coveted magics, 17
“Damn, you pizza guys are fast,” a woman’s voice called from behind the front door of an apartment in New Mexico, and Harry really hoped he’d gotten the right place. As far as he could tell, this was seriously just some ordinary apartment building with nothing magical about it. It wasn’t unheard of for mages, witches and sorcerers to live a life of obscurity, but still… Harry had an odd feeling about this.
The door opened, revealing a woman in perhaps her early thirties, with long wavy black hair and glasses. She was wearing a grey hoodie with obvious sauce stains on it, and a baggy pair of black sweatpants. “Oh. You don’t have my pizza. Here I was preparing to tell the pizza guy about how they deserve a million raises, and now I just have hunger and disappointment. So, kid, what do you want?”
“Are you Darcy Lewis?” Harry asked plainly, hoping to get his answer and move on. He wasn’t really in the mood to be especially patient lately, not with the gargantuan task at hand.
“Depends who’s asking,” the woman said with narrowed eyes. “You better not be a student asking for a supervisor, because showing up at my home would be wildly inappropriate.”
“No, I’m-“ Harry tried, caught off guard by the normalcy of all this. “I go to MIT, so I’m definitely not a student of wherever you work. Theoretically, I need your help with something entirely un-academic, but-“
“WOAH. Woah woah woah, no,” Darcy interjected, and then looked him up and down. “I mean sure, you’re cute, but I don’t go for anyone under thirty. I mean, who even are you? And damnit, why aren’t you my pizza guy?”
Harry groaned , and did the only thing he could think of to avoid any further embarrassment and unhelpful assumptions. He raised a hand, and shrouded it in darkened, magical energy. “Does this mean anything to you?”
Darcy’s whole face lit up, and she raised her hand and did the exact same thing. “Hey, I can do that! Oh my god, are you from some magical agency here to recruit me or something? I mean, I never really planned to go down the hero path since I started being able to do this, but… eh, might be more fun than grading honours theses. Just to be clear, you’re not trying to proposition me for sex or anything, right?”
“No,” Harry insisted. A small part of the back of his mind knew he’d find this woman attractive if he wasn’t so distracted by all the trauma and weight that came with his mother being an imminent threat, but he also was not the kind of guy to show up at some random’s place for a hookup. “Look, can I come in? This isnt’ the kind of thing I want to be putting on display in public.”
Darcy shrugged, and turned to walk back into her apartment. “Sure, why not. So, what’s this all about?”
Harry followed her in, careful not to trip on anything on the messy floor. “Have you heard of something called the Witches’ Road?”
“Nope,” Darcy answered. “Sounds like a trashy old horror movie title or something. Wait, hold on a second. Do you want to, uh… introduce yourself? Here I am letting you into my catastrophic mess of a home and I still have no clue who you are.”
“Right, sorry,” Harry apologised. “My name is Harry Osborn. I’m-“
“Wait, Osborn?” Darcy interjected again. “Like OsCorp? Damn, now I’m extra disappointed. You could have been here to hire me for some cushy job, but it’s just magic stuff.”
“Just-“ Harry started, found his words failing him, and took a breath. He was getting rapidly less sure of the merits of following his divination spell’s results. Perhaps he’d done something wrong and messed it up? No, he should at least try and win this woman over and see if she was on that list for a reason. “You know what, sure. I can get you a job at OsCorp. But that really isn’t what I’m here for. An extremely dangerous witch is threatening my family, and I’m gathering up a coven to travel the Witches’ Road. Those who complete the Road are able to amass power, which I need in order to stop this woman and protect the people I care about.”
“Huh,” Darcy said. And then, again, “Huh. That’s bonkers as all hell. But… why me?”
“Honestly? I used a divination ritual to generate a list of coven members, and normally that kind of spell gives pretty reliable information. You were on that list, so I’m here to see if you’re going to be able to support this coven on the Road.”
Darcy hummed, and grabbed a can of soda from her fridge. “Woah, divination . How did the whole world never notice all this magic and superpowers and crap before that big Iron Man reveal? Anyway, I don ’t think I’m a witch , so… wait, am I? Honestly, I don’t even know. I only got these powers like a year ago.”
Well, that certainly made things more interesting. If Darcy had gained powers a year ago from now, that meant that she had interacted with the Darkhold - or the Darkhold had interacted with her - enough that she would receive a portion of the Chthonic energy of this dimension that was unbound when Wundagore was destroyed. Now things were starting to make sense.
“Judging by the little display you showed me at the door, I would wager that you do in fact have the powers of a witch,” Harry informed her. “Though, I’m guessing you don’t have any training. Is that about right?”
“Yep, pretty much sums me up. I did a little at the Sanctum, but that was mostly just learning to get it under my control, and a bit of… scientific experimentation,” Darcy confirmed, and took a swig from her drink. “So I’m not sure if you want me on your little team.”
Harry shook his head. “No, I’m starting to get the sense that you should be coming along the road. If I’m right about my current hunch, you’re going to be one of Agatha’s targets, so it’s best that you get yourself some power and experience to protect yourself. Now, have you ever heard of a book called the Darkhold?”
“Woah woah woah, wait a second. Agatha, like Agatha Harkness? Agnes, from Wandavision?” Darcy asked, recognition filling her face.
There we go, now I ’m getting somewhere, Harry thought. “The very same.”
“I thought Wanda sealed her away in Westview,” said Darcy.
Okay, now Harry could take her completely seriously. She was involved in this side of the world, and had enough knowledge to connect some pretty important dots. “She did, but when Mount Wundagore was destroyed almost a year ago, a huge burst of Chthonic energy was released into the world, seeking out those who have held some kind of connection with the Darkhold. Some of it went to Agatha, freeing her from Wanda’s binding spell. As far as I can tell, some of it also went to you. You got your powers in November, right?”
“Sure did,” Darcy said, and started conjuring up energy and making it dance across her fingertips. “I’ve kind of been playing around with it a little but I never planned to get involved. Still, I saw what kind of person Agatha is up close, and if you need my help to stop her, I guess I’ll do what I can. Wasn’t the Darkhold that book she had in Westview? I remember Wanda took it before she fled. I don’t think I ever even touched the thing.”
Not really minding whether or not Darcy noticed, Harry quietly released a pulse of invisible magical energy - the same sonar-like ability he used to locate Billy back when he and Peter were sent to rescue the kid - just to gauge roughly how much power Darcy held. When the wave returned to him, it made clear that it wasn’t too small an amount. She wasn’t immensely powerful or anything like that, but enough that with a little bit of guidance she’d definitely be an asset on the Road.
“Unfortunately the Darkhold is-“ Harry started, and then stopped to correct himself, “-was a bastard. Essentially it functioned as a conduit for Chthon to fuck with people and achieve its goals. Wait… you said you were at Westview? The Darkhold was there too. Is there anything strange you noticed about yourself while you were there, or perhaps when your powers showed up?”
Darcy paused, and stared for a moment. “I knew it! I fucking knew it! That day, I remembered that- oh god , Wanda’s kids . Fuck, I should have hunted her down to tell her.”
“Slow down,” Harry urged her, wondering what exactly it was that Darcy knew about Billy and Tommy. “What are you talking about?”
Darcy sighed, and started drumming her long - probably acrylic or something - nails on the kitchen countertop. “So in Westview, Wanda had these two kids. Unlike literally everyone else on the Wandavision broadcast, we all thought those two didn’t match up with any known identities. Except when I got these powers, I remembered that I had found out that there ’s this one kid Billy Kaplan, and another kid Tommy Shepherd, who were older than Wanda’s twins ever were on the show but they were real. And I forgot . And then Wanda went and massacred a whole bunch of people because she was a grieving mom who didn ’t know her kids were alive .”
“Okay, definitely slow down,” Harry insisted, because fortunately for Darcy, he had information that would alleviate her worries. “Tommy and Billy are fine… ish, and Wanda knows about them now. It sounds like the Darkhold manipulated your memories, and must have been doing so for long enough that some Chthonic power latched onto you after Wundagore. That said, they are being targeted by Agatha. So, will you help me put a stop to her and protect them?”
Darcy’s face grew serious. “I’m in.”
Crash .
Riri winced as she watched one steel beam topple, and then another, and then another. It wasn’t a mistake - it was a calculated move, but she wasn’t a fan of ruining a whole bunch of difficult construction work all the same. Her opponent was some dude who’d gotten his hands on a military-grade exosuit. Probably a military researcher or contractor who’d lost it and snapped. He couldn’t fly or anything, but the suit made him strong , enough that he was wrecking cars and crushing anything in sight.
And damn , she ’d just been intending to go out for a fly and clear her head. She’d gotten a message from Shuri earlier in the day saying that she wanted to call this evening. What with how Shuri’s whole everything made Riri feel, she really needed that mental clarity. And then this asshole had shown up yelling about “showing everyone” in a busy city block. Riri couldn’t just ignore him, not with how destructive he was being. So she’d flown down, fired a few blasts at him and promptly became disappointed at how they fizzled out on his suit without any impact.
Luckily for her, and perhaps unluckily for whoever was responsible for the building project, Riri had found a perfect looking construction site right nearby, and a plan had come to her mind. Baiting the guy into the right spot had been easy . All Riri needed to do was taunt him, spouting lines about how beating her would “really show them”, and then he followed. His suit was fast, too, and a couple times he’d leapt into the air and almost gotten a hold of her. Into the construction site the had gone, and with some careful timing, Riri fired a shot on a typically sturdy structural support pole, and toppled the entire scaffold and tiering of construction onto the exosuit.
Riri couldn’t get close enough to take this guy out herself without risking her own precious suit getting busted up, so this was truly the next best thing. Maybe, just maybe , she ’d be able to get back to her evening flight before her stupidly impressive and politically important crush would call her. “Dude can you do me a favour and just chill out? I got shit to do.”
The man screamed, but there wasn’t anything he could do to break free of the sheer weight of at least fifty solid steel beams. Still, Riri wasn’t about to trust that, because there was always the possibility he’d shift the beams enough to lighten the weight before any effective enough law enforcement showed up to take him in. Daring to take the risk, Riri flew in close and got a better look at the exosuit. She couldn’t see any visible panels or weak spots, which meant that a solid, swift strike to the man’s head would have to suffice.
With that dealt with, Riri took to the skies once more. Now, it was time to get back to clearing her mind. Specifically, thinking through the current crisis enough that she didn ’t end up embarrassing herself by asking the very busy Black Panther to come and help fight some random witch. Well… not exactly random. This was Agatha Harkness, and Riri had done her research. She knew on a surface level that this woman was Harry’s biological mom, that she’d scared the shit out of Tommy and had Wanda absolutely fuming and preparing to sacrifice her own safety from Damage Control to blast the life out of that woman.
Riri also knew from Peter and his big sister Jessica that Agatha was clever and calculating, and had the skill and power to restrain masses of people while she sought after her targets. She knew from her gut , and had for a little while, that something like this was coming. She just didn ’t know what she could do to protect her people, and her city. Riri had hardly dealt with magic before, beyond training occasionally with Harry and Wanda. She didn’t know enough about it, enough to dissect its inner workings and truly prepare for an arcane onslaught.
It was freaking her out.
She wanted to build a bunch of traps she could activate at range to take Harkness down if she managed to get a one-up on the team, but for all Riri knew, there was some simple kind of magical EMP she could pull off. Harry hadn ’t been able to identify such a specific spell, but Harkness had hundreds of years on him in terms of knowledge and experience. She couldn ’t probe him any more for that kind of info - at least not right now - because he was all the way in fucking Norway recruiting some Asgardian kid for his inter-dimensional mission to amass more power.
The Witches’ Road. Riri didn’t like that plan. From what she understood, it could take anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks to traverse the Road, if they even survived. It left Boston even less well defended. Why couldn’t Harry just recruit these people to come and help in the fight?
No, Riri knew the answer to that. Bringing more and more magic users into Boston was just risking feeding Agatha more and more power. Maybe it was a good idea for Harry and his ragtag group he was building to be in another dimension, away from the threat. Let Wanda be the primary one to deal with Agatha, with the rest of the team there as backup. And the best Riri could come up with to better fight against Agatha? Improving her repulsors. More heat, more power. It’d have to do.
Her phone rang.
“Sup, Ironheart? How are things going over in Boston?”
“It’d be better if you’d get your ass over here to hang out sometime,” Riri responded without shame. “Hey, I don’t suppose you know much about magic? Or particularly if magical EMPs are a thing?
“Hmm, sure, I know a thing or two. And we can talk about that. But first… I want to keep up on the hot gossip, and you never told me how Gwen’s date with that other girl went last week!”
“Oh,” Riri paused, because it had truly slipped her mind. “Well, to be honest, they never really brought it up since. I think Gwen’s been too distracted looking after Tommy and helping him settle in.”
Billy gave himself a moment to take in the whole Playground around him. He really was in a sightseeing mood, especially after having flown across part of Cambridge with Wanda from home to the training facility, her magic concealing them both from anyone who might spot them in the sky. The facility was huge and empty, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been here before, but it all felt more official now. He was here to train , after all. Billy’s eyes landed to the door to the kitchen off to the side. He knew that there were protein shakes in the fridge in there, and wondered if the kind of training he and Wanda would do might result in him needing one.
He shucked off the warm winter coat he’d worn on the way here, using his magical abilities to fly it into one corner of the huge hall. It wasn’t like he needed the coat, but for some reason today he’d preferred it to using a spell to keep warm in the cold Boston winter. It wasn’t as cold as Chicago here, but still cold enough to affect him. Underneath his coat, he was wearing a blue exercise t-shirt that clung a little tightly to his body, as well as black shorts and leggings, and a pair of converse that definitely weren’t for working out in. He undid the laces and kicked those off too.
Wanda chuckled, seeing the outfit that had been half hidden under his coat. “I’m not going to have you doing laps or strength training, you know.”
Billy’s cheeks flushed. “Right, yeah. I don’t know, I guess it felt fitting?”
“Fair enough,” Wanda conceded. She was in her usual hoodie and track pants getup. The hoodie was still stained with sauce from a beef dish she’d made last night for Shabbat dinner. “I’m glad you asked this of me. I look forward to teaching you as much as I can about the magical arts. Still, you didn’t want to go to shacharit with Peter and Harley?”
“Nah.” Billy shook his head. “Even if Teddy is there, I can only take so much Jewish stuff in close succession right now, after the Kaplans kind of ruined it for me. Besides, it’s Harley’s first time going and I didn’t want to, like, invade? Did you know he’s thinking about converting?”
“I recall him mentioning that thought,” Wanda nodded, and then smirked. “Well, I hope he’s prepared for the Rabbi to turn him down a few times.”
“Wait, what? Why would he do that?” Billy questioned, because as far as he was aware, converts were more than welcome in Judaism, and Beth Shalom was an extremely accepting shul.
Wanda hummed. “It is an old tradition, and perhaps the Rabbi here won’t put it into practice. It is, in many communities, customary that the Rabbi refuse a potential convert three times, to ensure that the convert is sincere in their desires to become a Jew.”
“Okay, that actually is kind of cool,” Billy remarked, thinking of how much Christianity seemed to get pushed on everyone all the time. With his own experiences of having religion forced onto him, it was nice to see more active evidence that Judaism just wasn’t supposed to do that. At least, not to people who weren’t already Jewish. “It’s kind of weird to think that I’ve been here for almost three weeks now.”
“And I’m glad that you’ve settled in so well,” Wanda smiled, but that smile quickly turned to a frown. “I fear that Tommy isn’t doing quite so well. And… I noticed you’ve yet to spend very much time with him. Is everything okay between the two of you?”
Billy shrugged. “I dunno. I guess I Just don’t know how to talk to him? I want to try, though.”
“Tommy and I have been playing quite a bit of Scrabble together. Perhaps you could challenge him to a game?” Wanda suggested, and then began drawing scarlet magical energy into her hands.
“Alright, I’ll give that a try. So, what are we doing today?” Billy asked, matching Wanda’s action with blue crackling energy of his own.
“Well,” Wanda began, weaving shapes with her hands and conjuring a variety of symbols, scripts and shapes in the air off to one side of the room, “from what I have seen, you have inherited my ability to utilise Chaos magic. It is an extremely powerful branch of magic, with a far stronger connection to witchcraft than sorcery. I know you are already quite skilled with simple telekinesis and energy projections, but I would like to give you some foundations in witchcraft before I teach you anything about Chaos magic itself. That way, you won’t be at risk of making the same mistakes that I have.”
Immediately, Billy knew exactly what she was talking about - Westview. The time that she had enthralled an entire town of people, altering everything about their lives and surroundings in an out of control Chaos magic spell that she both didn’t know how to pull back in and didn’t have enough control of herself to do so anyway. “Yeah, uh… that’s a good idea, I think.”
Looking over to the symbols, Billy recognised some of them to be Hebrew words and letters, which he had not been expecting. Apparently Wanda noticed his reaction. “Curious about the Hebrew?”
Billy nodded.
“Although witchcraft does involve some raw energy manipulation without incantations, runes or sigils, much of the finer and more controlled aspects of the craft require the latter. There have been witches all over the world, going by different names, with different cultural roles and varying levels of acceptance. In fact, the modern notion of witches is largely shaped by the American Witch Trials. Tell me, Billy, have you heard of Kabbalah?”
The term certainly sounded familiar, but Billy couldn’t fully place it, beyond the connection to Kabbalat Shabbat - but he knew this wasn’t that. “I think so? What is it?”
“Kabbalah is a Jewish branch of mysticism that was a closed practice even within Judaism itself, restricted only to those who had dedicated their life to study. As a matter of fact, some Kabbalists were magic practitioners that could be compared to witches. Technically, the use of magic is forbidden in Judaism, for any purpose beyond simply studying it. It is likely this reason that they did not attract very much attention. Likewise, many other cultures have had their own witches, their own scripts and their own sigils,” Wanda explained. “I have studied a few different languages of witchcraft, and I would like to start by teaching you some from both Latin and Hebrew.”
“Sweet,” said Billy, more than happy to learn to use magic in a way that had rules and made sense. Maybe languages weren’t exactly his strong suit, but he could just put in more work.
“We’ll start with this rune,” Wanda said, pointing to a rune with the Hebrew word ‘shoresh’ written on it - and he’d learned enough Hebrew against his will to recognise and understand it.
“Shoresh,” Billy read aloud. “Root. Or maybe source? Something like that.”
“Exactly,” Wanda confirmed. “As you might already guess, this rune serves as a battery of sorts, storing and distributing power for other runes. I want you to try and conjure the shape of the word with your magic, see if you can get it right.”
Billy focused on the word, very much using the rune in front of him as a reference and tried to recreate it without much success - but that was okay, because he knew this would take work .