Now, we take the next step. Most of this hasn't been from Harry's perspective, as such, and it's been Sunniva out of her depth and off her home turf, learning more than teaching. Now, we flip the script. Now, we take things to somewhere a bit more familiar…
The vista, at first, seemed to be an unprepossessing black, speckled with shards of light – stars, cosmic furnaces that blazed in defiance of the endless night swirled by tides beyond comprehension into spirals and ellipses, some most irregular, and many definitely peculiar. The interplay of forces, of condensed power bending space itself, held them together as each group danced attendance in a stately ring around a vast centre, a portal of who knew what to who knew where.
And that was just the beginning of the wonders.
To those who could see, pillars of shimmering dust and condensed elements, unformed potential swirled by solar winds like a summer's breeze into art that only nature could produce. White mirrors of dark portals, invisible to simple mortal eyes, poured forth the fires of creation, furnaces in which all was transmuted and remade. The song of the cosmos, carried on a wave of cooled light across an invisible spectrum, telling a story of the beginning.
Scattered amongst them all, worlds. Worlds, moons, bodies from the smallest fragment of dust floating aimlessly through the void to the grandest giant of burning gas, faltering on the cusp of rebirth as a star. Some, many, shimmering gems of all colour, full of potential. In some fewer, though still many, oh so very many, that potential was realised in that most precious of things.
Life.
Life, constant and ever-changing, always ending yet always enduring, Life! It was persistent, wondrous, and infectious so much so that even fundamental forces took on lives of their own, while others aspired to be those forces, each rising and descending in their turn, and all, all moving to the patterns of the mortal universe, the eternal cycle of Creation and Destruction.
Creation and Destruction.
Life and Fire.
One inevitably followed the other.
"And that, nephew," Sunniva said, with the soft tones of one imparting a fundamental truth. "Is the embodiment of what we are."
"It's…"
"Beautiful? Or terrifying?"
"Both," Harry said, letting his eyes – his eyes, and senses that mapped onto them for ease of perception and understanding – pan across galaxies, before carefully drawing back as she had shown him, retracting his perceptions into a more normal range. While that was far beyond any he'd had before, the rest was background noise. "And neither. Mostly, it's a lot."
Sunniva let out a huff of laughter. "Yes, I suppose it is," she said. "You will adjust. I did. I think we all do."
"Not all of us," Harry said quietly.
His aunt shot him a look, then nodded. "Not all," she agreed.
She seemed much more confident now, he thought. On Earth, she had seemed pretty awkward a lot of the time, out of place, and doing a lot of catching up when it came to understanding things. Maybe she had been. Actually, from what she'd said and implied, she really had been. It had made her seem far younger than she was – at the very least, he'd never have imagined on first meeting her that, in this time and place, she had three centuries on his father and uncle both.
Then again, all accounts he'd had said that until very recently, his father and uncle had both acted a lot younger than they did now. Apparently, parenthood or generally being responsible for someone had that effect (Tony was a case in point).
Yet… Harry wasn't sure about that. It was part of the reason, but not all of the reason. In fact, he was pretty sure that Earth had something to do with it. It had certainly changed his aunt, some of it right in front of his eyes. She had acknowledged it herself, and that was something to think about.
However, the fact was that on Earth, she had been out of her comfort zone, an awkward young goddess learning what it meant to move among mortals and that sometimes, age both was and was not just a number.
Up in the stars, she was in her element. She was confident and assured, and more than just a goddess. She was timeless. She was, in fact, something else entirely.
And she had just shown him the beginnings of what that was like.
"I saw something like that… a while ago," he said slowly. "Hei – the God of the Watch, in my time. He shared his Sight with me. That was when I first saw the Phoenix. When I first saw anything like this." He paused. "Well, no, tell a lie. Probably the very first time was when I opened my Sight when passing through the Bifrost."
Sunniva's head snapped around, flaming hair swirling like a solar flare, and staring at him, aghast. "You what?!"
He shrugged. "I was curious."
She stared at him for another moment, then let out a gusty sigh.
"Of course you were."
He grinned. "Are you really that different, auntie?"
She eyed him. "You, nephew, are impertinent," she grumbled.
"And right."
"That too."
Harry smirked, then looked thoughtful. "Is this what you see? What we see? All the time?"
"Yes. No. Both."
Harry frowned, then thought about this, biting back his initial response. "What we see is not always what see," he said. "We filter our perceptions constantly, adjusting the focus." He smiled wryly. "My eyes used to be pretty bad. I needed glasses, with the right lenses, to correct the focus. They were corrected, and now, my eyes focus on what I need them, whether it's near or far. It's the same in the dark, though now that I think about it, my night vision is creepily good by human standards. Impossibly good."
"It isn't something you like thinking about much, is it?" Sunniva said with some sympathy, crossing her legs and floating in space beside him. It would later occur to Harry that they shouldn't be able to speak like this, in an open vacuum. And, you know, that they weren't breathing. Such rules apparently did not apply to the Phoenix.
"No, not especially," Harry admitted. "I mean, I accept the reality of it. I am half-human, half-Asgardian. Not entirely one thing, and not entirely the other, either. The only difference is that I'm used to being different from Asgardians, because I expect to be. The reverse, not so much. Strength, speed, resilience, healing, magic… all are now more than most of my human friends, but they're all human things, if you follow me. Even psionics isn't that far removed. Sort of. I know I'm different, that I have to be careful and adjust sometimes, and there's not much point in agonising over it. But sometimes…"
He trailed off, examining his fingers, his vision idly flicking through spectra, peeling away layers of visibility through flesh and bone to lightning flashes of nerves to patterns of magic and psionics… to something else entirely, made entirely of light. On a whim, he narrowed it to a point, then spread it into a star, stretching it and shaping it, mirroring it back and forth, before pausing as it snapped back. He blinked, and the perception faded, leaving his hand, plain and unadorned once more. It was also tingling.
"Shapeshifting," he muttered, flexing his fingers. "That's new."
"The essence of the Phoenix is novelty," Sunniva said simply.
"So I've heard," Harry replied. "And I think I'm only just beginning to understand. Which is both awe-inspiring and incredibly annoying."
"If it is any comfort, I felt much the same way," Sunniva replied. "Even now, after decades of wielding the Phoenix, a moment can pass, even a few months, and I can once again suddenly be faced with how much I do not know."
She tilted her head.
"To re-answer your question, yes and no. We do filter all we perceive; all that you perceived, and far, far more. I have opened your eyes so far, but there is more still to see, more to learn. Some is comparatively simple, in the form of senses you have yet to develop, senses that I am still developing. Some is apparently more prosaic, but far more profound. What I learned on Midgard, Earth, for instance. Weeks, maybe a month or two, on a planet that so many overlook, that I overlooked, and I learned so much. My whole view of the universe changed, because I learned to open my eyes and see."
She paused.
"And," she added, almost meditatively. "I hope it will be a comfort to you to know that I, too, have worried about how being a Phoenix marks me out as different. Even in Asgard, perceptions such as ours are rare to the point of being practically unique. In some ways, they truly are, because we truly are, and because of what we do and where we go. That is a truth I had been overlooking, because I did not want to acknowledge it, but it is truth nonetheless. One learned on Midgard."
"Our experiences change us," Harry mused. "Which probably means they help define us. I mean, we're who we choose to be, but that choice…"
"… is the product of how we react to our experiences," Sunniva finished. "Yes." She rested her chin in the palm of her hands, and gazed on a collapsing star about ten dozen parsecs away. Idly, she reached out, folding space, and plucked a piece of poisoned matter from the celestial furnace, then dismissed it with a snap of her fingers. "We are not alone, nephew. Not as Phoenix hosts, obviously. Even exempting you, that is the case right now."
"Wait, what?"
"The universe is a large place, nephew, and the Phoenix is a being of the higher cosmos. She can be in many places at once." She shrugged. "After all, She is Life, and like Death, she is happening everywhere. And in the final accounting, even if only an infinitesimal fraction of that life needs the Phoenix's aid, then there is still much Phoenix work to be done."
"Have you met other Phoenixes?" Harry asked suddenly. "I'm sorry, I'd never thought of it. I… I just thought we'd be rarer."
"We are rare. In a universe of hundreds upon hundreds of billions of galaxies, there are perhaps..." She closed her eyes briefly. "… four of us. Not including you." She turned to him. "The number varies; exceptionally few hosts are hosts as long as you – in the sense that you have even used your fragment, not been aware of it, much less possessed it, but merely used it. Phoenix work can be very brief, often by necessity. And the Phoenix has other agents, other aspects, to do Her work. Some great, some small."
Harry digested this. "You know, I'd never thought of it like that before," he admitted. "Either of those things. Though that does explain a few things about a certain bird I happen to know."
"Bird?" Sunniva asked, puzzled.
Harry considered his words carefully. "There's a species of bird, in my time," he said. "Almost certainly sentient, incredibly rare, and notoriously good judges of character. Their tears can cure anything short of death, they can lift impossible weights, and they're able to come back from the dead – they're literally reborn in flames, though thankfully, they grow up again quickly. It was a bit of a shock the first time I saw it. They're intensely magical, and their feathers make good wand cores – that's an empathic, or semi-sentient, magical focus. There's something about their song, too, I'd say it's a psychic effect, but I think it runs deeper."
He looked up at Sunniva, conjuring an image of Fawkes as he did.
"Fascinating," she murmured, leaning forward in interest, but not recognition.
"They're called phoenixes," he said. "I thought the name for the entity came from them, that it was just a convenient way of understanding it. I got that there was a connection, of course, that was pretty obvious –" He smiled wryly. "Well, it was obvious eventually. One attached itself to a mentor of mine, and conveniently, did so shortly after he had a run-in with the Phoenix. That same phoenix saved my life a couple of years ago, and provided the core of my wand. So, yes, obvious connection." He frowned thoughtfully. "I just never really considered what that might mean."
He looked at the image.
"I mean, I knew there were other aspects to the Phoenix, I knew there was a Dark Phoenix, and even that there's other bits of Phoenix power floating around. Potential hosts, too, unless I'm very much mistaken. I never considered something so…"
"Simple?" Sunniva suggested, now positively fascinated. "Simple yet complex, obvious yet subtle. As extensions and aspects of the Phoenix go, an entire species, no matter how small… that is something I have never seen the like of."
"It certainly gives me a whole new perspective on the whole 'there are other aspects of the Phoenix' thing," Harry remarked, dismissing the image. "But, getting back to the point, there are actual other hosts? People like us, active, on the mortal plane, right now?"
"Yes, and I was just as surprised," Sunniva said wryly. "As were others I have come across." She looked at him. "There are certain patterns in how hosts develop, some that I've picked up in you. It's not so different to how we adjust to mantles of godhood, or how mortals in general adjust to new stages in their development – whether empowered or ordinary."
"How so?" Harry asked curiously.
"To my understanding, your body, and you, adjusted to the raw power first," Sunniva explained. "Strength, resilience, healing, and, of course, Phoenix fire… the basics."
"Pretty much exactly," Harry agreed. "Mostly comparatively discreet lashing out if I was attacked, mental defence, that sort of thing."
Sunniva nodded. "They are both a survival mechanism and a basic template to build upon, with two fundamental functions: self-defence and threat elimination," she said. "That is the initial stage, and a considerable proportion of Phoenix hosts never progress beyond it – the threat is often open and obvious, merely requiring raw power to handle. If the problem is a nail, then there is no need for any tool more sophisticated than a hammer."
"That makes sense," Harry muttered. "Though it still sounds risky – what if we lose control?"
"Nothing about Life is without risk," Sunniva replied simply. "Why should the Phoenix be any different?"
Harry tipped his head in acknowledgement.
"The next stages, what could be considered the fine motor control, follow the mental adjustment," she continued. "That takes more time – especially for those, like you, who began this journey as mostly or entirely mortal. You have the strength, nephew. The psionics, too, more advanced because of your natural gifts. From the other stories I have heard, you have also manifested basic life-force manipulation." She eyed him, a touch disapprovingly. "And sublimation of your physical form into pure spirit and back again. Which is, by definition, not basic."
"Honestly, I just copied the elves," Harry said, shrugging. "I'm pretty good at improvising, and I learn by doing. I'm also a pretty good mimic."
"'Pretty good', he says," she muttered. "Nephew, by all right and logic, you should not have been able to do that."
"Auntie, when it comes to me, 'right' and 'logic' are rarely involved," Harry replied. "Also, it wasn't just mimicking them, as in 'watching them and seeing what they were doing'. I'm a telepath, remember? I linked with them, and they showed me how – impressions, feelings, instincts and intuitions…"
"… and you gained not just knowledge but understanding," Sunniva finished slowly. "Of course." She smiled at him, a faint, wondering smile. "That is genuinely brilliant, nephew."
"I'd love to take the credit, but I discovered it partly by accident," Harry said dryly. "Long story short, psychic battle with someone I had a pre-existing link with, I learned to copy some of her skills. And I'd been partially trained by someone who was also linking with me to clean out a psychic parasite. And I've got a lot of experience with psychic links in general."
"And it is how Shou-Lao helped you to, well. 'Process your emotions' does not quite seem to cover it."
"That too," Harry agreed.
"Interesting," she mused. "That will make teaching you perhaps rather easier, in some ways. Perhaps harder in others, but easier in the long run."
"How do you mean?" Harry asked, puzzled.
"Well, Aurvandil," she said, a playful hint to her tone as she used the name she'd given him. "You are an intuitive learner, and instinctive. That is your approach to psionics, and I suspect to magic… and presumably, also, to the Phoenix." She examined him. "I anticipated that you would need to have your perspective broadened, to show what you are, to adjust your mindset. You begin your approach from a mortal point of view, which is understandable. Even an Asgardian point of view is, frankly, limited. I wanted to break your perception that we had, by your reckoning, any limits at all."
She looked him in the eye.
"We are Life, nephew, and we are Fire. We are the dynamo of the universe, its potential embodied. While there are technically limits, those limits are imposed only by who we are and what we are."
"I've heard similar things said about chaos magic," Harry remarked.
Sunniva narrowed her eyes. "Chthon?" she said.
"Among others," Harry said. "We met." He showed his teeth. "He regretted it."
She stared at him for a moment, then chuckled ruefully. "You must give your parents conniptions, nephew."
"Oh, you have no idea."
"Unfortunately, I think I'm getting one," she said wryly. "That would explain why there is a tinge of chaos in your aura." She waved a hand. "Your comparison is accurate enough. While the Phoenix and Chaos magic are in many ways opposed forces, one being very much of this universe and one being very much not, they are in many ways very much alike. They mirror each other – Phoenix fire burns holes in reality if it is used too intensely in one place, and chaos is an essential part of Life. In fact, it is how Life begins. And, of course, they are potentially intensely corrosive powers that can burn you up and destroy you, or turn you into the shell of something horrific."
"And I'm guessing that the other difference is that we have to play by the rules of the universe," Harry remarked. "Being part of it."
"Essentially yes," Sunniva said. "Otherwise, all that limits us is capacity, control, and comprehension. We are gods, and in many ways, beyond gods."
"I've never been totally comfortable with that, if I'm honest," Harry replied.
"Good," she said simply. "The Phoenix does not belong with those who are too comfortable with power. However, they should not be too afraid of it, either."
"I went through a whole thing with Shou-Lao about fear," Harry retorted.
"And that was fear of yourself, of what you might do to others," Sunniva said. "What I am addressing now is less fear of a lack of control over yourself, more the fact that you stand on the edge of the nest, and hesitate to spread your wings."
She rested a hand on his shoulder.
"I understand," she said gently. "It frightened me too, a little, though I was further along before I faced a next step beyond what I was comfortable with. I am, after all, Asgardian born and raised, whereas by my reckoning, you were essentially born mortal – your Asgardian side has been slower to develop. You were also raised as such. What?"
Harry had sighed. "Yes, to both of those things," he said. "Sorry, it's just that I was teaching someone else about something very similar, not so long ago. He was reluctant for many of the same reasons."
"Well, a little shared perspective never hurt anyone," she said practically. "Indeed, I am finding it quite helpful." She shook her head. "In any case, being practically limitless is frightening, because it leaves us without a framework. We are off the edge of the map, so we must make our own paths. And we do. All living beings are unique, and all take their own approach to the Phoenix."
She gestured at him.
"Your approach to the Phoenix is intuitive, as I said. Just look at you – when your mind drifts off as you contemplate your changes, yourself, and suddenly, you discover a whole new aspect to what you are. In this case, reversion to the basic energies of your form, then reshaping them on a whim. Shapeshifting on a level more fundamental than the vast majority of species in the cosmos could even conceive of," she said. "It is tied up in who you are; a psychic, which provides some framework, but also unnecessary limitation. And, more importantly, someone who is fundamentally compassionate. It speaks well of you, and following in your footsteps has taught me much, of a more… personalised approach to the Phoenix. To see the individuals, shall we say. The smaller picture."
"But now, I need to see the bigger picture," Harry said.
"It is not a criticism of your morals," Sunniva said. "Just your perspective. A personalised, mortal perspective… I have come to appreciate it. I have learned much, and I think it will teach me more. But if you approach the Phoenix solely from that limited mortal perspective, then you will fail to realise what you can truly be."
Harry swallowed a dozen knee-jerk reactions, forcing himself to think it through.
"What are you saying, precisely?" he asked in a quiet, careful voice.
Sunniva smiled and took him by both shoulders, as a whirling portal of brilliant blue-white light emerged behind her.
"I am saying that I am not going to try and pour any more philosophy into your head," she said. "Instead, I am going to take you to somewhere where there is a problem that needs solving. And I am saying… I am saying that all you need to do is stop overthinking it, nephew. Cast aside your fears, get out of your own way. Spread your wings, Aurvandil of Asgard, and show me how you fly!"
OoOoO
Okay, Harry thought. After what you said, I was expecting to be thrown in the deep end – or over the edge, as the case may be.
Something vast, squamous, and made of a twisted mockery of organic life ripped through space at angles he hadn't previously imagined, both embracing him and insinuating its way through his entire body, exerting forces sufficient to turn planets to rubble, crawling towards his very soul.
It burned.
However, Harry went on, as if that hadn't happened. It might as well have not. He reached out his thought towards a tear in space a parsec wide. An extradimensional incursion about half the size of a spiral arm galaxy was not what I was thinking of – ow!
Thirty seven point three nine three percent, actually, Sunniva replied. This is Phoenix work, it needed doing, and I believe in on the job training. Also, nephew, that is not merely a wound in our reality, but another imposing itself. You are currently embodying an aspect of our cosmos. There is an inevitable reaction.
I'm not disputing that, Harry replied. I was just thinking that – for someone so concerned with the kind of trouble I've been getting into (and you hardly know the half of it) – you don't seem that bothered about picking this. I mean, I was half expecting regenerating wounded worlds, coalescing stars, telling black holes to behave, that sort of thing. Challenges that would open my eyes to the scale of our power and the wonder of the cosmos. But no, silly me, what I was thinking: in this family, we deal with reality bending cosmic horror. How do we do it? With violence.
Do you always complain this much?
Yes and no. My options are a bit limited right now: I can't talk to my enemies, which means all my good material is wasted, my girlfriend isn't here, so flirting isn't available either, and I think we'd both be a bit tired of a running commentary of what I'm doing.
You think I won't get tired of this?
… good point.
He clenched his fist, and a well-timed supernova's flames tore through a hole in space and seared the latest intrusion. Cosmic gas, it seemed, burned like a treat.
Then again, Harry mused in a private corner of his brain, most things did. Phoenix Fire was useful like that.
However, the soul-rattling shrieking, the other cosmos expressing its wails of pain and frustrated confusion, were unnecessary. On the other hand, it gave him both a battle thrill and a chill of fear; exultation at success, instinctive terror at the response as another reality tried to impose its nature on this one.
He fed them to the Phoenix, letting them balance each other out and raise the flames higher. One of Sunniva's first telepathic lessons in this very literal firefight was the gist of her emotion balancing trick: all emotions could be used, some more easily than others.
They could cancel each other out, or at least disrupt each other – love was good for disrupting hate, hope for disrupting fear – and that had its place. But they could be used together.
It was like rigging your sails to simultaneously capture two separate winds; do it right, and you'd move faster than ever before, your travel under total – but careful – control. Do it wrong, and if you were lucky, they'd cancel each other out. If you were unlucky, you had the metaphorical mast ripped off. If you were really unlucky, you were consumed into the resulting maelstrom and became a menace to all life and existence.
Best to do it right, then.
I am making a serious point, though, he continued. Violence is something I am good at. Excessively good at. I'm doing a few new things here, but this isn't making me flex my mind too much.
Indeed it is not, and not every problem requires a sophisticated solution. But just because something works, does not mean it works well. Or at least, as well as it could. You are still thinking too small, nephew, doing what you did before but bigger. The Phoenix makes us more, it amplifies our potential. There are better ways to do this, and deep down, you know it. You aren't spreading your wings.
Harry bristled, as a bubble tried to collapse him into two-dimensions, then a singular point. It then very swiftly found out what happened when a Phoenix was compressed into a single point.
An ethereal scream thrummed through the fabric of reality, as a miniature white hole erupted, spreading wings that embraced stellar clusters, a vast bow-wave of cosmic flame. A thousand-thousand faiths were born and reborn as a colossal golden-white beak surmounted with eyes the size of emerald stars rent at the tear… and snapped it like a thread.
How's that for spreading my wings?
Better, came the pleased reply. But also reactive. And look closely, before you miss the significance. Something was different when you did it that way.
Harry frowned. Huh. That stung less than last time. He let his senses scan deeper, further, and blinked. Okay… the flames burned away the defences, almost – a matter and anti-matter reaction, that sort of thing – and meant it didn't hurt so much when I struck it directly. It was vulnerable.
He heard a psychic laugh, like flickering starlight, and a part of his awareness caught his aunt systematically searing and pruning growing bulges in space-time, her mind clearly roving elsewhere. She was looking for the source. Her use of the Phoenix allowed her to sense shattering points, vulnerabilities in space and time; to most efficiently pinpoint what could be healed, what needed to be protected, and what had to be destroyed.
It allowed her to pick out crises, snuffing them out quickly and methodically, with minimal fuss. In other words, it made her a perfect cosmic warrior. In the process, she had gained an understanding of and an insight into the Phoenix's role in and connection to the cosmos that he could not (yet) even come close to. Now that he thought about it, it also probably explained a fair bit about why she could be awkward around people.
Exactly. And this is healing, universal surgery. We work where we are needed. And we work as who we are.
She half-turned and looked at him out of the corner of her glowing white eye, ten thousand light years away, and raised an eyebrow the colour of autumn fires.
Where are you needed, nephew? Who are you?
Harry frowned again, then reached out, letting time slow around him from rushing river to a honey-like crawl. That gave him a moment to think. Sunniva had been entirely correct in that he learned quickest on the job, because the scale of the problem forced him to think on an associated scale. Yesterday, he wouldn't have imagined that he could reach across lightyears and communicate across galaxies the way he would across a room, Phoenix or not, but now he was. It helped that, apparently, so far as the Phoenix was concerned, physical distance was a relative and entirely mutable concept.
However, the simple fact was that Sunniva had decades of experience at this and millennia of experience being a god and he did not. Cosmic senses were a norm for her, ditto following the guidance and instincts of the universe as whispered through the Phoenix (which, he knew, would inevitably lead to a million Star Wars jokes from Carol – just her, if he was lucky).
She could multitask more or less effortlessly, while he could follow the instincts just fine, and… well, he'd been adjusting. That was a large part of why he was handling more or less what very little got past her guard, or was already badly wounded. It was stuff that she could handle herself, if needs be.
Part of it was sort of like cats bringing home half-dead prey for their kittens to practice finishing off. At the same time, though, he also got the feeling that this was another test, challenging him to think. If this was easy, then what was he missing?
However, quite conveniently, the Phoenix was quite amenable to boosting little things like time magic, buying him time for his mind to rove into that strange sort of cosmic awareness, almost a meta-telepathy that tapped into the universe. He was pretty sure he'd heard of it before; Intellectus, sort of like a limited form of omniscience (or, to use Wanda's relayed phrasing, 'cosmic google'). It was a bit more intuitive than that, but even so, like google, you needed at least a general idea of what you were looking for.
Of course, some questions were a little more existential.
"'Who are you'," he muttered, surveying the incursion with mounting frustration. A million worlds twisted and warped, and a million responses came to meet them, burning them out on instinct, but it barely slowed them, and the tide that powered them was only growing stronger. "Great. Just what I need to work out. 'On the job training', my arse. Why can't there ever be a simple – oh."
He sighed and cast his eyes upwards, beyond the cosmos, beyond the boundaries of the universe, its pockets and parasites, its mirrors and mimics and skin, to the edge of Eternity and the Mystery, the Far Shore of all journeys… and found himself staring into a dimension of pure blinding white light.
Harry stared into the anti-void, the Heart of Creation, from which all light and life issued, and spoke.
"I'm an idiot."
Sometimes, he realised, things really were that simple.
"Be myself," he murmured, as the tides built further in a sudden surge, vast white lines, sickly, not life-giving, opened in the skin of creation – an infection that poisoned stars and made cancers of worlds. This was the big push. Normally, he'd have turned and joined his aunt, wielding flame and fury at her side against whatever she was facing, as she hunted the heart of this. But no… that was not his role. Not this time.
Harry was many things.
'Warrior' was but one of them.
"Be myself," he murmured, as he focused on one world in particular, a lush and beautiful world filled with inhabitants as gentle in nature as they were in appearance. There was something familiar about it, as if from a dream or a memory… or perhaps a vision.
A world and inhabitants who were being ripped apart from the inside, twisted and altered by an uncaring and vicious predator cosmos, weeping and screaming in fear and begging for help. Harry's fists clenched. There was something familiar about that as well.
"Be myself," he said for a third and final time, as his eyes blazed with the white fire of creation and his lips twitched into a devil-may-care smile. "Okay. I can work with that."
OoOoO
Some would say it came as a firestorm in the dead grass.
Some would say it came as a light in the darkness.
Some would say it came as whisper in the soul.
Those more philosophical would say that it came as all of those and far, far more.
They would be entirely correct.
It was a firestorm in the dead grass, it was a light in the darkness, it was a whisper in the soul, and it resonated across half a galaxy.
Its source?
A boy-god who came to earth, clad in green fire and golden light, and knelt before an alien child, who wept in fear and pain as the first beginnings of a transformation and infection began to stir within them. There was a war in the heavens, but that was not his concern. That was the province of another, and it was safely in her hands.
Time slowed around them as he laid a hand whose grip could forge stars, yet whose touch was as gentle as the faintest drizzle, on the child's brow. Light shone, warm and bright as it curled around the child's soul, and faded, and the pain was no more.
The child asked, in awe, who this being was. Were they a god? Why had they descended from the heavens? Oh, and thankyouthankyouthank –
The last was stopped with a smile and a gentle thought. Then, he spoke. If a candle could speak, it would speak as this, a whisper from one soul to another, as equals.
"I am someone who can help. I am someone who wishes to save your world. However, I cannot do it alone. Not if I wish to do it properly. Will you help me?"
The answer was clear and unequivocal, overflowing with the uncomplicated gratitude, curiosity, and certainty of a child. That received a gentle smile in turn.
"Thank you."
What do I need to do? the child asked, confusion and insecurity creeping in as time began to speed up again. What can I do?
This time, when the voice whispered again, it was not just to one child.
It was a whisper that grew in the telling, across a world, then across a sector, then half a galaxy, from regions corrupted all the way to regions thus far unmarred, travelling through the meta-minds of the cosmic unconscious.
It spread like a wildfire, untamed, untrammelled, and unstoppable, entering all hearts that desired to live and finding a welcome home. A trillion souls, from smallest child to mightiest Worldmind, heard that whisper.
And they answered.
"Look to the skies… and let hope burn bright."
In an instant, and instant captured in a slice of time across the universe, a trillion new stars burst into life, and a trillion voices spoke their defiance against an intruder of corruption in a voice of fire.
And for a moment, just a moment, as wings spread from galactic rim to galactic rim, a beak opened wide, and a Goddess of Fire took the opportunity to strike at the heart of the invader embodied… the universe sang.
OoOoO
Sunniva felt it in her bones, in her very soul, and smiled with pride as she felt light spread from world to world across the stars, a combined defiance that reasserted their reality, searing all but the core breaches, inverting them with its sheer force, forcing them to snap shut as the other reality reeled back.
She struck for the last time, picking her opening flawlessly, driving a burning glaive in deep through warped matter and reality itself, lancing a wound, cutting out a cancer, and twisting like an oyster knife. As she did, the song of the universe reached its highest note, striking a perfect counterpoint to the Beast of Annihilation's screams.
They reached a fever pitch, and then the thwarted and doomed howls of an alien reality were cut off in an instant, its Will fragmented and shattered before her as its constituent dimensions were torn to shreds from within and its resistance was broken with an explosion like a supernova.
She turned and her smile widened in wonder and delight at what she saw. The vast Phoenix began to fade from purest white fire to the shimmering multi-hued nebulae, as varied as the colours of the flame itself, and her nephew, clad in the green-gold aspect of the Phoenix-Creator and surrounded by oddly shaped but strangely sweet looking mortal creatures, all cheering as the embers of the Phoenix faded from their breasts, like all the others so touched, and their saviour caught his breath. She looked at her nephew across the rim of a galaxy, scores of thousands of light years, and met his gaze.
Well done, she whispered across the star-ways. It was a prosaic way to express feelings of such pride, pride beyond words in even the tongues of gods, so instead, she let him feel it. A small part of her then regretted it, as he was promptly knocked flat on his back, eyes wide, hair standing on end. He may, also, have looked a tiny bit scorched.
Oops.
"Sorry," she said, warm red of her aspect of the Phoenix-Destroyer shimmering to lush emerald green. "I think I may have overdone it. But, well." She scooped him up into a tight hug. "I am so proud of you, nephew," she said fiercely.
"I just followed your advice, auntie," he replied, muffled slightly by her hair. "Even if it was vague."
"It was simple, and the answers to the most profound questions are often just that," she replied. "I did not bring you here either to see you do more of what you knew you could, or to teach you techniques, to try make you into me." She leaned back and took him by the shoulders. "I am here to help you find your potential. To turn you, into you."
She gestured out across the galaxy; wounded and mourning, but healing and celebrating too, as fears of unstoppable darkness had been replaced by wonder at the light of the divine, light that they had shared.
"And I succeeded," she said, and laughed in delight. "You were true to yourself and look at what you did, Aurvandil! Look at what you achieved when, without doubts or preconceptions, you got out of your own way. When you let go and spread your wings and chose to just be."
Harry looked up and stared. Then, he smiled slightly. "Yeah. It wasn't bad, was it?"
Sunniva looked puzzled for a moment, then caught the gist of his meaning, and rolled her eyes fondly. "Not bad at all, nephew," she said. "Not bad at all. And this is only the beginning."
Harry grinned at her, and reached down to gently rub the head of one of the small aliens, a child, the adults having withdrawn to a respectful distance to allow what were quite obviously kin to reunite (which was only good manners, even when it wasn't obvious that these were beings of cosmic significance), and to start planning the local equivalent of a drunken party. Then, with a smile and a gentle prod, he sent the child running off giggling in delight after their parents.
"The sky is different," he remarked, squinting upwards as the crowds dispersed.
"The wounds are sealed, the damage healed, but scars remain," Sunniva said. "Even the finest healing often leaves a scar."
Harry's expression soured. "Tell me about it," he muttered.
"A chunk of space-time was devoured; absorbed or overwritten, or something else entirely," she continued, shooting him a brief look. "It is gone, and many scores of thousands of worlds are gone with it. We can defend, destroy, and heal, nephew. We can work miracles. But we cannot restore what is gone entirely. Even we must bow to an essential truth: everything has its time. And everything ends."
"No need to let that happen too quickly, though."
She laughed softly. "None at all," she replied. "Death is a friend, even family of a sort to the likes of us. We are of the Phoenix, and we have a reprieve, but only up to a point. We will all see her one day. But, as you say – there is no need to let that happen too quickly. And in the meantime? We embrace life, and face all that it brings with fire in our souls and hope in our hearts."
"Maybe a rest, too?" Harry asked hopefully.
"Hmm. Why not? You learned your first lesson, and you have passed two tests magnificently," she said. "You have most certainly earned it."
She paused, feeling a familiar thrum on her senses, and sighed.
"Unfortunately," she added, looking up as something colossal made the entire balance of the solar system they were in tremble with the mere gravity of its passage. "The universe seems to have its own opinions."
She soared into the heavens, and looked across the stars to see a familiar shape, of a ship unlike any other. It had existed since the beginning of time, and it would exist until the end. And so, to her regret, would its master. She feared that another lesson was coming, one far less palatable.
"Why am I not surprised?" Harry asked, as he joined her and set his eyes on a mobius strip the size of a solar system. "Which leads to the inevitable question: what, exactly, is that."
"That," Sunniva said in a low, bitter voice. "Is the other side of the coin. Creation and Destruction, they follow in an endless cycle. Life that is exhausted is recycled, so it can start anew. The harvest of the cosmos is gathered, the fields made fallow so they can recover. The garden is trimmed so it may bloom."
She spat.
"A thousand platitudes to justify the existence of something that is abhorrent," she said, as something the size of a small star emerged from it,. "Something made all the worse by the fact that those platitudes are true, for abhorrent or not, it is necessary."
A creature of concept that was ever varied in the eye of the beholder. He was not the black of the space between stars, but an almost regal deep purple and midnight blue, with glowing eyes the size of moons gazing from the depths of a crowned helm. It was the gaze of a cosmic predator, discerning countless subtleties, strengths and weaknesses alike. And it was set firmly on them.
"A being that is kin to us, in a sense," she went on. "Loathsome though that thought may be. The Phoenix is also named as Destruction, nephew, and behold that aspect in its truest form: Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds."
Harry's eyes went white. "It looks like he wants a word," he said, deceptively mild.
Sunniva met his gaze, eyes burning just the same, as the giant being bore down on them, and both their garments turned red once more.
"I agree," she said. "Do you have any in mind, nephew?"
"If he's what you say he is, and he's here for what he sounds like?" Harry cracked his knuckles, a fey and dangerous look on his face. "Maybe there's more dramatic ways of putting it, but what the hell. To thine own self be true, right?"
He looked up at the star-giant, before which they were mere motes of light, and narrowed his blazing eyes. Then, he spoke in a voice of fire.
"COME ON IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH!"
Oh Harry, never change.
Well, that was both fun and a bit of a pain to write. Cosmic stuff is like that, trying to nail the sense of scale, scope, and grandeur, without just seeming like you're throwing out words to the point of making them meaningless.
Now, why is Galactus here? Is he looking for worlds that are both vulnerable and newly enriched with life? Is he here to help the clean-up, to erase the corruption? Or does he have another purpose?
All important questions, with one very important qualifier: are we going to find out the answers before Harry uppercuts Galactus with a planet? Find out next time!