The Sanctum had acquired a new, unsettling resident. Miguel O'Hara sat curled in a large armchair usually reserved for contemplative sorcerers, a blanket Wong had produced draped over his shoulders. He stared at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Every few minutes, a wisp of golden energy would crackle from his fingertips, responding to his stress like a psychic sweat.
Peter Parker sat opposite him on a footstool, mask off, looking even younger than Miguel. The encounter had stripped away the seasoned hero persona, leaving behind the raw graduate who'd just seen his foundational tragedy resurrected and mutated. He'd been trying to explain things, but the words kept failing.
"So… you're saying the world is, like, a tapestry," Miguel ventured, his voice thin. "And a really smart, sad lady in Africa is pulling threads out to make it… better?"
"She thinks it'll make it better," Peter corrected softly. "She's wrong. But the pulling… it's causing rips. And sometimes, stuff falls out of the rips. Or gets… made." He gestured vaguely at Miguel.
"I fell out," Miguel said, a hysterical laugh bubbling in his throat. "I fell out of your memory. I was going to the library. I had a chemistry midterm." He squeezed his eyes shut. "Now I can see… strings. Everywhere. On you, on him," he nodded towards Stephen Strange, who was observing from a distance, "on the walls. Some are bright, some are frayed. The one on that guy…" he pointed a trembling finger at Marc Spector, who was leaning in a doorway, "…is a mess. Like a ball of yarn after a cat got it."
Marc gave a weak, humorless smirk. "Kid's got a gift."
Stephen approached, his demeanor shifting from Sorcerer Supreme to something more clinically curious. "Miguel, when you sealed the tear in Queens, what did you feel?"
Miguel thought, his brow furrowing. "It was like… darning a sock? But the sock was made of… ideas. I could feel the two sides of the rip wanting to be whole again. I just gave them a path. The golden stuff… it's like glue, but smarter."
"Reality adhesive," Wong murmured from behind a stack of ancient texts. "A psychic manifestation of the universe's self-repair function. Fascinating and terrifying."
"Can you see the big rip?" Stephen asked quietly. "The one in Wakanda?"
Miguel's face went pale. He looked towards the south, though miles and walls separated him from Africa. His golden eyes, a permanent echo of the energy within him, glazed over. "I… I don't see a rip there." He swallowed hard. "I see a black sun. It's not tearing. It's… sucking. Pulling all the threads towards it. And around it, silver threads are moving, tying knots, cutting…" He flinched, pulling the blanket tighter. "It's cold. It doesn't want to be whole. It wants to be… new."
The confirmation was a silent blow. Stephen exchanged a look with Wanda, who had been listening quietly. The Weaver's process was beyond mere destruction. It was anti-creation.
"We need to find others like him," Carol stated, her arms crossed. She'd been hovering near the window, a restless star. "If the universe is creating antibodies, we need an immune system. We scan for more Echo-born anomalies."
"Scott Lang might be able to help with that," Sam offered. He'd been on a secure line to the West Coast. "He says the Quantum Realm is going haywire. A 'tide' of temporal energy is building. He thinks it's the backwash from her preparations. If these… antibodies… are tied to the tears, the Quantum Realm's sensors might be able to pinpoint the ripples they cause."
"Do it," Stephen said. "Tell Lang to coordinate with Banner and Pym. We need a global sensor net, yesterday." He turned back to Miguel, his expression softening a fraction. "You're safe here, Miguel. We'll protect you. And we'll help you understand what you can do."
Miguel just nodded, looking lost. Peter placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. "It's gonna be okay. We'll figure this out. We're… we're good at that."
The attempt at reassurance felt hollow, even to him.
Wakanda, The Anti-Blink Chamber
The Weaver stood before her central loom, a device of pure light and thought that translated her will into temporal edits. The multiple Shuris around the chamber worked with serene, silent efficiency. All but one.
In a station monitoring the psychic resonance of the "Snap" event cluster, a version of Shuri from the period just after T'Challa's return from the Blip—wearing her lab gear, her hair in braids, a holographic model of a synthetic herb floating before her—paused. Her fingers, which had been inputting harmonic dampening sequences, froze.
Her head tilted. On her display, a sub-routine was highlighting an anomaly: the Queens event. Data streamed: Echo Matrix 889 (Parker, B.). Unstable resolution. Paradox birth. Entity O'Hara, M. manifested. Reality-adhesive properties detected.
The other Shuris took no note. This was expected statistical noise. The universe would rebel in small, futile ways.
But this Shuri—this memory of a sister drowning in grief yet still fiercely clinging to innovation—stared at the readout. She saw the energy signature of the manifested entity. It wasn't destructive. It was… reparative. A golden, warm thread in the midst of the cold, silver un-weaving.
Her eyes, copies of the real Weaver's but holding the specific memories of a younger self, lifted from the screen. They traveled across the chamber, past the pulsing vibranium heart, to the central throne where the Weaver, her older, ultimate self, stood. The Weaver was beautiful, terrible, and utterly remote. A goddess of elegant oblivion.
A whisper, a ghost of a thought that belonged solely to this echo, flickered through the younger Shuri's mind: Is this healing? Or is this a more complex kind of murder?
She looked down at her own hands, translucent and shimmering with borrowed stability. She was a memory given limited agency. Her purpose was to calculate, to execute. Not to question.
But she was Shuri. And Shuri always questioned.
Her gaze drifted to another station. There, an even earlier echo worked: T'Challa. Not the king from his final days, but the vibrant Black Panther from the battle against Thanos, his suit gleaming, his movements powerful and sure. He was running simulations of vibranium resonance frequencies, a task of pure, brute-force physics. He was a simpler memory, all action and duty.
The younger Shuri echo watched her brother's back. A pang of loss, so real it felt like a shard of ice in her spectral heart, lanced through her. It was her loss, yes, but also… something else. A loss she was now complicit in creating on a universal scale.
She made a decision. A tiny, impossible act of rebellion from a ghost.
Her fingers moved over her console, not inputting the Weaver's commands, but writing a clandestine sub-routine. A packet of data, containing the analysis of Miguel O'Hara's reparative energy signature and a simple, repeating algorithmic query: IS THIS NECESSARY?
She assigned it a low-priority diagnostic tag and released it into the chamber's data stream. It would circulate, a harmless piece of noise among quadrillions of calculations. It would likely be purged in the next system flush.
But it existed. A question, asked in a chamber that had outlawed them.
The T'Challa echo finished his simulation. He turned, as if to report to a superior, and his masked gaze swept the room. It passed over his younger sister's station. For a nanosecond, it paused. The head tilted, a mannerism so perfectly him it made the Shuri echo's non-existent breath catch.
Had he seen? Had some fragment of the king's conscience, preserved in this memory of heroism, sensed the heresy?
Before she could process, the Weaver's voice, calm and omnipresent, filled the chamber. "Calibration for the First Stitch is at 98%. Prepare the focusing array. We initiate the Unstitching of Event Cluster Alpha in four hours."
The younger Shuri echo quickly resumed her prescribed task, her act of defiance hidden. The T'Challa echo turned back to his work.
But the seed of doubt, in a realm built on absolute certainty, had been planted.
San Francisco, Pym Technologies
Scott Lang felt very, very small. And not in the fun, Ant-Man way.
The lab was a cathedral to quantum science, all sleek surfaces and holographic displays that showed the universe in ways that made his head hurt. Hank Pym, his expression perpetually caught between genius and grump, was barking coordinates at a bank of servers. Bruce Banner, in a lab coat over his purple trousers, was analyzing a waveform on a screen that looked like a psychotic cardiogram.
"The tide isn't just building," Bruce said, his voice tight. "It's structuring. See these harmonic spikes?" He pointed to sharp, regular peaks in the chaotic data. "That's not natural temporal backwash. That's machining. She's using the fabric of spacetime as a lathe."
"And the little blips here, here, and… oh man, here too?" Scott pointed to smaller, erratic pulses superimposed on the massive wave.
Hope van Dyne, suited in her Wasp gear minus the helmet, leaned in. "Those are new. They're localized. Micro-rips. Consistent with the 'antibody' theory Strange reported."
"Can we track them?" Sam Wilson's voice came through a secure comms unit. "We need to find these people before the Weaver's stitch does… whatever it's going to do."
"Already on it," Hank grumbled. "The micro-rips emit a distinct tachyon signature. We're syncing our sensors with Stark's old satellites, Thor's Asgardian observatory, and… whatever it is that wizard uses." He threw his hands up. "We'll have a map. But Scott, if we're going to get to these people in time, we need a delivery system that can handle spatial and minor temporal distortion. Something that can go through the frayed edges of reality without coming undone."
All eyes turned to Scott. He looked at the Quantum Tunnel, its rings humming with potential. He swallowed.
"You want me to… quantum jump to a bunch of reality tears to pick up kids who just got superpowers from a cosmic nervous breakdown?"
"Basically," Hope said, giving him a supportive but serious look.
Scott took a deep breath, a grin spreading across his face despite the terror. "Okay. But I'm driving."
---
The Sanctum
Peter was showing Miguel the basics of web-shooting in a magically expanded, padded training room. It was a distraction for both of them.
"So you think about where you want it to stick, and your body just… does it?" Miguel asked, watching Peter fire a line to the ceiling with effortless grace.
"Sort of. It's instinct now. Like breathing."
Miguel held up a hand, focused, and a thin, golden strand shot out. It wasn't viscous like webbing; it was a solid, glowing line of light. It struck the wall and stuck, humming softly. He tugged it. It held.
"Whoa," Peter said, genuinely impressed.
"It feels… like extending a thought," Miguel said, a flicker of wonder breaking through his fear. He fired another, then another, creating a fragile, glowing cat's cradle between his hands. "I can feel the strength of it. How it's tied to… everything."
As he played with the strands, his eyes glazed over again. "Peter… I'm remembering things. Not my things. Other things. A woman in a blue dress, crying over a broken shield in the snow. A man with a hammer, losing everything in a dark desert. A green giant, so angry and so sad… They're all… tied to the black sun. Their pain is feeding it."
Peter's blood ran cold. He was describing moments from the lives of the people in this very building. The echoes weren't just historical events. They were personal tragedies, being mined for their sorrow.
Suddenly, Miguel cried out, clutching his head. The golden strands snapped and vanished. "A big one! It's… it's happening now! In… in a city on a cliff? By the ocean! It's loud! So many threads snapping at once!"
Stephen burst into the training room, having felt the psychic spike. "Where, Miguel?"
"I don't know names! It's… there's a bridge! And a giant wolf made of shadows!"
"San Francisco," Stephen and Wanda said in unison.
The comms from Pym Tech crackled to life. It was Hope, her voice strained with urgency. "We've got a massive, multi-vector Echo erupting over the Golden Gate Bridge! It's… it's Ragnarok. The fall of Asgard. And it's not just an image. The bridge is icing over. Spectral warships are phasing in and out. We have readings of multiple life signs within the Echo field! Scott's suiting up!"
Carol was already a blur of light shooting out the Sanctum window. "I'm on my way!"
Stephen turned to the others, the plan solidifying in desperation. "This is it. The first test of her 'stitch' is destabilizing everything. We contain San Francisco. We find the antibodies. And we prove to the universe—and to her—that there's something here worth saving."
He looked at Peter and Miguel. "You two are with me. It's time to see what a spider and his… reality tailor… can do."
As portals began to swirl open, Bucky approached Stephen. "And what's our move against her? While we're playing defense?"
Stephen's eyes were hard. "We've seen her power. We can't match it. But Miguel proved something. The universe doesn't want to die. It's fighting back. We find the tools it's creating. We find the cracks in her perfect, grieving logic. And we remind Shuri of what she's trying to erase. Not just the pain, but the love that makes the pain matter."
He stepped towards the portal, the Cloak billowing. "We fight for the messy, glorious, painful story. All of it."
The team moved, not towards a battle, but towards a rescue mission at the end of the world, hoping to find in the chaos the first threads of hope.