Chapter One – Fire in Novi Grad
The room smelled of smoke and iron.
Concrete lay like broken bone around the shattered window. Curtains sagged as blackened shrouds. In the center of the ruin, a boy lay sprawled across two smaller bodies, thin arms spread in a final shield against Agatha's strike. White hair clung to his forehead in damp clumps. His chest no longer moved. Ten years old—and already a martyr.
Above the city, the sky burned.
Scarlet fire cracked like a whip as Elaine Maximoff fought Agatha Harkness over the rooftops. Their voices split the storm.
"Give me the Darkhold!" Agatha roared. "Once I have it, nothing will stand in my way—not the Ancient One, not Odin, not anyone."
Elaine's reply was steel wrapped in exhaustion. "Never. It belongs to my family. We've protected the world from it for generations."
Agatha sneered, her voice like broken glass. "I killed your husband. I killed the boy. I will take everything from you, Elaine, until you hand it over."
The witch's answer was merciless. A scarlet bolt lanced downward, shattering stone and glass. The house groaned, cracked, and began to collapse.
Inside, a missile jutted from the rubble, its casing stamped with a name that seared itself into memory: STARK INDUSTRIES.
The girls beneath the boy—two fragile sparks of red hair—sobbed into his chest, blind to everything but loss. Outside, Novi Grad bled smoke into the sky.
Far away, in another universe entirely, a man's end had come differently.
A military doctor's last sight was the glare of headlights cutting through rain. Metal screamed. Glass shattered. His chest seized as breath abandoned him. Darkness closed in—ordinary, merciful.
But death did not stay complete.
MC POV
I remembered it as if I were still there.
"As I took my last breath," I whispered, "the lights filled my vision… and then there was only darkness."
Consciousness did not return slowly. It tore.
My soul shot through a void at impossible speed, battering unseen barriers of worlds until they splintered like glass.
And then something rose to meet me.
Vast. Black. A gravity of absence.
It was a being of unimaginable power. Two enormous eyes glared down at me, each divided into eight shifting pupils. And it smiled.
"I'm free," the voice said—immense, echoing inside me. "Now you can have everything I had. You will grow. Adapt. Create instead of follow. Conquer instead of serve. I am Adnyeus. I gave everything to my creations—even became their puppet. But at last, I can rest."
Then it struck me.
Fire erupted inside. Power poured in like a storm, planting something deep within my core. A seed. A promise. A potential god.
Memories not mine rained down—snatches of lives, battles, names. One rang out like a bell: the potential to become king of the universe.
The darkness did not shatter me. It honed me.
Time unraveled—eternity folding into an instant, yin and yang braided together. Awareness sharpened until the void fractured.
And I fell.
The fall ended in ruin.
Beneath me sprawled a broken city. Elaine Maximoff lay lifeless, her final spell spent protecting her children. Agatha Harkness stood triumphant, hand stretched toward both daughters and the Darkhold.
Something in me raged. I struck.
Agatha shrieked as my soul collided with her form. She clawed at me, trying to rip me apart, to consume me. Her magic tore at my essence but found no purchase. My hand plunged through her chest, and I drank deep.
Her life.Her power.Her memories.
All of it bled into me.
Her bones collapsed into ash. Silence followed.
And then I fell again—this time into flesh.
I landed hard, gasping into lungs that weren't mine. A cramped Sokovian apartment closed in around me. Pain seared as my soul stitched itself into a boy's body.
Alex Walker.
His name slammed into me with his memories. A mother dead in childbirth. Seven years in a New Jersey orphanage. A fragile chance at family when Elaine Maximoff and John Grey had adopted him. Wanda. Jean. Siblings not by blood, but by bond.
Three short years of belonging.
And then the war.And then this.
I opened my eyes.
Two small faces stared back at me, soot streaking their cheeks, eyes wide with terror. Wanda Maximoff. Jean Grey.
Behind them, the Stark missile gleamed like a predator. Its name branded itself into my skull.
Instinct rose before thought.
Two shields bloomed around the girls—one crimson, one orange—raw power born of panic.
I reached out. Their energy bled into me, flooding my veins with knowledge—psychic, chaotic, impossible. My heart seized. My mind screamed.
The missile froze.
It hung in the air, trembling, caught inside a translucent sheath of my will.
"No way…" The words rasped out of me, disbelief sharp as glass.
But my hand moved anyway.
The missile drifted upward, through the ruined ceiling. A heartbeat later, fire erupted high above. The shockwave rolled across the city, muted but still strong enough to rattle the broken walls.
Two more shields flared—Wanda's shimmer humming with a strange reddish-blue glow, Jean's sparking with fierce orange. Their powers had awakened. Crude. Jagged. But real.
We stood together inside that fragile cocoon.
I pulled them close, feeling their ribs shudder beneath my hands.
"It's going to be all right," I told them, voice breaking on the lie.
They believed me because they had no better choice.
We packed what we could.
I moved through the apartment, instincts guiding me as if Alex's body already knew the paths. I wrapped Elaine and John's bodies in a blanket—a stuttering mercy. The safe came free under my strength. Inside: cash, documents, pistols, and a book inked with runes. The Darkhold.
A pendant for Jean, still faint with her mother's scent. A bracelet for Wanda, her mother's final gift.
Outside, Sokovia was burning. Streets collapsed into themselves. Fires chewed through doorways. Bodies lay abandoned where they had fallen.
And there, like a relic waiting for a fool, sat a DeLorean DMC-12. Its gullwing doors were scorched, but the body was whole.
Energy answered my thought. Bags lifted into the air, weightless. I herded the girls inside and buckled them down.
I had never driven like Alex, but the engine roared to life at my command.
The car lurched forward, wheels skidding against rubble, then stalled against the ruins ahead. Roads broken. Asphalt torn. No way through.
I closed my eyes.
The power rose like a tide. A shimmering field crawled over the DeLorean, taut and humming. Metal rattled—and with a snap of my fingers, a portal tore open.
Through it loomed a fortress.
Agatha's home.
The castle stretched higher than any cathedral, towers twisting into the night like skeletal fingers. The walls glistened faintly with runes that pulsed like veins. Steam hissed from vents cut into stone, gears shifted in the dark, and a thousand windows burned with pale blue light—like watchful eyes.
Jean and Wanda pressed against my sides, their small hands trembling in mine.
The DeLorean hissed one last plume of smoke, looking impossibly out of place in the courtyard of this monstrous fortress.
"This… was Agatha's," I whispered, though I didn't know how I knew. The knowledge wasn't mine, nor Alex's—it had been shoved into me when I absorbed her.
The gate creaked open by itself. No guards. No chains. Just a smooth, obedient swing, like the castle had been waiting.
Inside, the air smelled of wax and old parchment. Chandeliers glowed with fire that gave no smoke. Stairs spiraled upward, glowing faintly with runes. Hallways bent into shadow, yet I felt the structure listening.
"Is it… safe?" Jean asked, her voice thin as cracked glass.
I wanted to say yes. The truth was heavier. The walls pulsed with ancient magic and strange machinery, alive in ways I couldn't yet name.
Then it came: a vibration through the stone, words spoken without sound.
Ownership. Transferred.
With a flicker of instinct, I willed it—and the bond spread. The castle recognized us not as one, but as three.
"It knows us?" Wanda whispered.
"Something like that."
Later, when the sun had set, I built a pyre for Elaine Maximoff and John Grey. The fire burned long and steady. The girls held my hands as their parents' ashes rose into the night sky.
And for the first time in two worlds, I swore silently:
No one will take them from me again.