The air over Wakanda tasted wrong.
It wasn't a smell or a sound, but a sensation that prickled the skin and hummed in the teeth. From the cloaked vantage point Wanda's magic provided—a shimmering, crimson bubble of "unnoticeability" that bent light and perception around their quinjet—the nation appeared pristine. The golden city gleamed under the African sun, the river flowed, the Skimmers glided between the towers with their usual silent grace.
But the details were off.
Bucky, peering through the cockpit viewport with a sniper's focus, saw it first. "The people. Look at the market in the River Tribe sector."
Sam leaned in. The market was bustling, vibrant with color. Yet the movement was… rhythmic. A woman haggling over textiles repeated the same hand gestures in a perfect ten-second loop. Children chasing a glitchy, holographic ball ran the same path, their laughter hitting the same crescendo at the same moment, over and over.
"They're not stuck," Marc Spector said from the back, his voice tight. He wasn't looking out the window; he had his eyes closed, one hand pressed to his temple. "They're… buffering. Their timelines are being gently braided with redundant data. It's a cushion. To prevent shock."
"Shock from what?" Sam asked.
"From when the rug gets pulled out," Marc muttered.
Wanda sat cross-legged in the center of the cabin, her hands gently weaving the threads of her concealment spell. Her brow was furrowed. "The barrier around the capital is not just energy. It is layered with psychic dampeners. A field of… emotional sedation. Grief, joy, anger—all are being filtered to a median frequency."
"She's pre-anesthetizing her people," Stephen Strange said, his expression grim. He'd changed into more utilitarian sorcerer's gear, the Eye of Agamotto prominent on his chest. "Preparing them for the surgery."
Their destination wasn't the Golden City. Strange's spells and Marc's fractured senses had triangulated the source of the silent void not to the palace, but to the spiritual and technological heart of the nation: Mount Bashenga, the sacred mound under which the Great Mound and the original vibranium meteor lay buried. The readings were impossible—a temporal density so high it was collapsing into a kind of serene stillness.
"We land here," Stephen directed, pointing to a coordinates on a holographic map—a secluded, forested plateau two miles from the mountain's ceremonial entrance. "The concealment spell will get us to the perimeter. After that, every sensor known to man and magic will be focused. We go on foot, and we go quietly."
"Quietly," Marc repeated, a smirk tugging at his lips. "Right."
The quinjet set down with a whisper of anti-grav engines. The moment the hatch opened, the wrongness of Wakanda intensified. The jungle sounds were too perfect, a curated symphony missing the random squawk or rustle. The light filtering through the canopy had a flat, studio-quality texture.
Wanda maintained the bubble around them as they moved, a five-person phantom gliding through the undergrowth. Bucky took point, his every sense screaming. This was the land that had given him sanctuary, had pieced his mind back together. To see it like this, a beautiful museum diorama, felt like a profound desecration.
As they neared the ceremonial entrance—a grand archway of vibranium-infused stone leading into the mountain—they found it unguarded. Not a single Dora Milaje, no Border Tribe scouts. The silence was absolute.
"It's a trap," Sam stated the obvious, his hand resting on the edge of his shield.
"It's an invitation," Stephen corrected, his senses extending ahead. "She knows we're here. The lack of resistance is the message. She's not afraid of us."
They passed under the arch. The interior was not the dim, sacred cavern they expected. It was a corridor of light. The walls, floor, and ceiling were sheathed in a smooth, milky-white alloy that emitted a soft glow. The air was cool, sterile, and carried a faint harmonic hum, like a struck tuning fork held forever at its peak.
The corridor sloped downward, deep into the planetary crust. They walked for what felt like a mile, the silence pressing in. Then, the passage opened, and they stopped as one, breath catching.
They stood on a ledge overlooking a cavern of impossible scale. This was not a natural geode. It was a chamber engineered by gods or madmen. In the center, suspended in a column of coherent light, floated the original vibranium meteor—but it was not a solid rock. It pulsed like a heart, and with each pulse, it shimmered, revealing fleeting, ghostly glimpses of itself at different points in its history: crashing into the earth, being worshipped by the first Bashenga, being mined, being whole again.
Surrounding it, arranged in concentric rings, were stations of unfathomable technology. Holographic looms wove with threads of light. Quantum processors cooled by liquid time shimmered. And at dozens of stations, silent, focused figures worked. They were Shuri. Or versions of her. A teenage Shuri, giggling as she adjusted a dial. The Shuri who fought Killmonger, her face set in determined grief. The Queen Shuri from the aftermath of the Blip, regal and weary. All working in silent harmony, none acknowledging the others or the intruders.
"Temporal echoes," Stephen breathed, awe and horror mingling. "But stable. Conscious. She's not just pulling threads… she's collecting herself. Every version, from every moment of pain or decision."
"It's a suicide note written in people," Marc whispered, his voice uncharacteristically small.
A bridge of light extended from their ledge to a central platform that faced the pulsing vibranium core. On the platform stood a single throne. It was not the Panther Throne. It was carved from a substance that looked like solidified memory, swirling with colors and half-formed faces.
And on it sat the Weaver.
She was older than the Shuri they knew. Her hair was woven with intricate silver threads that weren't jewelry, but seemed to be literal strands of chroniton particles. Her robes were simple, grey, but the fabric shifted constantly, showing scenes from Wakanda's past—triumphs, tragedies, quiet mornings. Her face was serene, devoid of the vibrant humor they remembered. Her eyes held the depth of the void on Stephen's map.
"Welcome," her voice echoed, not from her, but from the chamber itself. It was Shuri's voice, but layered with a thousand whispers, a chorus of her own past. "I calculated an 87.3% probability you would arrive today. The variance accounted for Dr. Strange's stubbornness and Mr. Spector's… unpredictability."
Wanda let the concealment bubble drop. There was no point. They were utterly exposed.
"Shuri," Bucky said, taking a step forward, his voice rough. "What is this?"
She looked at him, and for a flicker, the serene mask cracked, showing a glimpse of the young woman who had called him "White Wolf" with a teasing smile. It was gone in an instant. "This is the Anti-Blink, James. The Great Correction. For every life snapped away, there was a five-year wound. For every victory, a cost buried in grief. I have mapped every trauma, every tear in the universal continuum stemming from the misuse of the Infinity Stones."
"You're causing more trauma!" Sam said, gesturing to the Echoes plaguing the world. "People are terrified!"
"A localized infection must be lanced before the body can heal," the Weaver replied calmly. "The Echoes are the pus of a poisoned timeline. They are proof of the sickness. My work will drain them, forever."
Stephen stepped to the front, his cloak flaring. "Your work will undo reality. You're not healing a wound, Shuri. You're proposing to delete the patient and replace it with a cadaver. A perfect, stillborn universe."
For the first time, emotion touched her features: a flare of profound, weary impatience. "You speak of 'reality' as if it is sacred, Stephen. Is a reality that contains the slaughter of half of all life sacred? Is one where my brother dies on a riverbank, sick and alone, worthy of preservation? You sorcerers guard the timeline with such fervor, but have you ever asked if the story is worth telling?"
She rose from her throne. The chamber hummed in response. "I have seen the end of this path. I built a viewer, not into the future, but into the consequences. The echoes of Thanos's actions will ripple forward for millennia. Wars sparked by the Blip's disruption. Genetic lineages severed. Cosmic imbalances that will birth horrors we cannot imagine. And for what? So a handful of people can call themselves heroes for stitching the corpse back together?"
"We saved trillions," Carol Danvers' voice suddenly thundered from above. A streak of light descended from a hidden shaft in the cavern ceiling. Carol landed beside them, her fists glowing. "We fought for life, Shuri. All of it. The messy, painful, beautiful thing that it is."
The Weaver smiled, a sad, remote thing. "Captain Danvers. You who have seen so many worlds. Tell me, do you see the beauty in a cancer cell? Is a supernova that wipes out a fledgling civilization 'beautiful' because of its light show? I am not eliminating life. I am eliminating suffering. By returning to a state before the Stones were ever a factor in the universal equation. A reset to a stable, neutral zero."
"You'll kill everyone," Wanda said, her voice trembling not with fear, but with a recognition so intimate it was agony. "To save them from pain. I… I have dreamed of that. It is a devil's whisper."
"It is logic, Wanda," Shuri said, her gaze softening momentarily for the other woman who had been broken by loss. "You of all people should understand the algebra of grief. The output never justifies the variables."
"It's not an equation!" Bucky shouted, the raw emotion in his voice shocking the sterile chamber. He took another step forward, ignoring the subtle shift in the guardian-echoes of Shuri that paused in their work. "Your brother… T'Challa… he chose to share Wakanda with the world. He chose to step out of the shadows. That was a risk! It led to pain, to his sickness, to everything! Would you erase that choice? Erase him? Because that's what you're doing! The man he was was made by his choices, by the pain and the joy!"
The Weaver's serenity finally shattered. A flicker of rage, deep and old, crossed her face. "Do not speak of my brother! You, whose mind was a ghost for decades, who needed us to rebuild you from scraps! You speak of choice? You had none!"
"And now I do!" Bucky fired back, his metal fist clenching. "Because of the messy, painful, imperfect world you want to delete! I earned this! We all did!"
The chamber lights intensified. The multiple Shuris at their workstations turned in unison, their faces blank, their eyes fixed on the intruders.
"You are emotionally compromised," the Weaver said, her voice regaining its icy control. "You are products of the disease, defending your own symptoms. I will not debate patients. I showed you this so you would understand the scale, the necessity. The first major stitch begins in twelve hours. The unraveling of the 'Snap' event cluster. You cannot stop it. But you may, if you wish, remain here. In this chamber, you will be preserved outside the reset. You can witness the dawn of a peaceful universe."
It was the ultimate dismissal. The ultimate arrogance.
Stephen looked around the chamber, at the technology manipulating the foundations of causality, at the army of self-echoes, at the utterly convinced, brilliant, broken woman on the throne. A direct fight here was impossible. They wouldn't last ten seconds.
"We decline your invitation," Stephen said, his voice ringing with finality. "And we will stop you."
The Weaver sighed, a sound of genuine disappointment. "Then you are a symptom to be excised. Goodbye."
She waved a hand.
The chamber didn't attack them. It changed.
The ledge beneath their feet became the sinking deck of the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier from 2012. The sterile hum became the roar of turbines and screaming metal. For Bucky, Sam, and Wanda, it was a visceral, shocking jolt of memory.
But for Stephen and Marc, it was different. Stephen, anchored by the Eye and his disciplined mind, saw the overlay—the sterile chamber still existed, but the Echo was being forced upon their perception with incredible power.
Marc Spector screamed. Not in fear, but in overwhelming, sensory overload. His psyche, already a fractured lens, was bombarded with not one imposed reality, but dozens, flickering at light-speed: the helicarrier, a desert tomb, a Chicago street, a psychiatric hospital, the surface of the moon. His body seized, the white cloak flickering as his personas scrambled for control.
"He's overloading Spector!" Stephen yelled. "Wanda, shield him! Danvers, get us a path! Wilson, Barnes, cover!"
Chaos erupted. Carol blasted upwards, but the ceiling was now the sky over the Potomac. Sam's shield deflected falling debris that was both real and remembered. Bucky fired his rifle at a approaching Chitauri chariot that phased in and out of existence.
Wanda threw a crimson cage of energy around Marc, trying to stabilize his reality. Inside, he was on his knees, voices arguing, pleading, raging.
"NOT REAL—steven, look at the moon—THE MOON IS A LIE—Jake, break it—CAN'T HOLD—!"
Stephen began to cast, his hands weaving shields of crimson against the torrent of forced history. He wasn't fighting the Echo; he was fighting the chamber's will. It was like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.
"We can't fight here!" Carol shouted, weaving through a maze of temporal phantoms. "We have to retreat!"
A path. They needed a path. Stephen's eyes went to the pulsing vibranium heart. The source of the power, and the source of the Weaver's control. It was also the most unstable point in the field.
A desperate, insane plan formed.
"Wanda!" he screamed over the cacophony. "On my mark! Hit the core with everything you have! Not to destroy—to resonate! Match its frequency and shout!"
Wanda, her own power straining against the chamber's dominion, understood. She turned from Marc, her eyes blazing scarlet.
Stephen poured his will into the Eye of Agamotto. He wouldn't manipulate time here—that was suicide. But he could use it as a tuning fork, to find the exact vibrational key of this moment, this forced reality.
"NOW!"
Wanda unleashed a beam of pure chaotic magic, not a bolt of destruction, but a wave of resonant energy. Stephen channeled the Eye's power, not to stop time, but to define it for a single, localized instant.
The beam struck the vibranium meteor.
The pulse that erupted was silent and blinding. A sphere of distorted reality exploded outward. It didn't shatter the chamber. It confused it.
The forced Echo of the helicarrier flickered, glitched, and for three precious seconds, reverted to the sterile white ledge. The multiple Shuris staggered, their synchronicity broken.
"GO!" Carol roared, grabbing the catatonic Marc under one arm. She shot towards the entrance tunnel, a blazing comet.
Sam, Bucky, and Wanda followed, sprinting. Stephen brought up the rear, throwing up frantic defensive wards behind them as the chamber, with a sound like a furious god grinding its teeth, reasserted its will. The walls began to bleed new Echoes—the Battle of New York, the fall of Asgard, the destruction of Sokovia—trying to trap them in a maze of nightmares.
They burst out of the mountain entrance and into the too-perfect jungle. Carol didn't stop. She flew them directly back to the quinjet, the craft powering up the second they were near.
As the hatch sealed and the quinjet screamed into the sky, they looked back. Mount Bashenga sat, serene and silent. No alarms. No pursuit.
They had escaped. But it felt less like a retreat and more like a being allowed to leave, so it could watch the coming end from a distance.
In the cargo hold, Marc Spector slowly uncurled, his eyes wide with a terror that was entirely new. "She's not just in there," he rasped, looking at the shrinking mountain. "She's… everywhen in there. How do you fight a enemy who is already mourning you?"
No one had an answer. The jet turned north, carrying them away from the palace of frozen moments, from the weaver at the heart of the void. The first stitch was in twelve hours. They had half a day to figure out the impossible.