If ever he still had some doubts about the veracity of the illusion, this cinches it: Vazeiros reaching deep into Stephenās mind to pull out a memory heās only ever told GwenaĆ«lle about, hammering on his past failures like plucking the string of a harp. Wanda Maximoff is still a raw wound and so it surprises him enough that his hands are caught and heās yanked closer, suddenly in the drowās grip.
That brittle exterior of cool, implacable confidence shatters and he starts to feel that old animal panic: the sound of Mount Wundagore collapsing, the ancient grind of stone-on-stone rhyming with bone-on-bone, inexorable grinding pressure and agonising pain lancing through him, so much worse for his old broken hands that never healed quite right, stuck in it like an animal caught in a trap,
āYou have no idea what youāre talking aboutāā Stephen hisses.
Vazeirosā grip is less like a clutching man and more like a vise. Stephen struggles and bucks but his hands are still helplessly pinned, christ, he needs his hands in order to do anything magical—
Or. Does he?
The thought comes to him like a drop of cold water on his feverish exhausted sleepless brain, sounding so much like the Ancient One: her questioning assumptions and pressing him to think further, beyond the constraints of what he assumes to be true. The crisp finger gestures do help him cast his spells, itās true. But heād seen another sorcerer cast them while missing a hand entirely. And if, as he suspects, this isnāt the real world at all ā
Stephen Strange flickers and vanishes.
As if someoneās yanked the entire scene a few feet to the left, the rug pulled out from under the creature who looks like Vazeiros: the library blurs as the sorcerer yanks hard on the picture and then re-emerges free of the drowās grasp, slippery, like a Fade-step.
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That brittle exterior of cool, implacable confidence shatters and he starts to feel that old animal panic: the sound of Mount Wundagore collapsing, the ancient grind of stone-on-stone rhyming with bone-on-bone, inexorable grinding pressure and agonising pain lancing through him, so much worse for his old broken hands that never healed quite right, stuck in it like an animal caught in a trap,
āYou have no idea what youāre talking aboutāā Stephen hisses.
Vazeirosā grip is less like a clutching man and more like a vise. Stephen struggles and bucks but his hands are still helplessly pinned, christ, he needs his hands in order to do anything magical—
Or. Does he?
The thought comes to him like a drop of cold water on his feverish exhausted sleepless brain, sounding so much like the Ancient One: her questioning assumptions and pressing him to think further, beyond the constraints of what he assumes to be true. The crisp finger gestures do help him cast his spells, itās true. But heād seen another sorcerer cast them while missing a hand entirely. And if, as he suspects, this isnāt the real world at all ā
Stephen Strange flickers and vanishes.
As if someoneās yanked the entire scene a few feet to the left, the rug pulled out from under the creature who looks like Vazeiros: the library blurs as the sorcerer yanks hard on the picture and then re-emerges free of the drowās grasp, slippery, like a Fade-step.