[Kamar-Taj, Kathmandu, Nepal — September 2010, Morning]

The first thing Johnny Blaze registered was the heat.

It sat deep in his bones, radiating outward from somewhere central, the way fever heat feels different from ordinary warmth. He lay still for a moment with his eyes open, staring at a ceiling made of old timber and pale plaster, and tried to work out where he was.

The room was small and clean. The walls were stone. There was a window with wooden shutters that let in thin lines of morning light, and on the table beside the bed sat several cups of water, filled and waiting.

His throat made the decision for him.

He got up, crossed to the table, and drank. He drank all of it, cup after cup, and it still did not feel like enough. His body had the hollowed-out quality of something that had burned through every reserve it possessed and was now in the process of accounting for the deficit.

The memories were coming back in pieces. Not all at once, not cleanly, but in the fragmented way.

He remembered fire and a fight. He remembered something that had hit him like a wall made of pure will, and after that the sequence became less reliable.

’Right,’ he thought. ’So that happened.’

He set down the last empty cup and looked around the room properly. His jacket was folded on a chair near the door. His boots were beside it. Someone had taken care to place them there rather than simply leaving him where they found him, which he noted as a good sign about wherever this was.

He pulled his jacket on, pushed the door open, and walked out.

...

[Kamar-Taj Courtyard]

The space that opened up in front of him was not what he expected. It was a courtyard of old stone surrounded by buildings that had the architecture of somewhere very far from any American city he had spent time in.

Mountains filled the skyline beyond the rooftops, enormous and snow-capped and close enough to feel like walls. Students in yellow robes moved through the courtyard in small groups. Some of them were doing things with their hands that produced results that had no business existing in the physics he was familiar with.

Johnny stopped walking and watched a young man fold a circle of orange light into a shape that looked briefly like a door and then collapsed back into nothing.

He didn’t have the mental strength left to feel shocked, or even to wonder if he was dreaming.

’Okay,’ he thought. ’This place is like a Monk temple with Magic academy crossover.’

He approached the nearest person, a middle-aged man carrying a stack of what appeared to be very old books, and asked where he was and who brought him here.

The man looked at him, considered the question, and then pointed behind him without speaking.

Johnny turned. She was standing at the far end of the courtyard, watching him with a patient expression.

She was bald, which he noticed first, and then he noticed the yellow robes, and then he noticed the quality of stillness she had.

She smiled. "Good morning, Mr. Blaze," she said. Her voice carried across the courtyard without effort. "I believe you have quite a few questions."

Johnny looked at her. He looked at the courtyard around him, at the students with their impossible hands and their old stone walls and their mountain skyline. He looked back at her.

"That," he said, "is an understatement."

She gestured toward the far building with one hand, already moving in that direction. "Come. We can discuss those things while sitting. My room is quieter."

She glanced back at him as she walked. "Do you drink tea, Mr. Blaze? The tea here is quite good for the body, the spirit, and the mind. In that order, usually, though sometimes the spirit benefits first."

Johnny fell into step behind her. He was confused and his head ached and his body felt like it had been used as kindling, but she was the first person who had addressed him by name and offered him a chair, which put her considerably ahead of most people he had dealt with recently.

"Sure," he said. "Tea is fine."

’I need answers more than I need tea,’ he thought. ’But I’ll take both.’

...

[Kamar-Taj, Outside the Library — Same Time]

Near the entrance to the library, two of the younger disciples stood close together in the manner of people having a conversation they were not certain they should be having out loud.

The taller one, a young man named Amir who had been at Kamar-Taj for eight months and was considered promising by his instructors, had his arms crossed and the expression of someone still processing information he had received that morning.

The other, a young woman named Priya who had arrived three months after Amir and had already surpassed him in two of the five foundational disciplines, was watching the sky with the focused look of a person trying to connect what she was seeing to what she had been told.

"The Ancient One confirmed it herself," Amir said. "She came to the morning assembly specifically to say it. Dr. Carter caused the entire atmospheric event. Alone."

"I know," Priya said. "I was there."

"The entire world," Amir said again. "Every weather system simultaneously. For ninety minutes and suddenly stopped, as if nothing happened."

"I know," Priya said again.

"And the energy signature in deep space that the scientist instruments picked up," Amir continued, "the one that apparently exceeded a supernova. That was also him."

Priya was quiet for a moment. "She told us not to do anything. Not to treat it as a threat and not to interfere."

"Because interfering would have been," Amir paused, looking for the right word, "inadvisable."

"That is a very polite way to say it," Priya said.

Amir looked at the sky. The morning above Kamar-Taj was clear and perfectly ordinary, carrying no trace of yesterday’s chaos. "I am very glad," he said, "that Dr. Carter is not our enemy."

"He is the second strongest being we know of after the Ancient One," Priya said. "Possibly equal... Possibly beyond... She did not specify."

Amir absorbed this quietly. "Then I am very, very glad he is not our enemy."

The sound of measured footsteps on stone approached from behind them and both disciples straightened automatically, turning to bow.

Wong came around the corner of the library with a book under one arm and the expression he almost always wore, which was the expression of a man managing a great many things simultaneously and finding most of them only moderately surprising.

He was the senior sorcerer of Kamar-Taj in practical terms, the librarian, the man who knew where everything was and what most of it meant, and he was respected, it was earned through demonstrated competence over a long period.

He stopped in front of them and looked at them for a long moment with that quiet, assessing gaze.

"We were just discussing Dr. Carter," Amir offered.

"I heard," Wong said.

The two disciples waited.

"Dr. Carter is not the one you should be concerned about," Wong said.

He paused. "It is his wives you should be wary of."

Amir and Priya looked at each other. Priya looked back at Wong. "His wives?"

Wong placed a hand briefly on each of their shoulders, which was unusual enough that both of them registered it as significant. His expression was entirely serious.

"Never," he said, "get on their bad side."

He withdrew his hands, tucked the book more firmly under his arm, and walked away down the corridor without elaborating further.

The two disciples stood in the courtyard and watched him go.

"What was that about?" Priya said.

"I have no idea," Amir said.

They looked at each other for another moment. Then they turned and walked back toward the Mystic Arts training hall, carrying the comment with them like a small stone dropped into a deep well, still waiting to hear it hit the bottom.

...

[SHIELD Helicarrier, North Atlantic Airspace — Same Morning]

The door to the council chamber opened and Nick Fury walked out.

He moved at the pace of a man who had somewhere to be and a great deal to think about on the way there, which was his standard pace, and behind him Agent Maria Hill kept up without effort because keeping up with Fury was part of her professional skill set at this point.

The world council meeting had lasted forty-seven minutes.

Fury had spent most of it answering questions with information he did not have while declining to speculate about information he was beginning to form opinions about.

The council members were not satisfied with this approach, which was fine, because their satisfaction was not the metric Fury was optimizing for right now.

"They want answers," Hill said, walking half a step behind his left shoulder.

"They always want answers," Fury said. "Sometimes the honest answer is that the investigation is ongoing."

"They find that answer unsatisfying."

"Most honest answers are," Fury said.

They moved through the corridor, past the operations stations where analysts were running data from the previous night on three different screen arrays simultaneously.

The overnight team had the look of people who had not slept and had been staring at numbers that did not behave correctly for long enough that their eyes had taken on a slightly glazed quality.

Fury had reviewed the early summary at four in the morning. A simultaneous global atmospheric disruption of a scale that had no recorded precedent. Equipment failures in forty-two countries within a four-minute window. Zero casualties worldwide. And then, almost as a footnote, an energy reading from deep space that one of his analysts had flagged with three question marks and the note: this cannot be right, but we cross-referenced it twice.

It was right. He had cross-referenced it a third time personally.

"What do the satellites show now?" he asked.

"The deep-space readings are still being processed," Hill said. "The initial analysis team is calling it an anomaly pending further data. The preliminary classification is an energy event of unknown origin in the outer galactic region, occurring simultaneously with the atmospheric event on Earth."

She paused. "The energy output registered as exceeding a supernova by several orders of magnitude."

Fury said nothing for four steps. "Simultaneously," he said.

"Within a margin of error of approximately forty seconds," Hill said.

He pushed open the door to his office and crossed to his desk and sat down. Hill closed the door behind her and stood in front of the desk with the file he had requested, holding it in both hands.

"The reports," he said.

She placed the file on the desk and he opened it. The first page was the atmospheric summary, the numbers and the coverage maps and the equipment failure log. He had read this already and turned to the second page.

He stopped.

The second page carried a field report from the New York observation team, filed at eleven thirty-two PM, roughly fifteen minutes before the atmospheric event began.

It covered an incident at the Baxter Building. A figure described as a humanoid skeleton engulfed in fire, identified in the report by the name that had started circulating in certain circles: Ghost Rider.

Confirmed supernatural threat. Engaged at the Baxter Building by a team that included Diana Prince in full Wonder Woman gear, Susan Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm.

He read the next section twice.

The Ghost Rider had been defeated and was currently missing. The agent or force responsible for the defeat was not identified. The damage to the surrounding area, including structural damage to the Baxter Building exterior, had been fully repaired by the time the observation team arrived on scene.

The report used the phrase as if the event never occurred, which Fury noted was not a phrase his analysts used lightly.

He looked up at Hill. She was already watching him.

"You’re thinking what I’m thinking," he said.

"Sir," Hill said, "if he was involved, the rest of it makes sense. The scale, the zero casualties and the cleanup. He is currently the only person we know of who is capable of all of that simultaneously."

Fury closed the file. He set it on the desk and looked at it for a moment, then began tapping the surface with two fingers, a slow and rhythmic motion that meant he was thinking past the obvious into the structural questions underneath.

"He had reason," Fury said. "The Ghost Rider incident would have pulled him in, and if the Fantastic Four were involved, that pulls in Susan Storm, and she is not someone Carter lets walk into a supernatural threat without a response."

He kept tapping. "The question is not whether he did it. The question is why he took it to that scale."

"The message," Hill said. "The atmospheric event and the deep-space release together. That is not a response to one incident. That is a statement."

Fury looked at her. "A statement to whom?"

"That," Hill said, "is what we do not know yet." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Fury stopped tapping. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. When he looked back down his expression had the quality it got when he had passed the point of speculation and arrived at a decision.

"I want monitoring on Carter Residence," he said. "And on Aeon Biotech. Anything unusual, any movement, any activity that falls outside the normal pattern, I want it flagged immediately."

He held her gaze. "If Carter is the one who caused this, he better have a reason I can work with. Because if I have to stand in front of that council again without an answer, I am going to lose it."

"Understood," Hill said.

"That will be all," Fury said.

Hill nodded and left, the door closing quietly behind her.

Fury sat alone in his office for a while. The hum of the helicarrier’s engines ran through the floor and the walls at a frequency you stopped noticing after the first week, but he was aware of it now the way you become aware of your own heartbeat in a quiet room.

He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and produced a phone. Not his standard issue nor his tactical unit.

A burner, prepaid, untraceable, the kind he kept for communications that did not exist in any official record. He typed a short message, read it once, and sent it. Then he removed the SIM, snapped the phone in half, and placed the pieces in his coat pocket.

He looked at the closed file on his desk.

’It’s time,’ he thought, ’to stop watching from the sidelines.’

Outside the reinforced windows of the helicarrier, the North Atlantic moved four thousand feet below, grey and wide and indifferent to the decisions being made above it.