[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 real objective was to check out the magical tomes of 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 stayed set to absolute minimum from the start.
Tao turned a parchment page on the table with two fingers, careful not to disturb the dust settled into the grain. The ward discussed in the text was a fifth-tier recursion loop designed to curse anyone whose soul had been formally anointed by the same magician.
Kamar-Taj's dimensional theory was ambitious in the way children are when stacking blocks toward a sky they believe they'll reach.
He glanced at the diagram in the margins: dimensional folding, third variation. The mandala's geometry was earnest, intuitive, maybe even the best approach here, but the derivation had dropped an entire tensor from the calculation, forcing the practitioner to bleed twice the vitality just to stabilize the anchor.
Tao picked up an inkless quill from the desk, guided a hairline filament of qi through the tip, and quietly amended the coefficient. A small tip for whichever archivist had the eyes to read it.
He closed the volume, tucked his hands into the loose grey sleeves of conjured apprentice's robe, and walked toward the southern courtyard.
The Witch & the Stray Tourist
The training yard was loud with the crackle of Eldritch light.
Wanda Maximoff moved through a training sequence with the focused desperation of someone who had learned to use effort as a substitute for understanding.
She lunged, planting her boots against the stone. She threw out two overlapping shields~not the golden, geometric wheels of the Vishanti, but crude, jagged mandalas fringed with pulsing crimson. The senior mystic opposite her brought a staff of condensed light down in a clean, disciplined arc.
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.
She didn't parry with stillness, had never had stillness. She met the blow with pure, grinding tension, forcing the crimson lattice upward until the light shattered into flying sparks. Tendrils of scarlet bled out from the hem of her robes, coiling into the flagstones like living roots before dissolving into ash.
Breathe, Master Hamir signed from the perimeter. Yield to the flow.
She couldn't yield. If she yielded, the red took the room.
Five years in this sanctuary, and every morning was a siege against her own pulse. She hadn't crossed two continents to become a sorceress; she had come because she had looked into her own future and seen a red sun rising over a barren crust of bone and glass.
Across the perimeter, a novice in drab grey robes walked past the colonnade. He didn't look at the duel. He was looking at his fingernails, drifting with the languid indifference of a tourist who had wandered into the wrong temple.
Yet as he passed, the crimson tendrils at Wanda's feet snapped straight, orienting toward him like compass needles in an iron storm.
***
Tao
He remembered what she'd become, in another life's telling. Avenger, widow, mother, partner, loyalist.
And here, gifting a wonderland to mutants and taking it away with a few words.
Whether she deserved sympathy or condemnation, Tao found the debate meaningless.
What caught him instead wasn't the cruelty or the sorrow. It was the certainty underneath both ~ the same 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.
***
Now, her aura brushed his for a moment and left its whole temporal history stamped on him.
I know that taste, Tao thought, not breaking stride.
It was the lingering ash of an X-gene married to something far older, far more disordered~residual Crimson Chaos. But it wasn't native to this timeline's baseline. It carried the specific, burnt-ozone static of an excision scar.
Ah. That world.
Five years ago~subjective local reckoning~he had needed to adjust the temporal architecture of this cluster. An imprecise bit of celestial surgery, performed back when he was somewhat less economical with his erasures.
To balance the ledger of an entire planetary quadrant, he had simply smoothed out an entire branch.
A quick pinch between thumb and forefinger. An entire globe's population, folded down into mathematical zero.
A boy with white hair running faster than sound, caught mid-stride, another red soul pulling away from complete erasure because : favor of a near zero probability.
***
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.
He had thought the excision was clean. But here stood one, carrying the grafted phantom of that deleted branch stitched clumsily into her current soul.
Under enough strain, it acted without her permission. One power was hard enough. Two, in a mortal vessel, was unsustainable.
Hunted as a mutant, feared as a freak, her mind fractured by an amateur telepath's crude attempt to soothe her grief, until she had fled into the mountains seeking chains strong enough to hold her.
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.
A thread of cause and effect~thin, brilliant, and undeniable~hung directly between her collarbone and his chest.
This was the effect, rippling backward up the time-stream 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.
Karmic residue. Tao sighed internally. Tedious.
When Chaos Reaches Out
He gave a nod of understanding, glanced at his rather expensive mechanical watch Long Yuyin gifted him, and decided it was time to head back.
He turned toward the outer gate. Mortal guilt was a swamp; wading into it only muddied the hems.
Stepping forward to 'fix' her would require explanations, theatrics, the tedious moral grandstanding of local heroes who would instantly cast him as a cosmic villain. Far better to let the local monks keep her locked in their little sandbox.
***
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.
It arranged for events to follow their own course instead.
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.
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.
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.
Then an idle curiosity fluttered in his chest. A strange, sour boredom, laced with a faint echo of pity.
He lowered his interior wards by a fraction, intending only to trace the emotional flare to its physiological root~
When Chaos latched on
As though sensing an impossible weight of emotions pressing against the space behind her, Wanda halted mid-motion.
The karmic filament flared.
Her concentration broke.
The senior mystic's staff struck her shoulder, and the pain shattered her focus.
The crimson within her, frantic and unusually suffocating, tore through her sternum in a wild, blind arc as if let out by something.
It did not seek the monk. It sought the only thing in the courtyard vast enough to ground a collapsing star.
It found the hairline opening in Tao's mind.
The crimson latched on.
Tao halted.
His divine sense saw the girl physically bent, her soul tore open, energy emerging from inside and contaminating the psionic imprint that left him in a few moments.
The time-stream around the event suddenly gone heywire in his vision.
Panic surged in the temple and as soon as Tao focused his attention, perception of time stretched thin around him, turning every desperate movement agonizingly slow.
He could have incinerated the filament instantly with a flare of true-spirit fire. But doing so in this courtyard would vaporize Kamar-Taj, the mountain beneath it, and three neighboring valleys. The noise would ruin his quiet morning entirely.
He could shield himself, but the backlash might tore her open - still he didn't.
What he felt instead, underneath her power reaching for him, was the shape of what came next if he did nothing or defended:
Her chaos is driven by temporal imprints in her soul being agitated - tearing away its very own concept and cohesion from reality in search of old.
But 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.
Moreover, he looked up and saw the array of sanctum reacting and is about to descend a containment spell as it is designed to, but as soon as he shifted his attention back, as if receiving some instruction, the array went back to quietness once again.
He was still casual about the sudden changes in his normal allusiveness until he felt something wrong with himself.
Only then did he register the faint ripples of law fluctuation emanating from behind his sternum, near his middle dantian.
A grave, unannounced influence was settling into him. Yet when he probed, his barrier showed no breach. Nothing had entered. And that was what made it worse.
Meanwhile the crimson energy is trying to find him who carries remnant and if he stopped - the power would open a temporal dimension inside magically shielded space of sanctum into the micro-verse - not intentionally but it is searching for its parent time imprint and destination without a marker is otherwise its dumping zone.
Unacceptable. Not out of concern for her. Out of concern for the few hours of subtlety he'd already spent and primarily what is happening to him unannounced.
Fine, Tao decided.
He pinched space between his fingers.
***
Kamar Taj
Monks only began to turn head in alarm, but then suddenly.
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.
Time was not frozen. It's just one of them decided to cease thinking like a human.
Both of them standing still, one facing forward, the girl lifting up to look.
Before time itself progresses, the patterns filled the air against the energy tearing from her.
The mechanism arrived in his mind before he willed it, and like solving mental arithmetic, the energy reaching 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.
He took the storm surging over between his fingers folded it back on itself like a page pressed flat against a mirror.
A mirror dimension of still time. Not space.
Yet the erratic nature of crimson hex and something else coiled within it still clawed hungrily at the seam, already bleeding beyond regular control enveloping her and slowing as Tao sensed it reaching for him next.
Then the tremor came back behind his sternum, and this time when it rattled through ribs he understood exactly what it was. That was the worst part. Not the mystery. The recognition.
The shock of it sheared straight through his focus. A short lapse, barely a breath, but in a mystic field this fragile a breath is an eternity.
Nearby the energies from dimension pulled both of them. A space where physical bodies could not enter. Their astral self to be accurate.
Her physical forms stayed rooted to the stone, while the crimson hex, gone haywire from sudden containment in a dimensional vortex, tore at their astral selves to be free of flesh.
He had time to shake out of his stupor and deal with it, while she had not.
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.
***