but it passed right through it. The sorcerers were having more success, using their spells to push the creatures into portals, but they were coming so fast she wasn't sure they could keep up.
"Don't let them...!"
The rest of Wong's shouted warning was lost as one of the beings latched onto Wanda, and with a noise inside her head that was more a sensation of acidity than sound, she was suddenly somewhere else.
She walked a bright Earth under a dark sky sillhouetted with pillars of blood. The giant white beings with blank faces poured up from a hole in the Earth.
She wore a scarlet crown, one she had seen herself wear in many other worlds. Beside her walked a small child: it was Clint's young son, Nate. She reached for his hand. Her own hand was covered in dark, clotted blood. Her hand fell off when he touched it.
He was lying atop a pile of dead. Her dead.
The oceans were boiling. It wasn't snow falling from the ashen sky.
The creatures crisscrossed the sky, flying freely. They became robots. They became streaks of scarlet.
She approached herself, stepping through a mirror that floated above the ground and reflected nothing. She wore a scarlet crown.
"Ya mæ mukeeb thed."
Another her walked up behind that one and killed her, stabbing her through the chest with a spear made of ice. She died silently.
The killer said. "Uy rew dyem oot gnirb thed."
Another Scarlet Witch descended from the sky and killed that one, enveloping her with the red light of their power and forcing her to her knees before she exploded in a red flash.
"Uy dlik mih."
And then it was Vision there, floating in a red glow, painfully contorted above the ground. Dead. And dying.
Wanda destroyed him.
"Don't you think I know this?" she screamed at the sky. "I have destroyed worlds! But I have saved worlds too! And I will save this one!"
She turned away, rejecting the reality of what she was seeing. But then Vision was in front of her again. Again, floating. He was alive. His soft eyes gazing into her. He reached out, placing his hand on her cheek.
She felt one word as deeply as if it had been spoken: Stay.
They could run away from this place. They could build their own world, one where they would be safe and together.
He wasn't real. He wasn't real. Vision was dead. She killed him. Whatever this was, it was a trick.
But even if he wasn't real, he seemed real. She would never get a chance to be this close to even a shadow of him again. And if she let herself believe he was real, did it matter if he wasn't?
Of course it mattered. It would be better to suffer Vision's absence the rest of her life than insult his memory by living a happy lie.
She closed her eyes and turned away from him, forcing herself not to look at him.
She had a world to save.
These demons fed off minds. That meant they were creatures of Mind. Mind was what she controled, what HYDRA's excruciating experiments had given her power over.
She reached out, only with her power, and found it, the one feeding on her. No, not feeding. Not yet. Preparing her, like a spider turning its prey's body to liquid before slurping it up.
She grasped it, grasped its essence, pure Mind.
She obliterated it.
The world of ice and blood and blank giants and piles of death faded away, and she saw the mountainside again, saw the mind creatures. One was latched onto Wong, another to Strange. The sorcerers were still, lost in the hallucinations the creatures were generating in them.
Wanda's power burst outward. She was determined to save them, to save everyone she could. She thought of the people she knew, the people still living that she cared about: Sam, Steve, Clint and Laura and their children. She was going to protect the world for them.
Other of the glowing demons came after her, and she destroyed them. Her light extinguished theirs. She destroyed the ones attacking Wong and Strange.
The largest of the creatures lunged at her from behind. She spun around and repelled it, but others were swarming around her. They created illusions, made her see a dark mist creeping around her. She ignored it. They made her see uniformed soldiers taking aim at her. She knew they weren't real—could feel that there were no minds within them. She ignored them even as she heard and saw bullets explode from their guns. She kept her attacks focused on the creatures.
She saw Wong form a ball of energy in his hands from the corner of her eye.
He was real.
"Èmó, huí xià dìyù!"
The ball of energy flew at her. She tried to redirect it with her own power, but couldn't grasp it. She dodged out of the way just in time. A hole crumbled in the rock it hit behind her.
Another ball of light flew at her. When she dodged out of the way this time, a portal opened up in front of her. She almost fell into it, and had to use her power to stop her momentum.
Wong prepared another blast. A large rock glowing red flew up to block the blast.
"Wong, it's me! It's Wanda! We're friends!"
He paused.
In a second, threads of yellow light wound around him and yanked him back. Wanda locked eyes with Strange and nodded her gratitude before he shouted, "Behind you!"
She turned to see the largest of the creatures shooting at her. It grasped her. She fell to the ground and felt illusions slip again into her mind. And this time she saw beyond them, saw the vast being that had sent out these runners, felt an inkling of its intentions. To rule the Earth. To devour all.
A burst of red flame flew from her and enveloped her attacker. When the red light faded, the creature was gone.
But her energy was flagging, and there were still six or seven more of the creatures.
Strange tossed Wong behind him and took on the creatures closest to him while Wanda fought the ones near her. When they stopped coming, when there were none left to be seen, she fell to the ground, panting in exhaustion. She looked back, and found both Strange and Wong were staring at her.
"You destoyed it," Wong stated.
She nodded. "Are you okay?"
"I think I am now." He looked around. "But I'm not sure I can tell what's real. I... Did I attack you?"
"That you did," Strange answered for her.
"I'm sorry, Wanda. I didn't know it was you."
"It's fine," she said. "I think when it realized the illusions weren't working, it tried to get you to kill me."
She regretted her wording at the horrified look on Wong's face when he realized what he might have done.
Strange stepped forward, toward her. "We saw you go down. The mind louse locked onto you and put you in a trance. We thought we would be on our own until we could free you, and that didn't happen. How did you get out?"
He sounded borderline suspicious, like he thought her snapping out of it might have been some kind of trick.
"I don't know. I mean, I do know, but I'm not sure I can explain. With my powers, when I get into people's heads, the things I see are like that. They feel real and like complete nonsense at the same time. It's like a crazy dream. And once I realized that, I realized these things are doing something similar to what I can do, so I attacked them back. What they're made of is something my power works against, if that makes sense."
"It makes perfect sense," Strange said with a thoughtful frown.
He walked away, and used his own power to drag the unconscious young woman out of the cleft in the cliff. He checked her pulse with two fingers on her neck.
"We have to get her to a hospital," he said. "And then we need to talk."
Notes:
For the nonsense speak in the hallucinations, the words are written backwards, word by word, roughly phoneticized.
"Èmó, huí xià dìyù!"="Demon, go back to hell!"