Chapter 4: "A Name From the Old Ledger"
Kamar-Taj at three in the morning smelled like incense and old paper, and Kent Nelson — back in his own skin for the first time in hours, Nabu retreated to the quiet place at the back of his mind — found he preferred it to the sterile hum of the Stark sub-basement.
"You said you knew the shape of the Hollow," Strange said, laying three books across a low table, each older than the last. "Do you know the shape of whatever's cutting the actual seam?"
Kent rubbed his eyes. Wearing the helmet always cost him something — hours of sleep he hadn't taken, meals he hadn't eaten, a bone-deep tiredness that came from being a passenger in his own body for however long Nabu needed the wheel. "Nabu has a guess. He doesn't like saying names before he's sure, because names have weight where he's from. But he's sure enough now."
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were, for just a moment, the color of old coins.
*"Mordru,"* Nabu said, using Kent's mouth without taking the rest of him. *"A sorcerer who was already ancient when I first bound myself to a human hand. He does not serve Chaos or Order — he serves only the accumulation of more of himself. Power, layered on power, borrowed from wherever the locks are weakest."*
Wong, cross-legged across the table, didn't look up from the book he was translating. "And you think he's found a lock between our realities."
*"I think he has spent longer finding it than either of you have been alive,"* Nabu said. *"Mordru does not act in haste. He tests a boundary for decades before he leans on it. The Hollow in your scientist was not his plan. It was an accident he allowed to happen, because a Hollow feeding on a thinning wall makes convenient noise to mask the sound of someone cutting through it properly, three floors down."*
Strange's jaw tightened. "So there's a real cut. Somewhere else."
*"There is,"* Nabu said, and the golden lattice bloomed again over the table, the second point along the seam pulsing steady and patient, utterly unlike the frantic, hungry rot Voss's passenger had left behind. This one didn't writhe. It waited. *"And unlike Voss's wound, this one is not an accident anyone stumbled into. It was built. Carefully. By something that wants very much not to be noticed until it's finished."*
Wong traced the coordinates the lattice resolved into, and for the second time that night, his expression did something Strange had learned to take very seriously. "That's not in New York."
"Where, then?"
"Sokovia," Wong said quietly. "Same region where your dead scientist got his 'promotion.' Convenient, or—"
*"Not convenient,"* Nabu cut in. *"Deliberate. Sokovia's boundary was already scarred from Ultron, from the Mind Stone, from every piece of dangerous magic your world has poured into that ground over the last decade. Mordru does not carve fresh wounds when old ones are lying around half-healed and easy to reopen. He is patient. He is also, I suspect, close to finished."*
---
There was a knock at the chamber door that wasn't really a knock — more a ripple in the air, a familiar signature of chaos magic brushing against Kamar-Taj's wards like a name being called.
Wong's head came up sharply. "That's not one of ours either."
Strange was already moving toward the door when it opened on its own, revealing a woman in red and black, dark hair loose around her shoulders, hands still faintly threaded with crimson light that hadn't quite finished dissipating from whatever spell had carried her there.
"Wanda," Strange said, equal parts surprised and wary, the way you greeted someone whose last few years had been complicated in ways that made "glad to see you" a loaded phrase. "This is — not your usual hour."
"I felt something tear three hours ago." Wanda's eyes swept the room, landing on Kent, on the golden shimmer still faintly clinging to him from the helmet's residue, and narrowed. "And I've felt something *building* for months. I assumed it was me. I've been wrong about that before." A humorless, tired smile. "I'd rather be wrong about it being me this time."
*"It is not you,"* Nabu said, and something in his ancient voice, when it addressed Wanda directly, carried a note of genuine and careful respect that Strange hadn't heard him use with anyone else that night. *"Though I understand why you feared it might be. Chaos magic recognizes its own kind, and what's stirring in Sokovia wears a shape close enough to yours that your instincts mistook the echo for the source."*
Wanda's gaze sharpened on him. "You know what it is."
*"I know what it calls itself. Mordru."* Nabu let the name sit in the room a moment. *"A sorcerer who collects power the way your world collects debt — compounding, patient, indifferent to whose ruin it's built from. He has spent a long time finding a door soft enough to widen between your reality and mine. I believe he intends to finish opening it soon."*
"And when he finishes?" Wanda asked.
*"Then two realities become raw material for a third thing entirely — one built for him alone, wearing the wreckage of both like a throne."*
Wanda's jaw set, crimson light flickering faint and involuntary at her fingertips, chaos magic answering the old dread that had crept into the room. "Then I'm coming with you."
*End of Chapter 4*