X-Men: The Last Stand by Chris Claremont

Author:Chris Claremont [Claremont, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-05-16T05:00:00+00:00

Magneto found Jean standing on the edge of forever. An escarpment rose behind the clearing where the mutants he’d been gathering had made their camp, beneath a cliff as tall as a skyscraper. It looked as if nature had formed this little valley just like a quarry, cleaving the rocks in disconcertingly straight lines.

Jean was balanced right on the edge, staring out across the sky in a way that made him think she was looking straight through the atmosphere at the very stars themselves. And then the thought came to him that she might actually see those stars in ways unavailable to the finest telescopes on Earth. He also saw as he approached that she was standing as much on open air as on the rock itself, and he couldn’t help but be impressed.

The more he saw and learned about her, the less he truly knew.

“Do you remember,” he began, and she sent the ghostly projection of her reply skittering across the surface of his thoughts before he even completed the sentence: Everything.

“…When we first met? Do you know what I saw when I looked at you?”

“A scared little girl,” she replied aloud, out of courtesy.

“I saw the next step in evolution.” Again, she permitted him a sense of her thoughts, which this time consisted of a round of quiet laughter, as she responded to a joke he didn’t get. “What Charles and I dreamt of finding.”

Words came this time—a warning: Be careful what you wish for.

He ignored her thoughts, and focused on the woman: “And I thought to myself, why would Charles want to turn this god into a mortal?”

“I am mortal.”

He raised a piece of metal, shaking his head. “I can manipulate the metal in this scrap of iron. But you can do anything!”

She faced him at last, intrigued by what he held.

“Anything you can think of,” he said.

The fragment of iron popped from Magneto’s fingers and began to glow as Jean’s telekinesis quickly excited its molecules. His own power gave him insight into what she was doing, and he couldn’t help but be amazed as she played with the core molecular structure of the metal, altering its density, its shape, its state, its very physical nature. She made it a glob of primordial ylem, and then formed a tiny statuette. She excited it to a gaseous state, compressed it to the verge of transitioning into a microsingularity. She altered it from iron to wood and then infused that wood with a spark of life, so that if planted in fertile soil, it might very well grow into a proper tree.

Her eyes narrowed as she worked, her mouth wide with a smile of delight, like a child embracing her latest Christmas toys. She had a child’s attention span, too, and very quickly she became bored.

The iron fragment flared beyond incandescent, lighting their corner of the shaded forest brighter than any conceivable sun, as bright as Creation must have been during those first moments when the universe was born.

The shock wave staggered Magneto, shook the trees around him, and generated a Fourth of July light show.

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