Behind me, in the quiet of the Sanctum, Daniel watched until I vanished into the flow of the city. Then he turned back inside, the door clicking softly shut.
The Ancient One still sat with her tea, calm and unreadable, as if the outside world couldn't touch her unless she allowed it.
"Ancient One," Daniel said quietly, "he's gone."
"Hm." She didn't look up. "From now on, interact with him more. Cooperate when possible. If anything worries you, contact me directly."
Daniel hesitated, frowning. "Why are you so… kind to him?"
The Ancient One's eyes drifted toward the window, toward the city beyond, toward futures Daniel couldn't see.
"I see interesting times ahead," she said. "One day, you'll understand why I chose this path."
Daniel bowed, accepting the answer the way you accept a mountain: you don't argue with it, you just adjust your route.
"I understand," he said.
The Ancient One rose.
Sparks swirled into a portal. And without another word—without a backward glance—she stepped through, returning to Kamar-Taj like she'd never left.
And somewhere in my backpack, the wooden box sat quietly, holding a feather that might finally let me build something stable enough to survive what was coming next.
I worked with surgical precision, because if I didn't, I'd be right back where I started: exhausted, wandless, and one bad day away from becoming a cautionary headline on a S.H.I.E.L.D. briefing slide.
The wooden box from the Ancient One sat open on my desk like a dare. Inside, wrapped in protective lining that smelled faintly of incense and something sharper—ozone, maybe—was the Valkyrie Pegasus feather. It didn't look dramatic at first glance. It wasn't glowing, it wasn't crackling with lightning. Just a feather.
But the moment I held it between my fingers, I felt it.
Not "power" like a fireball. More like a presence—clean, firm, and stubbornly bright. A kind of spiritual pressure that made the air around my skin feel slightly warmer, as if the feather remembered sunlight from a world that didn't belong to Earth.
I'd already processed it the way my old wandmaking notes demanded: careful trimming, separation of viable filaments, cleansing in the oil bath I'd prepared overnight. I didn't have the luxury of perfect technique or rare reagents; I had to compensate with patience and obsessive attention.
Easy. Careful. Don't rush.
The pine heartwood shaft lay in front of me—thirteen and a half inches, dark brown, plain as a stick a kid might pick up in a park. Except it wasn't plain anymore. Inside it, hidden from sight, were the runes and circuits I'd carved by hand: binding patterns, stabilization lines, amplification matrices. The closest thing I could recreate to a proper wand channeling system in a world that didn't want me to have one.
I took a breath, then slid the processed Pegasus feather into the wand's hollow core.
The filaments unfurled slowly as they entered, spreading like roots searching for soil. A faint hum rose from the wood—barely audible, but I felt it in my palm, in my fingertips, in the center of my chest where my magic lived.
The feather made contact with the inner runes.
And the whole wand… settled.
Not into silence. Into alignment. Like a lock clicking shut. Like a circuit completing.
Magic moved through the connection—faint, tentative, alive.
I inserted the final stopper and sealed the wand completely.
Done.
For a second, I just sat there, staring at it, not trusting my own eyes. I'd made so many dead wands over the past months that success felt suspicious. Like the universe was setting me up for a punchline.
I picked it up.
Dark brown. Unadorned. No fancy carving. No handle. No decorative inlays. It looked like the kind of wand Ollivander would judge harshly and then politely refuse to sell.
I gave it a gentle wave.
My magic surged into it like water finding a channel.
No resistance.
No sputtering dead spots.
No sickening "nothing happens" void.
Smooth. Natural. Like it had always been part of me.
It worked.
Holy shit, it actually worked.
I didn't even realize I was smiling until my cheeks started to ache.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
The wand vibrated rapidly, power flowing through it with clean efficiency. Objects around my room lifted one by one—books, pens, my desk lamp, a stray sock I definitely had not intended to include in the demonstration. They circled me like I was conducting an orchestra of clutter.
For a brief, glorious moment, I felt like myself again. Like the old me. The one who could cast without flinching. The one who didn't have to calculate every spell like it was a coin being spent from a nearly empty purse.
Then the joy collapsed into something colder.