Sierra was shivering from every limb. Her body turned into a forest trembling in its ancient dryness before the strength of a storm. It was tumbling through the rustled leaves, turning them to dust blown into the wind and lost forever to the grayness of a sky of terror. For she was, above all else afraid. Not as a teenager is afraid of an exam about to change their life, but rather as a child has that inert fear of darkness or what lays below their bed, in their closet or behind the rage of a tall guardian. 

All of a sudden, she had reversed back almost two years and she was again just a girl with voices in her head, running from things she didn't understand towards the great unknown... all for the same name: Danny Rand. 

One cannot realize how unlucky or lucky they truly are until they've lost the catalyst of their changing point. Danny had shown Sierra the path to courage, to knowledge, to growth and most importantly, to love, acceptance, the true meaning of a home which shelter that sacred forest from the destruction of the storm, stopped the threat before it could ever tamper with the healing of the nature. 

Now he was taken from her. The shield around the forest was ripped to shreds and from deep in the rotten roots now barely holding onto the ground to avoid being ripped by the winds of chaos and sorrow, she was looking for him. It was a fundamentally easy spell, but it fleshed out with terrifying accuracy from only a grain of dust and a drop of water from the accident scene the recent history of the place: The Environment Memory. 

In this vapor cloud of translucent shines and molecules exploding in a myriad of mirages, images sparked colors and formed the lightly blurred images of the press conference, moments before the attack. The focus was on Danny's face, so clear that any watcher could vividly spot the drops of sweat beading his forehead, wiped every two minutes by the back of his shivering hand. Echoes of his mind were only revealed to Sierra, whose eyes caught the faintest luminescence of bright white amongst the hazel of her irises. 

He was wondering why would him getting married be taken as such a big deal that the press would go out of their way to tear him down, as a person, as a CEO, and as a hero who helped the local communities continuously. Ward Meachum, on Danny's right at all times, was however convinced this was no surprise, because him, unlike Danny, had never expected the best out of people to begin with. For him, this was just the flock of hungry hyenas doing what they knew best: seethe storms.

"... once again," Danny's voice ghosted to the floating smoke of the spell. He was as nervous as the first flower of spring facing the winter all alone; his head bowed, then raised, blinded by at least a thousand flashes and reminded to look down at the notes Ward made for him, "the proposal has been in prospect for a year now and Sierra's input in the company-"

"Has she always been a witch?" a mocking question raised above the chatter of the crowd, right before the color drained out and turned to different shades of pink. Glitches corrupted the spell, like a thousand times before and like a broken recording, explosions after explosions lost the image, the sound to mere flashes of Danny's right fist lighting up with Chi, and just as fast, dying out as he protected Ward.

Now Ward was in hospital, Danny was missing and Sierra was in San Francisco, wired on the chase. She sat in a cheap, white plastic chair, in an office almost without any furniture at all, forgetting even how to blink only so she could raise her hand; then, the spell worked like a recording which she paused, then, by sliding her hand to the side, it played back the mocking voice. 

"That," her hoarse, cried voice, pointed out and desperately, her eyes lost their magic luminescence, turning to look at the people she reached out to, on Agent W's recommendation.

Grizzly leant back in his own plastic chair, posted behind a desk and a sturdy laptop. Sierra had appeared out of thin air and him and his Horsemen were in the middle of something, but he pushed aside those matters because one look at her paled face told him he should be frightened by anything able to make the brave witch he met at the beginning of the year look this horrified. 

He sighed and looked up, over Sierra's spell, at the four people also sitting and standing around the room. "Ring any bells?"

Clara was the first whose lips turned into a thin line and she shook her head. Morbius and Jake showed a stoic reaction, because they too were clueless, however, Detective Paul was more vocal, sighing, "We could run a voice recognition, but-"

"I don't have time for that," Sierra immediately stood up and walked through the fog of the spell, spreading it in the air and breaking it apart in an instant. "K'un-Lun is breathing down my neck. Not only am I his Guiding Light and I am supposed to look out for him, but... he's my husband, damn it. If I can't find him, then..." What was the point of it all? her mind continued that thought for her, those words that her lips refused to cause sacrilege and utter out. If I cannot find my Iron Fist now, then what was the point of travelling the Multiverse, studying with that Stephen variant for five years? What was the point of learning everything about mystic arts if it's all useless now?

And yet, a part of her mind, in the very back of her thoughts, whispered that there was still a magic type she hadn't tried to use in finding Danny. 

Conflict played on Sierra's features too clearly for Grizzly's mind not to run his thoughts at full speed and finally lean forward, "Maybe you are looking the wrong way at this, Miss Harss." And before her turning around could turn into a spiral into danger, he continued, trying to keep his composure from behind thick glasses, "Instead of looking for the voice, first look for what interfered so strongly with your spell, because correct me if I am wrong, but can't telepathic fields meddle with the stability of energies in a space during an event? Maybe there was a telepath... Sierra?"

While he was barely in the middle of his allusions and slowly build up arguments and judgements, Sierra's eyes widened, then narrowed and her hands tightened into fists, opening a portal behind her. "Thank you, Grizzly," she said very briefly to him before stepping back and through the portal. That bright thing closed and the lights there flickered to a stop, suddenly drained from having to shine as bright as her magic. The Horsemen's office was left in darkness and Grizzly sighed relaxation into dropping his shoulders down and himself back in the chair. 

Sierra appeared in the middle of Professor X's office, making Scott and Erik turn around with shock. Scott tightened his fists, turned his mouth into a snarl and was about to greet her with utmost disrespect, as anyone would greet an unannounced outsider intruding. But Charles simply spoke faster, "Miss Harss..." Empathy slipped through his tone and contorted his expression in a glassy showcase of what little he could understand of her mind before she shook her head and pushed him out of reaching into the deep darkness hiding behind the surface thoughts she carried with herself there. "How can I help?"

Charles' question did not surprise Erik as much as it surprised Scott, because if anything was clear after the Battle of Tuun, it was that as their beloved departed daughter, Daisy, was not particularly fond of Miss Harss. However, Erik found the mystics of the human kind quite intriguing, if not even superior, compared to the weak mere mortals. 

Caring not about what each of the men thought, Sierra showed the same spell for them, only this time, she stopped on the pink glitches into the memories of the environment. "Telepaths can tamper with the stability of energies if their telepathic fields are present and aiming to conceal."

"You come here to throw blame at us?" Scott's arms, crossed at his chest, creaked his rubber costume as his grip tightened for composure. 

She ignored him completely and only looked down at Charles Xavier, "Whoever caused the attack, whoever kidnapped Danny, could have had the help of a telepath."

"Danny?" Erik questioned then. He remembered the name and also the moment in which he stared on that battlefield and saw the man with glowing hands, though with no mutation whatsoever, give Thanos a run for his money almost more so than his daughter. "Someone took Danny? Why?"

"Frankly, I don't care," Sierra replied almost uncharacteristically blunt. "I don't even care about the person who took him. All I care about is finding Danny, making sure he's safe again. Can you help me?" Her eyes begged while they stared down at Charles Xavier and him, looking up knew that he was not the hatred Daisy had displayed when she left Earth, an action he was still so bitter about. 

"If this was the doing of our kind," Charles considered, knowing there were many mutants who took after Daisy's final spiteful moments on Earth and therefore showed archaic differences towards the mystic guardians of the dimensions -him, Erik and the X-Men had to deal with them more often than they would like. "Then," he sighed, nodding, "we'll help."

"You'll let her hunt our people down?!" Scott exclaimed, remembering their fallen X-Men from the battle with Thanos. 

"Call Logan, Scott, please." A gentle order from Charles was backed up by Erik's decisive look giving the final push to the lad to just nod and listen. Because while he went look for the infamous Wolverine now but an overly drunk retired X-Men, sporadically teaching classes to young mutants who only wanted to hear war stories from him, Charles took a trip into Cerebro, where he too met the same barrier of pink intoxication turning into glass, then into a web of noise that he couldn't get past to see the faces of the people involved in the attack -deemed terrorist- which struck tragedy in front of Rand Enterprises building in NYC. 

"But I could narrow it down to a source location and it is...," Charles' mouth dried to the point he had to do a hard swallow before continuing, and after that, his voice simply deepened, proportional with the weight of his guilt. "It is a club in a mutant neighborhood. Hellfire Club."

"Doesn't Emma own that one?" 

"She does," Logan's rough voice answered Erik's worried inquiry. He walked, hardly in a straight line, carrying himself to a stop where his half unbuttoned shirt showed off a hairy chest, puffed with the fire from the glass of whiskey he finished before Scott annoyed him into getting up from his usual spot on the couch and answering Professor X's call to arms. Because last time he answered, it went so well. As proof remained his halved claws on one hand. Once he joined the group, his eyes stopped on Sierra and he nodded while actively narrowing his gaze on her a surprising amount, "Miss witch."

Sierra nodded in return to Logan's greeting but they exchanged no other words to his puzzled demise, even as they left through one of her portals. Logan was supposed to accompany Sierra into this mutant territory, but not for her safety, even though Charles didn't say that out loud. In fact, Logan was by her side because even with a vendetta like Scott and his departed daughter, Charles knew desperation when he saw it and powerful people like Miss Harss are dangerous when they get desperate.

Logan was with her to make sure mutants, be them responsible or not for the kidnapping of Mr. Rand and the deceased at the press conference downtown, did not die that day. 

Entering the club was as much of a blur as everything else for Sierra since she left Marion's. It felt like she had submerged herself in a nightmare and now, trapped in it, she had to see it through. A suffocating atmosphere became a chaining rope around her neck and the irritating smoke and conglomeration of alcohol was intoxicating from the get go in the darkness of the club, without even buying any of the vices offered on plates and at the bar in abundance. 

Because the place was packed, busy, even though it was barely even sundown. The entire floor was swarmed and drowned out in loud chatter combining itself with music and blending in with an orchestra with no chance of ever harmonizing outside of pure chaos. Stimulated over the top, Sierra's senses were assaulted long before she realized that from countless tables fully occupied, only one of them, pretty much in the center of the room, had only one man sitting down at it. He was shuffling a pack of cards, grinning from under the shadow of his hat like a Cheshire cat. 

She spoke no word whatsoever to Logan, but simply passed in front of him to change direction and walk towards the empty table where the mysterious man had exactly two chairs. As if he was expecting their company.

His identity was elucidated as soon as Logan followed after Sierra and sat down at that table with her. "Remy?" Logan tilted his head to the side and Remy raised his to greet them with a smile. 

"Logan and Sierra Harss," he almost laughed their names out. Sierra noted something else though: Remy avoided looking directly into his eyes. Few people knew it was dangerous to look in the eyes of people with a secure control over Chi Energy, because they could slip into your consciousness at will and unexpectedly. In fact, it was unlikely that someone like Remy Etienne LeBeau would know about this without someone explaining it to him beforehand. "The Wolverine and the witch is not exactly the match I thought I would live to see."

Sierra's every fiber told her Remy was involved in the attack on the press conference, but he couldn't have operated alone either. It was a relief that this man was not her only chance at getting Danny back. 

"But then again," Remy looked down at his cards and started dealing them for a round of poker played with Logan and Sierra, with him as the dealer, "I always knew you'd be the first to betray out kind." He threw his remark with a quick glance at Logan.

"Where's Danny?" Sierra asked. The first time was blunt, emotionless. She even complied to play along, picking up the cards she was dealt with, but not looking down at them. 

"Who?" Remy laughed in her face.

"Danny Rand," Logan clarified.

"Oh, the rich dude? Blonde? This...," he raised his left hand up, though it held his cards, "tall? How should I know?"

Sierra's head leant forward ever so lightly, "You reek of that concealing telepathic field at the scene of the attack."

"There was an attack?" Remy leant his head back only to raise his chin in superiority. He lowered his arm back down and tapped his cards on the table. Looking down at his hand, Logan saw kinetic energy glowing between purple and pink at his fingertips, where they touched the plasticized surface of the cards. Paranoia came in handy because Logan straightened up and with only side glances realized, all over the club, mutants kept looking at their table in fast but calculated stolen glimpses. 

Sierra remained calm though, even though her body's forest was being shattered, hammered by the storm coming from thoughts now getting louder with screaming to her reminders about the dark arts she learned, the Darkhold and the chaos magic one too many people threatened her fate with. They all scared her deeply, but on the outside, she was an immovable stone, showing no emotion but the absolute desperation to find Danny. 

"Mr. LeBeau," she said then, flat as a painting with no depth. "All I want is to find Danny."

"There is no need for a fight here," Logan backed her up. Somewhere behind them, the exit out of the Hellfire Club was flanked, blocked and locked. Sierra was aware, but she didn't seem nervous enough to even flinch a single movement out of fixing Remy with her eyes and hoping he would cave in and just look right into her gaze. 

"Oh, but there is." Remy laughed and only looked at Logan while raising his palm, distancing it from the surface of the table and twisting that playing card between his fingers. 

"Remy...," Logan warned slowly. Something was terribly wrong with the one Logan had known as Gambit before; sure, he's always been quite the wicked bastard, but he's never been unreasonable or deafly stupid. However, Sierra would probably not see things this way. Hostility would be hostility and that would be the end of it for an outsider like her. 

"This is the only way," Remy smiled, content. 

The cards Remy dealt electrified, connected to one another by a thread of energy coming right out of his fingertips. Between him getting up with a swirl of those levitating cards getting charged up and the prepared attack blasting right into Sierra's chest was only a second in which Logan's only reaction was letting his claws out. But even so, by the time his claws were out the table was turned upside down by the power of the blast which hit Sierra Harss off of her chair and across the club where crowd stepped aside and let her crash and bury herself, back first, right into the concrete wall. Dust joined the poisoned air and though the boom was louder than the music, the latter never stopped playing, the loud rhythms of excessive bass and simple beats mimicking the depth of an orchestra often associated with the darkness of Victorian horrors.

Remy's hat was kicked off his head by the blast and though his throat was threatening to cough from the dust yet to be cleared out, he seemed proud of what he had done, while Logan, knocked off his chair was furious and disappointed, perhaps even a little concerned. Hurting Miss Harss would only confirm that their kind was responsible with the disappearance of the Iron Fist, one of the people who did the most to protect their world from Thanos. This would be the start of a war if-

Logan had to make a funeral for his own thoughts considered there and then, because a hiss of magic pierced through the air and everyone's eyes turned to the dust covered crater in the wall where a spark of bright white light appeared, grew from a chaotic little speck into a contained and well flashed out disk, then got a pair too, standing beside it. Their source and wielder opened her eyes, luminated in bright white flames. Dust immediately stood still and fell on the ground, revealing Sierra standing up, with only a burn into her shirt. 

The war Logan considered was not a future prospect. The war was now. 

Sierra wasted no breath to step forward and extend her right hand. The disc of bright white magic shining runes flew from under her palm and expanded in size, stopping above Remy and his wrecked table. She wanted to take this outside, transport just the two of them somewhere where no one else had to be a collateral damage but from the side, just as she was about to pass through, all mutants in the Hellfire Club acted as one and surrounded her, blocking her way to Remy. 

Logan stood up. "This is madness," he uttered and before he could even approach the crowd surrounding Sierra, Remy's hand dropped on his shoulder, turned him around and pushed the playing cards' energy right into his chest, breaking the bar with him. 

"No," Remy smiled, "it's chaos."

Sierra did not hear that word, because her glowing eyes was assessing the people who were trying to stand in her way. She grounded herself and closed the disks of magic. Her palms relaxed and it looked like she would surrender. 

They wouldn't care about that anyway because acid spewed out of a mutant's mouth on her and then it was revealed that she was surrounded by a shield, usually invisible that she concentrated on making. Touched by hostile activity, the shield came alive and exploded into a beam of bright white light which pushed back the nearest enemies and stunned with temporary blindness the rest. 

Elemental attacks, physical attacks, even some tries to penetrate her mind all came at once after this moment of breathing in a break, but with little effort, Sierra adapted to the many enemies she had to deal with.

Logan vomited out that whiskey glass which was too much at the wrong time for him. Through the blur of his sight he saw white threads of magic flying through the air like hairs, dividing reality and picking up, molecule by molecule the dust, turning it into solid whips that Sierra weaponized, swung and created a wider circle around herself.

It was then that Logan knew he had to force himself up, had to force himself to get to the witch and get them out of there. This violence was what Charles sent him as an escort for. They had to avoid mutant casualties and just then, the mutants were falling over tables, getting smashed on the ceiling, dropped back on the ground and burned by the direct touch of the threads of magic that Sierra had first wrapped around her waist in a circle which did not touch her skin, and only secondly spread throughout the masses of enemies in a packed club. 

Once she cleared out that wider circle around herself, her arms raised, hands above her head forming mudras with the help with five dimensions of her fingers, losing their overlapping and looking like an octopus before they merged their structure and the light from each source in the room was snuffed out, sucked out of its recipients, be it glowing bands, neon or reflections, summoned towards the witch and her lowering hands. They gathered two conglomerations of energy, one in each hand, buzzing and holding so much brightness that their very core seemed to black out and be the center of a black hole, screaming for relief and to feed on more light still. 

That was what she controlled under her palms at a rate at which reality seemed to warm around her bundles of light. 

There was no sound coming out of her mouth when she breathed out her attack of throwing one of these bundles ahead. To Logan's shock, though he already flinched, Sierra did not hit an actual person, but rather above them, opening a dark portal screeching through the stability of the dimension. The light under her palm did not change, in fact, it spread up her wrist, into her arm, through her veins, growing even the white fire of her eyes, so that they shone out of her orbits and cast luminescence on her skin, on her eyelashes looking pale and the ends of her hair, seeming alive with the energy she absorbed and played with in rage.

"She's not killing anyone?" Logan mumbled confused while looking back at the mutants she knocked out, mutants he thought where dead until he watched her pull out of that portal masses of differently structured beings from the multitude of dimension the universe benefited from. There were worlds within worlds and she knew each and every one of them, so to her it was no shock to pull out of a portal an arm of a being made out of papers, written letters that never got sent. Those papers clashed over the mutants, shattered and separated in the noise that paper usually makes, that cackles sound of wiggling and crunching, or twisting and turning, then retracted back into the same portal which closed and opened again some other part.

Sierra stepped over the remaining papers from another dimension, over the groaning mutants and even the knocked out ones because the more people covered the floor, the less would be blocking her view of the real target, the one who really might know where Danny was. She look straight at Remy with a look which could quite literally kill if only he slipped and met her gaze white flamed gaze, the blinding two spots in a room filled with darkness apart from the vibrancy of her presence. 

Her right hand circled its wrist and pushed out of her bundle of white light another portal from which water roared out and tunneled a tornado of it, hurling it at the mutants behind her. The portal closed but some of the water remained. Still a few mutants, with more physical abilities, like super strength and agility, quickness she could do nothing about most of the time, rushed forward. 

Sierra brought her hands together in front of herself, joined their bridges and twisted until the movement trailed a circle of thin line ahead. With its forming, the room started twisting too; the gravity center was moving, aiming to turn the ceiling into the floor. But while everyone fell over themselves and Logan barely held on to the chair, Sierra continued walking on the new ceiling. She did not abide by the new rules of gravity she inflicted on everyone else, neither did her clothes.

Her walk stopped when she got right above the place where Remy was, struggling to crawl out of the fallen over each other masses. Runes burned bright whiteness into the walls, some as big as a poster, others smaller than the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. They turned up, one by one, flooding and swarming more and more.

The room was becoming unbearably bright and to add to the daze of the enemies, when white threads of magic wrapped around Remy LeBeau and plucked him from the masses above Sierra's head -she did nothing but tilt her head to do that-, beneath his floating presence the room started spinning. 

Sierra, once again, was the mastering body not abiding by the new rules, while the force of the spin slowly started turning the walls into floor for the mutants of the Hellfire Club. Screams were dimmed by the spells written into those runes burning the walls. Amongst their uses was also written the fact that Remy was saved from that confusion too. 

The magic trapped him, squeezed him, and brought him to Sierra. She turned him around so he could face her directly and she stepped closer. "Where is Danny?"

Remy shook his head, tried to avoid looking at her but her face drew nearer and alas, her right hand swallowed the glow of the energy she collected under her palm. Her whole arm became a beam of light and her torching fingertips grabbed the man's chin. She turned his face to her and he was forced to look into her eyes.

Within a second, Sierra's Chi burned through the magic and her torching eyes saw beyond the physical body, right into his chakras and into his mind. She saw his pain, she saw his prison and with a small gasp, she saw the pink thread around his neck too. 

Her hand immediately released his chin and descended down, wrapping around that invisible thing which now turned painfully visible and painfully real: a psionic thread, turning Remy into a puppet.

The second her hand touched the thread, she had a direct link to Marion's mind. Flashes of her old universe, of the demons she unsettled in this universe's Limbo and of so much more destruction corrupted Sierra's sight right after the realization that though she saw Remy be the head of the attack on the Rand Enterprises public conference, it was Marion who orchestrated everything. 

This was all the Magician. 

And she was definitely the only one who knew where Danny Rand was at, because she had erased all trace of that memory from Remy intentionally. 

Sierra tightened her fist on the thread and it shattered. 

In a flash of bright white light, the whole club was arranged with magic back to its original state and everyone was back on the original floor, though in pain and mostly fainted. Sierra brushed down over her burned shirt, ignored Remy's mumbles about being free of Marion and turned away even from Logan, heading for the exit that absolutely no one dared stop her from reaching. 

Marion barely held herself steady on the wall when she felt the sting of a string of hers being burned away by the raw power of the beginning of what will soon be the White Witch. She had always been aware there would be suffering before her plan meets its conclusion... but she never expected to actually feel the shiver of it or the doubt.

A doubt misplaced because Stephen Strange returned to her, backstage and held the miniaturized version of a coffer, a prison for something he didn't know what was doing in Sierra's house in the first place.

"Whatever is in there, it feels wrongly powerful," he noted while handing it over to Marion. "Are you okay?" Stephen tilted his hand seeing that not only was she sweating, but her eyes looked bloodshot too.

"Sierra's on her way here and she is convinced I kidnapped Danny Rand," Marion explained something else entirely as a reply to his question. 

"Well, did you?" Stephen sighed, knowing she was the sort of woman who would do just about anything to see this plan through. He also had seen enough into the future to know that Marion was doing the right thing. This universe... this universe had an unfair faith and it needed the power Sierra had, sooner rather than later. In the grand scheme of things, they were saving this world as much as they were saving Marion's.

"I need you to greet her and make her watch my show," Marion dodged yet another question. 

"It doesn't sound like I have a choice here-" 

She closed the distance between them and pressed a quick kiss to his lips, sealing them from any more snarky comments. But a blink away, Stephen woke up in the hallway of the theater, already empty because all the fans of the magic show were inside, loudly chatting about what the Magician would entertain them with now. 

Marion tapped on the ground the magic staff she slipped out of Stephen's hand into her own before teleporting him away. She sighed and tried to draw in as much power from that relic as she could. 

"Ma'am," Illyana's voice joined her. "We have a situation..."

"It can wait."

"But the demons are coming th-"

"It can wait!" Marion shouted and turned around. "God damn it, Illyana, this is it, this is the night in which we unleash chaos. Show some god damn respect and zip it!" The lips of the blonde girl stuck together and no matter how ide in fear her eyes got, they refused to flinch or move to her will of speaking. They only listened to the cruel command of the woman before her, now straightening up and preparing to get on the stage.

"Sierra," Strange breathed out, turning around and flinching to see the woman so angrily coming out of a bright white portal.

"Get out of my way, Stephen," she called.

"Sierra, please wait," Stephen did not move out of her way and eventually, as he slowed down, she had to stop and glare at him. 

"She took Danny," Sierra blurted out then, vulnerability cracking her voice through and letting out the sound of that inner forest, mourning ruination. It pained him to look down at the young witch's face and remember that day she opened her first portal; he should have know that he looked power in the eyes then too, perhaps knowing that would have made this moment hurt a little less. Because though she believed he was on her side, the reality was much, much crueler. 

"If she did, she will return him to you," Stephen lied right to her face with a reputable calm. He was the false calm before the final blows of storm, the fake comfort given to a mourner after calamity. "She told me all she wants is for you to see her final act."

Why did Sierra believe Stephen? 

Why does the animal trust the hand which fed it once?

It's an original innocence of the soul behind naivity that lays at the bottom of such answers these questions demand. She believed Stephen Strange because a liar would not look as confident as him; he was a man convinced her was doing the right thing. She believed Stephen Strange because he had once been someone she trusted her life to. 

Sierra believed him because deep down, she wanted to think he was good, that her universe had a Sorcerer Supreme who cared about the stability of the dimensions and all those lives which depended on his protections. She needed to believe that someone still got her back while Danny was away.

So she nodded, took a deep breath and calmed that roaring energy in herself, stepping into the theater and beginning to hear Marion's introduction speech to the ground from the middle of it onward, while Stephen tried to find a seat for himself and her. 

This time The Magician was right on the stage, speaking to a confused crowd, "... There are, therefore, many faces to magic. Something which can be beautiful can also be terrifying, threatening, much like a hero, which is nothing but the conduit of a false idol into your world. I have observed it for so long and it doesn't really get better, I must admit. You put powerful people on pedestals, call them special then act surprised when they fall off the height and splatter in gore to the ground. We have a hero with us tonight. She helped save the Multiverse from crumbling into a million shards, you see."

Sierra froze as Marion seemed to address her directly. Though all lights were on the stage and therefore on the Magician, Marion seemed to know exactly where Sierra was because their eyes met. Marion's mental resistance did not allow any intrusion from the witch. 

Stephen felt Sierra stopping and he stopped too, only now growing aware of the speech.

"A Guiding Light to so many people, a beacon of hope and an example of purity, innocence," Marion huffed a mocking laugh. "But there is such darkness in her corrupted core. Such darkness that she, the savior who claims to care about rules and stability of reality, had desecrated the Multiverse intentionally and brought into this world a reason for the whole universe to crumble. She..." A light opened exactly over the spot Sierra was standing. 

A box appeared next to Marion, the coffer Stephen stole, now in full size beside the Magician. 

"No," Sierra whispered out, eyes going from squinting to going wide open in shock at the sight of the locked box.

"... brought Pandora's Box."

Marion tapped her cane on the ground and the box's lid flung open. Dark smoke burst out of it and engulfed it. Smoke condensed into a figure which blacked out the colors, grayed them out on the stage. Stephen stepped forward because the figure standing on top of the closed box, before a public and thousands of cameras reporting live across the country, looked familiar.

This man's head raised and Stephen realized, that dark, grinning face... it was his.

The strongest variant of Stephen Strange looked dead into Sierra's eyes. "Things... just got out of hand."

She tensed up and hate seethed through in iron decisiveness, molded after her public betrayal. "No."

author's note:    IT IS HER ERA

this is the beginning of the White Witch and I am in mf tears.. WE FINALLY GOT HERE Y'ALL OMG aaaaaa

remember to thank Marion for pushing our baby past her limits so much, even if it hurt ughh

AND OFF TOPIC: but this series now has a discord server so lemme know if you wanna joinnn