Well before the crystal ball and the wildly obvious obsession plaguing her eyes, Agatha Harkness started off on mere curiosity, mindlessly journeying into the heart of a cult worshipping power which to this day she shivers to remind herself of. Their eldritch names still clog her mind, menacing from horrid pictures on walls, right into her mind's eye, forcing her to recall the ritualistic chants, the commune of vision from ancient times none should be able to see. Lloiogoroth, Cthulhu, Slorioth, Tsathoggua, Shuma-Gorath, Zvilpogghua. They danced in her mind since the dark youth in the 15th century and have kept her awake many nights through the centuries which followed. 

The Salem Witch Trials, all the wars on new and old lands. She's been a coven leader, a cult leader, a nanny at times, a teacher when needed, the face you see in old and torn pictures and are left with an uncanny sensation after staring at it for too long. 

Before this crystal ball's grip on her life had tightened to a mania's conviction, Agatha has lived a plentiful, generous life. That is not to say she hasn't paid her debts in tears, that she hasn't given up pieces of her soul to even be able to live so long; no, tragedy has not spared her through the years, but eventually she came to realize that a life so long could not be lived in an emotion's state of vulnerability. Such a revelation laid the foundations to not just her purpose, but also a dimension built on the hardships of countless nameless witches and warlocks, people only she could remember enough to mourn. 

New Salem, she called it, in a bitter reminiscence of her old coven, the one who has gone so incredibly wrong for the same reason now boiling in the walls of this home. 

Though time has been patient with her, it has not been merciful. With most her attention and power diverted to her purpose catching flesh, Agatha's glamour spells have faded, greying her hair to snow white and wrinkling her face, sagging her skin. Were it not for a corset and black silks to cover her aspect in lavish foil, she would fit that dreadful image she knew the Central Dimension had of witches. 

A crone, that is what time had turned her into and frankly, Agatha cared not contradict anymore. She was long past caring of her appearance. A lot of vanity tended to fade into insignificance when a purpose finds its way into a being's life. Just like for a mother the appearance of her child warps her reality, revelations have turned her life upside down.

Indeed, her story started in 15th century, but none of the rituals which happened then, initiating her to magic and the mystic arts have been anything more than nightmares until a couple of years ago when her usual nightmare no longer happened the same way. She was back in that massive edifice of frantic fears, amidst a maddening circle. However, unlike expected, they did not chant in that obscenely old language of theirs, one she could not brush off her memory. They were dead silent. 

The whole coven was made out of cloaked statues for so long that she could feel the lump of dread in her throat materialize, choke her, weaken her knees with a pounding anticipation. Of what? She couldn't tell, nor truly admit that she had any morbid curiosity to find out.

"She has awakened," they spoke, voice unified to a loud transcendence, booming right into her mind through the barriers of time and dimension. She may have been in her bed in New Salem, far away from the physical ruins of the temple of old, sunken into its depravity now at the bottom of a dead lake, but when this vision was bestowed upon her, it all felt undeniably real once more; she sensed the humidity, a mockery of the decay in which it was drowned, preserved to perverse existence, the malice in the walls as it grew in pestilence over carvings of abhorrent dimensions, the vibrations of that odd material in which horrors were engraved and worshipped. "From the dying screams of the elder stars and the echoes of the first slaughter, rises the Unfading Light. Her lustre will call into the Outer Dark, fulguration to a new world. Comes forth the Mother-!"

"Mother?" the same voice who has pulled Agatha out of her vision those couple of years ago has now tugged her out of the trance of staring into her crystal ball. Her gaze lifted, watching her son approach with a tray; two cups and a teapot were brought to her round table, situated in the middle of a dark room, smelling of stagnated air, the sort which reached to tell the story of its inhabitant turned hermit. 

Nicholas Scratch had witnessed his mother's descent into a fanatic madness first hand. 

"Watch her for me," Agatha ordered him coldly, more interested in the tea he brought than in his actual imposing presence. While she had devoted herself to this woman's journey she claimed her visions of her cult have told her all about, Nicholas has taken over New Salem. At almost thirty years of age, he was the strongest dark warlock of the town, ruling the whole dimension made by his mother with a firm and dignified posture. Many would argue he was a sadist, a cruel punisher of the weak; no such whispers would come from the heart of New Salem, where his terror was glorified.

However, as soon as he left the town rituals and lectures and returned to the darkness of a house he could no longer call his true home, he was reminded of a leash of servitude under his mother. No matter how much he loved her, he had little understanding of what she was blabbering about; Chaos of Creation, the Great Old Ones, incursions and First Firmament, were only a few of the crazy words she was uttering and he had no desire to know more about. 

Since her vision in the dead of night, he watched Agatha neglect herself. She sought the Darkhold recently, sometime during the airing of the first shows of the Magician and since she's returned emptyhanded her mania has gotten worse. Apparently, she's had a taste of the power of this fabled 'White Witch'. But as Nicholas moved around his mother and took her place at gazing into the crystal ball, he only saw the same city girl, wannabe sorceress: Sierra Harss. 

"What's she up to these days?" Nicholas asked with little expectation to hear an answer. His sigh was enough to understand there was no hope left in him to return to his mother's focus. 

Instead of hoping for puerile miracles, he held at the base of the crystal ball and gazed right into it: within it was revealed the real-time moving image glazed in a green tint. It played the moment in which Sierra entered the rooftop, the official start of her wedding ensued. 

He sighed a second time, disappointment and fatigue settling within him. 

Things have gotten only slightly interesting to watch sporadically and perhaps a notch more often now that this unlikely tiny girl achieved chaos magic. It was a travesty, he believed. His estimation was that the chaos, as it usually did, will consume her within a couple of days. He counted the minutes to that event, hoping that it would return his mother back to him sanely. 

Frankly, this was the worst time to have the great Harkness waver: something was off with the Hell Dimensions and Nicholas did not know how to stop whatever was happening from affecting New Salem. This dimension was built on a pact, from what he was told growing up to a prune sky, and with the Hell Dimensions not all that far away from them, always mentioned in rituals, it did not take a genius to guess who that pact was dealt with. Now would be a fabulous time to separate from the Hell Dimensions, to protect New Salem. 

But all Agatha cared about was in that crystal ball. 

And as he watched on, the faint desire to open a portal against his mom's new sacred rule blossomed for the hundredth time behind his eyes; oh, how he wanted to simply take that witch out, save them all some precious time running out of grains in its eternal hourglass. Nicholas could not help his gasp when the crystal ball showed the turn of events at Sierra's wedding, almost ironically close to what he wished had happened. 

Followed by his dark chuckle, bemused in nature, his gasp had lifted Agatha's grim, assertive glance up to a pointed glare. "What?"

"The Phoenix is back," Nicholas huffed, adopting a clear grin of dark satisfaction. "And here I thought the wedding was going to be a bore," he added, lifting his chin and stepping aside, knowing all too well his mother will be rushing to take his place before the crystal ball. 

What he did not expect however was the absolute havoc of what came next. 

You see, both him and his mother thought it to be common knowledge that when you have the power to defend yourself, you should at all costs do so. Such creed has seemingly escaped Sierra's mind, placing her at the mercy of the Phoenix. Entering a frenzy, his mother caved in and interfered right away, not by opening a portal which the Phoenix could at any time track with a bit of tact in choosing her next prisoners, but by instead calling the Darkhold itself to her extended hand wearing the almost pitch black stain of the dark magic's corruption.

"Where...?" Nicholas' widened with betrayal. "When did you get the Darkhold?" he corrected his question with a blazing rage. That book belonged with their coven, he believed, it was outrageous to even think that K'un-Zi had ever managed to seize its knowledge and hoard it from them. 

"A peculiar friend brought it last night." With little care to detail and enlighten her boy, Agatha flicked to the exact chapter she needed. To this day, she was still overwhelmed to see the greatness of that one particular chapter, written in that same archaic language brought from the forgotten corners of death at the margins of the universe. It was a language she was taught to read in the past, one that had helped her summon the White Witch once before and it will help her again now. 

"L' tharanak ya uh'eog ot r'luh, fhalma ot throdog r'luhhor." 

Ancient words rolled off her tongue with conviction and across the table, a column of dark prune smoke twirled into existence. 

Agatha slammed the book closed and dropped it into Nicholas' arms , because as soon as the smoke cleared out, Sierra Harss was found unconscious on their floor. To Nicholas' utter shock, while he gripped the Book of the Damned to his chest, he looked up and saw a sickening view of how the mere aura of presence of the new witch altered not just her own wear, but the reality around her too. 

The flooring was merely nauseating to look at as it flicked between states of reality into absolute curses brought to the rules of geometry, but the chaos magic did not stop its reach there, threading light filaments to any piece of furniture it could: paintings on the walls catching life through abominable motions, exerting sounds of pounding realism growing in noise; the hard wood of the round table begun melting into a goo of iridescent darkness and the decay blistered tapestries mercilessly. From right under the sleeping witch, reality seemed to vanish altogether, glowing in an incomprehensible light from beyond which, at the expense of blindness, screams of heinous life tried to reach out.

Not a crease on Sierra's forehead.

Flesh was not spared by this chaos either, because the second Agatha knelt beside the girl, in a fit of absolute madness to even consider approaching, white energy begun pulsing out of Sierra, rupturing infinitely small cubes of matter from the old woman's hands, brushing them away, decomposing her like a cartoon character pulled apart by an eraser. 

The Darkhold vibrated in Nicholas' arms and he could have sworn that he had heard it chant, he heard it call, yearn for that witch unconscious on their floor. It was for the first time when none of Agatha's blabbers seemed nonsense to him anymore, because the nonsensical surrounded him, astonishingly fast. 

What the book said said, he could not replicate out of mercy on his mind cursed to always remember those words; all he could really spare to acknowledge at that moment was the twist in his stomach, the void of his heart and the speed with which he dropped the book on the melting table, beside the crystal ball. At that moment, the Darkhold's dark aura started materializing in an energy similar to Sierra's, forming tendrils of light reaching down to her. 

"Get out," Agatha shouted her order. "Seal the house, and hold it sealed."

"She'll tear you apart." Nicholas had a flinch of hesitation to leaving his mother behind, though he was already seizing his opportunity to reach the door and run for his very life outside this house of terror, bending to the emetic, unconscious will of this one girl. But even with this hesitation, it needed be voiced further than through her suddenly sane eyes that if the house wasn't contained, then the chaos would spread to affect the whole of New Salem; faced with a choice between his mother and the coven, Nicholas turned around and ran outside the house, barely catching his breath before beginning the casting a barrier of eldritch blue glow.

Though standing beside Sierra at this vulnerable state the Phoenix had pushed her into, making her but a crack shell to a power soaring light through and out of her head, pained Agatha through the fires of being bent to all sorts of atrocities of cosmic foulness, she did not lose her mind. It felt, ironically so, as if she has been waiting her whole life for this nightmare-pulled moment, when despite the godawful incomprehensibility of her own existence, she strained her hands over Sierra's chest. The chaos spurring right from her head burned its warp of reality onto her skin yet Agatha chanted ever so faintly what could sooner sound to unanointed ears as a mere prayer.

Then she heard the thudding call from behind, that pulse of stagnant presence coming from the Darkhold now plunged into the abyssal waters in which the table has turned. Agatha looked over her shoulder and saw the threads of light connecting the two. It took her no more conviction to extend her arm towards the book and call it forth. Almost without thinking, some instinct transferred through touch and she placed the book over Sierra's chest. 

A flash of luminescence engulfed reality, in all its layers and upon blinking herself awake, ears ringing from the odious noises of chaos, sight still blurred from a glimpse at Absolute Light, Agatha realized her back was against a sturdy surface. Her round table, much like everything in the room and house, has reformed and rekindled itself to their natural shape, to the reality which flowed on its own, untampered by elder horror beyond control. 

Before her eyes, still laying on her back, Sierra's hands have crossed over the book, holding it to her chest. What dark aura the Darkhold usually held had adopted from the girl's light motives of whiteness her magic has always been tainted with. It was her book; there was no question about it now... it has always been her book.

A far more questionable situation had been the one Danny found himself into. The X-Men hadn't a clue their beloved Daisy was back; in fact, Charles only sensed the return of the Dark Phoenix, hence why they answered immediately. Even after they informed them of Daisy's return, Professor X refused to believe his daughter had become a vessel for that terrible cosmic power. It was not until Tony Stark projected for him the footage that he finally believed them.

Danny could not just see, but also feel the pain radiate off of the man as he attempted to remain dignified with his words. "This is our problem as much as it is yours," he had declared upon eyeing the magically restrained Thor Odinson and recognizing with a snarl the aftermath of psionic destruction the Dark Phoenix left behind in the God's mind. "The X-Men will help and we'll do everything in our power to return Miss Sierra safely too."

With a little containment help coordinated by Agent W through SHIELD, they were able to transport a constantly sedated Thor to the X Mansion where classes were immediately suspended. Though Danny insisted on not needing the company in this endeavor, Strange accompanied him nevertheless. Wong remained behind to clean up the mess, make sure everyone got looked after and eventually got home safely. His ears were buzzing on a pitched tone, making him unable to hear none of the reassurance and solidarity promises he had heard from all wedding guest before he boarded the jet of the mutants. 

A part of him thought he could taste guilt, at long last. It was his vanity and faith in goodness that pushed to keep the wedding date, despite every single catastrophe that has happened since the engagement. Sierra had a bad feeling all along and he has completely ignored it for the sake of giving her comfort which proved now to have been something so incredibly dumb. Until he could hold her again and feel that she was safe and sound, no words from mouths of strangers could comfort him. 

Thankfully, Strange had stopped trying to talk with Danny and at least these hours spent on the hallway leading to Cerebro were finally quiet enough for some K'un-Lun wisdom to be implied and for Danny to simply meditate away all the sick thoughts and dark energies of pure wrath.  Such a deliberate action did not brush away miraculously all his worries, but instead gave him a little reason to hold on to, just about enough to greet Charles a little calmer after exiting Cerebro.

Charles looked tired. Understandably so. Thor was under heavy anesthetics in the lab, recovering from a battle Professor X alone carried in his mind to purge the eldritch fires away. Now, two more hours wore him down to a drawn out caricature of himself in good health.

"My apologies, gentlemen," he greeted them as a doctor would the family of a patient beyond saving. "I looked everywhere, but I can't find either of them."

"So it's true then," a grim, stern voice crippled the tension already fragrant in the atmosphere to pummel through its bounds. At the end of the hallway, Erik Lehnsherr stood in terror. "The Phoenix got her," defeat threaded in his voice with pure fright. He had made haste for home on the basis of rumor, however, the nightmare was true and it was only just starting. 

Sierra blinked herself awake slowly, hesitantly. An inexplicable fatigue had strained her awakening body, sparking aches into her muscles long before her mind had replayed the loudness of memories to her: the wedding, Daisy, the fire. With so many realizations clouding her immediate judgement it was not until several seconds into a clearer slight that Sierra finally distinguished the unfamiliarity of the ceiling. 

Where am I? was a strong enough of a question to startle the girl into rapidly standing from the couch she has been laid on. Off of her chest fell something heavy she didn't even realize it had been warming her with pressure until it cackled to the ground. Her gaze followed the sound and her heart almost jumped out of her chest seeing that same damned book. 

"Don't be afraid," an old voice eased into the room whose ambience drenched itself in darkness and stagnant blue hues dancing through windows covered with thin drapes. Sierra did not recognize anything in the room save for the Darkhold on the floor and the woman who brought down a tray with tea and cookies for her. 

"Agatha?" Sierra gasped, finding her sore dreadfully sore. Bringing a hand up to massage the discomfort out of her neck area, her silence built up sufficiently to leave room for the witch to coy in her marvelously honeyed voice. 

"So you do remember me."

"Hard to forget," she forced a quick cough before having to flinch away from the hand of the woman, reaching out to her forehead. Sierra stumbled off the couch and almost fell over trying not to step on the Darkhold. She held out her right hand defensively, but no magic sparked from her fingers. The pulse of a headache strained her terribly into an elongated blink, yet she was resistant in her conviction, putting enough distance between her and the old woman. "Where am I?"

"Somewhere safe," Agatha straightened up, joining her decaying hands in front of her chest. "My home."

"How did I get here?" Sierra hurried another question.

With the same calm, Agatha answered again, "Magic. You're welcome, by the way. I did save your life."

"Did you have anything to do with it?" Sierra jumped on her conclusions, tensing her right arm with yet still no clear spell answering her command. "With Daisy... going crazy and all that?"

Agatha watched Sierra's hand carefully, but not obvious enough for her nervousness to be noticeable right away. "Did you not hear me, child? I saved your life. Your friend was about to kill you and I rescued you."

"Yeah? And how did you get the Darkhold then? I had that thing hidden-"

"Apparently not well enough," Agatha interrupted. "A common friend of ours gave it to me last night."

At last, Sierra lowered her hand, confusion contorting her expression faintly. 

"Strange," Agatha could not help the grin; an old habit made her particularly happy to see the sting of betrayal flash through the girl's eyes. "He's more knowledgeable than he lets on, that's for sure. He knew you'd be needing my guidance, sooner rather later and you should be glad he gave it to me when he did. Had that creature been able to kill you, this whole universe would have been annihilated with your last breath too. Quite heroic of me, wouldn't you say? Saving the universe..."

Sierra didn't say anything though. 

Everyone was talking to her in riddles lately and frankly, she's grown tired of it. Tired of the lies. Of the scheming. 

It seemed Stephen Strange, no matter his variance, will always just betray her and if he could not change through the infinite possibilities of the Multiverse, than how could she trust a single word coming out this woman's mouth, a mouth who belonged to a myriad different Agatha's stirring absolute destruction in their path?

An overwhelming sense of loss had sprang in Sierra's heart when she turned her back on the witch and made for the door. 

"You need me," Agatha called, not moving an inch from her place, but exuding in her voice all too loudly that she was desperate to keep her there. "Strange knew it and you do too." Those words did not startle Sierra into stopping her attempt to leave the Harkness estate and the moment Agatha had watched the girl leave the room, she dashed to follow her. "I can help you," insistence sneaked into the conversation.

"I don't want your help," Sierra mumbled. All she wanted was to go back: not just to Danny, but to go back in time and stay on that beach in Tahiti a little while longer, to tell Strange to fuck off with his Magician and all that drama that turned her world upside down. 

"I know who you really are."

"If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed to know who I am better than I do..."

"The Phoenix won't be the last one!" Agatha finally shouted. 

For anything but the reason Agatha expected, Sierra stopped walking away.

"That cosmic entity is only the first in a long line of enemies challenged by your awakening," Agatha continued on her idea. "Whether you like it or not, whether you acknowledge who you are or not, they will not stop hunting you."

She didn't answer. She did not move.

It felt like talking to a wall, but Agatha marched on either way with her words, "You won't be able to face them all unless you start controlling the chaos, and you cannot control it unless you understand it."

Finally, movement stirred and Agatha held her breath to watch the girl a notch shorter than her turn around and lift her chin. "The Phoenix," she repeated. "You mean to tell me Daisy has been taken by that force all along?"

"Yes...," the old witch threaded carefully, not knowing how to react properly to hearing Sierra had only paid attention to a single detail thus far.

Sierra's eyes moved down, trailing into thought, but she seemed relieved by this realization which should have really been obvious. Her gaze had glazed, suddenly saddened to remember all too well what the Phoenix Force meant and also what Daisy, though not herself, had told her too. Associating the two morphed the words into something else entirely, something she felt compelled to consider now. Off her lips fell those exact words, "Your death will save everyone and everything from the reign of eldritch terror-!"

Agatha's hands caught Sierra's face, cupping her cheeks and thus stunning her into absolute wide-eyed silence. "Your death will shatter reality for the whole universe!" With menace in her eyes and absolute venom in her voice, Agatha's presence suddenly darkened the atmosphere of the room in a shiver of mania. "Get that through your thick head right now, child. You are not just anyone, you're not a silly girl who stumbled across power. You are power made flesh!" 

Sierra flinched as Agatha was praising her belief with damp noise right in front of her, inches away. 

Slowly, but without blinking her gaze away nor quietening her rapid breath, Agatha moved her hands down Sierra's face and drew their darkened rot away. "I do not know much, but I do know that if the Phoenix Force gets its way, every dimension will burn and this universe will turn to nothing in the most horrible way possible. Do you want everyone to die?"

Hearing the stakes a little slower, Sierra gulped and averted her gaze, shamefully just looking down. That sort of behavior lasted just a couple of seconds; soon, she lifted her eyes full with hope, "But if I can put my magic into an object -and I know that can work!- would the Phoenix Force even have a reason to want to kill me?"

"This is not the sort of power that can be stored into a relic, Sierra."

"Why not?!" she questioned, outraged.

"Because it's not just Chaos Magic. Chaos Magic is but a fracture of what you not only can use and harness, but fully embody. This is the Chaos of Creation, the reason why everything exists, the breath which blew the Big Bang into motion from a simple singularity. Sierra...," Agatha inhaled sharply, "the only way towards peace is learning to control it. You are the only one who can and you must at least try it."

Appealing to her good will seemed to have worked wonders compared to reason and sensibility, because Sierra chewed down on her tongue, thinned her lips, furrowed her eyebrows with uncertainty. 

Even that sigh which followed Agatha did not let follow through completely, "I know you don't trust me and that's alright. I wouldn't trust me either, especially since I know what rots my skin better than anyone else." Her boney hands lifted between them to show exactly what the effects of her dark magic had been to her after centuries of practice. It looked like her hands have been turned to twigs and immediately scorched, then petrified to a state of permanent dying. "But I can teach you."

"How?" Sierra finally looked like she was considering the possibility, at least for a second, before she took a step back, shook her head and inquired something else entirely instead. "Can you tell me what this.. Chaos of Creation is? Because I've read the entire library of K'un-Zi and I refuse to believe that the Darkhold is the only damn book which talks about me."

"K'un-Zi wouldn't have records about you even if they so desired to gain them," Agatha straightened herself and gained a look of dignity. If Sierra wished to be convinced of her worthiness to teach her, then so be it. "Most, if not all records of the Chaos of Creation is held not in text, but in temples and in stories. I cannot speak for all variations but I can tell you about one which was chanted about in the Temple of Z'oxe back in the 15th century when I was almost as young as you are now. To them, you were known as the Mother. The unfathomable power which nurtured the Great Old Ones into being so they may grow in the Outer Dark. Have," there, she hesitated, "have you heard about the Great Old Ones?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Their Iron-Bound books are stored in K'un-Zi," Sierra shuddered at the mere memory of it. "I had to flick through them, but I did not dabble in that sort of magic."

"And have you created anything peculiar since you awakened the chaos within you?"

Sierra hurried to answer with a negative when she recalled the creation before the wedding, that small octopus accursed with sentience and far too many eyes. 

Seeing her close her mouth in momentary terror, Agatha smiled almost morbidly satisfied, "Do not fret too much. Your creation needs to live in the Outer Dark in order to actually turn into an Eldritch Terror. But there you have it... The Mother. They had many names for you at Z'oxe and many stories too. That your first breath made this universe, that your light came from the absolute of the world. They raised praise to the Chaos of Creation constantly, for it controlled everything, surrounded everyone. Everything they told me and more was written about in the Darkhold. They have so many names for you, the source of their paradoxal theories, abhorrent dreams. Do you know who wrote the Book of the Damned?"

"Chthon," Sierra answered effortlessly, maybe even slightly uncomfortable that she was giving in to this witch's influence for the simply heeding of a warning that any other path she may choose may only ever lead to an age of destruction. Everything she heard unsettled her, but if there was chance of one grain in a dune that she could truly control this madness and avoid thus unspeakable bloodshed, then maybe it was about time she stopped running from the idea of chaos magic and stepped back, to see it in a different light. "The Dark Elder God of Chaos. He wrote it." 

From amidst those admissions, Sierra's mind reinforced her decision by thinking of those who'd benefit from her facing off with this obscure, disturbing branch of mystic arts that she was tangled into already: Danny and her could finally live normally, Wong won't have to carry her around as a time bomb or a burden, Daisy... maybe she could strike a deal with the Phoenix, convince it to let go of her friend too.

"He wrote it inspired by you. I would not believe that story if I didn't just see it with my own two eyes, Sierra. The book calls onto you. It yearns for you." Agatha took a deep breath before continuing, "There is surely more to the story that I do not know. Too much knowledge had been sunk, forgotten, lost to know for sure the full of it at my mere status of a guide to you."

"Say I believe you," Sierra studied the walls of the hallway far more intently than she dared look at Agatha, the bane of her moral issue. "Say I buy into all of this... madness that some ancient God wrote a book about me before I was born and that I was once a formless power which brought to life entities which are nothing bu sentient malice and strangeness. Say I just believe that you are well meant, that indeed I can do the impossible and control chaos itself. How would I do that? How do I control chaos when disorder stands in its definition?"

Agatha wished she had given herself the freedom of a sigh of relief for truly, they had finally reached the point where she felt Sierra had been fully convinced: by the story, by the stakes Agatha exaggeratedly presented to her, maybe even by the thought that her friend, Strange, had trusted this old crone in the first place too.

"Well," Agatha's putrid hands joined in front of herself and she raised her chin, "first lesson. You do not control the chaos. You control yourself, for you are the chaos."

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
WELLLLL, this chapter revealed a lot 👀
What are we thinking?