Wizards

“Do not hit an eldritch demon with a fire spell”, Stephen Strange noted mentally. A hellish blaze wrecked the point he was standing just few moments before.

The enchantment didn't seem to be working the way he had intended. Quite the opposite in fact: the monster had simply absorbed it and was now sending it right back. The entire room was catching fire, and some burning books were falling to the ground and spreading the flames everywhere.

Admittedly Strange was finding it quite difficult to handle the Sanctum Santorum all by himself, now that the Ancient one was gone. Sure, he had Wong –he thought as he dodged a falling blackened shelf –but too many valiant sorcerers had fallen in the fight against Dormammu and there were very few experienced ones left.

It had been just a couple of weeks, but Stephen was tired as thought he had fought for years. The survivors had to face all kinds of enemies and horrors that just kept appearing every day, without a pause. And everyone seemed to expect Strange to be their guide, their new Sorcerer Supreme. Now, in that flaming hell of his own making, he didn’t really feel fit for that role.

Stephen quickly tried to extinguish the fire with another spell, but soon he realized that it wasn’t enough. The flames kept spreading unnaturally fast. Strange hid behind a column and tried to clear his mind despite all that chaos. There had to be a solution, and he had to find it quickly.

Just half an hour before, the wizard was reading an ancient Sanskrit book about fallen deities, when he noticed that a drawing had started moving.

It was quite repellent, a sort of serpent without scales. It was covered in residues of blood as if it had been skinned. All sorts of limbs were attached to its body, some creepily similar to human ones. It also had a pair of atrophied wings, disproportionately small to the rest of the monster.

He only stopped for a moment to observe the creature. Moving illustrations weren’t all that rare in magic books, after all. As he turned the pages, the monster kept following him. He hadn't realized at the time, but the creature was stalking him, waiting for the right time to strike. When Strange rested his hand on the pages, the creature got its occasion and quite literally bit him.

As soon as a drop of Stephen's blood fell on the paper, the demon began emerging from it: a humungous, rotting, and angry mountain of flesh. It screamed words in a demoniac language that Stephen couldn't understand. From that moment on, everything went downhill.

A deep growl distracted the wizard from his train of thoughts, signalling that the room was beginning to crumble. He strived to regain focus: an idea was beginning to form in his mind. Blood had to be the key– if only he could understand how…

He was again interrupted by a cascade of falling rubble. Looking up, he realized the huge wooden beam right on his head looked unsteady and had started to creak horribly.

He couldn’t stay hidden there for long anymore, and the monster stood between him and the only exit of the library. Strange quickly peeked from behind the column, trying not to be seen.

The demon was wreaking havoc everywhere. Everything seemed to be either on fire or turned to ash. As he looked better, he noticed that wasn’t entirely true: when the monster moved, the Sanskrit book appeared from under his belly.

It rested firmly in one of the demon’s limbs and was covered in a repelling whitish slime, but it was undeniably intact. And from the way the monster dragged the book around with care, it seemed clear that the beast was trying to protect it.

The pieces of the puzzle started to come along together. The blood on the book had allowed the demon to arrive and, considering the monster attitude, its destruction would probably send it away.

He glazed at the demon ravaging a metal bookshelf like it was paper. He had a plan, or the beginning of one; better than nothing, at least. He looked back at the room and located another possible hiding spot, between two libraries that didn’t look too badly damaged.

He quickly sprinted there, hoping for the best. The monster didn’t see him, too occupied with trampling and breaking some tables with his horrendous body. Strange was closer now, he could even see the little red spot on the book’s page. He just had to wait for the right moment.

In case things got sideways, he could have tried running away from the library. Once he sealed the doors with magic, the monster would have been trapped inside. In this way Stephen would have had time to come back with help. He thought about sending a message to Wong right now.

He would have been furious, but if Strange’s plan didn’t work the way he hoped, he owed him information on what happened and how to solve it. So, sighing, he started to prepare the ritual. Without paper and a pen, it would have taken him longer, but he could deal with that. He just needed a bit more time.

The monster didn’t look exactly sentient. Its only worry seemed to be bumping his body everywhere he could and destroying as much as possible. Now that Stephen felt calmer and safer, he noticed that the demon wasn’t even really trying to find him. Its actions looked simply random.

If he didn’t know better, he could have let out a nervous laugh with renewed confidence. It was entirely possible that the beast wasn’t even all that strong and its immunity to Stephen’s powers had just been a side effect of the fact that it was summoned using his blood. It was beyond interesting. Stephen noted mentally to do some research on it once he fixed this mess.

Now he was confident he could do it. Hell, he could already imagine Wong scolding him later, on his reckless use of magic books; he would give him lectures on the importance of the library that he burned down, then proceed to inform him on how trivial of a demon that was, in the cosmic scale, citing long-forgotten battles of great sorcerers against Lovecraftian horrors.

Strange was smiling when he finished writing the last words of his message. He was about to send it, when he heard a sinister crunch behind his back. He only had the time to think “Oh no”, before a library collapsed on itself and on him.

The half-burning wood was scorching and heavy, and before Stephen could stop himself, he let out a scream of pain. The monster immediately turned towards him and slowly approached him, observing him carefully and hungrily.

“Shit”, the wizard spit trying to free himself from the volume of books that had crushed him. He managed to get out a hand, but the other was stuck. In that position he couldn’t do any enchantment.

He had improved incredibly since he arrived at Kamar Taji, but the road ahead of him was still long. No, he couldn’t die like that, he decided. He had too many things to do.

He furiously began shaking his blocked arm, trying to move it. If he arrived close enough to grab the book… but glaring at the monster, he noticed that it wasn’t anymore where he spotted it the first time. “This keeps getting better”, he muttered to himself.

The monster was close now, so much that the wizard could sense its rotting smell. But finally, he managed to knock some space with his arm so that he could move it a little. He just had to work it a bit more and he would have been able to cast spells again.

But before he could do anything, the monster began to screech horribly and to fold on itself, until it dissolved. Standing right behind it, was a woman Stephen had never seen, holding the burned remains of the Sanskrit book.

She stood impossibly clean among falling rubble and dust, wearing an emerald green dress with a deep V-neckline under a dark and large fur coat. Golden jewels, too fine to be fake, hang from her wrists and neck. Overall, she looked more like she had to attend a Gala than a fight.

She was smiling, as she cast some odd enchantment on the rubble blocking the wizard, finally freeing him. “You’re welcome”, she said as she offered her arm.

Strange glared at her, towering above him. She was tall already, but with her black heels she stood even higher than him. And there was something in her gaze, an attitude of confidence or maybe even superiority that for a moment made him feel small.

“Stephen Strange, I assume” the woman said. Then, without even letting him answer, she continued: “It was about time we talked”.