The transition from a mortal death to a divine rebirth was not a tunnel of light; it was the sensation of a drop of ink falling into an infinite ocean and realizing, with a jolt of cosmic electricity, that the ink was now the ocean itself.
Elena did not open her eyes so much as she "began" to perceive. Before her wishes, she had been a girl named Elena Vance, a person who worried about rent and the erratic weather of London. Now, she was a fundamental frequency. Her first wish—Primordial Dominion—had woven her consciousness into the very fabric of Earth's molecular structure. Her second—Conceptual Immortality—ensured that as long as the planet breathed, she would endure. Her third—The Divine Spark—gave her the hands to mold the clay of reality.
She manifested her physical form on the highest peak of the Himalayas, just as the sun began to bleed over the horizon. The air at thirty thousand feet was thin and lethal to humans, but to an Elder God, it was merely a soft silk veil. She wore a simple shift of white silk that wasn't woven by a loom, but manifested from the carbon in the air.
"It's starting," she whispered. Her voice didn't just vibrate the air; it vibrated the tectonic plates deep beneath the crust.
With her Divine Spark, Elena reached out with her mind, expanding her awareness across the globe. It was like tuning a radio to a billion stations at once. In a cave in Afghanistan, she felt a man's heart stutter against a shrapnel-filled chest—Tony Stark, the catalyst of the modern age. In a sterile mansion in Westchester, she felt the telepathic "static" of Charles Xavier, a man trying to hold the weight of a hidden species on his shoulders.
But there was a third vibration—a darker, metallic hum. Magneto. Erik Lehnsherr was currently standing on a cliffside in Genosha, his rage acting like a magnet for the world's iron.
Elena stepped forward, not into the snow, but into the air. Space folded around her. Distance was a concept for those bound by three dimensions; for an Elder God, "here" and "there" were the same thing.
She appeared in the courtyard of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. It was 2008, the early morning of the "Heroic Age." The grass was still wet with dew. Within seconds, the heavy oak doors of the mansion burst open. Scott Summers was there, his hand hovering over his ruby-quartz visor, and Logan was beside him, his nostrils flaring as he caught a scent that didn't belong to this world.
"Who the hell are you?" Logan growled, his claws sliding out with a lethal snikt.
"I am the answer to the prayers you haven't dared to speak yet," Elena said. She didn't look like a threat; she looked like a girl in her early twenties, but her eyes held the shifting colors of a dying star.
Charles Xavier rolled onto the veranda in his wheelchair, his face pale. "Logan, stand down. Your claws can no more hurt her than they could hurt the concept of Tuesday." He looked at Elena, his brow furrowed in a mix of awe and terror. "I cannot hear you, Miss...?"
"Elena," she said softly. "And you cannot hear me because my mind is the Earth you are sitting on, Charles. I have come because the 'Gifted' are about to be hunted, and the 'Avengers' are about to be born. The timeline is brittle. I am here to forge it into something that won't break."
"You speak as if you aren't one of us," Scott said, his posture tense. "Are you a mutant?"
Elena smiled, and for a moment, the flowers in the garden bloomed instantly, responding to the surge of life force. "I am what the mutants were meant to become in a million years. I am an Elder God. And today, I am going to fix the first mistake."
She turned her gaze toward the infirmary, where a young girl named Anna Marie—Rogue—lay in a self-imposed coma of depression. Rogue's power was a vacuum, a glitch in the X-Gene that sought to fill its own void by draining the life of others.
"What are you doing?" Xavier asked, sensing the shift in the atmosphere.
"I am giving the world its first miracle," Elena replied.
She walked through the walls—literally de-materializing her atoms and re-assembling them inside the infirmary. She stood over Rogue. The girl's skin was pale, her mind a chaotic storm of stolen memories. Elena reached down and touched Rogue's bare hand.
Outside, the X-Men felt the world tilt. The ground didn't shake, but the gravity felt more purposeful. Inside the room, Elena poured a fraction of her infinite essence into the girl. She didn't just give Rogue energy; she used her Primordial Dominion to rewrite the "glitch." She stabilized the X-Gene, turning the "drain" into a "battery."
Rogue's eyes snapped open. They weren't filled with the usual fear. They were clear.
"I can... I can feel the floor," Rogue whispered, looking at her hands. "I'm not hungry anymore."
Elena stepped back as the X-Men rushed into the room. She watched them—the fear, the hope, the confusion. She was their God, whether they wanted one or not. But her work here was only the beginning. Across the ocean, a man in a cave was about to build a suit of iron, and a god of thunder was about to be cast down to Earth.
"One pillar stabilized," Elena murmured to herself, her form flickering like a candle flame. "Eight more to go."
With a thought, she vanished, leaving the scent of ozone and ancient earth behind, heading toward the desert sands of Afghanistan to meet a billionaire who thought he knew everything about power.