Previously in HERALDS…

In the chamber of the Oracle, at the edge of the world beyond the natural laws of time and space, the enigmatic Delphi consults her mystic pool at the behest of the masked Lady Mandarin, Mistress of the Ten Rings.

The Mistress seeks to learn the identity of the five women who will become her Heralds in the near future – but Delphi instead reveals six Heralds in the shape of The Wasp, The Black Panther, Spitfire, Clea, Namora and a young Jotunheim frost giantess named Skadi. Why the anomaly, and what is Lady Mandarin’s ultimate scheme? Before Delphi can learn more, her life is tragically extinguished by Amora The Enchantress, who doesn’t take kindly to being spied upon and who perceives the Mistress of the Rings for the dire threat she is to all who might cross her path in times to come.

A short while later, the Heralds meet for the first time in London as a strange series of coincidences brings them together to face the threat of Llyra of Lemuria, a villain who seeks to terrorize the surface world by unleashing the ancient menace of the Unforgiven Dead. The Heralds vanquish Llyra – as well as the prehistoric peril Godzilla – but in the wake of this encounter Clea experiences a vision of Delphi and her Oracle, and a glimpse of the future. Clea now understands that she and her new companions have convened for a reason, and believes that the first step in unraveling this mystery is to learn the location of the Oracle…

THE WHITE

Part I: Without a Color, But the Light of Unanointed Blaze

By Meriades Rai

The chamber of the Oracle, exact location unknown
Beyond the natural laws of time and space

The blonde girl reclined at the edge of her scrying pool, stirring the opaque waters with a delicate hand.

“Many travel here, to the mountain at the edge of the known world and to the Oracle of Delphi,” she murmured, “but so very few appreciate the portents they receive. I can regale you with hidden significances of past, present and future… but the interpretation of those episodes is yours alone to determine. Do you understand?”

Clea focused on the girl’s words, even though they weren’t intended for her. Delphi wasn’t aware of Clea’s spectral presence drifting above her, but that didn’t prevent the sorceress from using the resonance of Delphi’s voice to anchor herself in the moment as she pivoted in her own personal sphere of time and space. Clea didn’t truly exist here, yet she was nonetheless free to monitor the scene before her through sensation and ethereal residue as much as sight. What she observed was intriguing.

Delphi was a mysterious specimen. A naked waif, she possessed an aura of a milky hue not dissimilar to the pallor of her unclothed skin. This was in stark contrast to the other physical presence in the scrying chamber, for the watcher in the shadows was a far darker, more lurid proposition. This watcher’s identity remained hidden to Clea, and for that she was glad; she knew instinctively that this other was an adversary and a formidable one, and she didn’t relish the prospect of confrontation when so much of the present situation remained unexplained. It was better to concentrate on Delphi… although this was easier said than done.

The air in the chamber smelled of snow and silk and blood, all so fresh and bright, and yet every nuance was implausibly ancient. Every sound – every word, every breath, every languid movement of Delphi’s hair and fingertips – echoed with a unique chime, distinct from every other. Sometimes Clea caught an impression of herself, her ghost overlapping upon its own tail, as time shivered and spiraled and strove to gain a foothold in this impossible realm where such things weren’t allowed.

It was… exhausting.

“Ah, but nothing worthwhile in life is ever easy,” a familiar voice murmured from a long way away.

In the lamp-lit comfort of his parlor at the heart of his Sanctum Sanctorum, Stephen Strange settled back in his armchair and sipped his tea. He smiled absently at the taste, or perhaps at his own wisdom, and his dark moustache quivered like a contented black caterpillar. Reclining nearby upon an unashamedly scarlet chaise longue, Clea opened one eye and scowled. In that moment the chamber of Delphi’s Oracle – and the events Clea had been eavesdropping upon a moment before – faded as if they’d never been.

“Were you always this… annoying during our days as teacher and student?” Clea asked. Strange seemed genuinely surprised.

“Annoying how?”

Clea rolled her eyes. “Never mind,” she huffed. “At the very least, an hour spent back here in your company means I now understand why Jackie scolds me for being patronizing…”

Strange set down his teacup and steepled his fingers as he sat forward, making no effort whatsoever to suppress a moustache-brimmed smirk. It was good to see Clea expressing herself so candidly; it was a sign of maturity, and this unfamiliar touch of humor suited her well. He hadn’t met Jackie Falsworth personally, but Clea’s new friend from England was evidently a positive influence on her. He was also delighted that his old pupil – and lover, in days long past – had appeared unannounced on his Greenwich doorstep earlier that evening. He’d missed her, more than he’d realized. It was merely a shame that the circumstances of her visit were so forbidding…

“Just relax and concentrate, using everything you’ve learned from me over the years,” Strange said, earnestly. “And remember: you were badly injured recently, so don’t—”

“I’m stronger than you think, Stephen,” Clea admonished. “I can do this.”

Strange nodded. “I know you can,” he said. “And I’ve genuinely never doubted your strength; it was only you who routinely held yourself back. But now, Clea, you’re more proficient in some aspects of the mystic spectrum than I ever was. I’m just following your lead here.”

Clea pursed her lips, a touch abashed. She nodded. She didn’t mean to be so prickly, but being back here in this house… in Stephen’s house… well, it had been a long time since they’d seen each other. Far too long. And there were so many memories…

There was a moment of awkward silence. Clea was clad in her familiar robe and silken leggings of myriad shades of violet, her lithe body at once innocent and sensual as she reclined. The light of the lamp colored gold in her silver-white hair and caused her eyes to glow bright, like a cat. Her natural perfume was intoxicating. Strange loosened his collar and cleared his throat, his moustache stiffening.

“Let’s try again,” he said, eventually. “Just like before. Lock on to the girl’s voice and let that guide you. And if you can conjure and maintain the sensory recollection of this Oracle chamber, I’ll employ whatever spells I have at my disposal to triangulate its location in space and time.

“And then we’ll set about unraveling this mystery, hmm…?”

The Cat Lick Club, Manhattan
Half Past Happy Hour

“What do you mean ‘we‘?” Shuri declared.

Janet Van Dyne glanced across at her furious companion from the opposite side of the leather-upholstered booth where they were seated, her clever brown eyes dancing with amusement. “We,” she repeated, firmly. “As in, you included. What, you’ve come this far but now you’re going to leave us in the lurch?”

“I didn’t sign on to join a team,” Shuri of Wakanda fumed. “Especially not some bargain basement version of the Lady Liberators. Or were you planning on calling yourselves something ever more kitsch?”

“I quite like Lady Invaders, actually,” Lady Jacqueline Falsworth said, raising a glass of gin in salute. The she paused. “Then again… no, that just sounds like a Scandinavian porn film, doesn’t it?”

Jan and Shuri stared at her, open-mouthed. Jackie looked innocent.

“What? Maybe just Invaders then, drop the gender specificism? Hearkens back to the War a tad, all very un-PC in this day and age, but I don’t think anyone’s using it, so that’s a plus. Anyway. Chin-chin.”

Jackie knocked back her drink. Janet blushed slightly and focused her attention on her lurid Blue Hawaiian cocktail in her hand. She was secretly delighted by the sparkly umbrella – a girl just couldn’t procure a good cocktail in England, she’d discovered, and she was therefore overjoyed to be back in New York – but she was aware that Shuri probably considered cocktail umbrellas to be kitsch too, and that dampened her enthusiasm somewhat. The Wakandan, it had to be said, was like a pin at a balloon convention and had so far declined the barest hint of alcohol.

“Lady Defenders?” Jackie offered. “Girl Guardians? The Vaginal Avengers?”

Jan choked on her cocktail as she drank, spitting Curaçao liqueur across the table and losing her umbrella in the process, as well as a hefty slice of pineapple. Shuri’s jaw sagged even wider. Jackie eyed her empty glass ruefully.

“God, I like gin,” she sighed.

Shuri buried her face in her hands. “Arse to it,” she said, weakly. “I’ll have a beer. Maybe four.”

“That’s the spirit!” Jackie cried. “Now, where’s that bartender with the cute sideburns gone…?”

Jan looked up at the clock on the wall behind the bar, breathing deeply and trying to focus on something other than the brazen English blonde across from her who was now shamelessly flirting (not for the first time that evening) with their young Irish attendant. It was almost nine o’clock; Clea had promised she’d return to the Cat Lick, a seedy-chic blues bar where the four of them had agreed to meet by half past eight at the latest. Jan bit her lip. Was she the only one who was beginning to feel concerned? She’d not wanted Clea to visit Strange’s Sanctum in Greenwich on her own in the first place, but an authoritative Jackie had mentioned something about old flames and giving Clea space, and Janet had ultimately relented. Now she was wishing she’d listened to her gut; after all, if the world was in deadly peril (as, according to Clea, it was) then splitting up was surely a bad idea. In this respect they’d already lost two of their number, with Skadi having elected to remain at the girls’ hotel downtown and Namora off goodness-knows-where to deal with ‘personal issues’.

Then again… wasn’t it odd that she was already thinking of them as a ‘them’, just because Clea had claimed their coincidental gathering in London wasn’t so accidental after all? Having been a member of the (nonspecific) Avengers, X-Corp and a thoroughly authentic version of the Lady Liberators in the past year, Jan was beginning to suspect that she was never intended to embark upon a solo career. She was the archetypal team player, the quintessential confederate. Besides, solo heroes needed their very own rogues’ gallery, or at the very least an arch-nemesis, and she couldn’t claim that…

Shuri swigged her beer when the bartender placed it in front of her, grimacing at the taste. She then glanced at Jan as Jackie continued batting her eyelashes at the man with the splendid sideburns who was young enough to be her great-grandson (what with Jackie secretly being eighty-seven years old and all, even if she didn’t look a day over thirty). Jan shrugged. Shuri nodded, and tipped her bottle in grudging toast.

“Ah, well,” she said, with an uncharacteristic attempt at amity. “At least this is an improvement on that debacle at the café in the King’s Road, right? I mean, so far no one’s tried to attack us…”

Across the bar, an outrageously pretty young African-American woman with a curiously retro beehive hairdo paused in the doorway upon making her entrance to the club, her eyes wide with shock. She stared at the three women seated in their corner booth for a good ten seconds, then set about fumbling in her designer handbag for her cell phone. When she found it, she hit speed-dial.

“Hattie?” she said, in a hushed tone that was enriched with a delicious southern drawl. “It’s Honey. Grab the girls and get them booted and suited…

“…because you will not believe who I’ve just seen kicking her cute-kitten heels in the same damn bar where we’re supposed to be performing tomorrow night!”

The Atlantic Ocean
Deep, deep down

The wreckage of the RMS Titanic was littered across a ten thousand foot stretch of gently sloping ocean terrain at a depth of some thirteen thousand feet, four hundred and fifty miles distant from the northeast coast of the United States. Over one and a half thousand people had lost their lives when the passenger liner had sunk after striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York back in 1912, and predictably there was an air of death about this eminent site. The world’s oceans were far more palpably haunted than its continents, as the dislocated spirits of the drowned always lingered longer and more emphatically than any other specters, save for those of murdered children.

Ghosts had never troubled Namora, however. Very little had, in truth… until she herself had suffered a particular manner of death.

Drifting through the darkness of the Atlantic depths, searching the rusted remnants of the Titanic’s sundered bow and stern with keen, lonely eyes, the daughter of Atlantis gave herself willingly to a rising fury. Prideful anger came readily to her, as it did to all her kind, but that was fine; rage was infinitely preferable to the grief, misery and bewilderment that swelled whenever her ire was less manifest. These past few days, since taking her leave from England on her own fateful journey just as the Titanic had done, Namora had been wracked with doubt and indecision. Now, here, she was mercifully presented with a more immediate matter than her search for her estranged daughter.

For a number of hours now Namora had been aware that she was being observed. That watcher had recently taken refuge in the wreck below, venturing closer than before – and that was his mistake. Fifty thousand tons of skeletal wrought iron would ultimately provide little protection when Namora was in the mood to smash…

“Show yourself!” the Avenging Daughter of Atlantis screamed, preparing to drive bodily into the heart of the wreck like a living torpedo. “And if you’re an agent of Llyra, know that your treacherous queen has already paid for her sins at my hand… and that you shall also—”

“Llyra of Lemuria is a name I’ve often hoped never to hear uttered again,” a male voice responded, drifting forth from the shadows. “And, regrettably, one such as she has been known to cheat death on numerous occasions. But if you have vanquished her once and for all, these oceans owe you a tremendous debt… my cousin.”

Namora stilled, her sapphire blue eyes widening in shock. Before her, a shape loomed from the murk of the depths – and then a body, and a face, and that hard, knowing smile, all so familiar even after her own body and mind had lain in oblivious stasis for so long. Namora’s heart flickered, her rage draining immediately to be replaced by anticipation.

“My apologies for the subterfuge,” said Namor, the Sub-Mariner, fixing his cousin with a dark stare. “Following you at a distance like some common cur. But I needed to convince myself of your true identity. This world is plagued with deception: alien beings from beyond this planet, with the ability to shift their physical form and with a mind for invasion; sorcerers and enchantresses with their perception-altering glamors; lawless genetic clones bred by scientists who believe themselves above nature’s edict…”

“I know about genetic cloning,” Namora said, softly. “It was that specific scientific art that allowed me to give birth to my child.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. But this world is less… innocent than the one you remember.”

Namora bristled. “Innocent? It wasn’t innocence that saw Llyra poison me and imprison me in a death casket for countless years—”

“And this world is worse still, believe me. Nonetheless… it’s good to see you, Aquaria Nautica Neptunia.”

Namora mellowed once more at the mention of her true birth name, although a glower remained about her eyes and she made no attempt to bridge the distance that lingered between her and her kin. “You accept that I’m no alien, then?” she simmered. “No mystic conjuration?”

“I know Atlantean blood,” Namor confirmed. “And I recently received communication from a human woman who encountered you in Antarctica. Her name is Carol Danvers, although she’s more commonly known as Ms. Marvel, one of the surface world’s more celebrated heroes. She’s an energy manipulator – or at least she used to be – and she reported to me that she’d caused an inadvertent power surge that revived you from your stasis after your casket was discovered in the frozen wastes. You rewarded her for this by punching her repeatedly.”

Namora sniffed, unrepentant. “I was… befuddled.”

“Yes, so was she after you bludgeoned her,” Namor said, with a smirk that suggested he didn’t feel particularly bad for the unfortunate Ms. Marvel either. Again, that Atlantean arrogance. Namora almost smiled in turn, but then her prior preoccupation returned with a vengeance, pricking her heart and causing her mood to darken again instantly.

“I’m searching for her,” she said, quietly. “For my daughter. Now that I’ve avenged myself against Llyra and arrested her latest scheme, I can only think of her. Of Namorita. Tell me, Namor… where can I find her? Because I’m trying to lock on to something about her, something that will lead me to her, but my instincts are still fogged and any innate sense of her is… gone.”

“It will return. You’ve been through so much. But, in the meantime, I can take you to her.”

Namora flinched, and her deep blue eyes shone even in the murky depths.

Namor held out a hand.

“Your daughter has grown into a beautiful, intelligent and capable young woman, Aquaria,” he said. “Just like her mother, whose long-overdue return has brightened even these grim and polluted oceans of the modern world. So come. Come and be re-acquainted with your child…”

The White, exact location unknown
Beyond the natural laws of time and space
And somewhere you really, really wouldn’t want to be

There was screaming in the White, and it wasn’t just the howling wind.

The traveler was an innocent man – or, at least, as innocent as any man could reasonably be – and his sole mistake was having believed himself competent enough to choose the correct path through the trees. But these woodlands were ancient, forged as they were from the blackest corners of all the world’s darkest, most long-lived true forests from Töfsingdalen to Daintree to Congalee Swamp, and beyond the gateway of gnarled roots and black briar there was only the featureless wastes of the slowly tilling snows and the coldness of unloved hearts.

This was the White. In most modern cultures it was Black that symbolized negative emotions such as hate and despair and evil, being in itself the darkness that was the absence of light. But the White was even worse, for the White was the blank canvas upon which all terror could be painted in streaks of red and it was what remained when all things that had come before had been removed.

And the White was snow. It was ice. It was the gentle blizzard that stripped away ribbons of flesh even as it brushed and swirled so delicately, and which lacerated eyes and tongue with its soft little lickety slivers, and which could hold a man in a soft, frozen grip of unending death.

And in the White were the Maidens.

The man who had braved the forest seeking enlightenment, and who had stumbled unwittingly into the White, he was now prey to the Maidens. Every aged culture had a name for them, but this man heralded from Japan and so in his native tongue they were the Yuki-Onna, as good a name as any. The Yuki-Onna, they came dancing in their snowfeather skirts on their elongated fingers and toes, their bare legs bending the wrong way at the knees, their eyes wide and lovely and mouths wide and not so lovely, with horns in their hair and down their backs and between their legs, and they sang in the snow, in the White, as they removed the man’s skin with their playful and unmerciful caress.

There was blood, and it was very red, but it soon became lost in the White as it ever did. The Yuki-Onna lapped it and savored it, and then spilled some more with their strange, pecking kisses. They could make this delight last for so very, very long – which was just as well, because visitors to the White were few and far between.

Fortunately for the Yuki-Onna, but unfortunately for those in question, there were other guests due any time now…

The chamber of the Oracle

Concentrate.

Rapt as she was by the scenes playing out before her, Clea knew that she needed to wrest her attention from Delphi and her scrying pool and to try and focus, to gather information for Stephen to mystically triangulate the location – inside or outside of traditional time and space – of this mysterious Oracle.

There were no windows in the shadowed chamber, but Clea understood the nature of physical perception all too clearly. Nothing was ever what it truly appeared to be. All reality existed as planes of discernment, and the nothingness in-between the somethings was so much more important than what one could see and touch. It was all a matter of careful re-arrangement…

Clea drifted towards the nearest wall, which was only as material as she perceived it to be. She conjured herself an aperture and phased through it, allowing the world to realign itself about her before it became unstable and fractured. Now she focused on the exterior of Delphi’s world rather than the interior, and in doing so she opened her heart and mind to Stephen Strange, her anchor in the true world, so that he could weave an ethereal link through her.

It wouldn’t take long, Clea knew, but she actually didn’t mind lingering here. It was beautiful. The trees, the crystals in the air like diamond dust, the slowly swirling snow upon the wind and the song that carried upon the air like a lover’s sweet lament. The White.

It was all so very White here.

Clea smiled, her heart swelling with gladness. When Stephen’s work was done, and when their future path was laid out before them, she would be delighted to lead her new friends into this magical world, and she was sure they would be equally enchanted by what the White had in store…

The Cat Lick Club

“Okay, peeps, it’s been a delight. But this little Wasp is going to call it a night…”

Janet stood tentatively, holding on to the edge of the table before her for much needed support. The clock behind the bar read half past ten and there were sixteen cocktail umbrellas lined up where she’d been sitting. They looked pretty. A halfway-decent wannabee fashion designer (in another life), Janet was suddenly consumed by love for umbrellas and decided, in that instant, that she was going to instigate a change of heroic direction.

“Forth-hence,” she said, to no one in particular. “Forth-hence.”

“Henceforth,” said Jackie.

“Yes. Henceforth. Henceforth, I am not going to be a little Wasp. I’m going to call myself… Umbrella.”

Jackie and Shuri stared at her. Or, because they were swaying slightly and seeing more than one Janet, they stared at the one in the middle.

“What,” said Jackie, “like the Rihanna song?”

“No,” said Jan. “Yes. But no. Umbrella… Girl. Woman. Umbrella-Woman. With recurring umbrella motif.”

“What’s your super power?” Shuri asked, her eyes narrowed. “The inability to get wet?”

Jan frowned. Jackie raised her glass, which was once again empty of gin, a fact that caused her much sorrow.

“Uh-oh. She’s calling you frigid. Better punch her.”

Jan shook her fist. “Don’t you… don’t you start.”

“I didn’t,” Shuri said, innocently. “It was her. English Bitch-Girl. Firestarter.”

“Spitfire.”

“Spitfire Gin-Bucket.”

Jackie giggled. Jan sat down again.

“I thought you were leaving?”

“I forgot what I was doing.”

“You’re drunk.”

“So are you.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t.”

Jan stared at Shuri with genuine dismay. “Goodness, you could really start a fight in an empty room, couldn’t you?”

“Natural charm.”

Janet sat back, suddenly unsure. She shouldn’t have had that sixteenth cocktail. Actually, she probably should have stopped at eight…

It was at that point that the three companions became aware that a commotion was occurring on the other side of the bar. They all looked across to see four women approaching their table with both determination and a decidedly sexy shimmy, considering they were all clad in identical, slinky black-and-gold-striped evening dresses slit to mid-thigh and deep-scallop cut about the cleavage. All four women were African-American, gorgeous, curvaceous, and sporting meticulously styled beehive hair-dos. Jackie, Shuri and Jan each did a double take, at first thinking they were seeing multiples again before deciding that there were four women after all.

“Friends of yours, Janet?” Jackie asked. “They’ve got the whole wasp thing going on here, if you hadn’t noticed…”

“Not wasp, sugar,” the woman at the head of the quartet snapped, with a sultry southern twang. “We’all are here to sing about a different kinda sting, you dig? Janet Van Dyne, you’ve been flapping your wings and strutting your perky li’l Avengers ass without a care in the world for far too long. Hell, girl, I bet you don’t even remember me in my past life. But you’re gonna remember me in this one.

“Sugarpot, we’all are Honey Bee and the Hornettes, sexy supervillain jazz-blues quartet of your nightmares… and things round here are about to get nasty.”

Jackie Falsworth pursed her lips. Shuri scowled accusingly at Jan.

Jan glanced down at her row of pretty cocktail accoutrements.

What was that old saying about umbrellas and bad luck…?

Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum

“So, you can determine the Oracle’s location?” Clea asked.

Stephen smiled, casting his hand with a theatrical flourish. “Trust in me, my dear – and also, of course, in the Eye of Agamotto. I’ll have an answer for you by sunrise, I promise.”

Clea nodded, then looked up shyly as Stephen stepped forward and reached out to help her up from the chaise longue. She took his hand in hers but made no move to rise.

“Thank you,” she said, softly. The lamplight was liquid gold in her eyes.

“It was my pleasure. It’s… been good to see you.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve missed you, you know.”

Clea smiled tentatively, then took a deep breath. Slowly, she lay back on the couch as she had before, but this time she gently pulled her companion towards her as she settled. With her free hand she began to loosen the clasp of her robe.

“Show me,” she said, blushing, but with a sudden wave of desire overwhelming her customary inhibitions.

Strange’s moustache twitched and he arched a delicate eyebrow. “Aren’t your friends expecting you?”

“We can save the world tomorrow. And I’m sure they can go one night without getting into trouble, yes…?”

NEXT: Think again, Clea – your fellow Heralds are about to require all the help they can get as they face off against the sexy, sinister songstresses known as… Honey Bee and the Hornettes! Plus, Namora’s reunion with Namorita! Don’t miss HERALDS # 7!