NOTE: The events in HERALDS: ORIGINS take place after the current LADY LIBERATORS series.

“The fourth, then,” said the voice from the shadows. “Show me the fourth of my five Heralds.”

Smiling shyly, Delphi reached towards the waters of her scrying pool once more… but then hesitated. She cried out in fright and began to shiver uncontrollably, her pale, naked skin suddenly puckering and her beautiful eyes of ocean blue growing wide.

“What’s wrong?” the watcher demanded. “Why do you delay?”

Delphi trembled, her eyes darting left and right. She froze. There was a glimpse from the corner of her gaze, echoed images. The resonance of distant voices. Displaced, confusing.

What happened here?

I’ve heard of them. Didn’t they believe themselves to be descended from gods?

They’re coming! Whatever you need to do, do it quick!

Oh, that poor girl…

Delphi closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe. In that moment there came a murmur at her ear, soft but precise, a message for her and her alone.

Beware, Delphi of the Pantheon. Tragedy draws close, even in this timeless sanctuary, and with regret we have arrived too late to offer a hand of protection. But time itself is fluid, not fixed; where there is hope, there may yet be a way. Fare well, Delphi. I am… so very sorry.

Delphi flinched, tears stinging her eyes. Beyond the ring of stone pillars that circled the heart of the chamber, the shadows seethed.

“What’s the matter, child?” the voice persisted.

Oh, that poor girl. What happened here…?

“It… I don’t know,” Delphi admitted, softly. “Something… a flash of fear. Dark, and terrible. A premonition of a different kind, not the work of the oracle.”

“A warning for me?”

Delphi’s mouth tightened. No, she thought. No, not you.

“There is much to fear in this world,” the watcher murmured, in placating tone. “Especially for one who has lived as long as I have. But trust me, child. Nothing can touch you here, not in your haven, and not whilst you shelter in my presence.”

Delphi lowered her eyes.

Beware, Delphi of the Pantheon. Tragedy draws close, even in this timeless sanctuary…

She glanced over at her oracle with trepidation, then slowly reached out once more. The waters seemed to darken and shimmer even before they felt her touch, and again her skin quivered.

Nothing to fear, she thought. Nothing to fear…

THIS ONE IS THE GATEKEEPER

By Meriades Rai

“You don’t scare me, Nyx,” the sorceress declared as she bestrode the winding steps of Dua’Lyth, placing each small and delicate foot with determination despite being unable to discern where each new step might materialize at the exact moment the previous one faded. This was a more treacherous task than it first appeared, considering that the locations of these magical treads were entirely haphazard rather than existing in any systematic procession. It wasn’t like scaling an invisible staircase, it was more a game of four-dimensional hopscotch while wearing your shoes backwards. The sorceress almost lost her balance with every third or forth pace, but she didn’t allow her unease to show.

The charade of self-assurance was crucial. In this deadly game of feint and bluster the slightest lapse of nerve could cost everything: everything in this instance being her immortal soul. That was a possession she wasn’t willing to relinquish just yet.

The final step shimmered into being away to the sorceress’ left, just as she was about to stride forward and to the right. She shifted her balance deftly and without murmur, any awkwardness of body disguised by the voluptuous folds of her cloak, and she reached the step with a seemingly confident skip. Her heart, however, was lodged in her throat.

Scared, no, she thought. Petrified maybe, frightened half to death, yes, but scared…?

There was a hiss of magic, and a golden door appeared in the red darkness directly ahead. The door opened not upon physical hinges but upon strings of sound, an unearthly melody that pleased the senses when played correctly but which otherwise caused fleshless energy to dissolve. Here in Dua’Lyth, the dimension of unremembered reality, flesh and blood and bone only truly existed when a soul had been lost long enough to forget it had once been corporeal, at which point that startled memory would cause the sequence to begin all over again. The sorceress, part energy-being due to her distinguished ancestry, would be a delicacy indeed for such a place. Fortunately she hadn’t been traveling through this realm long enough to be lost. Frustrated, yes, and seriously peeved, but not lost. She knew exactly where she was heading, and that destination lay somewhere beyond this door.

She reached out with a graceful hand gloved in a skein of powdered mercury – thanks, solely, to the power of her will, because there was presently no true hand beneath the fabric, just as there were no actual feet in her stocking boots. Holding her breath, concentrating fiercely, she caressed the whorls and knots and fancies of the door until it quivered and sang of wonderful things, and finally opened wide with a lascivious hiss.

Within the cowl of her cloak, the sorceress blushed as she stepped across the gratified threshold and regained her full physical essence, rosy pink cheeks and all. Not that she was the repressed type, but doors were… doors, magically metaphorical or otherwise. One shouldn’t have to go around exciting them by giving them a saucy tickle. It wasn’t seemly.

“This isn’t fear, my precocious foe,” a woman’s voice echoed along the corridor in which the sorceress now stood. “I’m merely heightening your preternatural senses to a crescendo, a state of quivering readiness for the final act.”

The sorceress blushed still deeper.

“Honestly, Nyx,” she muttered, “can’t you make any kind of veiled threat that doesn’t sound… smutty?”

The corridor was uncomfortably familiar, born as it was in shared nightmares. A hotel passageway lined with bright red carpets and walled with a series of white, paneled doors. Stark, fluorescent lights overhead. A strange darkness welling in the near distance, which then blinked and disgorged the curious image of two small girls dressed in blue and white and identical in appearance. From somewhere there came the sound of furious pedaling and tricycle wheels, and the clack-clack-clack of a typewriter. All work and no play, et cetera. The sorceress rolled her eyes and pulled back her hood.

She was an ethereal beauty, with ice white hair threaded with flakes of silver and hanging in coral shell ringlets, a soft yet healthy complexion, cherry red lips and eyes a startling shade of violet fractured with sapphire. Her cloak and robes were shifting hues of cobalt, indigo and plum, underpinned by a lacy black bodice; her stocking leggings were decorated with violet circles that swirled lazily upon the surface of the midnight fabric, traveling from throat and breast to the sway of her hips and the down along her thighs and calves to the dagger cut of her ankles. She exuded a captivating scent unwittingly stolen from a dimension where all physical matter had been transmuted over eons into pure, sensory snowdrift; it had attached itself like pollen to the downy hairs upon her skin when she’d passed through it one enchanted evening, and the fragrance had remained with her ever since. Remarkably, the taste of that skin was even more intense.

Not that she’d felt the touch of any man’s lips upon her in a long, long time. If only-

The sorceress admonished herself as she shivered, shaking off the hooks of lust that were trying to insinuate themselves like tics. Her enemy was the mother of night, and night wasn’t just the realm of confusion and fear. Desire was just as powerful, and just as deadly. But there’d be no more of those kind of thoughts, thank you very much. The sorceress waved her hand dismissively at the monotonous nightmares in her path, and at the sensual aura of erotic cravings that permeated the corridor in general, and was greeted with a weary sigh.

“Ever the prude, princess,” snapped the disembodied voice of Nyx, Goddess of Night. The sorceress looked aggrieved.

“Well that’s not fair, and you know it,” she said.

But, then again, maybe it was true. She’d only known one lover in her life, after all, and that hadn’t been the most… comfortable of relationships, now had it?

The sorceress’ name was Clea, born of Kha’Mor’Aii’Ner, otherwise known as the Dark Dimension of the Chaos Omninsula, and she was the princess heir to that realm. She was the daughter of Orini and the scheming seductress Umar, who was in turn sister to Dormammu and progeny of the ancient energy sentience of the Faltine. She was known as Elethera and Mesquevirasadhja and the Mo Ai Kim and the Ice White Heart of the Pentacular Star Winds, depending on which mythology any particular dimension subscribed to. And, right about now, she was fed up, and her feet were sore and needed a rub, and she was lonely because there was no one to do any such rubbings, and she was miserable.

That wasn’t all Nyx’s fault, it had to be said, but Clea needed someone to thwart and this was the best available option.

Scuppering the plans of the Night Goddess and rescuing the Earthly realms from being plunged into the Eternal Nocturne – again – was not how Clea had planned to spend the past three hundred cycles of the quasi-dimensional orbit, but their conflict had now run its course. The fact that Nyx was resorting to using Kubrik movies as inspiration for her fearful illusions suggested that her magical reserves had been exhausted. It was time to end this, at least before the troublesome witch conjured up Jack Nicholson running around with an axe. Critical acclaim be damned, Clea had never liked that film…

“Domalus ki u paana Sigguthur!” she cried, thrusting out both hands and flexing her wrists and fingers in a series of quick, complex gestures of arcanalgorhythmic incantation. And then, a tad spitefully, she added, “To toriaqua u masa!” and gave a little extra flourish with the index finger of her left hand.

Nyx, Goddess of Night, shrieked as she was forcibly materialized, her innards manifesting a second or two before her outer shell of dusk-blue flesh and midnight robes. She bucked in spasm, eyes wide with pain, then glared poisonously at Clea when the wave of acute discomfort had subsided. Clea blushed and looked abashed, as well she might.

“Well,” Nyx snarled, through gritted teeth. “It seems little miss sweet and innocent has learned how to twist the knife, yes?”

Clea scowled. “You’re the one who’s brought us to this,” she said.

“The solitary life doesn’t agree with you, Clea. Such a pity Strange cast you out. He bored of you, didn’t he? Took a fancy to a fresh, younger model?”

“Stephen and I parted on equal terms,” Clea said, evenly. Nyx laughed, her eyes black and wild.

“Oh spare me, spawn of the Faltine,” she hissed. “Look to these humans you consort with so freely. See your own circumstances reflected in their insignificant lives. The susceptible young virgin falls prey to a charming, more experienced man… he promises to teach her, in the ways of art – magic – and takes her under his wing, teacher and devoted student… he recognizes her infatuation, encourages it, takes advantage without pause for conscience… he revels in her innocence, feeds upon her adulation… and when he tires of her, when her virtue is stained and she wishes him to look on her as an equal instead of a conquest, he discards her.

“Does it sound familiar, Clea? A tragic rite of passage played out in schools of learning across that pathetic world; romantic girls on the verge of womanhood, used up and abandoned by wolfish, degenerate men. How wretchedly ordinary you turned out to be…”

Clea stood, jaw rigid, her violet and indigo robes swirling about her as the corridor of Nyx’s illusions faded and was replaced by colorless, shifting wasteland. The edge of Nyx’s plane of Everlasting Night, on the border of Dua’Lyth’s unreality.

“Have you ever known love, Nyx?” the sorceress asked, softly. “In all your centuries of passionless rutting and ennui, and hungers you can never sate, has that goodness ever touched your heart? Even briefly?”

“Your kind don’t believe in love, Faltine.”

Clea smiled. “I’m not my mother, Nyx. And Stephen Strange, for whatever faults he possessed, was a kind and blameless man. Whatever he took from me, he gave back a thousandfold. In your desperation you seek to break me by stirring up sorrow; yet all you’ve made me recall is the happiness.”

“A happiness now past.”

“Yes. But, as I say… better to have loved and lost, and all that.”

Nyx glowered, drawing her black robes about her. Clea extended one hand, her wrist flexing. The air sparked with purple light, flashing about her fingertips, and the aura of elaborate, interlocking circles that surrounded Nyx began to shine and warp. The Goddess of Night was sheathed in magical wards; Clea was now unraveling them in skillful, measured fashion.

Nyx trembled, her flesh paling to gray.

“It’s in danger, you know,” she said, her faint voice now lacking in venom. “You precious Earth. Fluctuations in the Vishanti, the shifting of the corner dimensions… everything’s astir.”

Clea continued to weave. Nyx quaked, furiously attempting to repair her wards through psychic sorcery but unable to keep pace with her enemy’s dexterity.

“The Dark Lady,” Nyx wailed, plaintively. “The Mistress of the Ten Rings. She’s a new one, an anomaly. I’ve been touched by her dreams, Clea. Her desires. She’ll stop at nothing, and she’ll show no mercy. And when she understands the nature of what she’s become, no force on Earth or beyond will be able to stand against her.

“Do you see, Clea? Are you listening to me? I can help you. Allow me my freedom, let me guide you and anyone you can recruit to your cause, and I promise-”

“Goodbye, Nyx,” Clea said, coldly. “I’ll see you in another ten thousand cycles, I’m sure, when you work loose another thread in the fabric of Dua’Lyth and gain your freedom. Until then, remember me with fondness, won’t you?”

The sorceress flicked her wrist one final time, her fingers splayed, and the final ward lock splintered with a hiss of dying magic. Nyx screamed, clutching at her head, her form beginning to dislocate and stain the dimensional refractions that now sliced through her in perfectly spaced partitions.

“Strange knew!” the Goddess shrieked. “He knew you’d surpass him in power. Show me now – show us all – that you surpassed him in wisdom also. Believe me, Clea. I beg you! The human world is-”

But then it was done, and Nyx was gone.

Clea staggered, momentarily breathless. Tears stung her eyes, and her heart ached.

Stop it, she commanded herself. She didn’t get to you. You’re stronger than that.

But even as she told herself that it meant nothing, she knew she was lying.

Dua’Lyth was closing, folding in upon itself into its own pocket of unbeing, and the realm of Everlasting Night was darkening. Right now, suddenly, this borderland was a very dangerous place to be. Clea pulled up her hood, casting her face in shadow, and began to weave herself an aperture of escape. She tried not to think of Stephen, or of Earth.

But, in the moment before she disappeared, she glimpsed a series of images that disturbed her to her very core, because she was experienced enough in the ways of magic to recognize a premonition when it came upon her.

She saw a handsome blonde woman standing before a heavy, ornate mirror in a bronze frame, and she saw the familiar monstrosity of a Mindless One – the scourge of her own Dark Dimension – looming in the woman’s shadow.

She saw a pixie and she saw a giant.

She saw a naked girl with golden hair reflected in colorless waters, her ocean blue eyes wide with surprise – and terror.

Oh, that poor girl. What happened here?

She saw a city beneath the sea. She saw the jungle. She saw the spit and hammer of fire and metal. She saw the reaches of space, a raw, undulating cosmos, and an invading army advancing past the red eclipse of Earth’s moon. She saw the past and she saw the future. She saw death.

Oh, goddesses in their legions, she saw death.

And she saw her, her body encased in gold and green and her hands red with blood, her hair black and her sinister facemasque, that of some time-lost Venetian carnivale, reflecting the light of candles and funeral pyres. The Adversary. The Mistress of the Ten Rings.

In that single, precious moment, before she vanished from the collapsing borderland with a heartbeat to spare, Clea understood that Nyx had been telling the truth and that a war she didn’t truly understand – yet – had already begun…

Delphi pulled back from the scrying pool, weeping silently beneath the curtain of her golden hair. Fear and sorrow had infected her heart, the first understanding of the loop she’d unwittingly become a part of and which was now turning inexorably towards conclusion.

“The fourth,” she said, bitterly. “A questing spirit and compassionate soul. The beguiling conjuror. The endless locking and unlocking of doors. This one is the gatekeeper, the one who reveals the paths the others must follow.”

The watcher in the shadows pushed forward, black hair alight in the glow of the candles and robes gleaming. A countenance hidden behind a full, ornate facemasque…

“At last, magic itself enters the equation,” the voice murmured, with some degree of scorn. “But still, I think, a conjuror’s apprentice more than the real thing. She’ll need hooking from her shell to reach her potential, I think.”

Delphi offered no reply.

As the candlelight flickered and the waters of the oracle shimmered, the naked girl with the milk-pale skin merely reached out with a weary hand, her beautiful eyes heavy with sadness. “Shall I continue?” she asked, quietly.

“The last of the five,” the watcher said. “Yes, child. Let us finish this. And then our true tale of glory can begin…”

NEXT: A casket frozen in the icy wastes of the Antarctic earns the attention of a mighty Avenger – and heralds the dramatic return of Namora, daughter of Atlantis! Don’t missHERALDS ORIGINS #5: NAMORA. “This One Is The Banner…”