[3rd POV]
Tao stood still amongst the other magical apprentices, for a moment washed over by the same profound surrealism he felt whenever he saw the main cast of this universe emerge from background noise.
That feeling dissolved quickly into the weary detachment of a man who had cultivated for who knows how many millennia. Looking at her, he felt no allure in the display and saw nothing more than a toddler carelessly playing with power.
How did he recognize her? It wasn't her face that gave her away ~ it was the crimson chaos streaming from her soul. It was alluring to him in a strange way, alluring enough that even he felt a flicker of unease, despite possessing all the knowledge of dark magic, just short of actually wielding it natively.
He lingered not out of interest in her parlor tricks, but because his primary objective was to check out the magical tomes of this Sanctum Sanctorum.
He dismissed her, away as just another face inside.
The wards of Kamar-Taj didn't trigger as he moved through. They rewrote themselves, routing around him the way rivers route around new regions, not defeated, simply recategorizing him as a geographic feature rather than a threat.
Detection spells marked him non-applicable. Kill-spells found no valid targets. Monks passed within arm's reach, breath fogging in the cold. Even the air didn't swirl around him.
None of them saw him. None even minded him.
The restricted libraries opened to his divine sense like books left face down. Even the forbidden, living tomes would have reacted to his soul, if not for his perception of divine sense staying set to absolute minimum from the very start.
Kamar-Taj's dimensional theory was ambitious in the way children are when stacking blocks toward a sky they believe they'll reach. Earnest.
Flawed in specific, correctable ways ~ tiny improvements that could stack up: more range, more stability, for the same effort.
He couldn't help himself. The OCD of a supreme cultivator, he joked to himself.
He corrected a foundational typo, reshaping magical ink on parchment with one finger. Inserted a missing term in their dimensional anchor stability calculations. Rewrote a margin note explaining precisely why their recurring problem - initiating a threshold for certain spells, would never resolve without abandoning Euclidean thinking entirely, even if magic did all the heavy lifting.
He didn't sign it.
Just a tip, left for whoever was paying close enough attention.
The Witch & the Stray Tourist
Wanda Maximoff moved through a training sequence with the focused desperation of someone who had learned to use effort as a substitute for understanding.
Multiple portals snapped open around her, jagged and unstable, edges fraying where they should have been clean. One hand held a Seraphim like shield but not the real one others use, the other wielded a whip-like magical construct, again an adaptation of same magical rules by her own. Red sparks bit into reality's surface with each gesture as she held a duel against a senior Mystic.
She was using fear and control as a stabilizer, forcing her way through tension that should have been approached through stillness. The technique would cost her an incomplete spiritual awakening. She knew that. She was doing it anyway because it was working, and working fast, gaining her the hope, or the illusion, of control over her own ever-growing reserve of crimson magic.
Five years here, and her progress, by talent alone, had been extraordinary, even when she still hadn't secured a contract with any eldritch gods. But much of her mind was still unable to cope with its own erratic nature, leaving her less effective in an actual magical duel against real opponents.
Returning from his brief excursion to the libraries, Tao caught sight of her again bumping into each other. With every step she took, errant tendrils of crimson chaos magic spilled over the hem of her plum skirt, leaving bleeding, luminous trails in her wake. It was a rather mesmerizing spectacle.
He remembered what she'd become, in another life's telling. Avenger, widow, mother by will alone, warden of a town she'd trapped just to keep her grief comfortable, breaker of futures across more timelines than she could count. Gifting a wonderland to mutants and taking it away with a few words.
Whether she deserved sympathy or condemnation, Tao found the debate meaningless. He found no use in judging her for it.
What caught him instead wasn't the cruelty or the sorrow. It was the certainty underneath both ~ the same selfish conviction he recognized in himself, that reality was negotiable, that it should bend until it matched the shape of her wanting.
He'd made that same demand of the universe more times than he could count. The only difference was that he'd learned how to make it stick without relying purely on raw power, and he'd learned exactly what the debt looked like when it came due.
He'd met her before, five years back, on a timeline he'd since burned out of existence. Younger, black-haired, no trace of Kamar-Taj's discipline on her yet, caught in the same unraveling he was erasing.
Karma
Now, standing in front of her, her aura brushed his for a moment and left its whole temporal history stamped on him.
She had not come to Kamar-Taj seeking power. She had come seeking restraint. Years before taking shelter here, she'd glimpsed a future where she was different, where nearly every being on the planet was reduced to ash or erased entirely under a power like hers.
That vision, coupled with the wild, untamed nature of her abilities, had left her terrified of her own volatility, rather than drawn to magic out of any genuine yearning for it.
First she was hunted as a mutant. Then hunted as a witch.
What lived inside her wasn't a mere X-gene. The Crimson Chaos from two overlapping lives had grafted onto her soul. Yes, he saw the anomalies surrounding her soul across this new timeline. Meaning the moments he'd undone still carried a ghost of themselves, reaching much further into this present than they should have.
Under enough strain, it acted without her permission. One power was hard enough. Two, in a mortal vessel, was unsustainable.
Pursued by her own fracturing consciousness and failed by the very people meant to anchor her, Wanda had simply run until the map ended. Her mind still throbbed with the sterile, lingering friction of a psychic's attempt to "fix" her ~ a well-intentioned trespass that felt indistinguishable from an attack from `we all know who`.
Too erratic for the mutant sanctuaries and too untamed for the covens, yet pursued by both, she crashed into the one hidden corner of the earth that belonged to neither. The Ancient Mystic found her shivering at the gates. And so, Kamar-Taj, a fortress built on absolute, rigid order, opened its doors to a girl made of pure chaos.
Yak-butter tea, brass wheels turning on their own patient time, forms repeated until repetition became a kind of cage strong enough to hold a storm. The place offered her comfort, the assurance of people nearby who could contain her if everything broke loose.
She was terrified of the harm she could do: half-formed, and underneath that, capable of remaking creation. She pushed through it the only way she knew: pain and regret first, understanding later, if ever.
That inversion alone told Tao something upstream had already broken.
He knew what.
That was when Tao felt the karmic thread.
One filament, strung between them, of his own making. He'd thought the timeline he'd erased was gone clean. It wasn't. Wanda was possibility and potentiality given a body, and she'd kept what even the universe had let go of.
This was the effect, rippling backward up the timestream from the cause of what he'd done.
In the "proper" timeline, she would have found the sorcerers eventually out of curiosity, trained at a measured pace, and quietly earned her place among them.
Here, a small, accidental reality-warp in her early years had caused enough disaster inside this temple that she still faced prejudice, branded vicious or unstable by fellow disciples. Her master shielded her from abandonment again.
Some part of her fear of losing control belonged to him.
***
When Chaos Reaches Out
He gave a nod of understanding, glanced at his rather expensive mechanical watch Long Yuyin bought for him, and decided it was time to head back. He accepted the conclusion without much emotion and turned to go.
He had no intention of addressing mortal karma that could be burned away with a single thought during one session of cultivation. And stepping out of character to fix it would only earn him the "typical villain" tag.
Magic, being the symbolism of events, however, rarely allowed observation without participation. Every encounter demanded a rite, an exchange. Crimson Chaos, being primordial, rarely cared for proper etiquette, not when the people nearby carried such cause and effect, more often than not marked by that same tainted magical signature.
But could it really hold him?
No. But something else could.
Tao turned to leave, but a sudden fog clouded his mind. That's when the thought hit him, sounding completely like his own voice:
You didn't get here by accident. For you, is any meeting outside your own conclusion? You changed your mind without even realizing it.
He froze. Unknown to him, deep in his gut, his Dantian buzzed for a split second, a raw instinct like a tongue poking at a sore tooth. It didn't care about the human girl herself. It was drawn to the wild, unformulated magic pouring off her.
Then came the feelings. First, boredom. Next, a strange spark of pity.
Why not stick around, the voice in his head whispered. It might be fun to watch. What's a few minutes to a god?
He almost scoffed aloud. Fun. Pity. He was an ancient being, not a mortal fangirl. He didn't do human emotions anymore. These were glitches, side effects of wearing a mortal body too long, maybe residue from the dark magic he'd recently practiced and half-adapted to, or the Darkhold he'd skimmed near Wundagore's roots.
Maybe he had been too casual with it, not thorough enough cleansing himself of demonic energies.
' Residual contamination. ' Close enough to true.
He was, somehow, too bored to check, unlike his usual self. But habit won out anyway. Annoyed at the distraction, he lowered his mental armor a crack, just enough to trace where the false feelings were coming from so he could flush them out for good.
But something didn't want that. It arranged for events to follow their own course instead.
As though sensing an impossible weight of emotions pressing against the space behind her, Wanda halted mid-motion and looked up.
The karmic filament flared.
Confusion spiked through her, and under that strain the Crimson Chaos inside her reached outward on its own, hunting for something vast enough to anchor itself before it warped reality again without her permission.
A red tide erupted from her. It found him.
He felt it land the way you feel a hand close around your wrist before you've decided whether to let it go. A choice, and not much time for his mortal body to make it. At his scale, shrugging it off would have cost him less than a sneeze.
He didn't.
What he felt instead, underneath her power reaching for him, was the shape of what came next if he did nothing: her chaos breaching open in the middle of a crowded training hall, thirty witnesses, a few deaths, and a very attentive institution watching a reality tear happen two feet from a nobody monk who'd spent all morning very carefully not existing.
Unacceptable. Not out of concern for her. Out of concern for the few hours of subtlety he'd already spent.
So he folded it shut. The mechanism arrived in his mind before he willed it, and like solving mental arithmetic, the energy tearing at his body turned into runes and vanished from sight, crafting the best outcome on its own.
It wasn't difficult, not for him. He'd spent the morning teaching the wards here to see him as scenery. Making a room agree it was somewhere else was almost the same trick, worn a different way. He took the moment, the hall, the girl, the storm collapsing inside her, and folded it back on itself like a page pressed flat against a mirror, until there were two of everything and only one of them was real.
A mirror dimension of still time. Not space.
The real one stayed exactly where it was. A snowflake, frozen mid-fall in the courtyard. Monks turned to statues mid-breath. The master's hand still lifted in whatever gesture he'd been making the instant his student's eyes rolled back.
Both of them standing still, one facing forward, the girl lifting up to look.
The other copy kept going.
That was where they went. A space where physical bodies could not enter.
The last thing Wanda saw before reality folded over, before her astral body and soul left, quiet as a turning page, was the face of a young monk. Familiar, the way any acolyte's face is familiar. Wrong, in a way she didn't have a word for yet.
Tao had no intention of showing his hand, or letting Crimson Chaos run the encounter.
He told himself the lapse was just his consciousness adjusting to feedback from a mortal nervous system, recalibrating to a mystical energy he'd studied and half-adapted to once at Wundagore, now finding it hosted secondhand in a human girl who hadn't asked his permission to have opinions.
Close enough to true. True enough that it became true.
He turned it over once, quietly, and filed it as residue, the way a man decides a wound's stopped bleeding because he's stopped checking. So he took control of the fold, even as a sliver of himself, a psionic avatar was recreated, a splinter of his outer mortal soul, was wrapped by the crimson energy and pulled through into her along with it.
He understood where that fragment was going, and what had carried it there. But it was only a sliver of himself - a thin but core consciousness housed in a mortal avatar, the human before all; - the sort of piece too easily colored by whatever vessel contained it.
Whatever thoughts or feelings it might acquire were of little consequence to him. He let it go without concern, never expecting that a fragment severed from the whole could stray so far from the mind that had birthed it.
Outside, none of it had moved. He'd made sure of that first.
***
An Uninvited Guest
Wanda stood in a small room lit by only source of hearth-fire. A kettle simmered paprikash into the air, mixing with old wood and cedar smoke, the smell of evenings she'd stopped letting herself remember.
She recognized what this was, however strange it looked. She'd lost control again. The guilt came first, then the picture of her master's face falling, the guarded looks her fellow disciples would trade behind her back.
After all this training, she'd hoped for the illusion of control, and the struggle she would face, at least. Instead here she was, calm and warm in a room that felt like home, which meant either the training had worked too well, or someone else had done the job for her.
She looked for the door. There wasn't one.
Against one wall, a brass clockwork tower taller than a man ticked through hundreds of gears in perfect rhythm, and without meaning to, her breathing slowed to match it, quieting her agitated spirit.
A dinner table sat nearby, set with the same number of chairs as her foster home's kitchen.
Somewhere past the walls, faint enough to be memory, Pietro was complaining about something.
None of it was Tao's doing, not really. He'd built the walls. She'd apparently insisted on the furniture.
The peaceful atmosphere ended when the ceiling tore open and something fell and landed perfectly on the ground.
"So this is where you are." The voice came from beside her, amused and a little put-upon, like a man whose afternoon walk had been interrupted by one more joke from fate.
She turned. Someone she knew sat at the table, in the usual plain dark suit of the trainees, pouring himself something like he owned the place, not like he'd broken into someone's mind uninvited.
What unsettled her wasn't the intrusion. It was what she didn't feel: no psychic pressure, no telepathic clawing, none of the friction she knew from every mutant who'd ever tried to get inside her head. Just a warm room and a familiar stranger pouring tea.
"Rudra?" She was on her feet before she'd decided to be, half relief, half suspicion. "You're not even on rotation, you should be asleep two floors u~ no why are you here in my memory~"
She stopped. Something about him sat wrong, the way a photograph sits wrong once you've stared too long at the real thing to be fooled by a copy.
"Hmm." The face that wasn't Rudra's looked down at its own borrowed hands, faintly unimpressed with itself, and slowly changed back.
"Borrowing the face of a sleeping trainee at this hour. Poor form, on my part."
"Hello, Scarlet Witch," he said, sipping at that memory of taste. The porcelain teacup chimed against its saucer, a distinctly mundane sound for the middle of whatever this was. The appearance came apart like smoke pulled sideways, and resettled into someone she'd never seen.
May be its the appearance that she felt comforting, "I'm not any witch," she answered instinctively.
Her astral form matched her body exactly, plum halter, layered crimson skirts, nothing borrowed except maybe the eyes. Same exhaustion. Same stubbornness underneath it.
"Different history. Different face," he murmured, half to himself.
"What?"
"Nothing worth explaining."
She didn't panic. "What did you do to him?" She'd already begun forming mandalas on her hand.
That was the first thing he noted; she reached for understanding and control before fear.
"Why would I want to do anything to him? Now tell me, who are you, if not a witch?" he countered. The question was obvious, but as he spoke with her, he found himself realizing what the very core of his consciousness had been seeking from this exchange all along.
"I'm a sorceress," she said, careful not to give away more than necessary. "Why are you in my mind?"
"...Your mind?" He looked almost amused by the word. "Lady, this is as real as it gets. You're the one who studies mysticism, not me. Tell me. Where are we?"
He asked anyway. Some small curious corner of him wanted to hear her work it out in her own words, and he didn't examine too closely why waiting on her felt so easy unlike a moment earlier.
She looked around properly for the first time: the clock, the fire, the smell of a kitchen she hadn't seen in years, the magic spread around, the complete absence of a door.
"...A liminal space." She tested the words. "You made this."
"Close." He poured. "A timeless space you built."
"That's not~"
"A threshold," he said, before she could argue. "A half-step between two realities. Material and astral, in your case. I gave it a shape. You built on it by instinct."
"You haven't answered me. Who are you? Why are you here? Why do I feel confined?"
"Who I am doesn't matter. Why am I here? You tell me. I was minding my own business. You dragged me in."
"I drag you in?"
"You did. Your chaos tore this open, not me. I just arrived after, and wrote enough order into the wound to keep it from bleeding into whatever was nearby." He considered his cup whether to tell her the following, but he felt delivering anyway.
"Which makes it yours by rite, technically. Old rule, older than your schools: only the witch who casts the runes works magic inside her own boundary. I made the runes. The signature's yours. So here we are."
She pushed a hand outward anyway, red fields spreading toward the walls like smoke hunting a crack. Nothing caught. The place had no edges to find. Not a bad attempt, as attempts went. About as much luck as scratching glass with a fingernail.
***
"I asked how, and who you are. You still haven't answered."
"I know." He let the silence sit until her irritation showed, then sighed like he was the one being inconvenienced. "You've been accusing me of confining you since we met."
"I have," she said.
"You're wrong.
Once again, your magic was fracturing under its own weight. It reached for something stable before it collapsed. I happened to be standing nearby. Then I did a little sorcery of my own so I didn't lose my footing in someone else's memory of a kitchen.
I'm not casting. Not by the rule's definition. Manifesting runes for you - to be exact. Phrenomancy, plus mutant psionics. It's in the older archives, third shelf past the entrance, if the librarians ever let you back that far."
Something in the corner of his mouth said he found the loophole funny. "Magic's just a dialect of what I can already do. The rule was written by people who never met anyone fluent in the whole language. So I make do."
He didn't say the rest: that the making-do had limits. That one wild burst of her power read as raw material, his to hold and shape all day. But the moment she cast something 'magic' with real intent, something that counted as her working the craft rather than just losing hold of it, the rule would close around him whether he liked the loophole or not.
He filed that away for later and smiled over the rim of his cup. "I'm nobody important. Came to Kamar-Taj for something else. Then I felt you."
She said nothing, still deciding if he was absurd, dangerous, or simply mad.
He answered before she asked. "I wanted to sharpen my own understanding of magic. Then I found a young soul carrying more darkness than should fit in one lifetime. Curiosity won."
"What a joke. Sneaking into dimension of Kamar Taj right under the eyes of enlightened one, because you found me interesting."
"Yet here we are blaming each other. It's already beneath me, explaining this much to a mortal. You give yourself too much credit. I have no business with you, young lady. I should be the one asking questions."
"Try harder. Mortal, me? What are you, some other-dimensional thing?"
"It really is hard to convince you of the truth." He sighed dramatically, more amused than annoyed. "Oh you call him enlightened one? I read his name as Yao. Is that who you mean?
For the record, I didn't drag you anywhere. It found me. We arrived together. That's all there is to it."
Against every instinct, it fit together cleaner than anything else she had to work with. She stayed tense, unmoving. "I don't have patience for this. Who are you? A human? A ghost?"
He watched her power up for an attack.
He swirled his tea, watching it settle. "A stray tourist..."
"That's not an answer. Are you some demonic intruder-er?"
Silence.
"Tell me," she shouted.
"You wouldn't make an enemy out of me for just being here, being so honest, with no harm done besides conversation, would you?"
He watched her without hurry, the way her eyes never settled, cataloguing exits, then threats, then options, checking him for intent even here, like betrayal was the only thing she'd learned to expect.
Interesting. He hadn't expected life to have shaped her this early. Seeing her say nothing, he grew bored once again.
"Well. It was nice knowing you." He raised his fingers to snap and be on his way.
She stepped forward before he could. "No. I've seen you before."