NOTE: The events in HERALDS: ORIGINS take place after the current LADY LIBERATORS series, but Delphi’s vision in this issue is one of the recent past and precedes Marvel Omega’s AVENGERS #33.

Delphi reached towards the oracle with a weary hand, her ocean blue eyes sorrowful as she contemplated the auguries of her scrying pool… and other recent premonitions.

“Shall I continue?” she asked, wishing she could forget the ghostly whisper that had recently murmured at her ear. But the echo in her memory refused to fade.

Oh, that poor girl. Fare well, Delphi. I am… so very sorry.

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

The naked girl stretched out upon the cold, stone floor of the candlelit chamber as she’d done on four previous occasions, believing that this would be the last portent required of her. It didn’t occur to her, even as her fingers slipped beneath the oily surface of the water and began to stir a new image into existence, that there had been a miscalculation…

THIS ONE IS THE BANNER…

By Meriades Rai

“So, uh… are you sure I can’t fetch you one of our spare thermals, ma’am? Because I gotta say, you look like you’re gonna catch one helluva cold in that… outfit.”

Carol Danvers smiled at the man alongside her, noting his gray all-in-one thermal suit and fur-lined boots and hood, and the way his breath clouded the air every time he spoke. The fur was flecked with ice and the air was hazy white beneath a powder blue sky, all of which was customary for Antarctica at this time of year. It was no wonder Carol’s companion, ice cap geologist Jamal Bailey was concerned for her health; it was minus-thirty degrees centigrade out here, a mile inland on the Amery Ice Shelf of East Antarctica, and not the kind of climate for a woman to be parading in what amounted to a black and gold swimsuit, arm-length gloves and a pair of thigh-high boots. Not that a healthy, red-blooded male like Jamal would usually complain, but if this lady dropped dead from exposure while in his care then there were bound to be repercussions.

Carol smoothed back her caramel-blonde hair as she squinted up at the sun-blinded skies. She was wearing a standard pair of blackout goggles over her domino eye-mask but the glare was still pronounced.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “When you’ve found yourself lost in the depths of the universe with the nearest sun some fifty light years away, you tend to get an appreciation for what cold really is. Not that I’m downplaying the conditions you have to endure out here, it’s just… I’m built differently, Mr. Bailey. This temperature doesn’t even bring me out in goose-pimples.”

Jamal regarded his companion studiously from behind the fringe of his hood, hoping she couldn’t see his grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, curbing a wolf whistle. “Smooth as silk. Trust me, I’d noticed.”

Carol reined in a smirk of her own. “So,” she murmured, in a purposefully husky drawl, “you want to show me what you’ve got, honey?”

Jamal was startled, his grin suddenly accompanied by a beetroot blush. He then checked himself and shook his head, exhaling a cloud of white.

“You mean why I called you out here, right? What we found in the ice?”

“What else?” Carol teased.

“Well, hell. You know, for one of those stuffy super-hero types, you’re alright.”

“So I’m told.”

Still grinning, Jamal trudged off across the densely packed snow and down a shallow gradient towards a misshapen ice formation at its base, with Carol Danvers – the hero otherwise known as Ms. Marvel – in close attendance. Jamal Bailey was a member of a scientific team conducting ice core research in this general region of the continent, and a recent discovery had prompted him to dispatch an urgent message not just to the private facility back in the United States that was sponsoring his work but also to the super-powered peacekeeping force, The Avengers. Because the discovery in question… well, Jamal had made the correct call that something this weird fell under Avengers jurisdiction.

“You know, no offence – and, believe me, I changed my mind the moment you arrived – but I was kinda hoping you people would send the new guy to check this out,” Jamal said as he and his companion reached the bottom of the ice basin. “The new Captain America, right?”

Ms. Marvel glanced across, her expression guarded. “You wanted to see what all the media attention was about, up close and personal?”

“No, no,” Jamal replied, hurriedly. Then he paused, and shrugged. “Well… yeah, okay, maybe a little. But there’s that sense of symmetry too.”

“Symmetry?”

“The real Cap, Steve Rogers… he was found frozen in the ice in the Arctic, right? Well, now we’ve got one too.”

Ms. Marvel was about to gently point out that her current companion in the Avengers, Josiah X, was now the real Captain America and not just some stand-in, when the import of Jamal’s words struck her and she faltered.

“Wait. Are you saying you’ve discovered a body out here?”

“What, the guy who fielded the call didn’t tell you that?”

“Guy? German accent, high-pitched voice?”

“That’s the fella.”

Ms. Marvel grimaced. Kurt, she thought, darkly. The world’s worst Avenger for monitor and general receptionist duties…

“I guess you’d better show me,” she said.

The item Jamal’s team had discovered was lodged in an ice cavity some thirty feet away. It was, Ms. Marvel was alarmed to note, a coffin. The snow and ice had been cleared, exposing the ornate casket in full, but Jamal swore the box itself hadn’t been touched. The base and sides of the casket were constructed of interlocking shafts and slats of metal, edged with the gleam of gold and a strange, pearl-hued ore. The lid was glass, and although prolonged exposure to extreme cold had caused it to take on a rough, frosted sheen, it wasn’t cracked. And it wasn’t opaque. Ms. Marvel could discern the form inside quite clearly.

She leaned in close, eyes wide behind her goggles and mask, her hair ablaze in the Arctic sunlight.

“Wow,” she breathed.

“She’s beautiful, right?”

“Gorgeous,” Ms. Marvel concurred, studying the woman behind the glass as if she were an exhibit at a museum; which, in some unsavory sense, she was. “But there’s more to her in that,” she murmured. “The set of her features, especially the forehead and brows and high cheekbones… and the ears. Pointed ears, unmistakable. A tinge of aquamarine blue to the skin, and it’s not through the cold. Plus the jewels about her neck, the tiara, and the general luster of the coffin itself…”

“You recognize her?”

“I don’t know who she is, but I think I know what she is,” Ms. Marvel said. “And although you did right to call us, there’s someone else I know who’s going to be even more interested.”

“Who?”

Ms. Marvel pursed her lips. “Namor, the Sub-Mariner. King of Atlantis. This woman? She’s one of his. And maybe royalty herself by the looks of things. I wonder…”

She reached out then, tentatively but driven by curiosity. That had always been Carol Danvers’ problem; or one of them at least. She was headstrong, and she found it hard to resist temptation. Of all the Avengers she was perhaps the member who was most… human, in terms of her failings. Even more than Josiah, more than Tony. Or maybe, in her defense, there was some undetected power inherent in the casket that drew her in – or there was a different kind of influence, directed from elsewhere, a mysterious force that compelled her to extend her hand and trail her fingers along the edge of the coffin lid, as if knowingly searching for a hidden catch that would release it…

Jamal and other members of his group had already touched the casket. None of them, however, was a woman like Ms. Marvel, a living, biological battery who could store and channel all manner of elemental and cosmic energies through her cells. I’m built differently, Mr. Bailey.

And it was Ms. Marvel’s power that both unwittingly opened the coffin and simultaneously awakened the woman within…

Years ago…

“Is this it, then?” Namora of Atlantis snapped, rounding on the green-skinned woman who had just entered her bedchamber and was now eyeing her like a hungry shark. “Is this where you try and kill me, Llyra? So you can take what’s mine? I know you were someone important long before I arrived here in Lemuria, and I’m sorry if my presence here leaves you feeling slighted. But I’m aware of your vicious little schemes, and you’ve tested my patience beyond its limits. If you think with me gone that you can steal away my husband, my child, my entire life-”

“Your child? Oh, Namora, spare me. What in the world would I want with your unholy offspring, a creature that only exists through the manipulation of science? An embryo cloned from your own DNA; a last, desperate attempt to populate your barren womb.” The scheming witch named Llyra inclined her head, her greenish-black eyes gleaming. “Believe me, when your beloved Merro emerges from his brief mourning to bed me, the first thing I’ll do is convince him to have that godless whelp purged from Lemuria!”

Namora screamed, surging forward with murder in her eyes – but then, almost immediately, she felt herself stumbling, her strength inexplicably draining from her limbs.

“What…?” she muttered, her breath clawing in her throat. “What is…?”

“Poison, my sweet,” Llyra whispered. “It appears my schemes have taken you unprepared after all. You see, as you danced and sang among the crowds tonight – among mypeople – and drank wine by the goblet, you were imbibing the tiny, crawling toxins that would soon begin to immobilize you from the inside out. But this isn’t death, Namora. A deathlike state, indistinguishable from the real thing, but in truth a life sentence of cellular paralysis that will persist for as long as your half-breed genetic template endures; a thousand years, perhaps. A thousand years, locked away, with only the distant echoes of your own lost soul for company…”

Even as Namora reached for her enemy – the woman who had, effectively, murdered her – she knew it was too late. Atlantean by birth, she had arrived in the undersea city of Lemuria years before and had always been aware of Llyra’s hatred of her, and the jealousy she felt towards her marriage to the Lemurian man, Merro. She’d long suspected the witch would one day attempt violence of this kind, but she’d grown foolish; she’d left herself open to Llyra’s brazen treachery, and now there’d be no escaping her doom.

Llyra smiled, her eyes and lips black, and her hair and skin the deep, emerald green of the Lemurian caste – although she in truth was also a half-breed, like the woman she’d slain. Both were the progeny of human mothers, but there was no kindred spirit between them; only this. Only hate, and murder. Namora stared up through dying eyes, commanding herself to imprint this final, terrible image on her brain and on her heart. Her killer.

Her killer…

Now…

Namora’s eyes opened and immediately she was blinded by the glare of the sun. She cursed and spat, thrusting her arms across her face. The sensation of it on her greenish-blue-tinctured skin and in her hair of palest gold was raw. The burn of sunlight but also the cut of the cold, crisp air… these were elements she was unaccustomed to at the best of times, being an ocean-dweller, but they were worse after such a long period of suspension. The pain was intense – but endurable.

The memory of her death, however, was far worse.

Llyra. Llyra!

Namora sat up in her coffin, still recoiling from the sun like some freshly awoken vampire but driven now by a desperate need for vengeance as much as she was stirred by the slow but irrevocable return of a fully functioning blood flow. She heard voices but couldn’t make out the words. She glanced to her left and saw a figure clad in gray furs, a man, but dismissed him. He wasn’t Llyra, and therefore wasn’t important.

She looked to her right.

Ms. Marvel stepped forward carefully, both hands outstretched. The genuine concern in her expression may have been evident if not the fact that Namora was half-blinded, if her body hadn’t been starved of nourishing salt water and was still crippled with the residual traces of poison, if her mind hadn’t been addled. All she could see was a distinctly female figure, the curve of breast and hip and the blaze of hair, the raised hands. The knowing smile.

Llyra was a metamorph, with the specific ability to fluctuate the colors of her hair and skin to imitate a regular human. That was all the evidence Namora required as she slithered from her coffin – and attacked.

“Murderess!” she screamed, grabbing Ms. Marvel by the throat and plucking her bodily from the icy ground. “What did you do? What did you do?”

And then she slammed her perceived adversary back down into the ice, with enough force to cause the entire surrounding area to shake, before hefting her once more and driving her fist into the other woman’s face. Ms. Marvel sailed backwards through the air at a rate of knots, punching a clean hole through the ice formation that overshadowed the basin where the coffin had been found and then keeping on going, her legs trailing behind her. When she eventually crashed back to earth she’d traveled a quarter of a mile, and the trench her helpless body carved into the ground kicked up clouds of frost like a miniature blizzard.

For a moment she didn’t move, more astonished than dazed. Then, slowly, she pushed herself up on her hands and stared back the way she’d flown, her goggles askew on her head and her expression a little vague. Her lip was bleeding. That… didn’t happen often.

“Okay,” Carol muttered, shaking her head. “Okay. So, no one’s hit me that hard in a long time…”

She stood and brushed herself down, than glanced up as she saw a figure approaching at speed across the icy vista. The woman from the coffin, her body sheathed in some manner of funereal black toga, her skin the same powder blue as the sky overhead and her snow-blonde hair streaming behind her. She’d lost the tiara. She looked mad.

Ms. Marvel’s eyes narrowed. Well, good. That made two of them.

Namora charged, gathering speed and strength with every stride, but this time her opponent was ready for her. As soon as the Atlantean was within striking distance Ms. Marvel swung a long leg and planted the flat of her boot in the other woman’s stomach, blunting her momentum utterly and causing her body to jackknife. Namora’s sapphire blue eyes shot wide and she grunted, jaw sagging. A split second later Ms. Marvel’s fist impacted with the side of her head and sent her skidding away across the ice on her backside, limbs flailing.

More snow clouds, and another trench. At the end of it, Namora rose, slightly unsteady at first but then pulling herself together, just as her enemy had done. Ms. Marvel looked on, grimacing.

“Not just a good puncher, then,” she said to herself. “You’re resilient. Namor-class, even. And with that pout on your face you look like him too. So who the hell are you?”

It was a question Carol wasn’t going to be able to answer any time soon, and she knew it. Her adversary charged again, muscles corded like iron in her bare arms and legs. There was virtually no toxin left inside Namora now – weakened after two decades in suspended death-state it had been purged almost immediately as soon as Ms. Marvel’s energies had kick-started her dormant biology. She still wasn’t as strong and fast as she would be when immersed in water but the human half of her heritage – her mother’s gift – was maintaining her well enough for now. That and hate.

Ms. Marvel met Namora’s rush with another kick, this time sending her spiraling through the air. On this occasion she followed on instantly, her power of flight carrying her swiftly in Namora’s wake, but she’d underestimated the Atlantean’s capacity for recovery; as Ms. Marvel drew close in mid-air so Namora somehow managed to shift her balance enough to wrap her powerful legs about the other woman’s waist in a scissor lock. It was a brief and clumsy maneuver but it allowed Namora the opportunity to clasp both hands about the back of Ms. Marvel’s skull and butt her square in the face as they tussled.

Carol swore, pain exploding behind her eyes. She wrenched free of Namora’s hold and unleashed a full strength punch, no longer willing to hold back as she was accustomed to doing. Such was the angle of their scuffle that Namora shot straight down and disappeared into the ice below like a bullet, churning up a fountain of diamond dust that glittered in the sun and causing the ground to fracture with a sequence of fissures in all directions. High above, Ms. Marvel banked and then descended, her expression slightly guilty – but only slightly. Her nose was also bleeding now, and one eye was swelling under her mask. That didn’t happen often either.

The blonde Avenger stared down into the hole Namora’s plummet had created. It looked deep. There was no sign of movement anywhere down there. Ms. Marvel scowled, then sighed.

“Damn it,” she muttered. “You never were the best at reasonable negotiation, Carol. But if someone’s uncouth enough to plant a Glasgow Kiss on you, then they deserve everything they-”

“Hey!”

Ms. Marvel glanced up to see Jamal Bailey approaching at a jog, his breath clouding as he huffed after his quarter-mile hike.

“Where’d she go?” Jamal panted. “Down there?”

“Uh-huh. But she’s a tough one. She’ll climb out. Hopefully she’ll be hurting so bad that she won’t pursue the fight, though…”

“Did you hit her hard enough that she could have gone all the way through?”

Ms. Marvel frowned. Jamal pointed at the hole.

“This is still the shelf crust, even this far in,” he explained. “Like a big raft of ice, see? We were only able to take ice cores from so deep here, else we would have punctured through. That’s the ocean down there. You think you hit her hard enough to pop her all the way to the water?”

Ms. Marvel pursed her lips.

“Eh,” she said. Inside his hood, Jamal smiled wryly.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, carefully.

Ms. Marvel glared down the hole in the ice some more but there was still no movement. She could have followed on in, tunneled down to learn the truth, but she really wasn’t inclined to. Claustrophobia aside – and, although she wasn’t as prone to that as Ororo, who had a chronic fear of enclosed spaces, it still wasn’t a pleasant thought – she didn’t want to find herself trapped in an ice funnel with Namora coming at her from the other direction like an angry bull whale. Better to wait and see what happened next, if anything.

And, besides, she had a message to deliver. She couldn’t help but think that Namor was going to want to know about this curious development…

Namora drifted in the dark depths beneath the Antarctic rim, still semi-stunned from Ms. Marvel’s punch and the residual grogginess of her extended near-death slumber. But, slowly, the freezing waters were invigorating her, in mind as much as body. Her memories were becoming clearer now, along with her understanding.

Llyra could alter her appearance but not her physiology. Whoever the woman had been who had just battered her through the icy crust of a continental shelf, she wasn’t Llyra; she was stronger and faster than any Lemurian. And she could fly. The taste of the ocean itself was also different; it was thicker, with a higher concentration of pollutants than Namora was used to.

This wasn’t her time.

How long, then, had she been… asleep? How many years had Llyra cost her? Was that treacherous witch even still alive? A thousand years, locked away…

“My daughter,” Namora breathed, her eyes sharp in the darkness of the fathoms. “What happened to my daughter?”

Her heart hardened, then. The fight with the woman above was done; only her daughter mattered now. And she knew she wouldn’t rest until she’d learned the truth…

“The fifth,” Delphi said huskily, withdrawing her hand from the waters of the oracle. “An irresistible force of majestic carriage. The vengeful warrior. The union of flesh and blood from water and air, a true spirit of the Earth. She is the banner, driving others on when all seems lost.”

The watcher in the shadows exhaled a triumphant sound, robes shimmering and hands flexing in their gauntlets of golden steel and silk. When those fingers moved they caught the light between joint and knuckle, reflecting brightly upon a sequence of ten distinct rings, each of singular design and set with gemstones of differing hues.

“The strength of an Atlantean!” the voice declared. “O, child, now do the pieces come together. We have royal blood and compassionate spirit, we have claw and sting, we have fire. And thus-”

“And ice. Fire and ice.”

The observer beyond the pillars faltered, hands clenched and rings glittering.

“There is another,” Delphi said, softly, as she gazed towards her oracle. “The sixth Herald.”

“No,” the voice murmured. “No, girl. My own premonition told me of five; five alongside me as I breached the gates, five emissaries heralding my message to those who would oppose me. Five-”

“Look,” Delphi breathed. “See.”

Her eyes remained pearl white, not ocean blue. Her delicate hand was drawn to the waters of the scrying pool, her slight and naked body pressed against the stone beneath. There was another portent to be revealed.

Royal blood and compassionate spirit, claw and sting, fire and ice.

Delphi’s hand slipped into the water…

NEXT: In a faraway world, a lonely girl despairs at the thought of her imminent marriage – but will Skadi, frost giantess of Jotunheim, be granted the miracle of one final wish? Don’t miss HERALDS ORIGINS #6: GLACIER. “This One Is The Waif…”