Previously in HERALDS…

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

Lady Mandarin seeks to learn the identity of the five women who will become her Heralds in the near future, but for reasons unknown Delphi instead reveals six Heralds: The Wasp, The Black Panther, Spitfire, Clea, Namora and a young Jotunheim frost giantess named Skadi. Before Delphi can learn more, her life is tragically extinguished byAmora The Enchantress, who doesn’t take kindly to being spied upon – and who correctly perceives the Mistress of the Rings as a threat to all existence.

Witnessing these events via a series of indistinct visions, Clea seeks the aid of her former mentor Doctor Strange. Attempting to pinpoint the location of Delphi’s Oracle she mystically observes a mysterious dimension known only as The White, but is unaware of the dire peril that lurks there… and, as Strange sleeps, Clea is drawn into The White against her will.

Meanwhile, in California, Namorita of Atlantis has just learned that her mother Namora isn’t dead, contrary to what she’s believed for close to sixty years – and this disclosure has not gone down particularly well…

THE WHITE

Part III: ‘Til Her Blood Was Frozen Slowly, And Her Eyes Were Darken’d Wholly

By Meriades Rai

Namorita Prentiss was no ordinary child of Atlantis. She was a mutant possessed a complex and unique physiology due to being a biogenetic clone of her mother, who herself was a hybrid of Atlantean and human DNA. Namorita not only demonstrated typical crossbreed capabilities – such as being able to breathe both on land and underwater, and to withstand the pressures of the ocean depths – she was also able to manifest an innate camouflaging technique involving skin secretions, allowing her to alter the color and texture of her flesh to an extent that she could render herself all but invisible when submerged.

Coupled with her ability to swim at top speeds of close to thirty knots, and with her knowledge of the undersea territory along the Californian coast, this technique should have been enough to affect an easy escape from the disaster presently unfolding back in Los Angeles: namely the shocking and inexplicable reappearance of her mother. Her deadmother.

But Namora was an Atlantean of prodigious talent in her own right, and now that she’d re-established contact with her daughter there was no way she was going to lose her again…

Namorita hurtled through the murky deepwater some five miles west from land, close to the rugged crust of the seabed, her skin now darkened to a twilight blue in contrast to the tanned Caucasian she routinely adopted when on land. Her expression retained the same rictus of horror she’d worn since setting eyes on her mother some fifteen minutes before, and her heart was in her throat. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible!

But it was true, and she couldn’t flee from it, because her mother was now close behind her, swimming even faster than her daughter, her features etched with grim determination as she persisted in her pursuit.

“Leave me alone!” Namorita screamed, whirling and cutting through the deep undercurrents. “This isn’t real, this can’t be happening—”

“It was Llyra!!”

The mention of that name, that old foe, seemed to latch into Namorita’s flesh like a hook. It slowed her, caused her to shudder.

Namora, the Avenging Daughter of Atlantis, swept in close. So striking, so elegant, so powerful. Namorita had always revered her mother’s memory without truly rememberingmuch about her, but now those long-hidden recollections of early childhood came flooding back. Her beautiful, wonderful mother…

“Llyra didn’t kill me, not… completely,” Namora breathed, her aquamarine eyes flashing in the murky depths that only Atlantean sight could penetrate. “She poisoned me, left me in a deathlike stasis indistinguishable from the real thing. My comatose body was interred in a glass coffin, and Llyra intended I should be forever entombed in that wicked, lifeless state. But the coffin was discovered recently, in the place the humans call Antarctica and by a woman named Ms Marvel. This woman apparently possesses some manner of energy transference power, and this revitalized me.”

Namorita looked on, trembling, desperate to comprehend what she was hearing.

“She brought me back, child,” Namora whispered, frozen tears now glinting on her cheeks like diamonds in the icy depths. “She brought me back, to this modern world… and to you. My precious daughter…”

Namora reached out her arms, her face broken with an uncharacteristically fragile smile. Namorita hesitated.

It was so much to take in, so much… but she didn’t take flight a second time. She couldn’t bear it. She knew instinctively that what she was hearing was true. Impossibly, wonderfully true.

Namorita wept, and smiled so broadly it hurt. She flung her arms wide and threw herself forward, blubbing wordless declarations of joy…

…and that was when The White came for Namora, a sudden whorl of stinging, cold, colorless emptiness, smothering her and stealing her away.

Namora shrieked, not in fear or pain but in sheer, bloodcurdling frustration. Namorita screamed in turn, her fingers now curled into claws and raking at the churning waters, at the nothingness, desperate to cling on to her mother as she was stolen from her again. But there was nothing either of them could do.

One moment Namora was there, returned to her daughter’s incoming embrace for the first time in decades… and then, in a blink, she was gone as if she’d never existed.

“NO! Noooooo!!”

Namora unleashed a banshee howl as she staggered through the biting snows that suddenly assailed her, her eyes bright and wild. Mere moments ago she’d been in the depths of the ocean. Now she was in a forest – a forest of white trees, white trunks and white branches and white leaves, encrusted with crystals of rime – and the raging blizzard consisted of wave after wave of cut-glass frost, stabbing cruelly at her flesh and ice-blonde hair. Roots curled and snapped at her feet, slithering like unseen snakes beneath the powdery drifts she was blindly stumbling through, and every second step she was in danger of falling.

She didn’t even know why she was moving, or where she was moving towards – she only knew that wherever this place was, this White, it was somewhere that her daughter was not. And that meant that this place was Hell.

“Namora…?”

She whirled at the voice and saw a figure lurching towards her, far more encumbered by the blizzard than she herself was. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized who this person was, first by the distinctive purples and violets of her garments and then by her silver hair.

“Clea?!” the Atlantean roared. “Damn you, sorceress! What did you do? Why did you bring me here?”

Namora thrust out a hand and grappled the other woman about the slender throat. The muscles in her arm corded as she bodily wrenched Clea from the snows and lifted her high above her head, as if readying to throttle her or hurl her to her death against the thick bodies of the white trees that surrounded them. Perhaps even both.

Clea choked and spat, her hands flailing. Her face was already turning mottled dark, her eyes bulging. Sparks of magic crackled about her spasming fingers but she couldn’t focus, couldn’t conjure anything to aid her.

“Killing… me…” she hissed.

But Namora merely snarled like something utterly feral, her eyes black slits and her teeth bared. She seemed to have no intention of loosening her grip… until she saw that Clea’s violet cloak was already speckled with blood, as were her purple and black jerkin and leggings beneath, and that the sorceress had left a trail of glistening scarlet through the otherwise impeccable snows she’d recently navigated.

Namora spat, then flung the other woman aside. Clea crumpled in the drifts, her head lolling.

“Wasn’t… me…” she croaked, her chest heaving for breath. “Don’t know… what happened…”

“This is dark magic at work!” Namora bellowed, stalking forwards. “If not you, then who? Tell me, who!?”

“Beware…” Clea hissed. “They’re… out there. In the White…”

Namora was about to bawl still louder when she became of the shapes now flanking her, shifting between the trees; not shadows as such, but definite shades of white on white. She turned quickly from one side to the other, watching these phantasms coalesce into the forms of women. Women with black hair and black eyes against icy skin, with overly wide mouths painted bright with blood rather than lipgloss, and wearing ivory kimono-style robes embroidered with teeth and hair and flesh.

The women were laughing and sighing, something almost shy about them, yet lascivious at the same time… and hungry. As they slithered closer, dancing amidst the snows, their black eyes grew bright with tiny pinpricks of white at their core.

One of them crooned and reached out a delicate hand towards Namora, as if to caress her throat. Her smile broadened, revealing rows of long, narrow teeth, each ending in a shining daggerpoint. “Lovely,” she breathed, with that innocent, wind-chime laugh. “Lovely, lovely, love—”

Namora grabbed the wraith woman by the hair and twisted her head, splintering whatever passed for bones in her neck. She then cast this enemy aside and lunged for the next, this time deliberately stuffing the fingers of one hand into the woman’s open mouth and wrenching down on her jaw, rupturing the woman’s skull as she pulled her winsome face in half.

Namora threw the detached portion of jawbone and chin over her shoulder, then glanced briefly at her hand. She was covered in her own blood where the woman’s teeth had punctured her palm and knuckles. This was unusual; Atlanteans were a hardy species with a durable hide, and rarely bled; but these wretches’ teeth were evidently inhumanly sharp. Namora paid the anomaly no heed, instead turning back towards the other women of the white and fixing them with a steely stare.

“Believe me in this,” she snarled. “I will rip every last one of you asunder if you keep me from my daughter one moment longer, do you understand?”

The wraiths shivered and hesitated, their previously beguiling faces now contorted with hatred. One of them reared with a hiss…

…but was then repulsed by a blossoming ripple of violet magic that struck it square in its slender midriff and then detonated, scattering it and its shrieking companions in all directions. Namora looked to see Clea beside her, weakened by her wounds but still defiant nevertheless. One of her hands was outstretched, colored magics still swirling about her spread fingers. She was trembling, however, and pale. She didn’t have much fight left in her. Namora felt grudgingly sorry for attacking her, her elevated emotions of before now subsiding as she came to accept that she wasn’t going to be returning to Namorita any time soon. This, as much as anything else, was the mark of one who boasted the blood of a human-Atlantean hybrid: devastatingly quick to anger but equally as swift to assume a clinical perspective regarding his or her situation.

“Tell me everything,” Namora demanded. “Beginning with where we are.”

Clea breathed raggedly, but before she could offer any explanation she was interrupted by a terrified scream from close by. A human scream, not one of those insidious wraiths, from somewhere in the White. And then, calling voices.

“That’s the others!” Clea whispered. “Janet, Shuri… and Jacqueline! Oh, by Faltine’s fire, they’re all here… and that’s Jacqui screaming…!”

Run! Run, run, run!!

Ever since an experimental transfusion involving the artificial chemical ‘blood’ belonging to Jim Hammond, the first Human Torch, Jacqueline Falsworth had been physiologically altered. Along with decelerated ageing and generally enhanced reflexes she was able to function at rapidly accelerated speeds – speeds that also, recently, had begun to generate spontaneous chemical ignition. In short, Jacqui could run supernaturally fast and could burst into flame, truly living up to her heroic moniker of Spitfire.

Regrettably, she hadn’t had the opportunity to fully explore her mutated capabilities… until now. Now, here in the vast expanse of the White, she could truly open up and let rip. It was merely unfortunate that pain and fear had resulted in her losing complete control of her own senses.

It had all happened instantaneously. One moment she and her two companions, Janet Van Dyne and Shuri of Wakanda, had been present in a New York bar, discussing recent events and deciding to seek out Clea; the next there’d been this terrible, flesh-crawling shifting of reality itself, and the three of them had been sucked into a whirling white hole, snatched from one world and rudely deposited in another. This new world had been White, so colorless and featureless – save for the endless stretch of white trees in the snow – that the companions had swiftly and inadvertently become separated from one another. That was when the witches had struck, the wraith women, dancing forward from the biting blizzard with their black hair and eyes and their wide, bloodstained smiles.

Those teeth, those teeth…

Jacqueline had required that aforementioned blood transfusion after being attacked by a vampire, back in the days of World War II. She knew the undead when she saw them, and nothing filled her with more fear. These women were vampires of a kind. They were Yuki-Onna.

And then they’d attacked, all claws and fangs, desperate for fresh flesh, and Jacqui had run. By God had she run.

She moved like lightning, igniting into an eerie scarlet-gold flame in mid-stride, her augmented reflexes allowing her to dodge between the densely packed trees as she traveled. She ducked and wove, skimming through the snowdrifts, bright and hot as a firecracker. She didn’t know where she was running, she didn’t even consider what fate had befallen her comrades, she simply knew that she had to get away. She was screaming, utterly terrified… and the Yuki-Onna were shrieking in her wake, relishing the chase.

They were the blood-smeared hunters and Jacqui was the fox.

And because the White was their domain, and because there really was nowhere to run to – just endless mile upon mile upon mile of nothing – it was only a matter of time before they caught their prey and rent her into shreds of well-cooked flesh…

“What the hell is going on here?”

Shuri shifted her balance and kicked out as one of the vampire women lunged at her from the side. The high heel of her boot impacted with the wraith’s colorless face, spearing her through one eye and out the other with a sickening shuk and almost tearing her entire head from her neck. The woman sank to her knees with a gurgling hiss, her head twisted the wrong way as Shuri pulled her foot clear and then kicked her enemy again, sending her sprawling backwards into the snow.

“They’re not human!” a small voice cried, seemingly from nowhere. Shuri glanced up as Janet Van Dyne, now shrunken to barely more than five inches in height as the miniature Wasp, zipped past her on rapidly vibrating wings.

“Great deductions there, mosquito,” she snapped. “And people say your ex-husband was the brains of your marriage…?”

“Don’t start with your nastiness!” the Wasp retorted. “This is serious.”

Shuri glowered, but it obvious from her expression that she agreed. Arched barbs were her way of dealing with stress, and this? This was stressful and then some.

“What I mean,” Wasp said, “is that these… women are unnaturally brittle. One of my sting blasts just tore a hole in one of them as if she were made of glass, and it wasn’t even full strength.”

Shuri shook her head. “Not glass. Just flesh and bone, mostly the latter, and thin bones at that. They’ve got no musculature, do you see? I thought they were one step up from ghosts at first, but actually I think they’re more like birds. That’s how they move so quick, and seem to glide around on the high wind.”

Jan appreciated Shuri’s detached observations. Even though the Yuki-Onna who were attacking them were obviously supernatural, it helped to try and think of them in more mundane fashion; better this, at least, than as vampires, which is the immediate image that those horrible eyes and fangs brought to mind…

The wraiths came sweeping from the blizzard again, more this time, with their claws outstretched and their hair flowing thickly in their wake, as if they were swimming through the frigid air. Wasp dodged the first two that snatched at her, even though she was buffeted by the wind and snow, and then unleashed a pair of bioelectrical stings in the direction of a third, sending it slamming backwards into the white trunk of a tree with an ungodly shriek. The fourth wraith was upon her before she had a chance to bank and fly clear however, and then Jan heard herself screaming as a fearsome jaw snapped shut like a steel trap close to her legs, shredding her jeans and a goodly portion of skin beneath. Blood misted the air and the Wasp wheeled, in desperate pain.

One of the vampires lunged for her, seemingly prepared to swallow her whole… but then Shuri was there, fast and precise, snatching Jan’s convulsing form from the air with one hand whilst semi-decapitating the attacking wraith with the other, landing a punch hard enough to cause the woman’s birdlike skull to shatter out through the black gust of her hair.

Shuri cradled the Wasp to her chest, instinctively turning her back to protect her miniature companion from another assault. Teeth raked her along the curvature of her spine, shredding her clothes and skin, and Shuri bellowed and hurled herself clear, her blood darkening the snows in all directions. She kicked out, disemboweling the next attacker with her boot heel, but two more surged in from the flanks and tore great chunks from her thighs as they pulled her down into the drifts.

So much blood, so quick, so chaotic…

If only I had my costume, Shuri thought miserably, barely able to see what was coming now through the sheen of blood that was dripping into her eyes from what must have been a scalp wound. Clad in the ceremonial garb of the Black Panther she was the ultimate warrior, but without it she was just a simple jungle fighter. The best that Wakanda’sDora Milaje had ever trained, it was true, but against this…?

Shuri felt a pang of guilt as she realized that Jan wasn’t in her hands any more, that she must have dropped her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, to her own surprise. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I just needed you to prove yourself to me, that’s all. I wanted you to earn it. I wanted to know how you made it work all these years, surrounded by all these—”

“Keep your head down!” someone roared from close by.

There was a dull whumpf, the sound of something impacting with the snowy ground a short distance away – or perhaps an explosion of magic. Shuri looked up dazedly, and through the red mist she saw two familiar figures leaning in. Namora, the Atlantean; the one woman whose fuse was even shorter than hers, Shuri thought. And then Clea, staggering through the White, her expression utterly haunted. What, were they all here, wherever ‘here’ was…?

“Jacqui,” Shuri muttered, coughing up more blood. “And Jan. I don’t… I don’t…”

“Don’t speak,” Namora advised. “You’re… safe.”

She didn’t sound confident. Shuri felt like she wanted to laugh. Atlanteans were too blunt and self-important to know how to lie well.

“Clea!” Namora cried. “The Wakandan is badly hurt. I need you to help her.”

The sorceress trudged over wearily to where Shuri lay, the white landscape beneath the warrior now stained a lurid cherry-scarlet. Clea’s eyes were wide and frightened, her hands trembling. Shuri could read the truth in her expression. Too late, too late. I can’t do anything for her…

…and, among the trees and the relentless blizzard, the Yuki-Onna were gathering again.

Nothing, Shuri realized with dismay, could save any of them now.

Don’t stop running, don’t running…

Jacqui zigzagged back and forth, now little more than a fiery blur in the colorless wastes. Suddenly she was required to bank and change her direction before she’d intended, as a flurry of shrieking Yuki-Onna erupted from the snowdrifts ahead of her, slashing and biting. She would have dodged easily if not for a low-hanging white branch, all but invisible even to someone with preternaturally enhanced senses; as it was, the branch punched clean through her nearside shoulder as she turned, spearing her cruelly and then ripping savagely through her flesh as her momentum carried her clear. Her blood sizzled and popped in her own unearthly fire.

Jacqui fell, her flame dying along with her speed. She crashed forward on her stomach, limbs splayed. Her shoulder was ravaged, her right arm hanging useless with the bones and tendons exposed.

In that instant the Yuki-Onna were on her. Hounds upon the tired, injured fox.

Jacqui felt the rabid gouge of those terrible teeth, feasting on her in her helplessness…

…but then there was a clattering and splintering, and a deafening thump of something landing heavily close by. Through her pain, Jacqui turned her head to look.

What… what was that, near to her? Something so peculiar that her mind couldn’t immediately comprehend it. But then, as she focused:

It was a foot. A gigantic, bare foot, almost as long in itself as Spitfire’s whole body, it’s skin a glimmering bluish-white. And then the figure that the foot belonged to – an enormous female swaddled in a half-gown of ice and rime – burst through the ancient trees and reached down towards her with a gargantuan hand. A beautiful, immense face loomed in close, her eyes bright with worry.

“Jacqueline!” breathed Skadi, frost giantess of the Jutenheim. “What is this hideous place, and how did we get here…?”

There was scuttling in the shadows, from all corners at once. The darkness seethed with creeping life, and the fragmented sheen of torchlight reflected in so many, many black eyes. The harem was awake. Lying there in the gloom, the flagstone cold beneath her unclothed back, the Bride reached out lazily with each hand and offered comfort, allowing her lovers to prickle and whisper and bite at her. The feel of tiny, hairy legs and the pierce of deadly venom aroused her. She sighed, and smiled.

Then, distractedly, she turned her attention to what lay Outside her nest, out in the White beyond the Dark.

There was much activity today, it seemed. Much blood and many screams; an altogether different kind of scuttling. The Bride’s black eyes narrowed even as she luxuriated in the flow of toxins spicing her blood, and felt the familiar spinning of silk in her hair, between her lips and toes, and between her legs.

“We have visitors,” she whispered, intrigued. “Intruders in the featherworlds. What is it they seek, we wonder? And what have they found instead…?”

The scuttling in the dark increased, irritated now. The Bride smiled wider, soothing her lovers with a gentle song.

“Patience,” she breathed. “There’ll be time enough for play later, little ones. For now, let us observe what occurs out there in the lonely wastes…

“…and let Bride of Nine Spiders decide whether she wishes to lend a helping hand, yes…?”

NEXT: Who is Bride Of Nine Spiders, and will she prove to be friend or foe? Is Shuri done for? And are the Heralds any closer to unraveling the mystery of Delphi’s Oracle…? Don’t miss HERALDS # 9!