volume 1: hanged tree
chapter 1.1
the cell is dark, beyond light, beyond the realm
in its stygian iron bars a hermit lingers
meditating in ennui
rust creaks
sun enters, seeking truth
and a tale is spun
So, finally,
you've come. If you are here to extract the truth, then, you shall find it long and protracted. Ah, so quick to anger with that old hex. Let me remind you of your superior's punishment and consider weighing that against the barb of my tongue. I see you have found your wits.
Now, sit. Pacing around the room angrily like an angry mule is unbecoming of any practitioner of the Mystic Arts, even one as foul and deluded as yourself. Sit like me. No, don't cross your legs like that. Breathe in past your diaphragm and concentrate on your first chakra. Your stomach. The one - Are you telling me a well-funded organization like yourself can afford to bind me to this godforsaken rock and yet, fail to teach its pupils the basics of meditation? Ah, where is the Dread One to soothe the aches of incompetence I see before me? Do so again and - it is like a poker on your belly. Concentrate, yes. Now, temper it so you don't give yourself an aortic aneurysm. There. You see, this should give you enough patience to bear my tale.
No, why would I give the last piece of the puzzle to you? Regale me with torture if you must but your master won't give you the pleasure of seeing me die nor will he let me live a free man. Frankly, torture would be entertaining from the likes of you. I have survived tangling with the facets of Shuma-Gorath, face death from the likes of the Dread One, fend off the Nightmare from the aether and fought in the War of the Vishanti. Your imagination is puerile and gauche in the face of their boredom and honestly, your ineptitude would frighten me more.
So, let us start at the beginning of all things.
It begins with a mother.
Her name for me was Stephen Vincent Strange. My father was Bartholomew Strange, a tax consultant serving multiple clients in the New York Exchange. Roxxon, Hammer, Stark, all were at his beck and call. He burned books with a single-minded drive of an automaton and could never leave one number out of place. My mother was Rebecca Brandt, an overworked night-call nurse who lived on a diet of over-processed vending machine food and caffeine overdoses trying to compensate for the schedules of burnt-out nurses. They were both atheists at heart, although, they would never announce it on the census. I am and still hold to their -
You jeer at me but I still remain faithless to this day because I find no God worthy of my undying fealty or worship. I call them allies or friends, yes, in the case of the Vishanti but most remain craven such as Shuma-Gorath or unpredictable like the Greek or Nordic pantheons. Others remain inscrutable. For the ones I have yet to name, is like trying to burn incense in favor of gravity or pray to the laws of molecular attraction. A man flings himself into a hurricane and calls it a sacrifice for his god. I call it what it is.
So, naturally, my mother gave me the drive to batter myself against the marble halls of medicine and my father honed my mind to a razor's edge. There was a time we were a family. I had a sister in case you didn't know. No one really knows. Her name was Rebecca. She was the first I failed to save. It was winter. We were young. We were ice-skating on a frozen lake. That is all I am willing to part with. My life progressed on and so, I earned my M.D at the age of 21 and earned two Noble prizes for groundbreaking surgical procedures that are still in use to this day. For 10 years, St Barnaby Presbytarian became my throne, the media my suitors and I, Ozymandias. It was the height of my career and I became de facto judge, jury and executioner, doling out ridiculous fees for patients that I thought 'were worth my time'.
Worth my time.
These are not proud moments of my life.
My temple collapsed on 2005. I was driving off the coast of Baja, a bottle of rum in my hand. My blood alcohol concentration after the accident was measured to be four times over the national limit. I crashed a 4 million dollar Rolls Royce into the rocks below. My body survived, my hands were crushed and my ego festered and rotted into a sickness. A sickness that, to my shame, led me into the follies that have led me here today.
In spite of all I have learnt, my hands still shake. Why I didn't cure them with magic, you'll have to wait.
So, let us skip forward then. I doubt you want to hear the rest of my journeys. Past my trials to reach the top of the Himalayas where the Vishanti awaited me on the summit. Past my first communion with Agamotto the Wise. Past my first invoking of the sacred principalities. Past my commiseration with the most infuriating and brilliant man I have ever met. Past my first friendship with my once greatest ally. Past my first entanglement with what shall be my one and only heart.
Let us delve into how I first killed for the title of Earth's Sorceror Supreme.
It was the middle of Summer on Bleecker Street. It had been two months since I first received the post of Keeper of the New York Sanctum Sanctorum. I see you scoffing. How could I end up with such a menial post? You might remember it as an institutional relic from a bygone era of magic but the Sanctum Sanctorums were once key to the structural defense of Earth's reality. Built on continental ley-lines and inscribed in babylonian rune-script in the time of Agamotto, Earth was in a sense, shielded from the worst of otherwordly predators and beings. Think of it like a filter or a sieve.
The first rule of warding is that no magical barrier is wholly impenetrable. There is always a chink in the armor and in our case, the chink was magical entities small enough to escape our attention. Without the Sanctum Sanctorums forming a network of magical defense, we would return to the Yld Days when the Earth was no more than a nexus in a storm, when our ancestors pounded rocks together in fear of the sky-demons that conquered the clouds, when men was feasted upon.
And in return, we bit back.
But, I digress. You did not come for a history lesson. It had been two months and yes, I rejected the post of Sorceror Supreme. Before me, Baron Karl Mordo was the Sorceror Supreme. The shortest-lived Sorceror Supreme. The Ancient One, had died during our sojourn in the Wundagore Mountains. The details of how my master, teacher, friend and rank asshole of a magician died will come later into this story. For now, the magical world was still grieving. The Ancient One had lived for a good 599 years and had made indisputably important alliances, deep-forged bonds, between Earth and numerous other realms.
Asgard. The Greeks. The Purple Dimension. Weirdworld. The reverberations of his deeds can still be found to this day in the binding pacts he had made. Now, those pacts were to be tested and I, to my shame, couldn't support Mordo.
Perhaps, if.....Nevermind, reflecting in retrospection is a fool's way to trap one self in guilt.
Nevertheless, I found myself on that day sipping on a cup of jasmine tea Wong had brewed. He was out doing a deli run near Manaheim's. Wong came from a delegation of Masters from the east who sought to shore up the lacking defenses I suppose much of the weight he had gathered over that time was due to that disgusting szechaun meatball submarine he kept eating. I amused myself with the only television in the entire Sanctum Sanctorum, an old tube box from the 1980s that had been enchanted to work inside the ambient magic of the Sanctum Sanctorum. The current zeitgeist of the era was the tale of mutant rights.
Mutants.
If there was one reason to explain why magic hadn't gone mainstream, mutants were the answer. Again, that shaking of the head. I know. We could have spread the use of magic into the general populous. Magic was teachable, not inheritable. There was no abberation in human purity you needed to cast a simple enchantment. Could you imagine how S.H.I.E.L.D, the F.B.I, the C.I.A, the very public itself would react? My boy, we would see something far worse than the Salem Witch Trials.
However, magic hadn't been revealed to its fullest extent to the world, yet. No, the world was concerned with mutants and the mutants were the centre of a new Cold War. Senator Kelly was at the forefront of national efforts to suppress the growing mutant population and he was one step away from goose-stepping into a pit of corpses. Charles Xavier, a room-mate of mine in college, was simultaneously the greatest enemy and ally of the Master of the Mystic Arts. The arcane signature of his telepathic abilities was probing our mental wards and he could already access the Astral Plane. Thankfully, a vote was closed on the Council of Masters to make an attempt to globally neuter telepathic mutants using a binding curse. That would be abominable.
Whilst musing on this newest development, a ghost burst through the air in front of me, the window of reality breaking apart into a hundred shards. I had raised my arms, forming the movements for a quick banishment of the enemy phantasm from the borders of the Sanctum Sanctorum when it spoke in an unmistakably terse tone of a human. It was Wong in his astral form. I lowered my hands and asked why he hadn't bothered to rift into the Sanctum.
" Strange. Come to the park. Disguised. Keep the Cloak on you."
And it was that day on Central Park that I found myself facing a stone girl with a stone sword skewered in her belly.
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