The Age of Krakoa Begins PART-5

Marcela let out a sigh as the silence lingered. She could feel many eyes on her even though she was deep in meditation. So instead of focusing on her task, she stood up and faced both Daiyei and Dante. "Okay, from the looks of it, you want me to explain right now. So, Dante, when was the last time you saw me? Althena I mean."

"Years ago. Some gold alien guy was attempting to terraform Mars and Earth. The Avengers went up to fight him while we assisted on Earth with the other X-Men. We were in Shanghai at the time..." Dante paused as he looked at Marcela and then glanced over at D. There was this giant plant pod thing. You, D, Armor, and some of the others went to inspect it, but you... Althena, as soon as you touched it, you started to glow bright white and then you exploded, taking D with you."

Marcela nodded and then pointed at Daiyei. "And you?"

"Nothing as spectacular as that," D replied, "We all went to sleep one night, woke up, and you all were gone. Stark found Althena's body on the moon."

"See, the stories don't match! Because time travel!"

"So..."

"Both happened." Marcela could see another question coming, so she kept talking. "Beginning of the loop starts with Dante, he watched me die because I was killed by the Ivory Kings. Powerful things from outside existence. Pretty much every hero on Earth has encountered one or two of them, made everyone and everything their playthings, and those were the nice ones! Anyway, remember that mess with Dark Althena and then my dead self created her own multiverse that you two played in for a bit? Well, it turns out, crafting an infinite reality instead of a smaller, single universe is kind of bad. Those Beyonders used that flaw to slaughter every cosmic entity up and down the scale simultaneously as they began to use existence as their plaything. That, Dante, is why you saw me die, though out of sequence and not entirely. And I'm sure you ended up seeing all manner of Gods beyond Gods and abstract concepts litter the universe before everything blipped out of existence."

"Yeah, Iron Man and The Watcher found the Living Tribunal on the moon from what I remember," Dante replied.

"Hmm, he didn't say anything of the sort to me when he found Althena..."

"Probably trying to hide the fact that the universe was going to end. The incursions happened again after all. But anyway, Althena didn't entirely die, she existed as some disembodied energy blob thing. Dante was fortunate to survive past the end of everything, live long enough to see something new, and then managed to make it out of that alive too. With a little blue haired helping hand along the way, though that took a bit since Dante let Thanos steal his way back into the universe. Thanks for that. You could've skipped that whole 'stranded in the beginning of time with the Silver Surfer fighting some abyss god' had you not been blind to the context clues!"

"Wait, how did you....?"

"I just told you, Althena was a disembodied energy blob stranded with you. And thanks to you and Surfer and everything the Fantastic family did, the 8th version of the multiverse was born! And time went on all over again, yada yada. Althena merged her essence with Earth's biosphere, piggybacking off of Gaea and some Celestial blood, attaching herself to a cycle of life, death, rebirth, and evolution until the first mutants would be born, and then part of Althena would reincarnate every so often, manifesting as someone's mutant power at some point, with the end goal of coming back as Althena proper, in whatever form that may take. Some lifetimes have all of her memories, some have no memories, but we all get a little bit of her power. future versions a little bit more than others since in the renewed timeline, I, as Althena, was alive when your pale, blue haired Althena was also alive. So when she died in this version of your reality, all of that power kind of merged. But that's getting in the weeds of it, and I've spent enough time in weeds already. All you need to know is that you're both right. Dante's memories come from the 7th iteration of our reality, D's and everyone else's comes from the 8th. Don't think about it too hard, cosmic stuff makes the brain hurt."