Mount Wundagore, now a grave of shattered stone and smoldering ash, trembled in silence. The Scarlet Throne had been destroyed, Voldemort was imprisoned in a vortex of runes, and the winds no longer wept. But Doctor Stephen Strange stood still.

  His eyes were drawn to a crack in the air—an invisible seam pulsing softly, like a heartbeat inside a dream.

  “Stephen…”

  The voice was barely a whisper, but it thundered inside his mind. He turned. No one else reacted. Wong, breathing heavily, was tending to the spell-wards around Voldemort’s containment. The air stank of scorched stone and forgotten spells.

  “Stephen… please… listen.”

  The voice came again. Familiar. Soft. Grieving. Powerful.

  It was Wanda.

  But she was nowhere. Not in spirit, not in form. Only in his mind.

  Strange clutched the Eye of Agamotto, but it no longer held the Time Stone. He whispered, “Wong… did you hear that?”

  Wong looked up, confused.

  “Hear what?”

  “Wanda,” Strange murmured. “She’s… speaking to me.”

  Wong’s expression darkened.

  “Her magic was anchored to the throne. When it shattered, maybe… fragments remained. But be wary, Stephen. Scarlet echoes can deceive.”

  Strange ignored the warning. He knelt by the broken roots of the throne. The rock pulsed like it had blood. And then—his mind drifted inward.

  ---

  The Labyrinth of Memory

  He was no longer on the mountain.

  He now stood in a bleeding mirror-dimension, where red vines coiled like veins and candles floated in the air. Walls stretched with paintings of Wanda’s past selves: from childhood in Sokovia to the woman who warped Westview, to the mother who dreamed children into existence.

  Then came the Scarlet Witch. And then… ashes.

  “You saw me as broken,” the voice echoed in every direction.

  “But I was just… unfinished.”

  Strange turned. From the red mist, a woman in shadow emerged—her form unstable, face veiled.

  “Wanda… is this really you?”

  “A sliver,” she answered. “Not whole. Not free. But aware.”

  He stepped closer. “Why me?”

  “Because you're broken too, Stephen. And only the broken can see what others refuse to.”

  The mist trembled. A distant chanting began—not hers, but a voice older, colder, echoing from the chasm beneath the vision.

  “He wasn’t alone,” Wanda whispered. “Voldemort was never meant to wield my power. He was a harbinger.”

  Strange’s eyes narrowed.

  “A gate.”

  She nodded. “He opened what he could not comprehend. Something… heard him. Something is coming.”

  Suddenly the candles extinguished. One by one. The vision shuddered.

  Wanda’s voice broke:

  “The Scarlet Gate has been touched… it stirs…”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  But the answer never came.

  A scarlet hand erupted from the floor and dragged her shadow away, screaming.

  Strange awoke on the mountain floor, gasping, frost on his hands.

  ---

  Back to Reality

  Wong stood over him.

  “You colpsed mid-chant. What did you see?”

  Strange wiped his brow. “The throne was a prison… not for Wanda. But for something she bound inside herself. It wants out.”

  He turned toward Voldemort’s prison—already cracking at the edges.

  Wong grimaced. “What do we do?”

  Strange looked toward the horizon.

  “We don’t go to Kamar-Taj. We go deeper. Into the shadow beneath the gate.”

  A wind howled through the broken summit—this time not of the mountain, but of something far older than chaos.

  Something awake.