⚜️ Saga 0: The Ash Years
🗓️ Location: Westchester County, New York
Charles Xavier's Private Study | Early Morning
Characters:Charles Xavier (solo POV)
The snow had fallen lightly through the night, frosting the earth in silver hush and cold elegance.
Charles Xavier sat alone in his study, the same room he'd lived in for decades—walls lined with dusty tomes, sagging portraits, and quiet regrets. The younger students hadn't stirred yet, and the mansion breathed with the silence of dawn. He held a worn ceramic mug of black coffee, untouched.
His eyes weren't on the fire crackling in the hearth. They were fixed on the slightly-glowing crystal orb resting beneath a dome of reinforced psi-proof glass.
Three hours ago, it had pulsed red for the first time in ten years.
A psiquake. No—that wasn't quite right.
A *collision*.
What had first felt like a Phoenix surge in the Eastern grids had quickly evolved into something worse. It wasn't just Jean. It wasn't *just* the Flame.
It was another presence.
"Who are you?" Charles murmured aloud to no one. His fingers hovered just above the crystal globe, not touching it, but feeling the residual pull. Psychic residue like knotted thread—one line blistering with chaotic tension, the other... darker and Colder.
Calm with the sharpness of inevitability.
He hadn't felt anything like that in decades—if ever.
"Two dreamers," he whispered,"One already on fire. The other... far too quiet."
Before founding the Institute, Charles had studied many disciplines—comparative theology, forbidden psionics, and lineage-lore of Earth's pre-atomic civilizations. Cults who had tried to map emotion itself. Priests who claimed soul-tethers could reach across realities. It had sounded like madness, once.
Now?
Now, madness simply meant he understood just enough to be afraid.
He stood and moved to the window, watching winter settle into the yard where children would later play—unaware that time itself might be fraying nearby.
*Jean... Jean had been stable for months.*
At least, he'd believed so. Carefully tapered psychic inhibitors, weekly dream monitoring, tailored meditation. But last night she'd torn the outer layers of her containment from the inside out. Not with violence carefully crafted—but with intimacy that didn't belong to this world.
"Dream-bonds don't fragment containment. Unless..." He paused, jaw tightening.
"Unless someone else reached her core."
He'd checked the records—no visitors logged. No missions. No psychic broadcasts. No hacked Gateways.
And yet, Jean Grey had changed overnight. Her heartbeat strangely synchronized with forces that shouldn't exist. Reaching for something—or someone—he could no longer trace.
He whispered, "It didn't come through the mind. It came through the... soul."
The globe on his desk pulsed again. This time, green.
Not Phoenix.
*Chaos energy signature? No known student radiates that harmony...*
Ten minutes prior, the mansion's containment systems had triggered a silent alert—another echo pinged halfway across the world. A girl's emotions had spiked into the red, tearing minor holes in the dream-layer net. That same girl had been on his cold case logs for months, Missing.
Codename: "Scarlet Witch".
Wanda Maximoff.
Xavier frowned and rubbed the side of his temple.
That name, too, was older than it ought to be.
He moved back to his chair and activated a secondary scan—a personal ritual. Low-grade neural sweep designed to visualize emotional frequencies, translated by muscle memory more than map displays.
And there it was again.
Threaded through Wanda's echo... 'him.'
Not Erik. Nor he was an another mutant.
But a stranger. A third presence. One who didn't howl like a god—or rage like war—but simply existed with Impossible Calm.
Charles's lips thinned. "What are you?"
The sensory trace didn't pulse like a mutant. Didn't shimmer like a celestial. It vibrated on intention. Anchored entropy. A will sharpened to magnetize fate.
The network had no classification for what he was seeing.
One woman shaped by fire.
One woman infected by madness and yearning.
And between them... something ancient, veiled in shadow, walking inside human skin.
Charles leaned back and whispered to himself. "So... this is the pivot."
He didn't need Cerebro for prophecy. Not when he'd seen the signs before: 'two obsessions binding themselves to a man they were willing to fight fate itself for'. Maybe it wasn't love in the traditional sense. Maybe it wasn't even choice.
But it was *truth*, twisted and pure.
And the world *always bled* when truth fought itself.
His hand trembled slightly as he poured the cold coffee into the sink and began preparing a new pot. He wouldn't sleep tonight. Or tomorrow.
"Jean," he whispered to the empty space, old sadness knotting in his throat. "Whatever part of you is still listening... please don't go to war for him."
He closed his eyes, just long enough to feel the shape of what stirred beneath the Earth.
It was coming closer now.
And it bore no labels.
Not mutant. Not god.
Just... **Dante**.
And somewhere in Charles Xavier's long memory, that name echoed like thunder from a forgotten age of burning skies and red horizons.
> [Sin System: Temporary Pulse Ping — Detected by Mutant-Level Psychic Monitor]
> ➤ Status: Unregistered Observer Logged
> ➤ Thread Infection Risk: 6.5% (Minimal)
> ➤ Interference Block Initiated
The faintest breath ghosted across the glass of his window as the System rejected contact. Charles stiffened.
He hadn't reached for anyone.
Something had... noticed him.
He stepped away from the pane.
Outside, the snow continued falling.
But for Charles Xavier—old man, teacher, reader of balances—it felt like winter had just turned against him.
—