Wally blurred across ridges and valleys, the wind biting at his cheeks. Peaks and cliffs flashed past in dizzying succession until a carved gateway emerged from the mountainside, its stonework worn but unyielding. The structure felt out of place, like a secret wedged into reality, and even from here he could sense it wasn't built to keep people out—it was built to make them think before they entered.
He slowed on the final stretch, footsteps whispering against weathered flagstones. The great wooden doors bore faint scorch marks, each one a quiet reminder that this place had seen battles worth remembering.
Kamar-Taj.
Far away, the streets of New York throbbed with late-afternoon noise. Wanda's coat snapped in the wind as she kept pace with Pietro, who moved at an easy jog no one else could match.
"You know," he said, voice edged with mischief, "I think our new speedster friend might have a little interest in you."
Wanda shot him a look. "Interest?"
"The way he looks at you. The way he—"
"He looks at everyone like that."
"Not exactly," he smirked. "Most great relationships start with people being 'just friends.' You talk, you laugh, then one day—boom—"
She stopped mid-stride, frowning. "What are you even talking about?"
He shrugged, suddenly less eager to finish. "Never mind."
Before she could press further, a voice called from ahead. "Wanda. Pietro."
Steve Rogers waited at the entrance to Avengers Tower, casual jacket over broad shoulders, a presence that cut cleanly through the noise. His smile was polite, but his tone left no space for questions. "Good to see you both. Come on in. We've got a debriefing."
The tower doors sealed behind them, the city's clamor fading to a low hum.
---
Back in the mountains, Wally pushed through the Kamar-Taj doors. The air inside was warm, thick with incense and the faint tang of ancient paper. Scrolls lined the walls, their ink shifting as if refusing to stay still. Sunlight filtered through high latticed windows, scattering gold across the floor.
She was already there, standing in the center of the hall.
The Ancient One.
In this Earth-Prime Nexus, no being—god, machine, or otherwise—could truly see the future. Some caught fragments: pages torn from the book of time, half-formed prophecies, hints of looming disaster. Asgard had its Ragnarök, but even that was only a woven piece of the whole. The Ancient One didn't see the future. She sensed those who could bend it.
Her shaved head caught the light, robes shifting with her breath. The stillness around her wasn't absence—it was presence, pulling the room toward her like gravity.
"Welcome," she said, her voice soft but cutting through the air as if it belonged there.
Wally felt the weight behind her gaze—a sea of power compressed into human form. And she, in turn, read the coiled energy in him, the kind that wasn't earned but carried. Neither named it.
"Thanks," he said, scratching the back of his neck. "So, here's the thing—I was wondering if I could, y'know, study here. Learn the mystic stuff. I can pay—cash, gold, whatever works. Or if you've got a quest or a chore, I'm game."
Her expression didn't change, though something flickered behind her eyes.
"But before all that… mind if I know your real name? 'The Ancient One' sounds like I'm in trouble every time I say it."
A faint smile touched her lips. Her gaze drifted, softening into something distant, as though the question had tugged on a thread buried in memory. For a long moment, she wasn't entirely here. Then her focus returned.
"One of my names," she said, "and one I've always been fond of… is Tilda."
Wally grinned. "Tilda. Alright, Tilda—so… about the fee?"
"You can study here," she replied. "I sense no true malice in you."
She wasn't wrong. Wally might have sworn off chasing every call for help, but he'd spent most of his life doing exactly that—saving strangers, standing between disaster and the people who couldn't. Now he wanted a break. Time to sharpen himself instead of burning out on the next crisis.
His grin widened. "That's amazing. You're amazing. You've got this whole wise mentor vibe, but without the creepy old wizard thing. And the place—don't even get me started on the décor—"
Tilda's laugh was genuine, loosening the still air between them.
"Okay, so how do you teach here?" he asked. "I'll be real with you—I don't know squat about magic. Like, nada. But if you've got a library… maybe I could take a quick look. Build a little foundation before you hit me with the real lessons."
"Quick," she repeated, amused.
"Yeah. Really quick." In his head, he was already racing through shelves, chewing through centuries of knowledge in seconds, walking out a full-blown mystic scholar in under a minute. But even as the thought thrilled him, he knew the flaw—his recall was as human as anyone's. Maybe worse. His brain moved so fast ideas sometimes slipped before they stuck.
"Is there a spell," he asked, "that can store information? Like… a personal Google in my head? My brain could work like a quantum computer. Or better."
Tilda's brow furrowed, not in disapproval but in thought. "There's no direct spell for that. Most only record experiences like a moving picture. Without understanding, they are useless. But… a mind space is different. A personal domain of thought, shaped by your will. With mastery, you could build it into anything—and change it as you see fit."
"That's perfect," Wally said instantly. "I've got, like, fifty ideas already. No—seventy—"
"Start small," she cut in. "Begin with the foundation section of the library. Enough to understand the language and structure of magic. Then we will see about shaping your mind space."
Wally was already moving toward the door. "Foundation. Mind space. Got it. This is gonna be fun."
---
The library at Kamar-Taj folded in on itself—shelves curved like the inside of a shell, alcoves stacked with books whose spines hummed faintly when someone passed. I
t had the kind of hush that made ordinary sounds feel rude, and for the first few minutes Wally tried to match that hush. He walked between the stacks like a guest, fingers skimming title after title.
Then he vanished.
He returned a heartbeat later, a book clutched to his chest, blinking as if discovering the room anew.
A second passed. He was gone again. The pattern repeated until even the apprentices who'd sworn they'd seen everything leaned forward, unsettled.
By the time Wong stepped out from behind a stack, the quiet had split into whispers.
"He touched three thousand," one of the apprentices mouthed to another, voice small as a folded paper. "At least."
Wong didn't correct them. He moved with the quiet efficiency of someone used to containing things that unbalanced rooms.
He watched Wally—the flashes of motion, the gusts, the books that opened and closed on their own—and spoke to the students clustered near the reference table, not to the speedster.
"You've noticed," Wong said, hands folded, eyes steady. "He does not read the way we do."
He let the last word hang, because it was the best way to explain something that had no neat precedent in their manuals.
A young apprentice pushed a strand of hair from his forehead. "How many books has he touched, Master Wong? Three thousand? Five thousand?"
Wong let out a breath that sounded like a soft bell. "More than you'll count on your fingers. In twenty minutes he moved through thousands of volumes."
He did not offer an exact number, because precision would do no good here; sensation did. The students bristled either with awe or with mild indignation—the sort of irritation bookkeepers reserve for people who scatter pages for fun.
Wong gave them the shape of it instead.
"Imagine one book—seventy-five thousand words. A normal person reading at about two hundred and fifty words per minute takes: seventy-five thousand divided by two hundred and fifty equals three hundred minutes. That is three hundred minutes, which is five hours."
He said the arithmetic plainly so none of them could turn the math into a joke. (75,000 ÷ 250 = 300 minutes → 300 ÷ 60 = 5 hours.)
"No one could sit five hours for every book he touched," someone said. "So what does he do with them?"
"He captures their outline," Wong said. "He can scan a volume and hold its surface pattern—phrases, images, melodies of argument—long enough to pluck a thread of meaning. But scanning is not the same as mastery. Memory requires scaffolding: repetition, practice, time."
One of the older apprentices blinked. "But Master Wong, he's gone and back in a second. Doesn't that mean he's finished them?"
Wong considered the answer. "He can scan at a rate no ordinary mind can follow. That means his conscious awareness can sample reality so quickly the rest of us see nothing."
The apprentices exchanged looks: wonder, a little fear, and a spark of professional irritation at the havoc his presence wrought on their quiet.
The one who'd tried to record Wally's comings and goings held up a neat pad of figures.
"If one scan takes him a quarter of a second and he never stops, he could touch three thousand books in twenty minutes," he said. "But that would be only surface impressions—titles, the arc of argument, a few images."
Wong nodded at the numbers, but he wanted them to understand the deeper problem.
"He can gather volumes faster than the fastest ledger can log them. But even with perception that fast, the mind must still fold raw data into usable knowledge."
A murmur ran through the room. "So he's like a light that burns through books."
"Exactly," Wong said. "Bright, dazzling. Dangerous for librarians." The corner of his mouth twitched. He let them smile for a breath before he added something quieter, a thought he hadn't spoken aloud until this moment.
"He and Tilda—while not the same—share an odd symmetry. She has years of cultivated mastery of cosmic pattern; he has raw affinity.
Sometimes those differences are complementary. I do not know why the Ancient One invited him to study here, but I would not be surprised if he becomes her disciple.
And I say that without understanding the whole of it myself."
The room leaned in on those last words. Wong did not pretend to know the future any more than the students did; he only let them have the possibility.
They watched Wally vanish again, a rustle like wind through paper, a small comet that left no scorch marks but left a hum in the air.
Wong folded his hands behind his back and turned the conversation back to practicalities: how to catalogue the books he'd disturbed, how to mark tomes that required re-binding after being touched by gales of kinetic presence.
The students argued, sheepish and delighted, about which volumes would need sealing.
But as they argued, Wong's eyes slid to the doorway where Tilda had stood that morning.
He had no certainty, only a stitched map of impressions: speed that could think at slices of time others could not, a tendency to forget unless anchored, a hunger not for applause but for learning.
For all the speedster's jokes and nervous energy, Wong had felt something, an axis of potential that the ancient practitioner recognized and, perhaps, could teach.
Outside the library, Wally thumbed the edge of a page he hadn't yet opened, imagining the mind space he might build—shelves shaped like racetracks, vaults for spells, corridors that looped back into training rooms.
He had scanned thousands of tomes in minutes; how many of them he could turn into something usable depended on what he did next.
Wong watched him from the stacks and, as any librarian does, saved his quiet notes.
---
The library smelled like old parchment and candle wax — a strange mix of dust and magic. The shelves didn't end. They rose like pillars of a forgotten cathedral, row after row, floor after floor.
Wally stood there for a heartbeat, staring at the sea of books. Then, in less than a blink, the world blurred.
Words, diagrams, sigils — all streaming past his eyes in perfect clarity. At attosecond speeds, the turning of a page was less a movement and more a thought.
The letters didn't wait for his gaze to travel; they slammed into his mind as a complete whole. He didn't skim, didn't skip. Entire subjects stitched themselves into his memory as naturally as breathing.
My processing speed is ridiculous.
It wasn't bragging. It was fact. His brain ran so fast it could map and remap pathways before the paper cooled from his fingertips.
In the span of what anyone else would call an hour, he had devoured the basics — magic theory, mana circulation, sigil grammar, the classification of spells, their weaknesses, the history of every known school.
His mind constructed entire simulations, running them faster than light, checking the outcomes before he even closed the book.
In the far corner, Wally West sat cross-legged at a long, low table. A pyramid of books stacked to one side, another forming on the other—read pile, unread pile. His head moved in micro-jerks, eyes darting across the pages like flickers of sunlight through leaves.
The thing was… for other people, it was a blur too fast for the mind to track, yet each flick of his gaze landed on a page, absorbed every ink mark, flipped, and moved on.
By the time novice student Tsering returned from fetching tea, the stack of unread books had been halved. Ten minutes ago, it had been untouched.
"How—?" Tsering whispered under her breath, watching his fingers dance over paper without tearing it.
"Don't bother," muttered the young monk beside her. "I tried to count. Lost track after the first thirty flips."
"For him, apparently," Wong said. He folded his arms.
"He isn't just skimming. Every time he vanishes from your perception, his thoughts are running at… extreme temporal compression. In his own head, he's spending hours, maybe days, in the time it takes for us to blink."
It wasn't just reading speed that unsettled them—it was the return. One moment he'd be there, hunched over a book, the next he'd… vanish.
It kept happening. Over and over. Until whispers filled the aisles.
By the time Wong left, Wally's pile of finished books had grown… absurd. The basics were done. He could've stopped. Should've stopped.
But he didn't.
One title caught his eye — a study on cognitive planes and mental constructs.
Another, on soul architecture. Then meditation techniques from a desert sect that believed the mind could be "sculpted."
Then dream walking rituals. Each thread led to another, and before long, the concept began forming in his head:
A mindscape.
Not a simple meditation room in his head, but a fully realized dimensional construct inside his own consciousness.
A place where time could move at whatever pace he chose.
A domain where memories could be stored like libraries, skills practiced without danger, strategies modeled against opponents in perfect simulations.
He pieced it together from a hundred unrelated sources — mental defense spells, soul-forging rites, mnemonic palaces, temporal compression fields.
He imagined building it as a layered construct: the outermost level functioning as a shield, filtering intrusions and illusions; the inner layer as a personal laboratory for thought experiments, where time could run a million times faster than outside.
At its deepest core, a vault — a place to store knowledge, power, and memories, all perfectly preserved.
The theory was intoxicating. His speed meant he could expand it faster than anyone in history.
And if he integrated temporal manipulation? He could spend centuries inside, mastering skills in what amounted to seconds outside.
By the time he looked up, the library had shifted. Lamps burned lower. Apprentices were gone. He realized he'd been at it for… well, technically no time at all for him, but for everyone else? Hours.
He closed the last book, the idea burning in his head. In an instant, he was gone — a streak of red and yellow through the halls.
The Ancient One was in her study, sipping tea, her expression calm but expectant.
Wally stopped in front of her, still riding the high of his discovery.
"Okay, hear me out," he said, words tumbling over each other.
"I've got an idea — and not just any idea. The kind of idea that's going to give me infinite room to grow."
"Not a normal mindscape, but a Speed Force-powered one. No static mental palace nonsense—it's alive, dynamic, growing as I grow.
Thought loops for infinite processing. Time layers inside time layers. Simulation rooms for training without real-world cooldowns. Storage for every detail I've ever learned, instantly accessible."
He laid it out for her — the architecture, the layering, the time dilation, the integration with his own neural speed.
The idea came to him in flashes—tiny sparks darting across the darkness of his mind. At first, they were unformed, drifting like dust motes in a sunbeam. But as his focus deepened, the chaos began to take shape.
He will start by shaping the first star.
It pulsed faintly at the center of an endless void, a sphere of memory distilled from raw thought.
The second star will follow, then a third, each one a perfect crystallization of an experience—sights, sounds, every fleeting heartbeat of the moment locked in radiant detail.
Then the stars multiplied.
Each one anchored itself in the pattern of a constellation, not by his conscious design but as if pulled into place by invisible gravity.
When new memories arrived, they will gravitate to the nearest constellation, reshaping its pattern, or—if too alien to fit—igniting a star of their own.
In time, the constellations gathered into galaxies.
Galaxies swelled into clusters.
Clusters merged, warping the mental void into a sprawling universe.
And when the last thread fell into place, reality itself bloomed inside his mind—layered, alive, and endless.
Every sentence pulled more detail from his mind, more diagrams he'd memorized, more cross-links between arcane principles and pure cognitive science.
He can forge a horizon around his consciousness, drawing from principles he'd read in soul architecture texts—walls not of stone or light, but of will. The Shell curved like the edge of a world, enclosing his thoughts in a self-contained realm.
He can anchor its frame in the Speed Force. Time inside became elastic—stretching into stillness or shattering into infinite acceleration at his whim. Within the Shell, a second felt like a year, and a year could vanish in the blink of an eye.
At the center of this inner reality, he can built the Engine. Not mechanical—something sharper, faster.
Mana conduits adapted into neural pathways, each one supercharged by Speed Force cognition until ideas raced faster than lightning.
The Core will run on an Infinite Loop: thoughts feeding into thoughts, insight birthing insight, never tiring, never slowing. The more it processed, the hungrier it became.
He abandoned the limits of linear memory. Instead, experiences formed multidimensional constructs—spheres of living memory holding not just images but the exact emotional weight, the subtle shift of air, the rhythm of the moment.
Every memory linked to another, not as a chain, but as a web. Recall one, and a thousand related fragments whispered their knowledge to him all at once.
Deep within, he can carve a chamber where time bent to his will. Here, reality could freeze, fracture, or spiral into centuries within seconds.
It will became a battlefield of thought—where he could dismantle a spell's structure stroke by stroke, or fight an enemy's shadow ten thousand times until victory became inevitable.
Every error dissolved with no physical price, every strategy tested until it shone like sharpened steel. And if he learned enough about a foe… he could face them here before the real fight began.
And somewhere in the middle of his rapid-fire explanation, one thought echoed quietly in the back of his head.
If I can pull this off… there won't be a limit to what I can learn.
His grin was wide, bright. "It'd be like having an entire universe in my head—and I could make it run at, what, a million years per second? Give or take."
The Ancient One arched one brow. "And what," she asked softly, "do you intend to do with a million years?"
The question hit Wally like a bucket of cold water. His mouth shut mid-ramble. For once, he didn't have a quip ready.
A million years.
He hadn't actually thought that far ahead. His mind flickered—images of infinite libraries, endless adventures, maybe finally outrunning the universe itself—but no clear reason why he needed it.
"I… uh…" He scratched the back of his neck. "Huh."
She waited, patient as a mountain.
Why do I need something like that? I mean, sure—it's a ridiculously overpowered mindscape.
A brain that can hold centuries of memories without losing a thing, think at speeds so fast even light trips over itself trying to keep up.
That's… insane. That's freedom. But… do I need it?
He glanced at her. Nah. Screw it.
"Because I can," he said finally, grinning.
"So why not? HAHAHAHA!" A laugh burst out of him.
The sound echoed in the quiet chamber.
Tilda sighed, the kind of sigh that carried centuries.
She could see it—no argument, no warning, no cosmic cautionary tale would change his mind now. He already had the knowledge to attempt it, and that was the real danger.
Still, she wasn't about to let him walk headfirst into a mistake that might one day tear his life apart. "Very well," she murmured, more to herself than him. If she couldn't stop him, she could at least guide him.
So, for the rest of the day, the two of them—two beings tied to cosmic forces in wildly different ways—spoke, argued, and occasionally laughed.
It was an odd dynamic. One taught with measured wisdom, the other absorbed with restless curiosity.
And it was strange, when you thought about it, how quickly she'd allowed him access to the Kamar-Taj library.
But then again… it wasn't as if she could stop him from coming in if he wanted. She could try soul-based wards, yes—but making them land on someone like Wally?
That would take every ounce of her focus, and even then, he'd probably slip away before they took hold.
And if she failed, he'd simply vanish, only to pop up another day without warning.
Besides, she'd said it earlier—there was no malice in him. She could sense it. His Speed Force was chaos, but Wally himself wasn't.
And as far as she could tell… Wally West wasn't looking to start trouble here