Clea’s head snapped up just in time to see a third tentacle reaching out from the portal nearest her, a watery world that had caught Holly’s interest. And then caught Holly herself.
The pink-haired witch was wrapped up like an aquatic mummy, only her head and feet showing. There were far more than three tentacles by now, and as another coil covered Holly’s mouth, the screaming stopped. Clea thought the sudden silence was far more unnerving than the screams had been.
Its prey sufficiently immobilized, the owner of the appendages began to pull Holly back through the dimensional portal from which they had issued.
Margali readied her staff, shooting out a bolt of bedevilment at the creature before Clea could warn her against it. As the silver-haired woman expected, the bolt – which missed Holly’s head by an inch at most – did little damage to the thing, only causing it to squeeze Holly tighter and draw her in more quickly.
“Margali, don’t!” Clea shouted, as the green-skinned sorceress readied herself for another attack. “You’ll either make it crush Holly, or you’ll hit her yourself and save it the effort. Sometimes offense isn’t the best offense.”
She knew that was sufficiently cryptic to make the other woman pause for a moment, and that was all she needed.
“O Demon Claws of Denak,
Free my friend from this attack!”
Stephen would have laughed at her, Clea knew. The spell might not be flashy or eloquent, but it got the job done.
From out of nowhere, a multitude of spectral yellow claws came screaming shrilly past the women, grabbing on to the various tentacles that held Holly and tearing them to bloody bits. Clea, who was the closet to the portal, had to step back to avoid the spatter of brownish ichor and bits of wriggling flesh. Within moments, Holly was free, and what remained of the creature had pulled itself back through its portal, leaving slimy streaks on the pathway that led to it, its only prize the remains of Holly’s backpack and whatever had been in it.
Once the last bit of tentacle dropped off Holly, the screaming claws disappeared as if they had never been. Clea rushed over to Holly’s side, helping the shaken young woman down the path to the main roadway.
“What were you thinking?” Elizabeth snapped, her voice as angry as Clea had ever heard it. She had stomped over to stand in front of Holly and was shaking a tanned finger in the other woman’s face, as though she were admonishing a child. “Didn’t I just say to stay on the path and keep away from the portals? And didn’t you just reply in the affirmative, that that was rule number one when it came to fairy tales, before rolling your eyes at me behind my back?”
“How did you–?” Holly began, then interrupted herself, “And actually, what I said was–”
“I don’t care what you said!” Elizabeth shouted. She grabbed Holly by the shoulders and shook her. “You could have died, you little idiot! And it would have been my fault for letting it happen!”
And then she threw her arms around Holly and hugged her so tightly Clea thought she might have to recall the demon claws. “You scared the life out of me! Don’t ever do that again, OK?”
“O-OK?” Holly managed with a hiccup, her eyes wide and shimmering. Clea realized she was crying. When Elizabeth pulled back and released the young witch, Clea saw that the Talisman’s eyes were also shining, but she wasn’t sure if it was with unshed tears or with unvoiced rage.
“Listen,” Elizabeth said more calmly, addressing all the women as she stepped away from Holly. “I know I’m just here to be your guide through the Crossroads. And that’s all I want to be, frankly. But while you are here, and I am your guide, you are my responsibility. I don’t know how you settlers and sorceress-slash-demons from other dimensions reckon responsibility, but Indigenous people take it very seriously. It’s foundational to our worldview. And while I wasn’t raised in my culture and am still learning and reconnecting with it and my people, I do know this. There is no hierarchy for us, with man standing at the top looking down at the four-leggeds and the land. We are all equal, all connected. Which makes us all family. So, while I’m here, I’m like your big sis. That means you listen to me, and I keep you safe. Got it?”
“Sure thing, sis,” Holly said, with absolutely no trace of sarcasm in her tone or expression. The other two women just nodded. Clea didn’t know what Margali’s thoughts were on the matter, but she herself found it interesting that Elizabeth could hold this view on family while still despising her own father so much.
Then again, families were complicated, as Clea well knew. And she had heard the saying while on Earth that love and hate were just opposite sides of the same coin. She wasn’t sure if that was true, but she did know it was entirely possible to hold conflicting and contradictory views about your family, especially your parents. Part of her still mourned the loss of her relationship with her father, Orini, who had chosen his master Dormammu over her, although that choice had ultimately resulted in his death. And part of her still longed for a relationship with Umar, even after all the pain and destruction her mother had caused, even knowing she was evil to her core.
Even knowing that, while Umar had spared her life once, there was no guarantee she would choose to do so again.
Margali probably felt similarly, Clea decided. She remembered hearing rumors that Margali had once tried to kill her foster son, Nightcrawler, because he had killed her other son, Stephan. And even if that wasn’t true, how many times had she betrayed Amanda? Yet she was here in part to protect her daughter, a daughter who might well run her through with the Soulsword the moment she saw her. And Clea didn’t even want to think about the dynamics of Holly’s codependent relationship with Agatha Harkness.
Families were just complicated. Even found ones and chosen ones. It was the nature of the beast, she supposed.
Having delivered her speech and gotten a satisfactory response from all her little sisters – most of whom were far older than she – Elizabeth turned back to the road and began leading them once more along the pathway to the portal they actually wanted to go through. Margali fell in line after her, leaving Clea and Holly to bring up the rear.
As the two walked, side by side this time, Clea noticed that Holly looked pensive. “What’s wrong, Holly?”
Holly looked up at her with those doe eyes, wide and full of worry. “Clea, can you promise me something?”
“Of course,” Clea replied, wary but willing. According to Elizabeth, they were sisters now, and she supposed sisters made promises to one another, and kept them. She wouldn’t know.
“Can you keep this a secret?”
Clea was confused, but sisters kept secrets as well as promises, didn’t they? “What secret?”
“My screwing up and almost getting sucked into another dimension by a rancid octopus thing,” Holly replied. “Please make sure Agatha doesn’t find out. I’d never hear the end of it.”
Clea opened her mouth to promise when Holly continued, “Plus, she’d probably make me eat calamari for, like, a month, just to make sure I’d learned my lesson.” Holly’s expression was completely serious. “And I hate seafood.”
•••
Elizabeth led them through the mind-bending pathways of the Crossroads without further incident. Clea kept a close eye on Holly, but the young witch never strayed from the center of the path. She did still walk slowly, rubbernecking as she tried to catch a glimpse of the worlds that lay beyond those portals close enough to see from the road.
And sometimes hear. Everyone paused for a moment when shrill screams tore through the quiet, coming from a nearby portal. Flickers of fire could be glimpsed through its fanged-mouth doorway, and wisps of sulfurous smoke drifted over its threshold.
Clea looked at Elizabeth questioningly. Nightmare’s realm was one of those in the Archipelago of Anguish and Redemption. It was one of the two dimensions next to the Dark Dimension, in fact, with Otherplace, or Limbo, being the other. If this doorway led to Nightmare’s domain, perhaps they should use it instead of waiting until they found the portal that led to the Dark Dimension. They would only be a hop, skip, and a… leap, was it? – away from their goal. It might save them some time.
Elizabeth shook her head, already knowing what Clea’s question would be.
“Sorry. Wrong hell.”
As they resumed walking, Clea turned her attention back to Holly, whose head was still swiveling this way and that as she tried to take everything in. Clea could understand the girl’s excitement. Knowing there were other worlds was not the same as actually seeing them, especially for the first time.
Holly’s enthusiasm was mildly contagious, and Clea let herself be caught up in it. She looked where Holly looked, trying to imagine that she had never seen these wonders before, that she was coming to them fresh and unspoiled.
There were many watery dimensions, but Holly understandably did not spare much attention for those. Desert worlds, ice worlds, jungles. Doors that seemed to open to nothingness, while others led to star-spangled space. Then there were the portals that led to worlds like those Clea was more familiar with, but which were brand new and a source of never-ending astonishment to Holly. Kaleidoscope worlds, their colors and features changing according to some unknown schedule. Translucent worlds seemingly made of gelatin. Others that spun and whirled in hues and patterns Holly had no words for, having never encountered them on Earth.
A few doors were closed off. Some of those had clearly been sealed from the outside, perhaps by survivors of some apocalypse as a warning to those who traveled the Crossroads not to enter. Clea thought it more likely their closures had been at the hands of either enemies or beings wiser and more powerful than those who lived on the other side of the barrier. Or perhaps by conquerors who wanted to control access to their possessions. That thought made Clea shiver; she could only imagine what horrors they might find awaiting them at the doorway to the Dark Dimension.
Some of the locked doors were crisscrossed with enormous chains, some had been bricked over, some pulsed with magical or technological forcefields. Vines bearing black blossoms grew over one; Clea assumed the flowers were either poisonous or carnivorous. Possibly both.
More interesting by far were the doors sealed from the inside.
These presented as doorways with shadowed entrances at first, but if you tried to look closer, you’d find your gaze sliding away of its own volition, and if you were lucky, you’d only be left staring at your feet, or the loops of road above or below you. If you were not so lucky, you might be turned around entirely, staring at the next portal either before or behind you on the pathway and not knowing which it was. These portals did not want to be seen; would not exist at all if the inhabitants of the worlds within them had their way. So, they were spelled to direct curious eyes elsewhere, lest someone from the Crossroads decided they wanted to know what was worth spending such effort to hide.
Clea supposed garden worlds full of riches might lie beyond those portals, but didn’t think people generally locked themselves in just to keep out thieves or nosy neighbors. These spells were not “Keep Out” signs. They were more akin to “Quarantine” placards, or ones that read “Condemned”.
So, of course, Holly wanted to know everything about them, from how the “nothing to see here” spells on the doors worked to why someone would choose to nail them shut from the inside, as it were.
“It’s not like there’re any zombies running around out here to hide from, right? Or walking, or shambling, or however it is they’re getting around?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Clea answered, chewing on the insides of her cheeks to hide her amusement. The girl was just trying to understand things in her own terms. She wasn’t trying to be humorous, she was trying to learn. Clea needed to meet her questions in that same spirit.
She did wonder, though, how Agatha might have responded to such a query, or if Holly would have dared ask it at all.
“Why barricade yourself in like that, then? Knowing you won’t be able to get out again? I mean, obviously I’m still a novice compared to you all, but I’m actually pretty well-versed in magical theory and energy signatures, and these spells… they’re not reversible.” Her brow furrowed with concern and her eyes shone with sympathy. She was no doubt trying to put herself in the spellcasters’ shoes. Clea doubted that was something she’d learned from Agatha, who struck her as about as empathetic as a cat when its tail had been stepped on.
“No, not usually,” Elizabeth replied, having noticed that the two of them had slowed to a stop and come back to see what the problem was. Meanwhile Margali just leaned on her staff, looking bored and impatient. “Sometimes the zombies are on the inside, and the last person bitten realizes there’s only one way to stop the spread.”
Clea wasn’t completely following their conversation. She had, of course, studied magical and supernatural creatures while under Stephen’s tutelage, but she didn’t recall actual Earth zombies propagating through bite. She was, in fact, rather certain that was vampires. But Holly and Elizabeth seemed to be talking about a type of zombie Clea wasn’t familiar with. She might need to refresh her studies at some point, but considering zombies, biting or otherwise, were not a threat in the Dark Dimension, she didn’t anticipate that happening any time soon.
“Got it,” Holly said, nodding. “Makes sense. It’s sad, though.”
Elizabeth snorted. “Get used to that, cuz.”
“I thought we were sisters?” Holly replied, confused, to which Elizabeth just gave a small laugh and then shrugged.
“Sorry, forgot who I was talking to,” Elizabeth said. Then her words took on a lecturing tone. “Most Indigenous peoples don’t differentiate much between siblings and cousins, because aunts and uncles are like second mothers and fathers. And in the absence of a female parental figure – mother, auntie, grandmother – then the eldest female sibling often takes on that role. So, sis and cuz are often synonymous. But honestly, the term doesn’t matter. It’s whether or not your people accept you as one of their own. That’s how we measure belonging. Blood degrees and lineages and all that other nonsense are tools settlers created to define us; they were never the ways we used to define ourselves.”
When she laughed again, it was tinged with self-deprecation.
“Sorry. I usually save that sort of thing for sternly worded letters to the Premier and the Lieutenant Governor. Anyway, we use cuz for pretty much everyone, no matter the degree of relation, because we are all related, one way or another. Consider it a term of affection. Unless I’m good and mad when I say it. Then you should probably just teleport to safety.”
Even Margali laughed at that, and Clea felt a tension she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in break loose and begin to flow out of her, freed by the women’s combined laughter. From the looks on their faces, Clea suspected they felt much the same. Elizabeth had both revealed an unrealized fracture in their team, and preemptively healed it, all in one fell swoop. Or, rather, one bad joke.
Clea was grateful, if a bit chagrined. She had ruled the entire Dark Dimension, led rebel forces against both Umar and Dormammu, even marshaled a team against and defeated her mentor, Stephen Strange. She was no stranger to leadership, on both small and large stages. But she had missed this potential weakness in her team.
Maybe because she hadn’t really been thinking of them as a team, just as a group of powerful sorceresses with aligning goals. But Elizabeth had made her see that, for this to work, they needed to be more than that. They needed not just to present, but to be a unified front, a well-oiled spellcasting machine, or they would stand no chance against a super-powered Umar.
They needed to be like sisters.
Sisters in sorcery.
Holly chose that precise moment of profound reflection to voice her familiar, plaintive question. “Are we there yet?”
“As a matter of fact,” Elizabeth replied, “we are.”
Then she frowned.
“But something’s wrong.”
“Of course something’s wrong,” Margali replied, unperturbed. “You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?”
Margali’s words were directed at all of them, but Clea took them personally. While she had not expected it to be “that easy”, she had harbored hope that it might be. Their road thus far had not exactly been free of hurdles; it would be nice if at least one thing went according to plan.
Then again, it would be nice if there were no need for the plan in the first place.
“A girl can dream,” she quipped, forcing a smile she didn’t feel, to mask the frustration she did. She of all people knew how ineffectual wishing was as a means of changing one’s circumstances.
“Best not, in the Splinter Realms,” Margali answered. “You never know who might consider it an invitation.”
The other sorceress made a fair point.
“Hush!” Elizabeth said, glaring at them as she concentrated on the portal nearest them. “You’re feeling too loud!”
It might have been an odd statement to any other group of women, Clea mused, but these women lived and breathed magic, and knew that emotions, even other people’s – sometimes especially other people’s – could interfere with spellcasting.
They were also a group of passionate women who felt things deeply, and some of them did not make a regular practice of keeping those feelings to themselves. Clea eyed Margali, who, despite her earlier aplomb, had started tapping her foot impatiently. Elizabeth had better hurry.
Clea wondered what the Tsuut’ina woman’s concern was. The world within the portal certainly looked strange enough to be a landscape from the Dark Dimension. Floating islands, pink skies, weird bubbles. And if she stared long enough, it would probably change to something else. Stability was a rare commodity there.
Elizabeth frowned, as if in answer to her unspoken question. Perhaps it was an answer; Clea was not conversant with all the abilities the Coronet of Power both granted and unlocked within the other woman. Telepathy was not out of the question.
“This is definitely the way to the Dark Dimension, but for some reason, its… signal, for lack of a better word, feels… weaker than it should.”
“Maybe it’s you that is weaker,” Margali suggested with a saccharine smile, and Clea found herself surprised anew at the absence of fangs.
Elizabeth rolled her eyes and gave a half-shrug.
“Maybe,” she replied, her dismissive tone more of a reply than the word itself. “I’ll go through with you to make sure I’ve gotten you safely to your destination, and then, to quote an annoying old lady, ‘I’ll be taking my leave of you’.”
Then, suiting word to deed, she turned and stepped through the portal, her body disappearing from the Crossroads but not reappearing in the world inside, at least not anywhere within their field of vision.
“Is… that what’s supposed to happen?” Holly asked, her voice wavering.
“Let’s find out.” The words were barely out of Margali’s mouth before she was attempting to shoulder her way past Holly to get to the portal. Holly, taken by surprise and standing too close to the doorway as she searched for Elizabeth, never had a chance. Margali’s shove sent her over the threshold, the young witch not even having the time to scream.
“Well,” Margali said with an exaggerated sigh. She didn’t look at all remorseful for essentially pushing the pink-haired girl into another dimension with no warning. “That’s one way to quiet her incessant questions. I suppose we’ll have to go after her now.”
As she turned to do just that, Clea stepped forward and caught her wrist.
“Listen to me, Margali of the Winding Way, and listen well. I am grateful that you have joined me in my mission, though we both know its goals benefit you and yours almost as much as they do me and mine.” Clea’s voice was cold and hard. She needed to put an end to this now. Margali’s antics were one thing on Earth, where Agatha had been able to keep her on a short leash, ensuring her damage could be contained and didn’t draw the wrong sorts of attention. Even in the Crossroads, where Elizabeth had things well in hand. But if she tried to pull a stunt like that in the Dark Dimension, it could very well expose them all to Umar’s paranoid gaze, if not just kill them outright. And more than just their lives depended on that not happening.
“But make no mistake. This is my mission, not Agatha’s. Do not for one moment think that because my elderly doppelganger is gone that you are either in charge or free to run wild. I have been fighting Umar since before you ever walked the Winding Way. I know the Dark Dimension like a lover’s body; the people trust me, and follow me. So, if you want to ensure Amanda’s wellbeing, as well as your own continued access to the Winding Way, then it is in your best interest to stop behaving like a sullen teenager and start acting like the smart, powerful, accomplished sorceress you are.”
Margali’s eyes had become blazing yellow slits as Clea spoke, her grip tightening on her staff. Clea readied the Shield of the Seraphim to counter whatever attack was coming.
Then Margali surprised her by throwing her head back and laughing.
“Did I hear you correctly? Did you just… tell me to grow up?”
Clea smiled wryly. “I suppose I did.”
“You were brave to do so. Brave… and perhaps not completely deluded. I will agree to ‘behave’ myself, inasmuch as such a thing is within my power.”
Clea supposed that was the best she was going to get from the other sorceress.
“That’s all I ask.”
Margali motioned for Clea to precede her through the portal.
“Leaders first.”
As Clea was stepping through, she heard Margali laughing again.
“…elderly doppelganger…”
•••
Once through the portal, Clea didn’t need to see the dawning realization on Elizabeth’s face to know that they were not in the Dark Dimension. She was a child of the Splinter Realms. She could feel the wrongness in her bones.
“Are we there yet?” Holly asked, as Elizabeth helped her up from where she’d landed on a small, grassy hillock.
“It’s no wonder your parents foisted you off on Agatha,” Margali muttered, having come through the doorway right behind Clea. “The only real marvel is that Agatha hasn’t killed you yet herself.”
As Clea glared at the green-skinned woman, Holly cocked her head to the side and blinked at her, like a little pink bird.
“Well, she is dead. That sort of put a damper on a lot of her plans.”
“I would imagine,” Margali said.
Clea turned away from them to face Elizabeth.
“Where are we?” she asked their guide.
“Wait,” Holly interrupted, “you mean this isn’t the Dark Dimension?”
“All the pink didn’t give it away?” Margali countered, clearly just snarking for her own amusement now.
“No, this isn’t the Dark Dimension,” Elizabeth answered, her expression settling into one of grim determination. “It’s Liveworld.”
“What’s that?” Holly asked.
“Nowhere special. Just the realm of the Dreamqueen.”