⚜️ Saga 0: The Ash Years
Location: Skies above Westchester, New York
🕰️ Time: Just past midnight
POV: Jean Grey
The sky trembled when she ascended.
Jean didn't scream this time. Didn't rage. She simply rose—lifting off from the north tower dome of the Xavier Institute like a flame trickling up the edge of scorching paper.
Her fingers were still bruised from throttling her own madness. Her lips had barely healed from whispering his name in sleep.
But the fire inside her?
It had stopped devouring.
Now it searched.
The Phoenix curled around her like a cloak. Not total transformation—no golden raptor upon the sky. Not yet. But the beginning. Fingertips aglow. Her pupils narrowed and veins cracking open with threads of living incandescence.
She saw his face again. It was for the first time but too calm for a stranger. Too close for a dream.
"You stayed," she had whispered.
"I always do," his silence had answered.
Around her, clouds parted like curtains.
✶
Twenty thousand feet above the Hudson Valley, she opened her mind like a star unfolding.
[Phoenix Feedback Thread — Soul Target Imprinted]
🔥 Dante
➤ Emotional Bond: Active | Obsession: 8.7%
➤ Location Signature: Eastern Europe | Magic Interference Present
STATUS: Seeking… Initiated
Back at the Institute, alarms triggered. Cerebro shrieked a red warning.
Charles Xavier clutched the arms of his chair, stunned by the psychic signature surging into the upper atmosphere.
But even he could not interfere now.
Jean wasn't breaking.
She was choosing.
Her energy flared brighter, streaking forward across the Atlantic like a living meteor.
"I remember every version of him I lost," she murmured to the darkness. "But now, I'll win the one that survives."
[Sin System Minor Infusion Detected]
➤ Phoenix Manifestation Level: 17%
➤ Emotional Status: Focused | Determined | Territorial
➤ Alignment Shift: Claimant Forming
Rival Engagement Projected… Active
Her mind murmured his name again — like a prayer strangled in heat:
Dante. Dante. Dante.
And the Phoenix purred.
He burned deepest with her in the memories of Apocalypse. In timelines where empires had fallen. He had touched her shoulder in solar war zones, touched her cheek before dying.
It wasn't love.
It was a pattern.
The gods might call it fate. Jean now called it truth.
✶
The clouds blurred into snow as she dove faster, eyes fixed on the signal pounding in her skull.
He stayed put. Why?
He was always leaving.
He was always a shadow.
But not now.
And that… that was a single choice Lit the Phoenix inside her like fuel poured on belonging.
Jean smiled—not sweetly, Not softly.
But with certainty.
"He's calling me," she whispered.
"He chose to burn."
The raptor behind her stirred faintly in the upper mind layers, tail igniting into spiraling solar flame.
Around the Earth, satellites blinded.
In a church below in Spain, a priest saw four candles vanish at once and called it a sign.
In slumber, Wanda twitched — and her dream flared red with warning.
✶
Back in her body, Jean whispered into stillness one final truth:
"I'm not chasing him."
"I'm coming for what's already mine."
And she would. She would soar through sky and silence to him. Tear through root and chaos to wrap herself around the one fixed point that had held when all else burned.
Not because she deserved him.
But because... *someone else claimed him first.*
> [Warning: Rival Thread (Wanda Maximoff) Projected Clash Within 24–48hr]
> Phoenix Behavior Profile: ADVANCING
As the floor around her glowed molten red with contained rupture, Jean rose into the air — and disappeared in a flash of fire.
Not for vengeance.
Not for arrogance.
But *to be the first to touch him again before the world chooses.*
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