“I like your pants,” Gilgamesh said with a small nod of approval.

  My eyes lit up. “Did you see my pants? No wait, you missed them!” I sang, doing a little twirl on the spot to show off the space-and-planets themed print. “My pants are a tour of the solar system!”

  They were definitely a little kitschy, but I’d had to buy them the second I’d seen them. The spirit of Peter Dinklage would demand no less of me. They’d been sitting in Natasha’s wardrobe for weeks, and I’d only just remembered about them this morning when I was picking out clothes. I’d chosen to pair them with a boob tube that I’d also bought ages ago but had never actually worn—I’d originally picked it up because it was the exact same cherry red colour as the Dr Martens that Pietro had gotten for me. I wasn’t anywhere near as fashionable as Nat was, but I was honestly really feeling this outfit. Probably partially because I was still really enjoying showing off my gainz.

  Pietro groaned. “Wanda, it is way too early for this…”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said dismissively, grabbing at his hand and pulling him along. “It’s never too early to be enthusiastic about awesome pants.”

  “You are telling me not to be silly?” He grimaced as he let himself be dragged through the door into the hangar. “What is with you this morning?”

  Instead of tiring me out, the, uh, intense workout that Bucky and I had run through last night had had the opposite effect somehow. I’d gone back to bed with Nat afterwards for a bit of a cuddle, but by the time she’d gotten up, I’d been practically bouncing off the walls. Natasha had, of course, managed to rather accurately guess why I was in such a good mood, and we’d had a little talk about it before I’d run off again.

  There was a White House press conference happening this morning to announce Ross’s departure from his role as Secretary of State. I knew that some of the Avengers had gathered in the media centre to watch and discuss their next moves, but I’d never really been one for political theatre and speeches. While Nat had headed over to do that, I’d grabbed a still-sleepy Pietro and dragged him to the training hangar instead, Thena and Gilgamesh joining us on the way. I doubted anything of any actual importance was going to be said at the presser, and if there was, I could always just get the Cliffs Notes later.

  Plus, Sterns was going to be there to provide commentary and I was honestly trying to minimise how much I was around him until I had a better idea of how trustworthy he might be. I was still feeling a little paranoid about how much his power might be able to read off me without my conscious knowledge. Yesterday, after a brief conversation, the Avengers had provided him with a basic briefing on the Eternals, though even Tony had agreed it would be best to keep the specific details about the Emergence beyond ‘world-ending threat’ closer to our chest for now.

  As far as I knew, all other non-essential personnel had now been moved off-site, either on paid leave or to work remotely, with only a straggler or two like Maria Hill holding the fort. Sterns had elected to remain at the compound as well despite the risk, offering to leverage his ability to help as best he could. Part of me couldn’t help but still be suspicious about his motives, but he seemed earnest enough.

  “Okay, so, Thena, Gilgamesh.” I gestured at the Eternals with both hands as I spoke. “You obviously had a lot of experience fighting Deviants alongside Makkari, right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Gil said. Thena just nodded—she’d definitely already guessed what I was about to say, I could feel it through our connection.

  “Well, Pietro’s a speedster, too. He was also originally trained by HYDRA, who we’ve already established had literally zero idea of how to train us to use our powers effectively. So, I was thinking…”

  Gil perked up. “Ah, I see!”

  I gave him an enthusiastic nod, clapping my hands together. “Wonderful! So, uh, Pietro, did you want to show them what you—”

  My words were cut short as, without any warning or preamble, an invasive tendril of power darted into my mind, trying to wrap around and paralyse my consciousness. My magic responded reflexively, leaping to my command, and I mentally slapped it away.

  “What the fuck?” I spat, wincing and shaking my head. There was a raw edge to where it had touched me, like my neurons had been stung by the mental equivalent of a jellyfish.

  Across from me, Pietro had straightened up, shoulders relaxed, as his eyes clouded over with faintly-luminous golden energy. He turned toward the Eternals—there was something about his body language that felt wrong somehow, his movements tighter and sharper. “Thena, Gilgamesh,” he said with a small smile. “Good to see you.”

  “Druig,” Thena responded calmly. “Please get out of our friend’s head.”

  “Oh, I absolutely will, but not until after we’ve had a little chat.” Pietro, puppeted by the mind controller, turned to glance at me. “Give me a moment to finish muzzling your witch.”

  My hand was already on the Mind Stone at my throat, magic filling every part of me. With how easily I’d batted away his initial attempt at taking control, I thought I was ready for him.

  I was wrong.

  Cosmic energy lanced into my mind, hitting me a dozen times in the space of a second, probing and thrusting from every angle. Without any passive mental defences, I found myself scrambling, gasping, as I tried to keep up with the assault. Each attack was easy enough to deal with on an individual basis, but Druig just didn’t stop, hammering at me again and again as I fought off each tendril with a spike of magic.

  The Eternal’s power felt uncannily like the Mind Stone, but where I had significant limitations around leveraging the Stone efficiently or effectively, he wielded his own power with a grace and ease I couldn’t even begin to approach. It felt a bit like I was trying to fight off someone else who also had a Mind Stone, and was expertly conducting its power through an interface specifically tuned to do this exact thing. Which was basically what was happening, I guess? This was what Druig was designed to do by Arishem himself. I couldn’t possibly match him one for one. Not like this.

  God, what a terrifying power.

  Why was he here? It didn’t make any sense, unless Ajak had decided to try to thread the needle and keep the details of the Emergence from him, but that still didn’t make a lot of sense. I needed to talk to him, tell him, convince him to stop. But I couldn’t do that through Pietro—there simply wouldn’t be enough time before he overwhelmed me. Hopefully Thena and Gilgamesh…

  Even as I thought it, a tendril of cosmic energy bypassed my defences, my magic reacting an instant too slowly to catch the attack. As it went to wrap itself around my mind, I threw myself inward, diving deep into my own mind in a desperate attempt to buy myself a little more subjective time.

  I skimmed across my mental landscape, dodging through a forest of grasping golden threads. It was complex and relentless, each an efficient, tight expression of power—Arishem’s signature work, without an ounce of wasted energy—but there was a repetitiveness, a sameness, to it. Each attack was as strong as any other. Uniform power, uniform variations on the same complex structure. How did noticing that help me, though? It wasn’t going to stop me from being overwhelmed. I felt like I was on the verge of some sort of important realisation, but couldn't quite work out what.

  There was a presence behind the attacks, and I reached for it, forcing it to resolve into something comprehensible in my mindscape.

  “Well, hello,” Druig said playfully, a lopsided grin on his face. A mental representation of him skimmed through the darkened, nonspecific smear of mindscape alongside me, easily keeping pace. “You’re rather interesting, aren’t you?”

  “Druig!” I snarled. “Stop! Please, let’s just talk for a second! You’re being manipulated. Ajak’s hiding the Eternals’ real mission from you.”

  He raised a hand and the two of us slammed to a halt—it was like the mental equivalent of when Ikaris had dragged me up into the stratosphere before stopping dead. I just couldn’t keep up with him anymore. Cosmic energy locked around me, Druig’s power ensnaring me inside a series of flat, golden rings, trapping my mind and magic inside.

  My awareness of the rest of me was a bit muted—I couldn’t reach out, couldn’t escape—but I could still feel my body, dully, as it started to move seemingly on its own, helplessly puppeted by Druig. He was making me say something to Thena and Gilgamesh: Alright. Now that that’s out of the way…

  In my mental landscape, the representation of the Eternal gestured again and we were both suddenly upright. “You mean we’re not here to safeguard the birth of a Celestial?” he asked, a hint of mock surprise in his tone.

  “I… what?” I blinked, feeling a little confused. “I mean, yes, but it’ll destroy the world!”

  “And? Ajak isn’t hiding that from us. Not anymore, at least.”

  I had absolutely no idea what to say to that. “But… humanity?” I asked helplessly. “Everyone will die.”

  “Ah. I see what the problem is, here,” Druig said, leaning in conspiratorially and lowering his voice slightly. “You might find it helpful to know that Ajak has removed my memories of this cycle.” He flicked his fingers demonstratively as he blew out a sharp puff of air, as though scattering dandelion fluff to the wind. “Seven thousand years, all gone.”

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  “Ajak reset you?” The words hit like he’d slapped me across the face. I hadn’t even considered that as a possibility. We’d had zero expectations that we’d have to fight Druig, and I wasn’t even sure we could. His power trivialised any conflict with the Avengers. “And you’re just… what, okay with that?”

  “I mean, no. Not really. I’d have preferred if she hadn’t. But I understand why she did. A necessary action to preserve Arishem’s grand design.”

  This didn’t make any sense. Why would he accept something like that? I’d guess that all of the Eternals would have a powerful compulsion to obey the Prime Eternal planted inside them by Arishem, but still, this felt… off, somehow. I mean, sure, Druig had followed Ajak’s orders for thousands of years before finally snapping, but that compassion that he’d felt—that desire to save people—that had to be baked into him at a core level as well. It just didn’t make sense, otherwise, for it to have been such a strong part of his identity. Was the weight of actual experience so heavy that, without it, the preservation of people’s lives as a more abstract concept was something he was fine casting aside? It didn’t sit right.

  “You don’t care if humanity is wiped out?”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t say I don’t care. It’s regrettable, but—as I said—something that’s necessary in the grand scheme of things. You’ll be remembered, if it’s any consolation.” He paused, looking briefly thoughtful, then shrugged. “Well, not by me. I expect Arishem will move us on to the next planet afterwards and we’ll do the whole song and dance again.”

  “I… but…”

  Druig slowly twirled a finger in the air, causing my mental prison to rotate so he could inspect me, eyes roving over my avatar appraisingly. “You know, if you had any idea how to construct some proper defences, this might’ve gone very differently. I’m actually impressed. Ikaris wasn’t kidding around—you’re strong for a witch.”

  “I could help you,” I pleaded with him, my voice tinged with an edge of desperation. “I went into Thena’s mind and undid Arishem’s locks on her memories so that she could remember everything. Yours will still be there, too. I could give them back to you—give you back to yourself.”

  The mind controller let out a surprised bark of laughter. “Now, isn’t that an unexpected little proposal?” He paused, eyes weighing me with a little more seriousness. For a moment, he seemed to consider the offer, and when he spoke again his tone was softer, lacking his earlier playfulness. “Tempting, but no, sorry. Not right now. I already have my own plans. Family matters first. We might talk again, though, once I’ve settled a few other things.”

  Well, we were fucked.

  Druig was capable of blanketing an entire city with his power—seizing control of an army—in the space of a couple of seconds. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where he specifically targeted only Pietro and me, so I could only assume that he’d simultaneously taken control of everyone in the Avengers compound. With a single move, Ajak had beaten us, and she’d made it seem effortless. We didn’t have any plans or strategies in our back pocket that could deal with this. We’d already lost.

  I pressed my magic against the bindings leashing my mind, testing to see if I could break out from the inside, though my familiarity with these sorts of bindings meant I knew exactly how hopeless—

  Oh.

  Oh.

  God, I’m a moron sometimes.

  The realisation I’d been grasping at the periphery of earlier was, all of a sudden, very obvious. Druig was monstrously strong, but he couldn’t be creative with his power. Just as Thena was restricted to making weapons with her ability and couldn’t arbitrarily create whatever she wanted, Druig had been purposefully designed to express his power in a very specific way. He was a specialised tool, built by Arishem to serve a particular function. I still wasn’t sure why Arishem had built his tools the way he had, but I didn’t need to to understand that this was the Celestial’s design—tight, efficient specialisation married to extreme power.

  But the thing about the way Druig’s power was binding me? The specific cosmic energy patterns of Celestial language, of Arishem’s programming code, that made them up? I knew them. I’d made them… or ones essentially very similar to them, at least. I knew how they were put together.

  Which meant I knew how to take them apart.

  Red energy boiled out of me, tracing the edges of my confinement as it sought out and infiltrated anchor points and seams within the structure, weaknesses that would have been essentially both impossible to find if I didn’t already know they were there, and impossible to exploit without sufficient magical power. I twisted and the golden rings shattered, separating into their component code assemblies.

  Druig flinched back, his eyes wide with surprise. I lashed out with chaotic energies, smashing him with a concentrated spike of power as I withdrew from my internal mindscape.

  As I came back to myself, Pietro was suddenly there, his hand around my throat, his eyes still clouded over with gold. “Clever girl,” Druig said through my brother’s mouth, giving me a lopsided grin.

  I didn’t hesitate. My hand came up, grabbing his face, wisps of red dripping from my fingers, and a brief exercise of magic freed him from Druig’s control. Breaking this sort of mind control on someone else was pretty simple, when it came right down to it.

  “Wanda!” Gilgamesh had reacted too slowly to do anything and was now looking between Pietro and me with an expression of concern on his face. “Are you okay? The others are here. They want to talk to us outside.”

  “I—”

  Druig didn’t give me time to collect myself. He renewed his assault, tendrils of cosmic energy seeking to retake control of both Pietro and me. Some, I fought off. Others successfully wrapped around mine or my brother’s mind, forming bindings which I promptly shattered with ease. The mind controller couldn’t win, but it felt like I couldn’t, either—he was powered by infinite cosmic energy, whereas I would eventually need time to recover. I just couldn’t keep this up forever and I couldn’t do much else while fighting Druig off.

  I grimaced. “It’s hard. Druig’s so strong, I don’t…”

  There was an icy sensation in the back of my mind, Thena’s presence flooding through our connection as she opened her mind to me. I looked over to see her staring and it took only a moment before I realised what she wanted me to do.

  Drawing on the Mind Stone, I grasped Thena’s mental defences from the inside, stretching them wider than they were designed to reach and drawing my own mind underneath them like we were sharing an umbrella. Her already-strained internal structures seemed to groan in protest, threatening to break, and I fed a tightly controlled thread of cosmic energy into them, trying to reinforce and relieve the stress somewhat.

  Druig’s assault dimmed in my perception, unable to penetrate the Celestial-grade mental fortress I was now taking refuge inside. I pulled Pietro close, touching our foreheads together—we had a connection too, an extremely strong, sympathetic one. It wasn’t quite the same as what tied Thena and I together, but I’d used it to find him before, when he’d been hidden from me by Mordo’s ward. I used it again, here, drawing more power from the Mind Stone to extend Thena’s protection even further, cloaking us both in it.

  “You good?” I asked Pietro between laboured breaths.

  He gave a shaky nod, the movement rocking my own head. “Yeah, I think so. What happened? What was that?”

  “Druig,” Thena said. There was an edge of tension in her voice.

  The Stone burned cold at my throat as I continued to channel its power, my entire body lighting up with pain-adjacent signals as if I’d been submerged in frigid water, its power raking across raw nerves. Drawing this deeply on the Stone was always like this, but even so, this time it felt… different. More manageable. Like I’d acclimated to it, somehow, even though I didn’t really think it was possible for a human to acclimate to what was effectively a nuclear reactor of cosmic energy.

  Druig suddenly stopped, his power withdrawing from us in an instant.

  The suddenness surprised me. The mind controller obviously knew he couldn’t brute force his way through another Eternal’s mental defences, but what I was doing—keeping Pietro and myself protected—was a massive strain on both Thena and myself. I’d expected him to keep testing, keep pushing, to see if he could potentially break through or catch us if I faltered. It was almost like something else had distracted him and he’d needed to refocus elsewhere. Still, I wasn’t sure if I could risk letting go.

  “I don’t think we have a lot of options, here,” Gil said, sounding conflicted. “Ajak’s got us over a barrel. The Avengers can’t fight Druig.”

  “Ajak wishes to speak with us,” Thena noted.

  “Okay,” I said, mind racing to come up with a plan of attack.

  If Thena and Gilgamesh went out by themselves, there was no way they could overcome the others in a fight, and Ajak had already shown she was willing to reset the other Eternals. But what else could we do? I could portal the four of us away, but that would be abandoning the Avengers…

  Ugh.

  I had an idea. It was not a good idea.

  “I think… Okay,” I said, twisting my head to look sidelong at the two Eternals. “Go out. Try to keep them talking. Don’t start a fight if you can help it. Buy as much time as you possibly can.”

  Gil frowned. “What are you going to do?”

  “Probably something stupid,” I said. “Just go. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  --

  The Domo had remained invisible for their approach. Even with the airlock section of the marble-like shell fully retracted, revealing the greenery and buildings that made up the Avengers’ compound below, the illusion would remain fully intact until they chose to reveal themselves. No one would have had any idea they were there until it was already too late.

  Druig was standing right near the very edge of the open space, looking down at the compound, with the others arrayed behind him. His armour’s red-and-black colour scheme had always made him look a bit villainous, in Kingo’s opinion—Ajak had directed them to gird themselves in their ceremonial battle dress before they’d arrived. It made Kingo feel even more apprehensive… wearing the armour made everything seem a bit too serious and real. He’d insisted that Karun wait back in one of the ship’s interior chambers, worried about what might happen should a fight break out.

  Absently, Kingo ran a finger along the edge of his left bracer. Even after five hundred years of disuse, the deep purple and grey materials—accented with golden cosmic energy made solid—still fit more comfortably than anything else he’d worn in his long life. Of course, every other piece of clothing he’d worn wasn’t the personal handiwork of the head of the Celestial pantheon.

  He glanced over at Phastos. While the detailing on the technopath’s armour was unique, their colour schemes were perfectly matched. Silently, he held out a fist. Phastos stared at it, then looked up at him doubtfully. “Purple Eternal bros,” Kingo said by way of explanation. “C’mon. Don’t leave me hanging, here. Purple’s the colour of royalty, and you can’t have royalty without the royal ‘we’.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” Sprite’s sing-song voice came from behind them.

  Kingo ignored her, continuing to look at Phastos with a hopeful expression on his face. After a moment, Phastos heaved a heavy sigh—like he’d utterly and completely reached his limit—but reluctantly lifted his own hand and bumped his knuckles gently against Kingo’s.

  “Phastos?” Ajak prompted.

  The technopath nodded and unfolded a series of metal rings from the subspace pockets that clung to his arms, forming a series of small, round platforms. With a few hand gestures, he sent the constructs levitating over to hover gently in place in front of each of the Eternals.

  As Kingo was about to step onto his, Druig barked out a surprised laugh. “Oho! Your witch is a feisty one, Ikaris,” the mind controller said, turning slightly to face them. His eyes were clouded over with gold by the active use of his power. “We might need you on her after all, Phastos.”

  “She won’t be a problem,” Phastos responded flatly.

  Suddenly, Druig’s expression shifted, a deep frown marring his features as he turned back to the open air.

  “Did you get everyone else?” Ikaris asked, a touch of tension in his tone, but Druig didn’t respond.

  Several seconds passed and a few of the other Eternals exchanged concerned glances before Sersi reached over and touched the mind controller on the shoulder. “What is it?” she asked softly.

  “Wanda’s protecting herself and her brother,” Druig said, but his tone was distracted. Unsure. “There are two others. One with defences of her own. The last is… strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  Druig flinched back like he’d been slapped, straightening back up quickly before shooting Sersi an uneasy look. “I don’t know.”