What is reality?

Don't you think it would be the most horrifying experience to find words capable of describing that which exists beyond words, materialism and physical dimensions? How do you begin to define an idea which has no shape, no clear characteristic, but which imbues nonetheless the entirety of your mind with expression? 

To describe reality is to define the meaning of life. To explain the beginning and the end of all that is, all that will be and all that never got the chance to exist.

Reality is not just everything from the space between atoms to the one in which a universe expands, but also the cumulation of all the emotions without name, all the theories that have never been discovered. Every choice, every fluctuation of probability, every filament of energy or pillar of construction to domes of primordial knowledge. With and without laws at the same time. 

Reality can be volatile. It can be calm and furious. It can meaningless until you give it meaning and also meaningful beyond the recognition of a simple mind. It can be chaos in an unbridled form, but it can also be the forgiving kiss of sunlight... It warmed her cheeks, tickled the bridge of her nose and pressured on her forehead. 

Thunder rippled the thick atmosphere. Warmth abandoned her to the freezing embrace of heavy rain. It hunched her back, turned her into the grayed white swan mourning a loss beyond comprehension of all, even herself. Sierra opened her eyes from within a dream and found herself knelt, head bowed in penance, staring at a withered flower bouquet. 

Her eyes were stinging and the framing of her focus was odd, to say at least: the ground has been turned into a cubic formation from which several bits were missing or just beginning to fade. Her dress, drenched and overgrown with moss, was slipping through the cracks leading into nothingness. 

Yet a mere peripheral view obstructions its verisimilitude through blur. Was it really the ground deconstructing to basic three dimensional structures or was she on top of a falling building where time had been slowed down? 

The same confusion happened however in the center of Sierra's attention as well. Holding the bouquet, she found it impossible to distinguish what sort of flowers these were and are. One blink the flowers were gray and dead, the other they were vibrating life, standing tall, sprouting for the first time in color which reflected in her eyes. She couldn't stop blinking and the flowers couldn't stop changing, in a constant flicker from which her mind burnt itself to stretching.

Eventually, her gaze averted, travelling down to her own hands, to the golden ring on her finger. Was it golden or was it actually rusted, old? Were her hands wrinkled or young? 

Flickers of all which was true overlapped and scrunched, flashing before her eyes, nearing into the very center of her iris, where the pupil turned to a hole, humming, calling, forming hands to reach out and grasp the consciousness inside a darkness which grappled everything to the void of nothing at all. 

Her scream was snuffed to non-existence, at a space past singularity, where her physicality was thinned to nothing but perception. A century to make a thought that sped up the infinite zero second to a thousand years in a blink wiping the black hole. Her own hand grasped on an eyelash, feet leaving behind the dark pool of the pupil. 

Thrown into the air by a movement significantly faster than all the certitudes before, the eyelash broke off the blurred mountain of million eyes, blinking away in their own time and their own speed. What Sierra held onto slipped between her fingers, solid turning to liquid, pulverized into her face.

She sneezed.

The shake of her head shook off her cheek a drop of tears in the reflection of which she lost herself to a soundless scream, drawn out on the elongation of the fall. Succumbed into the flicker between death and life, specks of color battled stains of black and white, in a painting of abstract havoc. 

Imponderability was not beyond reason, not while no laws of physics seemed to apply to her suspended fall emptying her body of anything which would make it human, forcing her to experience the opening to the unimaginable light of this painting as the flower blossomed her out, to glimpse at herself: still in the middle of sneezing. 

Making the mistake to look past herself, Sierra felt the clouds, dark and troubled, passing lightning bolts of a thousand more storms, swirling around each other in a distant pounding that each thunder warned in a countdown towards. The lightning were lines, thinned out spanning years worth of terror, forming roads and paths, and-

"Stop that," Sierra cast her head to the side and dropped the bouquet on a solid ground, of a roof still and silent, without the buzzing of rain for the air was dry in its entirety. 

She could see the bouquet though she was not looking at it, still flickering between its first days and its last and she could see herself from its perspective, jaw shivering, eyebrows furrowed down. 

"Stop," Sierra forced her eyes to open and focus once again. Already standing several feet away from the altar, a new perspective ran her over a series of disturbing details. The wedding dress she was wearing was ripped, stained with mud and blood. Her stomach's twist proved it's been upset for a while now. Around her, chairs have been pulverized into ash after atomic blast, waiting for the gust of wind that was her exhale. 

It all fell apart, the whole reception on the rooftop, and with it, in a chain reaction the surrounding skyscrapers, tilting with metal whines to the side, shattering their windows in one singular cry that scratched her ears until she shook her head again.

Her cheek hit the pillow this time, but Sierra shivered nonetheless. Which was an unexplainable thing given that this environment felt more like reality than the last one. It was a room she recognized, to begin with, the one she remembered falling asleep into before the whole charade of nightmare slithered past Charles Xavier's mental barriers that bought her a good two hours of true rest. 

A cold tickle grazed her skin.

Bringing her hand up to brush that sensation aside, Sierra found her forehead and her hair all damp. Distant sound of rain matched the immediate startle to jump out of her bed and witness the creak of her steps on the floor. She was as wet as someone who's been sitting out in the rain for hours and frankly, her shivering could only prove that she had. 

Nothing was too weird anymore for her, not since Marion pushed her to open the Darkhold, not since she let that wretched witch manipulated her into reading from the Book of the Damned and therefore damning herself to whatever this was. A state of constantly questioning what was real and what was not. 

Though Marion Hall had the audacity of reassuring Sierra this was all meant to happen eventually, that she would be able to control the chaos now buzzing in her brain and veins and very soul, Sierra stood petrified looking at the dry bed, hearing the heavy rain, seeing her own shadow cast over the blanket and reach to rest on the bump which would be Danny, sleeping on his side. 

Wind blew the rain against the window and the wrinkles distorted the reflection of dark blue light, finally allowing Sierra to cease holding her breath. It was futile, this fight to restore herself to normal, but neither her nor Danny were ready to accept that the things she's done have all finally caught up to her in a suffocating wave of repercussions. 

The Paradox was only the beginning. If one nightmare could make her change the whole Earth what would stop this Chaos Magic from using any of her ridiculous thoughts to conjure horrors out of thin air? If not even Professor X's mind tricks could keep her thoughts in check, what hope was there at all? 

Fidgeting with her engagement ring turned to a hug and Sierra turned around, leaving the room and letting her husband-to-be continue his sleep. It was a big day ahead of them once the sun shone over New York City, but until then, the nights remained dreadful and long. 

Due to her accident of creating the Paradox, it was decreed by her own School that it would be better for her and Danny to move to the Sanctum Sanctorum where there was a higher chance to contain the extent of her newfound powers before they changed reality again. What is reality and how does one know when it changed?

The trick was that no one could really tell the difference between two phases of reality because minds can only perceive one reality at a time and normal brains can only comprehend the solitude of such a vastly abhorrent concept. 

Sierra was horrified that she could tell the difference, though there were others capable of sensing when something was off too. To her, it was less of a sense and more of bent perception of reality. Everything could be real at the same time. Take Schrödinger's cat and double its conundrum over every single surrounded aspect of life; don't limit yourself in this exercise of imagination to the physical world, but think further into atomic behavior, into the concept of thoughts and behavioral free-will. 

Theoretically, this was the greatest power in the whole universe; who wouldn't want to nitpick everything that exists, have the perfect world at their disposal and no one to tell them this is wrong? However, Sierra wasn't in control. 

The Magician's banishment cost her a dark stain on her mind. The Paradox was a mistake that though fixed, has returned a world which did not fully forget that for a good chunk of time, they were all part of a video game. These handful of people who remembered, people who she did not know, were the entire reason for the social backlash she's been facing since the Magician's last show. People wanted her locked away and frankly, Sierra couldn't exactly say she disagreed with them.

She did instead doubt there was any prison capable of containing her anymore. 

This ability to create reality was a dream come true, unless you have no control over it. Then it is a poison, taking advantage of every moment of weakness in order to twist your words, your thoughts, your subconscious ideas, even your memories. 

Sierra was exhausted and to her own demise, sleep was the first thing Chaos Magic ruined for her. 

One dragged step at a time, she buried her yawns in a flick of her hand which, through a circular motion, lit up a growing disc of eldritch magic ahead of her, shining in her characteristic bright white luminescence. She walked through the disk and rubbed her eyes stepping on the other side of the mist with different, considerably drier clothes. Her hair remained damp, but Sierra was planning on fixing that inconvenience by going down the main stairs and seeking some of the commodity-filled rooms on the ground floor of the Sanctum.

From the corner of her eyes, just as her right hand grasp the wooden railing, she saw one door which shouldn't have been open, going into the room both her and Wong decided it would have been most suitable for the classes they offered. 

Since the Magician's unfortunate mess has left quite a few ridges in the apprehension of sorcerers in the world and several decisions were made that would further rally the public against Earth's finest defense, Sierra insisted Wong take the Sorcerer Supreme mantle in secrecy and Supreme Strange take the place of their universe's real Stephen Strange, now departed to help better Marion's universe. To cover up the whole scheme and the fact that Dr. Strange was fundamentally different, no matter how luckily similar in aspect to the previous version of himself, they funded the Strange Academy to help arcane individuals gain control and mastery over their potential abilities. Their first two official students on paper were Sierra and Illyana Rasputin, though only the latter had truly been accounted for as a student, until... well, until the Paradox happened.

Now, Sierra too felt like she needed a schooling. Only there was no one to teach her. 

Distracted and naturally curious, she turned towards the open door and, reaching out to close it, she caught glimpse at a familiar dark silhouette. Now, she had a good enough reason to sigh and enter the room instead of going after a much needed towel. 

"Why are you awake?" she let her voice carry itself faintly louder than her own steps through the indistinct ambience of this room plunged into the cover of night. They've stripped the chamber of any furniture that would stand in the way of more practical lessons with the young and reckless Queen of the Limbo, therefore, Sierra found herself stepping over several patches of burnt flooring, towards the only shred of color, only barely shadowed by the other sentinel of the night. 

Still looking at the grandeur of the round window and the glowing darkness of the blue reflected through it by the pouring rain outside, the shadowed person responded with nonchalance. "You're awake."

"You're no longer under the bindings of my magic, Stephen," Sierra sighed, joining beside the man with little no prospect in wanting to lower his chin of pride any time soon, or look at anything else but the storming city outside the window for now. 

"Old habits die hard."

Sierra hummed in response too lightly for anything else but silence to slither around them, an environment contained to absolute stillness in comparison to the agitation of the storm outside. 

"The rain woke me up," Stephen admitted after a while. 

Whatever relaxation watching the rain could have brought upon Sierra, his words crushed it, morphing her expression into slowly parting her lips, arching her eyebrows upwards in terror and widening her eyes to the gripping guilt. "You mean I-?" Her gaze darted to her right only to already be met with a calm nod, pitying her. 

Stephen watched his once star student turn her head away, purse her lips and sniff back desperate tears. "Xavier's walls would have never been able to hold back Chaos Magic, Sierra," his whispers were coarse, voice malignant to its depth, no matter how kind his reasoning for the chosen words would have been. "It was a futile attempt to begin with."

"How can you be so calm about it?" Sierra snapped at him, turning away from the window towards which his attention was brought back altogether. 

"Well, I think it's beautiful what you can do..."

"Conjuring up rain-"

"You didn't conjure rain," Stephen interrupted her with a correction, staring into her panicked eyes without altering his composure. This was a bland, cold, but familiar approach; she was looking into the eyes of a man she has sought out deliberately in the Multiverse, a man she spent five years with training, a man who, ultimately, had been released from his prison by her and now was actively threading a place in her universe. "Any sorcerer can make rain with a bit of practice and a lot of desperation," he continued slowly. "You didn't make rain. You made it that rain should exist tonight. That people should expect rain tonight. That rain happened because it was supposed to happen."

Sierra's breath stuck in her throat as the images played before her eyes in a overlaying synchronization, two streams of sound echoing over each other before separation: 

"Did you check the weather?" she asked Danny that very afternoon. 

"A sunny day," he replied with a smile. The echo of the second image took over in bright color, "But it will rain tonight."

As if struck by severe motion sickness, Sierra stumbled her way out of the perceiving, bumping her shoulder down onto Stephen's palm. It wrapped around her shoulder to steady her out of the strain of knowing the exact foundation to what reality is supposed to be. "If you could only stop for a moment and understand that you are fearing Chaos magic for no reason at all..."

Sierra pushed his hand off of her and took a step back. "No reason at all?" her glare was unforgiving. "Have you considered that I do not want anything to change and this Chaos does not care for what I want in the slightest? I like control, I like order and peace and I like my life the way it was, the way it should be. But right now, I am only a danger and I don't care if no one would notice the changes to reality. I would. I get to notice and I am forced to live with that."

Several steps have been taken away now and finally, her head bowed, "Just stop with the 'seeing the bright side' or the beauty of Chaos. It's not for me..." 

Curiosity killed this cat, surely. For whatever reason, Sierra hoped some company would solve her hard time dealing with lack of sleep and impossibility to rest any further; obviously, there was no such thing left for her as now, walking away, she felt the dread of not only having lost herself in a dream of confusing scales by the realm of chaotic powers, but also transpose her subconscious madness onto the real world, again. 

What if she dreamt someone close to her died? It was a strain to undo her own damage, to tame her mind to recreate the reality which used to be. Glimpses of the Paradox still lingered in her head, taunting her with illusions and mirrors at each steps and breath. 

"Did you read all of it?" Stephen's question stopped Sierra at the middle of the distance between him and the door. 

"Read what," Sierra hardly contained the urge to roll her eyes. Her damp hair dripped on the back of her shirt and now, the chills have returned, making her shiver whilst turning around.

The sorcerer turned around as well, keeping afloat before himself a particular book. 

Sierra's breath hitched and her hands dropped, "What do you think you're doing with the Darkhold?"

"Relax-"

"How did you find it again?" Sierra raised her hand, flickers of white magic sparking from her fingertips to the delve of her palm. 

She's had Wong hide that book immediately after the Magician was taken care of and frankly, it would be a lie to claim she hasn't been thinking about it, mindlessly seeking it in thought from time to time. The corruption oozing off of the Darkhold had mere grazed her and the addiction to its call had her good nonetheless. 

To see it there, so close to her again... It was cruel. Cruel because she wanted to grasp it, to hold it, to read it, to consume-

"I was the Sorcerer Supreme of my universe," Stephen sighed. "And I have already read the Darkhold my world had to provide. So please, relax. There is nothing left for this thing to do to me."

"Then put it back," Sierra's jaw locked, eyes forgetting how to blink.

"I will," Stephen reassured her. "It's nothing I haven't read really, apart from one chapter."

Sierra slowly lowered her hand, "I don't want to know." With a short shake of her head, she straightened up and squinted, "Why were you even seeking the damn Darkhold if you already read it once?"

"Your universe's Darkhold has an extra chapter no other universe holds, Sierra," Stephen raised his voice and attempted to turn the book around. However, his filaments of purple toned magic were vanquished and relaxed with Sierra's signature white, which stopped the book from moving and closed it on the spot. "Don't you find that endearing? Don't you at least want to know why or what the chapter is about...?"

"No," Sierra dropped the book at Stephen's feet. In fact, all he said was simply troubling her further. Her own heart thundered out of control in her chest. "Take that thing back where you found it."

"You want to read this chapter," Stephen blurted out, still not allowing Sierra to turn around from him and this opportunity of his to once again influence her on a path. 

"I'm not touching that book ever again," Sierra shook her head rather disappointed he hasn't caught up on that yet, or rather that, after all this time, he was still clinging to his malice. "You do well and understand that, or I'll have no choice but to turn you back into a cape. Consider this your last warning, Doctor." 

Head pounding ever stronger than her own steps finally skipping down the stairs, Sierra had little knowledge of getting to the kitchen and even less so of having started the water boiling. A gasp of pain brought her hand up to the place between her eyebrows and, wincing her eyes shut, opening them changed the entirety of the environment by first and foremost turning night into day.

"Good morning," Danny laid a quick kiss on top of her head, hand on her shoulder. "I'm so ready for today."

Sierra's sight focused back in and she immediately glanced to the side, at the clock. 5:48. 

"Can't believe there's going to be a wedding here," Illyana mumbled, face stuffed with milk and hooped cereals. Her voice, however, startled Sierra into turning around. "Is this like the first wedding to be held on Sanctum Sanctorum grounds?"

"Perhaps," Wong sipped from his coffee, seated beside the young student at the table. "It's all for the protection of everyone involved and invited over."

"Did you put up the wards already?" Sierra murmured.

"Of course I did," Wong smiled up at her. "Everything is safe and there should be no magic allowed past teleportation, for young Nicholas' sake."

"Good," Sierra sighed in, a notch more relaxed by the second.

"So excited to meet this acquaintance of yours in person, at last," Across the table from Wong and Illyana, Stephen had his back rested against the wall, reading from the newspaper. 

Danny returned to Sierra's side after having retrieved from the fridge his unfinished box of noodles from last night. "Are you okay?"

"Nervous," Sierra admitted, leaning against the counter with him. As soon as Danny stilled himself there too, she rested her head against his shoulder. "But every bride gets nervous."

"That is true," he confirmed with a hum. "Just remember, we've taken extra care that everything will be safe, that our lives continue to be just as they are supposed to be, even while you learn to control these new abilities."

He could have called it off at any moment. He could have ditched her the second her action impacted his public image and the profits of his company. But Danny was still there, still by her side, still wanting to marry her. 

"Thank you," Sierra whispered. It started feeling like he has just become her Guiding Light. 

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

And so it begins oh my goshhh 😭😭 I cannot believe how much has happened since the last Phase ended.. not just to the universe, but to me as a person ( in my life ) and my writing style ( plus graphic game y'all, look at these gifs and the cover– )

Sierra, whenever the Darkhold is involved:

WITH that pout in particular.

ANYWAY, chapter dedicated to the one and only raichia, to whom the badass baby Nicholas Strange belongs to. In order to no so subtly tease the upcoming collab project between our Marvel Universes, Nicholas will be making a more thoroughly cameo next chapter. Stay tuned 😎