Marion's deep sigh marked the moment in which, no matter how much he wished things between him and her were different, especially considering how alive she made him feel for a moment of total oblivion, Stephen made the choice of turning his back on the offer of the fireplace and a seat beside her.

A sharp inhale turned him towards the only door there instead and since she managed to hijack his way out of the theater once, he took no chances and just grabbed the handle of the door. He walked through, towards an oddly long hallway ahead. The metal taste of sorcery surrounded the scene.

She didn't bother moving to go after him. In fact, when the door closed, she turned her face towards the fire and counted, "One step, two steps..."

The third step stumbled into the middle of the room and Stephen looked around, back where he started. "A loop spell," he leant back, his laugh barely holding his irritation anymore. "So you are a sorceress, Miss Hall."

"Of course I am," Marion shrugged. "How else would I truly pull off half the things I do? It was a necessary skill to learn when I came here really. Particularly hard to harness considering that where I come from, magic doesn't exist." Her eyes reflected the fire's flame as if her own brown was the trunk of an oak tree, ablaze, at last. The sting did not get strong enough to break her numbness while staring at the burn. "But I am not half as good as you." She openly acknowledged that if he really wanted to, Stephen could have just broken her spell, shattered the whole theater and made sure she was put in her place.

"When you came here...?" Stephen accentuated those words of hers, repeating them back with bitterness which hitched abruptly, with his aggravated inhale. "Can you just stop with the riddles already? These word games... This isn't a game at all!"

"I am aware," Marion didn't bother looking at him, but she did break the shell of her numbness by lifting up to her lips a cup of steaming tea which has been floating next to her armchair all along. Its content stirred themselves. She took a sip and the level of disrespect he perceived reached a limit.

"I thought you said I'd get answers from you if I found out your name. Well, I am all ears for more of your lies, Marion Hall," Stephen let sarcasm come through with his last statement. At any point after figuring out the loop spell, he could have stopped talking to break himself out of that place, but he didn't and that, on its own, was a choice which scared him to have made so naturally.

"Lies?" Marion lowered her cup and finally looked at him again, with minimal movement in her chair though. "We are no longer business partners, Stephen. You know my name, so now, you are my first friend. I am truly sorry about those fibs I had to speak during our first meeting, but the riddles were a necessary test to figure out what kind of Dr. Strange you really are. My universe never had one of you."

Something in her smile had changed. It wasn't the same exuberant dazzle she put on during her shows, it wasn't even close to the proud and mischievous carvings into her features that she dug during their first meet... Her whole aura changed, along with her clothes in the privacy of this backstage room, clearly enchanted. Marion Hall wore herself casually, in all the infinity of that word's meaning, and because of that, her smile seemed serenely sincere.

"But I cannot tell you everything unless you sit down."

"Convenient," Stephen brought back the venom to his tone. "Then your truths will have to wait until I tell Miss Harss about the mess you've created for her and her fiance. Which by the way, are good people. Just like Wendy and Peter."

"Please don't," Marion's voice begged, but her head turned one more time, to look at the fire. "Mr. Rand did not ask her to marry him just yet and if you go now, you'll stop it from ever happening. Predicting the future has its dangers, you surely must know that by now."

Stephen kept his sighs and tiredness to himself. Whatever was his thought process, Marion witnessed none of it. The only giveaway to his reaction were the shuffle sounds of his clothes at the moment when he sat down in the armchair to her left.

He couldn't risk it... breaking their universe because he had no patience. So Stephen bit down on his own pride to wait a little longer and safeguard their reality through that. Better safe than sorry, sometimes was a mantra worth bowing his head towards.

"I'm going to tell you a story," Marion pointed ahead, at the fire, "of Marion Hall, a dreamy mutant girl living in the 19th century of Magemire." Stephen followed her gaze to the fire with the slowness of hesitation. After all, it wasn't just any day that he got to see the vulnerability which hid under the shell of someone apparently as cold on the exterior as him.

"Where is that?" The name of the place did not sound familiar to him.

"You'll soon find out."

Her smile was a homage to the purest melancholy, the type only gravestones of the past could have witnessed, so perhaps, this fireplace became their graveyard. Stephen looked into it and witnessed the flamed ash rise, twirl and enter his eyes, not to damage them, but to spread over his iris and allow him, after another blink, to see the flames have turned bright pink. Amongst them, images formed: houses, streets, tiny people.

Magemire was a small town for that century, greatly impacted by an industrial revolution which had ultimately provided jobs, as well as gas light and overpopulation. Some horse-drawn trams moved lazily up and down the main street, as rarely as the breeze, but it was the few buildings in the center which drew most attention: an imposing town's hall, standing out of the unsanitary mud, catching its breath after a rain, and the theater, where posters sprinkled in dirt, colorfully decorated the atmosphere, be it gloomy and dark.

"Trask's Circus of Oddities" read out on the posters.

The image was quick to change though, in flashes which, half conscious, Stephen was able to identify they came from an odd pink glow in Marion's unblinking eyes. It was unsettling and fascinating all the same.

Now, he witnessed the stage of what history might call a freak show.

"Mutants," Marion explained. "In my world, we've existed for far longer than you might think. Since forever, we've been nothing but entertainers for humans. People like Bolivar Trask made sure of it. I was part of his circus in Magemire for as long as I can remember, because I was born into the world of clowns and acrobats, like my parents before me. We've never known any freedom greater than using our constrained tricks for some laughter and claps to occasionally erupt from a public which stared at us with disgust, fright and perhaps, more often hatred."

Her hands were shaking. No matter how much she would have prepared for this very moment while constructing her plan, nothing would have eased the drowning sensation of having to evoke everything painful about what universe she had left behind.

To match her words the fire images played her memories of the shows. Stephen witnessed, through the frown of sadness how a much younger Marion stared a lion right into the eyes and the feline started answering her commands.

"I was one of the lucky few born with a less visible mutation. Looking in the eyes of any living being connects an invisible string between me and them and for as long as the string remains, their thoughts are my thoughts and their actions are what I want them to be. Mostly."

"That's what you did on the stage when the lights were on," Stephen spoke without taking his eyes off the fireplace. "How many strings can you attach at once?"

"Right now, as you can see, I'm at my limit," The pink flickered and Stephen saw the strings she had wrapped around her fingers in the fire, how they connected, one at a time, either to animals or occasional clown-playing fellow mutants for the circus show. Briefly, he had a curiosity about her words and pried his eyes away from the fireplace.

To his surprise, the pink color obstructed the world and he glanced at Marion's true hands, burdened by thousands of different strings, all disappearing through the walls and connecting, at their end, with a different person's head each. She was the center of a web network, the puppeteer of the biggest manipulation show.

He looked down at himself and realized, with a brief relief, that there was no string attached to him.

"I've never connected a string to you," Marion admitted, noticing his shoulders' sudden drop, a sign of a possible relief being found by his mind. "Not necessarily because I've always known you were the right sort of Doctor Strange, but rather because even if you failed the test, I knew you'd fall in love with me, so strings were out of question."

"Fall in love with you?" Stephen felt the pink hue was stuck to his retina, no matter how much he blinked. "Didn't you just jinx that future by telling it to me?"

Marion looked away from the fire and caught his stare, claiming it for herself. "It's not a future prediction."

At least a thousand questions hid themselves on Stephen's lips, but her words and the magic of seeing the world through rose colored irises was intoxicating him into a state of comfortable malleability, a general knowledge that there was a bridge between them being built, there and then, without him ever having to open up and without her even having to consider controlling him into taking her side.

They returned to the explanatory story just as the scenes in the fire changed to Marion's darkest night yet.

Those with less visible mutations could blend in better, so they took turns in going to the market for the rest of the circus crew, to spend their community's income on the necessary items for each trailer set in the back of the theater. They lived in an area where the trash was stored and where none of the taller buildings surrounding them had any windows to overlook the depravity of the lower race, as they liked to call them.

Unlike in Stephen's world, Marion's had no emancipation of the mutant kind in the eyes of the masses. Perhaps it was the cruel times or the fear of her kind, but they weren't likely to fight back either, even if their living conditions were poor and their dignity was dragged across the sand of the circus rink every night.

Once Marion came of age, she started being tasked to go into town for the community groceries too. She was twenty the night she returned with her face particularly red from the summer humidity and the effort of climbing muddy streets with heaviness on her back and in her hands, only to be welcomed into the camp not by the usual enthusiastic children, the helping hands of her friends and the waves of her parents, ringleaders for the whole circus, but instead, by flaming ruckus, wails and agitation.

"A bunch of teenage humans barged in while I was away. They were drunk and they wanted to feel powerful. So why not start burning the trailers of the freaks?" Bitterness purged Marion's tone. "They set our homes on fire. The fire did what any fire does and it spread, no matter if the homes were empty or not. Children, Stephen... Those humans burned children, some who didn't even get to the age at which they'd understand the divide between our kind and theirs. So my father tried to stop them."

The images played in the fire. "Christopher Hall," Marion narrated as a solid man walked towards the group of drunk teenagers, shouting. "He was a telepath," she smiled. "His mutation wasn't visible either so he was made the face of the show." The humans ignored him and shoved him aside, continuing their havoc at the cost of mutants' suffering, so Christopher raised his hand up and the boys froze, eyes wide and frightened by the grips on their minds.

"Hey, stop it, freak!" The voice of a policeman, one of the many brought there by the noise, echoed out of the fireplace. A gunshot made Marion flinch into closing her eyes.

"No!" A woman's voice echoed through the memory. Marion's mother was the presence of a siren. Her despair transcended into her eyes and the fragility of her mutation spoke for itself so instead of fascinating perverts watching the freak show, she made two of the policemen turn their guns against each other. Knelt before her husband, the third shot her.

"It turned into a bloodbath fast," Marion narrated what turned out to have been the memories she saw by connecting a string to her universe's Remy LeBeau, the moment she returned with the groceries, scattered in blood stained dirt. He stopped her from seeing the corpses of her parents. Illyana helped him hold Marion back.

"They were your friends in your universe," Stephen noted, understanding at last. "So you are controlling them here to keep them close still."

"In my defense, Illyana and Remy were the first people I met from your universe. I needed them. But I sought Emma out myself to bring her by my side. Telepaths are hard to tame, but she was worth the struggle."

"How did you end up in this universe though?" Stephen shook his head, still trying to figure out that bit. "There's no way you got here without any of us noticing..."

"But I did," Marion's eyes met his with defiance. "After the incident in which my parents died, the humans got cruler with mutants in my world. They got morbid, vengeful, they made me attach strings and animate the corpses of mutants, at first to keep the show going, but then just for the amusement of seeing decomposing 'freaks' on their wretched stage."

"Animate corpses?"

"I touched death so many times I forgot what life felt like," she answered ghostly. Her own gaze became absent, though still purged in the menacing pink of her mutation. "Remy was the first who fought back, joined Emma's initiative to go against the humans, free the circus... They were the first who died. Lost my parents, lost my friends... My best friend, Illyana, died last and I was left in a graveyard, a puppet to the human masters, alone, with no way out."

The fireplace kept playing images, the memories Marion replied as fuel to her will, to her self-constructed mission: herself, knelt in the graveyard at night, talking with the animated corpses of her parents and her friends, even though her animation was not life and her strings couldn't make dead people talk. She stood amongst open graves, covered in dirt and playing with the dead as a last comfort, as her last resort... Because there, she could pretend she still had people to talk with.

"But when Illyana Rasputin died, everything changed," Marion inhaled sharply. "Her mind was still connected to the Limbo she had been forsaking for too long. The demons in that dimension thought my temporary, pseudo-reanimation was their queen returning."

The fireplace darkened, showing the night in the graveyard, when the skull of her dead friend opened and from the dark cracks, demons crawled out, destroyed Marion's macabre fantasy tea party and grabbed her ankles, to drag her through the portal of a grave.

"They pulled me in there without a second of hesitation. To Limbo," Marion finally found the breathing time from all the narrating to wipe some tears from under her eyes. She couldn't allow them to fall, not now, when her story was nearing the end and the torture of opening up -a necessity in her eyes- was almost over.

"Call it luck," she willed herself with a small laugh, "but that split moment, between dimensions, caught me at exactly the same time when the Multiverse broke. That ripple shivered throughout everything. No inch of the Multiverse was unaffected and my world was brazed by the crack directly. Through the cracks, the falling shards of reality, I caught a glimpse at a being I was not supposed to make eye contact with... And I attached a string."

Marion left herself breathless just by remembering that part, but the fireplace stopped showing the visuals in her mind long ago and this being she had wrapped around her little finger, Stephen did not see the identity of. However, he noticed the strongest wire around her hand, going towards the ceiling and shivering when the being was mentioned. He looked up and a shiver went down his spine as an instinct, even if he saw nothing. He felt something should have been there.

"Oh, Stephen," Marion sighed, "the things they showed me... Infinite possibilities." Her sigh ended abruptly and she shook her head ever so lightly. "I was still dropped in Limbo, just not mine. Yours," she accentuated by looking at him. "Ten years before you and Miss Harss sealed the cracks, I came to your world through a pocket dimension and my existence went unnoticed because of it."

"This being..."

"I can't talk about them yet," Marion answered promptly. The pink hue was gone for both of them and now, in the warm normalcy of a room embraced by the cracks in the fireplace, she took her cup of tea back in her hands. All the reminiscing froze her into a paralyzing state of cold sadness. Stephen noticed the cup was hardly steaming anymore so he winked towards it and the tea gradually started warming again for her and for her shivering hands' comfort.

"But I can say that they're the reason I know so much. Past, present and future," she smiled, for the warmth and for finally relaxing her shoulders. "The future I have seen... of your world and the people living in this universe, that is how I managed to plan the perfect magic show these past ten years, so by the end of these acts, of these entertainment moments put on display for the world one last time, I would have gotten what I want."

"And what is it that you want exactly?" Stephen's eyebrows furrowed only lightly while watching Marion speak. He had a bad feeling inside of him constantly being silenced by an unexplainable trust he found in her. "What is it that it was absolutely necessary you dragged Wendy Weber, Peter Parker, Danny Rand and Sierra Harss into this?"

"Wendy and Peter were mentioned in the first act only so I could get your attention and trust me, they were the safest route for me to go down on without causing too much damage to your world. In fact, the news will stop affecting the pair in a few weeks, give or take. I just knew they had the highest probability to gain your attention after the Spider-Man sensitivity the Multiverse proved to have," Marion explained.

"Sierra Harss, on the other hand...," she trailed off at that part, a little grin building some wickedness on her lips, a detail which confused Stephen, as it came suddenly, after a long time in which it was sincerity which he received.

"Did you know she's the only one?" Marion turned her head back towards her dear Dr. Strange with the inquiry.

"The only what?"

"The only her in the Multiverse," Marion explained. "The being I connected with when the Multiverse cracked open took me exactly where I needed to be apparently. Because there are plenty of universes out there without a Wanda Maximoff, some in which she never even becomes the Scarlet Witch even..."

"Who's Wanda Maximoff?"

"Exactly!" Marion almost laughed, pointing towards Stephen and his statement. "She doesn't exist in your world, which is not too shocking until you realize that despite the fact that she doesn't exist, your universe still has a Chaos user of its own. One no other universe benefits from, one who can and will control chaos. They brought me to the only universe hosting someone who can rewrite reality successfully without any consequences."

"Wait," Stephen grew stiff enough that his armchair seemed uncomfortable. Confusion hardened his expression and he shifted to turn more towards Marion. "Sierra? Our Sierra?"

"Sierra," Marion confirmed. "But, since I am not planning on growing old in your universe, no offense about that, I had to find a way to step in and speed up the process in which she embraces her full potential."

"You actually think Sierra Harss is capable of Chaos Magic?" His disbelief riddled itself in many nuances, but none of them more obvious than his genuine denial. He knew Sierra, he fought alongside her, not just once, but multiple times and she was odd, weirdly gifted, but not a madwoman, not a witch.

"I know she is," Marion nodded along. "I've seen her do it. Reconstructing corpses, rewriting people to life, so why not me too? It would be just another walk through the park for her to wave her hand and change my universe. Bring my family back, my friends, make mutants free as they are in this world. That's all I want, really, and then, I'll go back and never bother another universe again. I'll willingly release all my strings here... But before that future happens, I need to get Miss Harss past her moral blockage. She might," Marion sighed, almost rolling her eyes, "be a little hesitant about Chaos Magic right now."

"For a good reason too!" Stephen exclaimed. "There's frighteningly little information about Chaos Magic available in the world, even for me, but what I do know is that it's dangerous, unruly. No one can control something without order."

"Then you underestimate her."

"Let's say, for the sake of your argument, that Sierra is indeed meant to use Chaos Magic," Stephen played along by proposing a game of imagination. His alert state did not fool Marion. He was scared by these ideas she was proposing. "Drama, conflict, tragedy, which mind you, they are very frequent in Miss Harss' life, become excuses to change the world to fit the image that she has for it. Rightfully so. Anything she doesn't like, she can change. No matter how slight. People. Places. Things. Everything is hers to change. But every time she does that, every time she gives in to her desires, no matter how noble they may be... a little more of her slips away. She loses herself. Her reason. Sierra is right not to want to go down that path if it ever gets offered to her."

Marion simply shook her head, "And yet I saw the future."

Her determination, otherwise admirable, now casted a mist of worry on Stephen's expression. "If it happens now or after another decade, there is no difference in the way Miss Harss will end up after her awakening. She will ascend as the White Witch and her magic will be the strongest light in the Multiverse, part of the Split Essence, a beacon, a source... Tell me, Stephen, have I ever been wrong before?"

"Well, no, but-"

"I am not wrong about this one either," Marion hurried to speak that fact into their conversation.

"But what exactly will you do to convince her to accept something she doesn't want?" Finally, one of Stephen's questions brought a true surprise to Marion and he caught her truest inner panic. Her plan, whatever it was, he understood with just one glimpse that it was dangerous. His own moral compass creaked: Sierra was his friend, her fiance had helped him solve inter-dimensional conflicts, yet Stephen was aware his worry was not for them at that moment, but for the safety of the world.

Timely, the clock above the fireplace blasted its alarm, as an allusion to a Slavic saying of the end.

"Time's up," Marion pointed up toward the clock. "You can go tell Miss Harss about what happened now. Tell her she can come talk to me and I'll make this go away."

"And if I don't?" Stephen got up at the same time with Marion, knowing well enough that she won't fix this chaos for Sierra. Now that he knew what the Magician was here for, who she really was, it was easy to understand chaos was what would help her goals thrive and be achieved.

"Stephen, Stephen...," Marion sang his name in a quiet tone, taking a step forward. Her eyes were fixed on his, but her hands were drawing circles and shivers on his thin shirt, under the weight of the Eye of Agamotto. "You are already part of this, like it or not. You are an accomplice. Just trust me and all will be fine."

His hand grasped over her wrist, squeezing just about hard enough to draw her away from his chest and stop her altogether from snapping her fingers. He tasted magic in the air and knew she was going to teleport him away from the backstage. Not yet. With cold eyes narrowing his vision down at the smiling woman, Stephen's aggravated tone dropped an octave.

"Show me," he commanded.

"What?" Marion found it exhilarating that the man almost made her stutter. He had been a peculiar individual to watch since the very first glimpse she took at this universe's timelines.

"Show me what you've seen of Sierra's future," he rephrased his demand. "Seeing is believing, Marion Hall, and if I am to help you, if I must truly betray my friend's trust for the greater good, the least you can do is show me this future we are fighting for. Show me what she becomes and if it is safe, for the world and for her, I'll help you go back to a better version of your world."

Marion's long hesitation was a test to their eye contact.

"Deal," she finally formed her grin. Marion's held hand wrapped around Stephen's wrist as well and the pink hue returned to the world between them. Stephen's retina itched with that nuance, but inside his mind played fragments of the future, flashes of light amongst which he saw it. He saw her.

"The Queen of Chaos..."

author's note: there we go!! finally explained the chaod magic part in my universe and why we have no wanda and why sierra is a very important person for this world

how are we feeling about the morality tests in this chapter? what would be your side in this story?

ALSO, yepp, i just name dropped me and Raichia 's future collab project, a crossover between our Marvel universes, "The Split Essence" 💖😌