There was an entity from the distant reaches of the universe – from Beyond – who looked upon Earth, and the seemingly meaningless travails of its primary race, and was… intrigued.

This Beyonder, demonstrating powers that far surpassed human understanding, forged an artificial world from fragments of other worlds – including a chunk of Earth itself, specifically a suburb of Denver, Colorado, from the United States – and upon this world set superhuman individuals in combat with one another, promising the winners of this fray that he would fulfill their heart’s fondest desire.

One of these individuals was named Victor Von Doom. And, as perhaps should have been apparent from the very beginning, once Doom was involved none of the other pieces on the Beyonder’s game board truly mattered. For Doom craved power, the ultimate power, and he would blithely sacrifice untold souls in his pursuit of such reward…

Doom sought to swell his personal army of villains, brigands and murderers with two new recruits of potentially incredible power. He plucked two women, two friends, from that fragment of Denver and – at the heart of a raging tempest one thousand times more violent then anything Earth alone had ever witnessed – he subjected them to experimental transfusions of indefinite cosmic power. One of those women, Mary ‘Skeeter’ MacPherran – a frail weakling in her former life, someone who yearned for the strength to terrorize others as she herself had been persecuted – was transformed into a muscular powerhouse who adopted the name Titania.

The other? Her name was Marsha Rosenberg, a dull and unassuming drudge of a woman with a kind heart but a dearth of self-esteem. She was changed far more drastically than her friend, for she received the gift of fire and earth and thus became an elemental force that – in more assured hands – would likely have swayed these otherworldlysecret wars in Doom’s favor. Fortunately for the universe, this outcome never came to pass.

But Marsha’s transformation was permanent, and there was always an uneasy concern among those who were aware of such things that her nigh-dormant reserves of power were hazardous indeed…

…and that, one day, the superhuman now known as Volcana would be encouraged to attain – and unleash – her terrible potential.

“That’s Marsha Rosenberg. That’s Volcana…”

It was difficult to believe that this extraordinary being could revert at will to the body of a normal woman. Sure enough she maintained a recognizable female form, lissome and curvaceous with a lush cascade of hair about her shoulders, but where there should have been flesh and blood and bone there was now only pumice and basalt shot through with arteries of molten lava, enshrouded in a corona of blistering flame and superheated plasma. Reed Richards had once offered an off-the-cuff dissertation on cellular memory models, describing how certain superhuman individuals who were able to alchemically metamorphose at an elemental level – such as, most notably, The Sandman or Vapor from the U-Foes – could retain their innate biological template and accurately reconstitute themselves even after a prolonged period in an altered state. In She-Hulk’s view, Marsha Rosenberg’s present condition was absolutely along those lines; transformed into an elemental force of fire and rock, she maintained herself in an effigy of familiar human form through sheer force of will and particle recall.

But was she really still human beneath it all? How much did a mortal soul persist when the physical hardware was so fundamentally distorted…?

The individual now known as Volcana strode forward with grim purpose, a seven-foot-tall Amazonian of seething black basalt and crystal and spitting, liquid flame who left burning footprints in her wake. Behind her, a phalanx of molten Lava Men shadowed her in strangely orderly fashion, more an entourage than the invading horde that they’d initially seemed. She-Hulk looked on curiously from the end of the street along which the fiery procession was advancing.

“I can take them,” Johnny Storm declared at She-Hulk’s side. He too, as the Human Torch, was enveloped in flame and plasma, although he demonstrated a remarkable close control over his ambient temperature and was therefore a far more sophisticated ideal than either the Lava Men or Volcana. As The Torch made to engage the enemy however, She-Hulk raised an emerald hand.

“No,” she murmured. “No, for once I think this can be resolved without a fight…”

She turned to the muscular man at her other flank, fixing him with a stern glare. Namor the Sub-Mariner met his comrade’s accusatory gaze with an arched eyebrow.

“Did you cause this?” She-Hulk asked. Namor snorted.

“Jennifer, I am the King of Atlantis. I’m the soul of diplomacy and a figurehead of righteous benevolence.”

“No,” said Johnny, patiently, “you’re a pointy-eared tool. Answer the question.”

Namor’s eyes narrowed. “Storm, there will be a reckoning between us. And on that day—”

“Namor, please,” She-Hulk cried. “She’s almost here, there’s panic in the streets, and there’s nothing I hate more than boy-bitching. So: why is she attacking you?”

Namor scowled. “I have no idea. I was investigating erroneous fluctuations in the temperature of the North Atlantic current and discovered a recent rift in the crust of the ocean floor. I followed the rift, and a trail of latent volcanic activity, here to the tectonic foundation beneath Manhattan, whereupon I witnessed the ascent of the Lava Men. They were congregating at a specific location in the city and, upon further inspection, I was confronted by this woman you claim some familiarity with.”

“And then you punched her in the face, right?” said Johnny. “And made her mad?”

Namor broiled, his jaw twitching. “A measure of punching may have ensued, yes,” he said, eventually.

Johnny huffed. She-Hulk rolled her eyes. “Lord save the world from men in over-tight trousers,” she muttered. Then, to the surprise of both Namor and the Torch, she strode forward from the wreckage of the bar where the three of them had been lurking and approached Volcana at a careful but easy gait. She looked magnificent in the morning sunlight, the celebrated jade giantess with her dark, emerald hair and her arresting beauty, and her powerful body sheathed in an ivory leotard…

…but she appeared decidedly less impressive a second later when she transformed back into her human identity of Jennifer Walters, slight and self-effacing, her costume consisting of unstable molecules still fitting snugly to her body but with considerably less muscle and curve to fill it out. It was Jennifer who slowed to a halt before the scorching magma and flame of Volcana, not She-Hulk – and it was Jennifer who spoke, quietly and calmly, attempting to forge a dialogue with her adversary.

“Hello, Marsha. Is there something I can help you and your friends with…?”

Along the street, Namor and the Human Torch exchanged glances.

“A magnificent woman,” Namor said, appreciatively. “With the courage and compassion of a goddess.”

Johnny nodded, then pursed his lips. “Which she’s about to get walloped out of her, right?”

“I would say so, yes…”

AND SOON GO KINDLE FIRE WITH SNOW

Part II

By Meriades Rai

“Can you stop the voices?” Volcana asked, her voice akin to the splintering of granite and the hiss of escaping steam.

Jennifer Walters breathed deeply, maintaining a serene expression and tone. “I can’t hear the voices, Martha,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not there. What are they telling you?”

“They started yesterday. Was it yesterday? Maybe longer. Bickering, snapping… sometimes in a language I don’t understand. My parents argued a lot when I was young.”

“Mine too,” Jennifer said, smiling gently. “It’s worse for girls, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Are these your parents’ voices you’re hearing or something else?”

Volcana seemed to snarl, her approximation of a face contorting, although in truth it was difficult to tell. She seemed to possess eyes, a mouth, a memory of hair, but her black, ashen visage was constantly rippling with lava flow beneath the loose crust of her rhyolite flesh, and the air about her was a mist of heat haze.

“Are you mocking me?” Volcana hissed.

“No,” Jennifer replied, in that same moderated tone. “I’m just trying to understand, Marsha. These voices—”

“I’m being summoned from afar. One of the voices, she’s commanding me. She’s sent these… lava creatures to me, so they can show me the way. I have a great distance to travel…”

“Where to, Marsha?”

Volcana faltered. “I’m… not sure. Hawaii? Another island in the Pacific Ring? Somewhere with volcanoes, with incredible heat… but there’s ice as well, and bitter cold. Colder than you’d believe possible. I don’t want these visions in my head. I don’t want the voices. But I can’t resist. You see?”

“Marsha—”

“I just wanted a normal life! Is that too much to ask?” Volcana reared high now, gaining in height and girth. She seemed to be drawing extra mass from the horde of Lava Man assembled behind her, siphoning swirling coils of liquid heat from them into herself and swelling before Jennifer’s eyes. “My relationship with Owen Reese, the Molecule Man, that was never going to end well. And I’m over him now, I really am. But I thought there was a chance for me, if I could meet an ordinary guy and settle down, try and pretend everything with Doom and that Battleworld never happened. And I was getting there, I swear. I had a job, I was dating again…”

Volcana was crying tears of molten gold, and the sight of it genuinely pierced Jennifer’s heart. Skeeter MacPherran, Titania, she’d always been a bad seed; she’d wanted power for all the wrong reasons and she thrived on inflicting pain and humiliation, the classic bully archetype. Marsha had been different; she still was different. She hadn’t deserved any of this.

But that didn’t make her any the less dangerous now, far more so than a simple thug of muscle and leather and studded steel like Titania. Volcana was a living timebomb, a barely-contained vessel for a potent, primeval force of nature. She was a fire elemental. And she was losing herself in an ever-decreasing spiral of fury and sorrow.

Jennifer Walters gritted her teeth. Don’t be stupid, Jen, she told herself. You change back to She-Hulk. You damn well change right now, because she’s about to blow her stack like a modern day Vesuvius and getting gamma-pumped is the only way you’re going to survive that.

But that was her head speaking, and her heart disagreed. Her heart still thought she could talk her opposite number around. She forced herself to relax, to keep smiling, to keep breathing evenly.

Volcana inclined her head, scrutinizing the strange, plain woman standing before her. “I know you,” she said, softly. “You’re… her. The one who fights with Skeeter, the one she hates. The one who put her in prison…”

Volcana’s eyes flared bright.

“And that means I hate you too,” she hissed. And then she thrust out both hands and unleashed an instant eruption of searing magma and ash, a thick, black, scalding pyroclastic flow of certain death that no mere human could hope to survive…

…an attack which would have spelled doom for Jen, unable to transform to the more durable She-Hulk in timely fashion because of her earlier hesitation. Fortunately there was another person on hand to offer her assistance, in the form of an impenetrable forcefield of psionic energy. When the worst of the heat and smoke cleared, and with an embittered Volcana looking on in the expectation of seeing only melted, blackened bones where her enemy had been standing, there was instead the glorious She-Hulk, the emerald Amazon, shaken but unharmed behind a protective shield generated by the figure presently suspended in the air overhead.

Susan Storm-Richards, the Invisible Woman, had emerged from an inter-dimensional portal a handful of heartbeats earlier, just in time to witness what would have been a tragedy without her intervention. Now she was carrying herself aloft upon a column of invisible force, her blonde hair flickering in the breeze and smoke like silken ribbons and her blue eyes narrowed as she surveyed the scene beneath her. She raised an open palm towards Volcana and her legion of Lava Men and the air beneath her fingertips began to shimmer.

“This,” she declared, sternly, “is not acceptable.”

Volcana roared and extended her own hands towards her new foe, gathering more liquid plasma from within her churning core and preparing to unleash another devastating blast. However, in that same instant the Invisible Woman enclosed the villain in a perfect sphere of energy, containing the subsequent eruption and feeding its intensified power back upon itself. The resulting implosion was spectacular, Volcana’s humanoid self detonating in a controlled whorl of magma and cinder to create a sphere of pure black heat and destruction – and the ensuing feedback caused its creator to recoil in mid-air, her head snapping back on her neck and her legs weakening beneath her.

Susan fell, limp, but her rapid descent was curbed before she struck ground by She-Hulk gathering her in her arms. Her force bubble was now ruptured, failing when she’d lost concentration, and the pyroclastic ash-storm that had been Volcana now funneled into the sky like a typhoon before beginning to reconstitute into its more familiar, feminine profile. The Invisible Woman grimaced, squinting upwards as a thick shower of hot, black pumice began to fall like fetid snow.

“That went well, then,” she muttered. “Time was I could have contained ignition and concussive discharge on a scale five times that without even getting a headache. I had no idea our powers had been reduced that drastically…”

“Sis!”

Sue heard Johnny’s voice before she saw him advancing at speed, in full Human Torch mood with a trail of fire curling behind him. And, also in his wake…

“Oh, good grief,” she muttered. “That’s all we need.”

“Are you harmed, Susan?” bellowed Namor, striding forward with an expression of genuine concern etched upon his haughty countenance. “I swear, if this volcanic harridan has harmed you—”

“Fan club?” said She-Hulk, as she set the Invisible Woman back on her feet. Susan rolled her eyes.

“Please, don’t even go there,” she sighed. “Hi, Jen. You missed the madness of New York?”

“Hey, sweetie. Glad you could join the party…”

Overhead, now levitating in a lazy storm of sulfuric gas and hot ash, Volcana had almost fully reconfigured. On ground level the Lava Men were advancing, still in that strange formation that She-Hulk had noted earlier, as if guided by a singular purpose. These beings weren’t usually psychically aligned to a hive mind but that’s exactly how they were responding now. Voices in their heads…

“Y’all deal with the shock troops, I’ll take Volcana!” the Torch barked, streaking upwards and unleashing a hail of blistering fireballs. The Invisible Woman baulked.

“Johnny, no! She’ll just—”

But it was too late. Volcana absorbed the Torch’s barrage into her churning body with nary a flicker of discomfort, then whirled upon her attacker and stretched out a seething hand towards him. The Torch wheeled… and then focused, thrusting his arms out to either side and grimacing with the effort of retrieving those same fireballs before Volcana could fully consume them, effectively ripping her newly re-formed body asunder from the inside.

It wasn’t enough to destroy her, or even cause lasting harm, but it certainly distracted her. She combusted yet again, struggling now to hold on to her original form, especially when the Human Torch slammed into her at top speed and then ruptured her with a rapid corkscrew motion of his body, spinning away from the bleed of lava and scorching ash that threatened to engulf him.

Down below, three pairs of eyes looked on in shocked admiration in the last few moments before the Lava Men came upon them.

“Wow,” She-Hulk declared, with a grin. “He’s got better…”

Namor snorted. The Invisible Woman ignored him but grimaced nonetheless. “Declining powers,” she said. “I’d assumed Johnny hadn’t noticed, as he hadn’t mentioned anything. But obviously he’s realized that he has to fight smarter; to expend less energy with distance attacks and rely less on high intensity heat and flame, and to be more clinical. Way to go, little brother.”

“Yes, well. Give him five minutes and he’ll do something stupid again,” Namor muttered as he swept past his two female companions to engage the lumbering menace of the Lava Men. “Then my faith in the natural order of the universe shall be restored…”

The Lava Men were fearsome beasts forged in the deepest, hottest pits of the Earth, but the Sub-Mariner was their equal as much as their opposite, a warrior born fashioned in the dark, pressurized depths of the ocean. Namor was strong and swift, yes, but more so he was resilient, a lithe, lethal tank of a man, and although his skin of burnished pearl hue remained marred with lobster-red from an earlier, scorching encounter with Volcana, he had already recovered enough to make short work of the first line of the phalanx that surged to meet him.

With a blood-curdling cry of “Imperius Rex!” Namor bludgeoned his way through a half dozen fiery foes with a flurry of fists, scattering molten rock in all directions, then immediately powered on into the next batch, mindless of his own seared flesh. There was an element of one-upmanship about it all – the Avenging Son was upstaged by no man, least of all the infernal Human Torch! – but there was also genuine courage and a drive to triumph against adversity. Inspired by her comrade’s valor, and recognizing that there would be no reasoning with the likes of the Lava Men as she’d hoped to pursue with Volcana, She-Hulk also thrust herself head-on into battle, reducing her enemies to a liquid gold mist with a series of pummeling blows. The desperate touch of the beasts seared even her gamma-irradiated skin, and it was painful as hell, but the pump of exhilaration in battle as much as the pulse of radiation – not to mention a sterling healing factor – propelled She-Hulk onwards at an even more furious rate.

For the Invisible Woman, greater subtlety – but no less a show of force against these inhuman invaders – was required. Manipulating myriad wavelengths of light throughout the ocular spectrum to render herself unseen was no real option in this particular battle, not with the relentless blizzard of ash that would delineate her cloaked outline within seconds, but – contrary to her codename – her aptitude for stealth was the least of what she was. Her manipulation of psionic forcefields was a fantastic weapon in every sense, and she scythed through the Lava Horde with a brutal precision, alternating between the thrust of blunt slabs of invisible energy to dislodge her foes and then the deployment of swift, lacerating spears and blades to dismember them, in as such as these creatures could be dissected. The cellular composition of these monsters, much like that of Volcana, rendered them virtually immortal in the sense that they could reconstitute even when smashed to smithereens, but – unlike Volcana – such bodily restitution would take time.

As the Invisible Woman, She-Hulk and Namor went about their mission with heroic verve, so the Lava Men were forced back, and back, and back…

…but for the Human Torch, after his initial success in subduing Volcana’s threat, the tables were quickly turned. Coalescing her overall mass into a cyclone of jagged, slivered basalt, she assaulted the Torch in mid-air even as he attempted to dissemble her by manipulating the broiling fire at her core, and her gambit was too ferocious for him to counter – especially as he was feeling himself beginning to weaken, a result of the decline in his power levels he’d been experiencing these past few months. There was a time when the Torch could have burned brightly for hours, and could have withstood Volcana’s attacks… but not now.

Almost extinguished, the air misting with strings of blood and fire, the Torch fell. Volcana could have pursued him, finished him, and then turned her attention to her other enemies… but the voice in her head, just singular now, was commanding her to cease her private squabbles and to heed its disembodied summons. A touch weary from her exertions, and a woman who habitually preferred to be a follower at heart rather than a leader, Marsha Rosenberg relinquished control in that moment and descended in a curtain of fiery rain before slipping away from the battleground in a river of lava at incredible speed.

Her departure wasn’t noted until it was far too late, and was signified only when the few remaining Lava Men yet to be obliterated by their enemies also implemented an abrupt retreat. Namor apprehended one of the beasts, threatening it unless it revealed its plans, but in truth none of the Lava Horde had offered any discourse more than unintelligible grunts throughout the battle, and now this specimen was more inclined to disintegrate into a deluge of blazing magma than to be interrogated.

The Sub-Mariner recoiled in fury, brushing away streaks of scorched flesh from his arms and chest with little more than a grimace of pain. Behind him, She-Hulk looked on in exasperation as the Invisible Woman rushed to the side of her fallen brother, her temporary panic only lessening when the Torch raised a sorrowful head to lament his own failings.

“Don’t sweat it, Johnny,” She-Hulk murmured. “You did the best against Volcana than any of us could have, considering how much we underestimated her. She’s powerful, more than we gave her credit for. If only I could have got through to her, found out more about these voices she mentioned…”

“I’ll track her through the oceans if need be,” Namor snarled, raising a clenched fist. “That woman will not elude me! Wherever she thinks she can hide, I’ll—”

“She’s not hiding. She’s heading to a specific location – and she told me where.”

All eyes turned upon the She-Hulk. Her beautiful green gaze was narrowed in consternation.

“Hawaii,” she said, “or somewhere similar. Somewhere in the Pacific Ring of Fire – the most active and potentially destructive tract of volcanoes on the planet…”

Come to me, avatar of the flame… come…

The goddess emerged from the miasma of black ash that was spilling from the jagged rim of the Mauna Loa caldera, her lithe, naked body a ripple of liquid gold and shimmering heat. The shadows of her flesh were the hot, red glow of embers and the black of cinder, and her hair was a cascade of delicate fire.

She was the goddess of volcanoes, Hawaii’s most famous sister deity, and she was rage and tempest and beauty incarnate. She was Pele.

And this day she summoned a kindred spirit to her thrall, knowing that this avatar – this Volcana – would be the deciding factor in the battle that was about to be waged. Thefinal battle, in a war that had endured for generations but which was now destined to reach its crescendo. For in the north, the goddess of the snows had claimed significant power of her own and planned to use it to destroy her sister and to usher in a new age of dormant cold upon their land, something Pele could not allow.

The volcano goddess stared out upon the distant horizon, her gold-black eyes smoldering… and then she smiled in thought of her upcoming victory. It would potentially cost the sacrifice of every last living soul on the island, of course, but every war had its casualties…

NEXT ISSUE: Pele, Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and all things hellaciously hot is on the warpath – and she’s intent on using Volcana as her living weapon. But against who? How do the Fantastic Four fit into this? And are we really about to witness our favorite fantastic family allied with Namor, or will fisticuffs inevitably ensue…? Be here next time when As Soon Go Kindle Fire With Snow continues!