Marvel: The Enlightened One#154+155: Birth of the Dark Phoenix, The Ghost Rider's Wild Goose Chase

Dawn broke over Kamar-Taj's grand circular courtyard.

The apprentices had already assembled for their morning drills, standing on flagstones carved with ancient runes. Some cheered as sparks finally coalesced into functioning portals. Others slumped in frustration as their spells fizzled out—again—before steeling themselves and trying once more.

Gwen stood in the library's corridor, chin resting on her palm, watching the scene below.

After Hawk's explanation about the true cost of magic, her fascination had cooled considerably.

Well—not entirely.

She still thought it looked incredible.

But trading her soul for party tricks? Becoming a hostage someone could use against Hawk?

Yeah, no. Hard pass.

'No matter what, I won't be dead weight.'

But still… was it really that hard? It was just drawing a circle, right? How could they fail so many times?

Gwen watched one of the apprentices fail again, a flicker of curiosity in her eyes. Then her thoughts turned back to Hawk. She looked at the closed doors of the library, a trace of worry in her eyes.

Hawk had been in there for over a day.

Just then, the library doors opened.

Gwen’s eyes lit up.

The next second, her hope faded as she saw the stoic, unsmiling face of Wong emerge. She offered him a polite greeting.

"Morning, Wong."

"Good morning."

Wong nodded, glanced back at the library, then seemed about to tell her Hawk would be a while longer when his gaze shifted past her shoulder.

His posture straightened.

"Sorcerer Supreme."

Gwen followed his gaze and saw the Ancient One, who had appeared behind her without a sound. She composed herself. "Sorcerer Supreme, when will Hawk be out?"

The Ancient One didn't answer immediately. Instead, she gave Wong a small nod.

He took the hint and left.

Only then did the Ancient One move to stand beside Gwen at the railing, her gaze settling on the apprentices below—as if she could see straight through them, into futures not yet written.

"He'll come out when he's ready."

Gwen's mouth twitched in an expression she'd definitely picked up from Hawk.

'That's... not helpful.'

But she didn't argue. Just took a breath.

"Okay."

"If you're bored," the Ancient One said, "you're welcome to study some of our techniques."

"No, no." Gwen waved her hands. "It looks way too complicated. I'd never get it."

The Ancient One glanced at her, a faint smile touching her lips.

"For you? With your intellect? You'd master it easily."

"Still no. But thank you."

The Ancient One let it drop. After a pause, she shifted gears. "Would you like some tea? Hawk will be a while yet."

Gwen looked back at the silent library doors, hesitated, then nodded.

"Sure. I'd like that."

...

Inside the Library.

Within the Vishanti Chamber, Hawk floated cross-legged in midair, the Eye of Agamotto hovering between his palms. Green light pulsed in steady waves, bathing the stone walls in temporal glow.

Time was strange. Fast and slow at once. But when you are immersed in it, the concept of duration lost all meaning.

Inside his Cosmo, Hawk's perception had collapsed into a single infinite moment.

And in that moment—

The Underworld was born.

Structures rose from nothingness in the space between breaths. Massive, oppressive, suffocating in their scale. Palaces and fortresses materialized across the barren expanse, their foundations sinking deep into the newly solidified bedrock.

At the same time, the laws of life and death—still raw, still settling—spread outward from the Underworld's core like ripples in black water. They seeped into every corner of his Cosmo, weaving themselves into the fabric of his inner universe.

When his Cosmo finally manifested in the physical world, when stars gave birth to life, every soul that died would pass through this place.

But for now? No life existed. His universe was still a desolate place. Lifeless. Cold.

Just like the Underworld itself.

At the Underworld's only entrance stood a gate—towering, crystalline, metallic, unsettling in its beauty. Beyond it stretched a vast and desolate plain of black sand and jagged stone. The sky above was choked with ash-dark clouds that never moved.

At the plain's edge: a cliff.

Below the cliff: a river of malevolent energy.

Its banks were lined with black reeds and twisted, skeletal trees. And far downstream, barely visible through the gloom, rose the true heart of the Underworld—a sprawling complex of temples, halls, and dungeons.

Souls would leap—or be thrown—from the cliff into the river. The current would carry them to judgment.

To the Court of Judgment.

To the Eight Prisons.

To the Elysian Fields.

Everything a proper afterlife required.

Hawk, treating this like some cosmic Minecraft session, threw himself into the work with gleeful focus. Using the Reality Stone's power, he sculpted every detail with painstaking care.

And when he finally finished building the Underworld King Palace—a perfect one-to-one replica placed at the center of Elysium—the satisfaction was almost overwhelming.

The moment he stepped into the throne room, the Dark Phoenix stirred.

WHOOSH.

The spectral firebird exploded from his soul and merged with the palace itself.

Its burning black form etched itself into the floor. Its wings became reliefs carved into the pillars. Its head fused with the throne at the center of the dias, its twin eyes transforming into obsidian gems set into the armrests.

Hawk felt the shift immediately. He looked up.

High above, suspended within the cathedral-like vastness of the throne room, black flames roared—and within those flames, something began to take shape. Countless Underworld Gems, melted and fused together. He could see it forming:

A suit of armor, both crystalline and metallic, forged in the fire.

As Hawk watched the Black Phoenix Surplice take shape, an image of Mephisto flashed in his mind.

‘Mephisto!’

‘I hope you like my gift.’

The corners of Hawk's mouth lifted. The next second, he opened his eyes.

...

The instant his consciousness returned to the physical world, the stone faces of the Vishanti glowed with power.

The Eye of Agamotto snapped shut, wrenched from Hawk's grasp by invisible force, and returned to its pedestal.

Hawk raised an eyebrow and looked up at the three stone heads.

Eight eyes met his gaze.

"Stingy bastards. No wonder it takes three of you to run one dimension."

Silence.

"Tell you what—how about a deal? Give me the Time Stone, and when my universe is born, I'll let you set up shop there. Exclusive access. Prime real estate."

The stone faces remained silent.

Hawk didn’t press. Even after his Phoenix Universe was born, it would still be a fledgling cosmos—a single-universe construct, not a multiversal empire like the Marvel Multiverse.

The Vishanti's power stretched across the entire multiverse.

Why would they abandon that to become minor gods in some upstart parallel dimension?

They weren't idiots.

Hawk respected their choice. With a silent release of his Sixth Sense, he vanished from the chamber.

...

When he reappeared, it was in the open courtyard.

Gwen was sitting with the Ancient One, the two of them deep in conversation, looking like old friends.

The Ancient One noticed him first. She stopped mid-sentence.

Gwen, noticing her silence, turned and saw him. A look of joy spread across her face. She shot up, ran to him, and threw her arms around him. "Do you know how long you were gone?"

Hawk nodded. "Two days."

He'd known the moment he left the Time Stone's influence. The sensation of reconnecting with linear time had been... jarring.

But worth it.

In two days, he'd compressed centuries of development. He'd pushed his Cosmo to its current limit and birthed an Underworld that should have taken millennia to form.

But a fair trade or not, he still owed Gwen an apology. He looked at her, his expression serious.

"I'm sorry."

"You're forgiven." Gwen’s worries had vanished the moment he appeared. She smiled brightly.

Hawk pulled her close, kissed her forehead, and then looked at the Ancient One and bid her farewell.

His business in Kamar-Taj was finished.

<><><><><><><><>

A portal of sparks brought them to Kamar-Taj. A portal of sparks brought them home—

After a two-day retreat at Kamar-Taj, Hawk said his goodbyes to the Ancient One, took Gwen’s hand, and stepped back through the portal into the New York Sanctum.

Minutes later, they emerged from the building that pedestrians somehow never noticed, slid into the car, and Hawk gunned the engine toward their home.

Just then, Gwen, who had just buckled her seatbelt, glanced at the morning light of New York City and a thought struck her.

"Something’s not right."

"What’s wrong?" Hawk glanced at her.

"It was morning when we left. Morning when we arrived. And it's still morning now." She turned to him. "Shouldn't it be, like, midnight in Nepal right now?"

Hawk had thought it was something serious. He just laughed. "The Sorcerer Supreme took care of it."

Gwen’s eyebrow shot up.

Hawk smiled. "Jet-lag prevention. Don’t forget, she’s got the Time Stone."

Gwen’s expression cleared, and she nodded in understanding.

Thirty minutes later the A8 slid into the garage.

The moment Gwen was safely dropped off, Hawk vanished from the concrete echo of the bay—then reappeared a mile above the skyline, a streak of red gone so dark it was almost black, cutting a vicious line toward Fort Stockton, Texas.

...

The alarms inside S.H.I.E.L.D’s New York Command Ops blared once again.

"He’s back on the board."

"Where to this time?"

"Track shows… Texas. Again."

"Get Agent Carter on the phone."

"On it."

A few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents stuck on holiday duty watched as Hawk’s trajectory—almost too fast to track—resolved on the satellite feed.

Without hesitation, they contacted Sharon Carter, who was on vacation in Texas. Only a handful of agents in the entire agency had ever dealt with Hawk directly, and by now, Sharon was the expert among them.

...

Someone else felt Hawk’s signature arc south—Johnny Blaze, slumped in the back row of a bus rolling out of Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

Scruffy, wrung-out, hiding behind Nicolas Cage’s face like a bad disguise, he stared out the window and did the math he hated.

Don’t ask why he was on a bus.

Even a Ghost Rider couldn’t sprint from Texas to New York in a single night. And daylight had its own laws—once he left Texas, not even the Ghost Rider could roam freely beneath the sun.

So the routine went like this—by day, Johnny Blaze bought a bus ticket and minded his business. By night, the Spirit of Vengeance jacked a biker’s ride and tore north under a laughing skull.

Technically, he should have been in New York by yesterday.

But Johnny Blaze was now a person of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Rider wasn’t scared of S.H.I.E.L.D—Johnny was. All he knew was some federal outfit wanted him in cuffs. He spent yesterday wedged in a hole, barely breathing till sundown. Only then did he change and gun it again.

Honestly, this one was on Johnny.

If you’re going to cancel a show, give ten days’ notice—not ten minutes.

And a certain professional S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, who had paid a small fortune for a front-row ticket and had been looking forward to his performance, had been royally pissed off.

Feeling like she had been played, the agent had gone on a warpath, vowing to find this unreliable ‘Johnny Blaze.’

Then surveillance fed her a gift: footage of Johnny morphing into a skeleton in a gas station, blowing the place sky-high, cackling through the flames as he stole a bike.

Personal grudge became official business in a heartbeat.

The full force of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resources had been brought to bear, all focused on finding Johnny Blaze.

Most of the elite were still in Africa, but the agents left on home soil were more than capable.

If it had been anyone else, they would have been caught by now. But Johnny, with the heightened instincts of his fusion with the Ghost Rider, had managed to evade them time and time again, even successfully boarding a bus to New York this morning.

But—

He was only three hours from New York, and now, feeling Hawk’s tagged aura streaking back toward Texas, Johnny Blaze was on the verge of tears.

But what could he do?

His father’s soul was waiting to be saved.

Johnny’s mind raced. He walked toward the front of the bus, shouting, "Driver, stop the bus! My house is on fire! I have to get off!"

The driver slammed on the brakes, nearly sending Johnny tumbling down the aisle.

Five seconds later, the bus sped off.

Johnny watched it dwindle down the empty highway, stared at the nowhere stretch of road around him, and realized something important.

He should’ve waited for the next transfer stop...

...

Hawk had just landed back in the same valley where he had fought the Earth Demon.

Hell’s pressure slammed into him immediately—an invisible weight trying to choke his power down.

But the Life-and-Death law pulsed through him, and the attempted suppression washed off in a wave.

'Before I finished building my Underworld, you could argue my soul fell to Hell—fine. But now that my Underworld exists, if I ‘die’ and still end up in your Hell, then what did I build mine for?'

He flexed his hands, feeling the last of Hell’s residue fade, then pulled his phone, checked the screen, and answered.

"Sharon."

"Hawk, you’re back in Fort Stockton?"

"I am."

Hawk just laughed. "I was thinking about that motorcycle stunt show you mentioned. Decided I had to see it for myself."

He shouldn’t have brought it up.

The moment he said it, Sharon’s voice was filled with a fiery rage. "You mean Johnny Blaze? Don’t even get me started. That son of a bitch is a Demon."

Hawk paused.

Sharon explained how she had spent a fortune on a ticket and had looked forward to it for weeks, only for him to cancel at the last minute. Furious, she had gone looking for him—ready for a real confrontation—and instead saw him transform into a flaming skeleton.

"You’re too late. He’s already on the run in Pennsylvania."

"Not too late. Just in time."

Hearing her story, Hawk realized that the “surprise” Mephisto had prepared for him was the Ghost Rider.

He felt a brief pang of pity for the poor bastard who had spent the last two days trying to reach New York. Suppressing a laugh, he simply said, "He’s coming for me. A word of advice—tell your people to stay away from him at night."

Sharon was taken aback for a second, then her curiosity was piqued.

"What happens if they don’t?"

"He was once a Lord of Hell. He was defeated by Mephisto and turned into the Spirit of Vengeance, a bounty hunter for souls. What do you think will happen?"

Sharon hissed a breath. "Copy. I’ll push the alert. And if he’s headed for you, then you—"

Hawk just smiled. "I’m here for him."

Sharon understood. She hung up and immediately reported the new intel.

The information was relayed quickly.

...

Two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents driving along the highway in search of Johnny spotted him in the distance, thumbing for a ride. They were about to accelerate and make the arrest when new intel came through.

Johnny, seeing the Chevy SUV approaching, felt a surge of hope.

The next second, the SUV shot past him without even slowing down. The two men in black suits inside didn’t even seem to see him.

"WTF—"

"The people here have no soul!"

Johnny watched the SUV disappear down the road and unleashed a string of curses, grumbling that the people of Pennsylvania were nothing like the friendly, helpful folks back in Texas.

...

Night fell.

Fifty kilometers south of Fort Stockton, in a desolate canyon.

Hawk sat on a cliff, looking up at the rising moon.

It was a full moon tonight.

He remembered being a kid at the church on the fifteenth of August, standing in the backyard and gazing up at the moon while his sister stood beside him, mimicking his pose.

He hadn’t truly looked at the moon since she died. Every time he tried, he saw her there beside him and felt the ache of memory.

Tonight was the first time in years he had allowed himself to really look at it.

Because... barring any unforeseen circumstances, by sunrise tomorrow, he would have his sister back.

He had built his Underworld with meticulous care, even using the Reality Stone to craft a flawless, lifelike Elysian Fields—just so his sister could be comfortable during her time there.

Almost there.

'Anya, I’m coming for you.'

"kek-kek-kek." A chilling cackle echoed from the distance. Hawk slowly lowered his gaze and looked toward the source of the sound.

And saw...