Wanda had tasted madness before.
When her children's laughter was ripped away, when the Darkhold whispered in her dreams, when she stood atop Mount Wundagore and saw the shape of all that could be—she knew what it meant to crack.
But this?
This was something other.
Amon hadn't broken her spell.
He had answered it. With a reflection. With a story layered beneath her own. And in doing so, he had rewritten the rules of her trap before she could spring it.
Wanda stood in the center of her ruined sanctum, crimson and gold sigils still smoldering in the air. The glass shard lay at her feet, humming faintly, almost… mocking her.
Then came the voice. Calm. Precise.
"You let him into your question," Wong said, stepping out of a portal.
She turned, energy still humming in her palms. "He didn't come. He sent a copy."
Strange stepped out beside Wong, looking weary. "A conceptual echo, more like. He's playing through shadows now. And reflections. We need a new approach."
Wanda narrowed her eyes. "What's he planning?"
Before Wong could answer, a ripple split the air, and Loki stepped through last—his cloak torn, and in his hand: a twisted relic of gold, shimmering with unstable power.
"He's planning a performance," Loki said dryly. "And it starts with this."
In the Library of Broken Scripts
They gathered around a conjured table in a conjured space: the Sanctuary Mirror—a hidden fold in magical space where no timelines passed through.
Wong studied the relic Loki retrieved. It resembled a coin, yet impossibly thin and lined with runes that spoke of narrative anchoring—a way to affix a story into reality.
"He's stitching a false ending," Wong murmured. "An ending where he wins."
"No," Loki said. "An ending where we think he wins. It's misdirection wrapped in myth. He's baiting us into stopping him too soon."
Strange leaned forward. "Then we don't stop him."
Wanda frowned. "What do you mean?"
"We don't take the bait," Strange said. "We follow the performance. Let him set the stage—and use his own narrative momentum against him."
Loki smirked. "You want to out-trick the God of Deceit wearing the skin of a Sequence Error. Delightful."
Wong conjured a projection of the Multiversal Map. "He's already begun. Look."
Three realms flickered into view:
Earth-1096 – A universe where the Avengers never disbanded.
The Dream-Loom – A nexus of subconscious dimensions.
Kamar-Taj – Their home.
Each of them had been subtly altered.
"Someone's been rewriting them," Wong said. "Planting seeds."
"And guess which one just sprouted?" Loki said with a grin.
Kamar-Taj
They arrived in silence—Strange, Wong, Wanda, and Loki stepping through a shimmering gate into the courtyard of Kamar-Taj. The air felt… off.
The wind moved backward. The bells on the temple rang in reverse.
And in the center, floating calmly above the stone tiles, was a massive stage, made of broken mirrors and lined with velvet curtains.
"A stage?" Wanda asked, incredulous.
"It's a declaration," Strange said grimly. "Amon's telling us where the climax begins."
Then, laughter.
Soft, familiar, and distant. Like a memory remembered out of order.
Amon stepped onto the stage, wearing a cloak of torn timelines stitched together. His monocle gleamed.
"Welcome," he said, cane tapping once. "To Act One of the Finale."
Loki stepped forward. "You're ahead of yourself. Finales come at the end."
Amon smiled wider. "Then let's stretch time until everything is the end."
He snapped his fingers.
Chaos Unleashed
The sky over Kamar-Taj split.
Above them, stories rained from the heavens—pages of alternate histories crashing like meteors. Each page, as it touched the earth, unfolded into a different version of reality.
One moment, Wanda saw herself as the Sorcerer Supreme, crowned in flame.
Another, she was the Dark Queen again, children clinging to her legs as reality burned.
Strange fought a doppelgänger version of himself with six arms and no heart.
Wong barely avoided being rewritten as a cultist librarian of Dormammu.
"Don't touch the paper!" Loki shouted, slicing through an illusion of himself ruling Asgard with Amon by his side.
Amon twirled on his stage, arms wide.
"Each of you contains a lie," he said. "I simply encouraged it to grow."
Wanda gritted her teeth. "This is all distraction."
"Distraction is the truth," Amon replied.
Then she saw it—the real spell etched beneath the stage.
Not a summoning. Not a cage.
A broadcast.
Amon wasn't trying to defeat them.
He was trying to make sure everyone else was watching.
The Error in the Wings
Far beyond Kamar-Taj, in a place without light or structure, she watched again.
The pale figure, seated upon a throne of broken prophecy, hummed as she adjusted her monocle—identical to Amon's, but inverted.
The Mother of Forgotten Ends.
She whispered to the echoes of fallen timelines, eyes never blinking.
"He dares to make this a play," she said. "Then let me write the curtain call."
A pulse left her throne—a ripple of forgetting, aimed straight at Kamar-Taj.
Back on the Stage
Amon paused mid-monologue.
The mirror behind him cracked.
Wanda felt the tremor first—magic unraveling, not from destruction, but from absence.
Strange nearly collapsed. "Something's severing the narrative thread—"
"It's her," Amon whispered, but not in anger. In awe.
The stage began to corrode.
He laughed. "Oh, I love this part."
Then, for the first time, Amon looked… genuinely uncertain.
He turned to the four watching him, cane steady, smile still there—but forced.
"If I vanish," he said, "remember one thing."
Wanda glared. "We'll remember how to end you."
"No," he said. "Remember who wrote the version of me you hated."
With that, he raised his cane—and vanished in a burst of ink and fractured time.
The stage exploded.
Aftermath
Silence fell over Kamar-Taj.
The pages stopped raining. The sky stitched itself shut.
But nothing felt real.
Wong was the first to speak. "What just happened?"
Strange shook his head. "He lost control of the narrative."
"Or he let us think he did," Loki added. "That's the point."
Wanda picked up a page that hadn't dissolved. On it, a drawing of Amon—not as a villain, but as a hero. Laughing. Smiling. Saving worlds.
A lie.
Or was it?
Epilogue – In the House Without Curtains
The pale woman sat alone again, but this time she was not smiling.
She placed a page on the floor. A blank one.
From her pale wrist, she drew blood, dipped a quill, and began to write.
"Chapter Zero – The Day the Trickster Died."