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Post By IW Sat Feb 26, 2005 at 07:15:44 am EST |
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Avengers: Underground #8 | |
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| Previously: Pursuing a possible plot to wipe out all superheroes, the Black Knight (Dane Whitman) and Princess Crystal of the Inhumans were mystically transported to the pocket dimension of the Lady of the Lake by the captured Baroness Mordo, leaving Crystal’s husband Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) and her former brother-in-law the Vision (Victor Shade) to deal with the consequences. This story is part of a collection of fan-fiction stories assembled by Ozbot at Avengers Anew. Previous chapters can be found at on the Avengers: Underground Archive Page. The principal characters in this story at the property of Marvel Comics, and this isn’t a challenge to their legal rights. Avengers: Underground #8 The string of lights laced along the low shaft flickered then went out, plunging the diggers into absolute darkness. “Nobody panic,” Dr Whittaker called out in the blackness, “and nobody move. Last thing we need is anybody knocking a roof brace over.” That made sense to the archaeology students crouched along the claustrophobic tunnel they’d cleared out over the last three months. They held still while Grant Whittaker fumbled on a torch, then relaxed as the dim light shone over their faces. “Okay. Everybody relax. We’re fine now.” As if in answer to his words the whole cliff face tremored. Then the tunnel collapsed behind them, burying them all under the rubble of Wundagore Mountain. The torrential downpour was almost freezing, and every drop bounced off the canvas of the base tent like a tiny bullet. “Come in!” Janet Whittaker called desperately into the radio transmitter. But as usual the reception on Wundagore was wretched, and only a mocking crackling whine fed back to reward the woman’s efforts. “Nothing!” she said, adding a swear word as she tossed down the headset. “Sam, we’re going to have to try and get down to the village.” “In this rain?” the student worried. “We’ll slide off the track over a ravine.” “We have to risk it. Grant and the others might be hurt down there.” Sam privately considered that Janet’s husband and the rest of the dig students might well be dead. Lightning flashed overhead as the storm clamped in; but it illuminated two men stood at the tent flap. “Is there a problem?” asked the taller of the two, a gaunt figure with greying temples, dressed in a mustard trenchcoat that seemed hardly wet. Janet Whittaker had no time to ask how the strangers had pressed through the storm to the dig camp. She simple pointed to the collapsed tunnel. “The rain… it must have loosened the soil. We were digging… opening up an ancient chambered passage under the mountain. My husband and six students are caught down there!” Quicksilver glanced at the Vision. “You’ll need to brace the roof,” he said tersely. “Agreed,” Victor Stone answered him. He turned to Janet and Sam. “Remain here and prepare medical aid for the injured.” That was a deception of course. As soon as he left the tent the Vision used his density-changing ability to become intangible enough to slip through solid rock. He ghosted past the collapse and solidified again on the other side, becoming denser than the stones he held aloft to shore the ceiling of the remaining passage. Then Quicksilver used his mutant speed to dig, hurling away rubble faster than the eye could see, his stamina constantly renewed by his amazing gift. In less than five minutes he had cleared the blockage and had reached the Vision. “Bring them out,” Pietro Maximoff growled to the synthezoid. “And then let’s stop wasting time.” “You’re a godsend!” Grant Whittaker told Quicksilver and the Vision again as he sipped the warm soup provided for him in the base tent. “If you hadn’t come when you did and dug us out we’d all be dead.” As it was there were some cuts and bruises amongst the archaeology students but no serious injuries. “The fall was perhaps not as severe as you first estimated,” the Vision suggested, with regard for his cover identity. “We were able to break through to you very quickly.” “We’re just lucky the roof held,” Dr Whittaker breathed. “We’re lucky you were passing,” his wife noted, realising for the first time how unlikely the sudden rescue was on the lonely Transian mountainside. “We were looking for you,” Victor Shade explained. “Urgently.” “You’re trying to open a tomb of some kind, right there carved into Wundagore, right?” Pietro Maximoff demanded. “We are,” Grant agreed. “We’re a joint survey from Southampton and Rhiems Universities, on a grant from the Little Foundation. We’ve got some documentary evidence that this is the grave site of a Tartar tyrant called Baron Grigoriy Russov, who was around in the sixth or seventh century.” “The Bonewalker?” Quicksilver speculated to Vision under his breath. “How many people are likely to have been entombed on the mountain?” the synthezoid replied. “It’s fortunate for these people that the creature has already been summoned abroad, and now lies in a stasis cell in Wakanda.” “Sorry?” Grant said, having missed the low conversation. “We need access to the burial chamber,” Quickilver told him imperiously. “It’s a matter of life and death.” In the darkest and wildest part of the night, the Vision dropped the hologram making him appear to be human. In his familiar red-skinned plastic form he ghosted through his sleeping bag and exchanged a glance with Pietro Maximoff. The mutant nodded once and blurred out of the tent to take station at the far end of the unblocked tunnel. “I will locate the chamber then take down any intervening walls,” the Vision told him, following along the shallow reopened shaft. “Hurry up then,” Quicksilver spat. “It has been almost twelve hours since Crystal and the Black Knight were transported to the presence of that mysterious Lady. Who knows what might have happened?” “I am still uncertain why you felt that coming to Wundagore would aid us in recovering our missing comrades.” Pietro Maximoff shifted angrily. “Because when the Lady took Crystal it seems to have triggered some kind of contingency curse on that Mordo woman, hurling her into some kind of mystical sleep. Until T’Challa’s people get her back to Wakanda and work out how to wake her she can’t tell us how to undo what she did. So the alternative is to follow the only other clue we have.” “That this Lady of the Lake arranged for the release of the Bonewalker to retrieve the documents recently stolen from the American government,” the Vision recalled. “Examining this tomb would not have been my first recourse. Perhaps Doctor Strange or…” “I don’t trust Strange,” Quicksilver snapped. “I don’t trust any of them, but especially not Strange. He said that there was no such thing as Chaos Magic. He lied. He said Wanda caused all those deaths. I am convinced that the only way to save my wife now lies hidden in that underground chamber.” “Still,” the Vision persisted, “given the dimensional nature of the trap into which the Black Knight and Crystal fell…” “Don’t tell me how to protect my own wife!” Quicksilver hissed. “Not after how you let down my sister!” The Vision’s eyes seemed to flare redder in the gloom. “I what?” he asked in icy tones. “You took her from me,” Pietro accused the synthezoid. “She was safe with me, but she chose to be with you. And then you abandoned her.” “I was dismantled in an attempt to destroy me, as part of Immortus’ plot to turn Wanda into his reality-altering slave,” the Vision answered. The first tinges of irritation distorted the modulated tones of his android voice. “I was reduced to a mere emotionless robot, wiped of all personality. My children were destroyed. My friends encouraged my wife to choose another man.” “And then you got your memories back and you abandoned her,” Quicksilver persisted. “And when she needed somebody to care for her, to help her, to save her from what she became, you weren’t there. You weren’t there!” A sudden flash of insight splashed into the Vision’s angry mind. “And nor were you,” he realised. “You were not there to save her either.” Pietro shot him a look of pure hatred. “No. I failed her. I will not fail Crystal again. So find that chamber, and what lies within, and let us get her back.” The Vision didn’t reply. He simply faded through the heavy stone wall that the archaeologists had uncovered, and which they had been picking at with scientific precision. Quicksilver hissed and tried to calm himself, his hand balled into a fist against the ancient brickwork. “You are very close, Pietro Maximoff,” a quiet voice assured him. He turned to see the Dwarf in the formal black suit observing from further down the tunnel. “You’d better be right about this,” the mutant warned the sinister little man. “The scroll lodged in the tomb will restore Crystal to me?” “It will make all your wishes come true.” The Vision didn’t like Wundagore Mountain. Perhaps it was the radioactive deposits, the traces of rare minerals that felt so strange to phase through. Or perhaps it was something more, the psychic residue of the imprisoned elder god beneath the mound of stone. As he methodically searched for the chamber he knew must be hidden somewhere in the lightless rock, the Vision reviewed what he knew of Chthon and the mountain. One of the first beings spawned on the new-born planet Earth, Chthon was an aspect of sanity-destroying beings from outside creation itself. The demon was finally bound and exiled in the very rock of the Transian Alp, his power confined until such time as he could break free. From time to time he had sponsored servitors who had attempted to sunder the bonds that held their master. One such stratagem had been to attract the genetic scientist known as the High Evolutionary to build his workshop on the haunted mountain. Although an attempt to corrupt the Evolutionary’s work had led to the rise of the Man-Beast, the most significant gambit has come when a dying woman had given birth to twins in the Evolutionary’s citadel. Chthon had altered the genetic makeup of one of the mutant children to make her into the Scarlet Witch. But had he only altered one twin? Chthon’s plan to possess Wanda Maximoff’s body as a means of escaping Wundagore had been thwarted by the Avengers. But what if he had a second plan for the other child born on the wild night when lights shone on the peak of Wundagore? The Vision shimmered down through the bedrock of the mountain and sought access to the lost burial chamber. The distance seemed further than he had expected, and the material he passed through began to feel uncomfortable. Then he broke out into a low barrel-roofed chamber. He had found the Bonewalker’s tomb. Switching his eyesight to infrared and ultraviolet imaging allowed him to get an idea of the proportions of the chamber the Whittakers were looking for. The low ceiling was six feet at its highest point. The tomb was no more than four paces wide. A stone sarcophagus held ancient calcined bones twisted into bizarre spirals and loops, mute testimony to the original curse laid upon the body that had been laid there. “Can you hear me, Quicksilver?” he asked over his internal radio link; but the background radiation of the mountain and some strange electromagnetic pulsing almost like a slow heartbeat drowned all contact. The Vision shifted his density to become as hard as diamond and began tunnelling out the hard way, pounding through solid rock to reach the tunnel where he had left Pietro Maximoff. The Dwarf had come to Quicksilver in those shocked first minutes after Crystal and the Black Knight had been carried away by the Lady. While the Vision tried without success to revive Baroness Mordo from her mystical coma and was calling Taku and his Wakandan security forces for back-up, the mutant speedster had quartered every inch of Mordo’s boutique and checked every scrap of paper in the building. “The document you need isn’t here,” the Dwarf had told him, coming upon him unexpectedly as he had just reached the moment of despair. “The spell that can restore your bride to you.” The stranger was three feet six inches tall, dressed in a black silk Armani tux with a blood-red carnation on his lapel. He reeked of evil. Pietro hadn’t cared. “Talk,” he’d warned the Dwarf pinning him hard to the cellar wall. “I’m not a patient man at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times.” “What I said. There’s a page of an old book hidden in the tomb your adversary the Bonewalker was laid. It has power. If you possessed the page it would grant your wish.” The fragment was from the Darkhold, the Book of Sins that had damned Baron Russov to become the undead horror that had risen to protect an even older conspiracy yet, but the Dwarf didn’t feel the need to mention that. “And who are you?” Quicksilver had demanded. “I’m an agent of destiny. Your guardian angel maybe? And I’m telling you, if you can get the page – in time – and use the spell scribed upon it to make your wish come true, then you can call the lovely Crystal back to your side and keep her forever.” The Dwarf smiled unpleasantly. “But you’d better run.” It took the better part of two hours for the Vision to pummel his way through the granite bedrock and clear a path for Quicksilver to squirm through into the burial chamber. “Anything?” he demanded peremptorily, glaring into the blackness. Victor Shade allowed the solar collection gem on his forehead to glow, lighting the burial place for the first time in fifteen hundred years. “I am assuming the carvings upon the wall and the ancient traces of chalk indicate a Christian rite of burial – or perhaps of interdiction. An exorcism, perhaps?” “Is there a paper?” Quicksilver demanded. “A scroll, a page? Some kind of parchment?” “Any soft materials would have long since rotted in this gloomy environment,” the Vision noted. “Not this one,” Pietro insisted. He braced himself and rummaged through the sharp abandoned bones of Grigoriy Russov. And there beneath them lay the ivory case containing a thick rolled leaf of some waxy squared hide. “Is this what you expected to discover?” Victor Shade wondered. “Why you were so urgent and adamant in dragging us all this distance?” It had been a literal dragging too, with an almost insubstantial Vision clinging to a rapidly-running Quicksilver over treacherous mountain tracks in the gathering storm. “Yes,” breathed the mutant speedster. He wrenched open the bronze cap of the scroll-case and unrolled the contents. The page felt unpleasant to his fingers, greasy and sweaty. The script upon it was alien; yet after a few moments it began to resemble Latin, and then Pietro’s native Romany. Quicksilver realised he could read this. “I suspect I may be missing some key information,” Victor surmised. “Yes,” agreed Pietro tersely. “Let’s get out of here before the roof comes down again.” The Dwarf watched them depart with a gleeful inhuman smile. “Wake up!” Quicksilver called to Grant and Janet Whittaker, bursting into their tent uninvited. “Is this what you’ve been looking for?” “What?” Grant moaned, rising from a troubled sleep. “What is it?” “Grant!” his wife gasped. “They’ve found the Darkhold!” The archaeologist blinked fully awake. “They what?” “The Darkhold?” the Vision noted. “A legendary occult tome said to have originated in Atlantis, containing magical procedures taught by the Elder Gods to promote their influence on this dimension. For a time the primary copy resided in the vaults at Avengers Mansion, where it was the subject of a theft attempt by the vampire lord Dracula.” “So that’s what this is,” Pietro sneered, handling the scroll. “I should have known. Dwarf, show yourself!” The Whittakers peered round in surprise as a well-dressed midget emerged from the corner of their crowded tent. “Read it,” the Darkhold Dwarf urged. “It will make your wish reality.” “This is not a human being,” Vision warned. “In fact I’m getting no life readings off this creature at all!” Quicksilver glanced down at the page. It seemed to want to be read, and now Pietro could see how the incantations might come together to cause a rend in reality and amend what people thought was real. With this he could recover Crystal to his side, restore Wanda, punish his enemies and reward his friends. He could end mutant prejudice and erase hatred. All he had to do was speak. It occurred to him that this is what he was born to do. “I don’t think so,” he told the Dwarf. “Do you really think I’m that stupid? That weak? No, I wanted the scroll for a different reason.” He held it firmly by the corners and held it up. “You return my wife to me of I’ll tear this into a thousand pieces.” “Be careful with that,” Janet Whittaker warned. “It’s incredibly powerful. We saw the Darkhold corrupt even a powerful mage like Mordred the Mystic.” “I am no mage,” Pietro answered. “I just do things very quickly. Including seeing through confidence tricks and destroying valuable artefacts. Decide, Dwarf.” The Dwarf looked suddenly uncomfortable. “You can’t. It won’t let you. You don’t have the power.” The Vision’s solar gem flashed for a moment. “I suspect that I can destroy it, however. I can project my collected solar energies at 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit, one tenth of the heat of the sun’s corona, sufficient to vaporise any substance on Earth… and I am not human.” The Dwarf looked from Quicksilver to the Vision and read the implacable certainty in their minds. “Your allies are already returned,” he admitted. “They overcame Lady Viviane and found passage back to this world through the vestigial conduit that brought them there.” “Vision?” the mutant asked. Victor Shade’s expression changed for a moment as he accessed the airwaves. “I still can’t get any radio contact. The storm…” “Bring them here,” Quicksilver demanded of the Dwarf. “And then… well I think we’re all going to require explanations.” The Darkhold Dwarf glowered. “Then I’d better see you get what’s coming to you,” he promised. Continued… Footnotes for the Burgeoning Bibliophile: Grant and Janet Whittaker debuted in Marvel Chillers #1 when their archaeological questing for the Darkhold led them to discover and free the spellbound Mordred the Mystic. Profiles on the couple are available at The Unofficial Appendix to the Marvel Universe – Janet Lyton and Grant Whittaker. There’s also an entry for Mordred the Mystic. The Darkhold Dwarf, a demonic servitor of the imprisoned Elder God Chthon, was the recurring adversary in the 90’s Darkhold: Book of Sins title. His main function appears to be to tempt mortals into using the various scattered pages of the damned volume, always with unpleasant consequences. He also has an entry at The Unofficial Appendix to the Marvel Universe – Dwarf. |
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