• HORIZON (02) •

Wanda's domain was once a beautiful portrayal of the home she had made for herself in the outskirts of Sokovia—a grand mountain range circling its borders. As Wanda returned to this world as The Scarlet Witch, corrupted by the Darkhold, her domain suffered, too, doused in an eternal red sky, barren of all life. She avoided her domain for many weeks—until, suddenly, the red is no more. Instead, a dense forest has taken its place, the green of moss and grass taking over the otherwise dried and dead trees found before. It is a labyrinthine endeavor, but soon enough a path will emerge with flowers blooming on the floor of the forest, slowly growing into a tunnel of leaves and blossoms, and a doorway will appear at the end of it: the entrance to The Scarlet Witch's domain.

Anyone who steps foot from this point forward will be taken notice of, and will have one corvid friend following after them throughout, hopping from tree to tree, soaring ahead and then back, curious about their traversal through the domain. It will not interrupt nor interfere, but it will be constantly watching, seemingly barking a laugh any time someone turns towards a dead end or slips into a stream. The longer one spends inside the domain, the more birds will join the first. Though it still bears an obvious path, the forest holds one too many distractions. The further in one goes, it looks like not only the birds are watching, but some of the trees, too. In a blink and miss it moment, pupils turn towards the traveler. One can certainly veer off the path, and may find a rocky pool. Further away from the path, broken slabs of rocks replace the trees, like an afterthought that Wanda forgot to clean up; looking closer, they look pretty eerie.

If whoever traverses the domain takes too long exploring, the ravens will start getting annoyed and impatient, actively leading the way towards a bridge, that leads up to a set of stone steps and a house pressed close to the outer edges of the forest. With a porch overlooking the incline, the front door opens to an eclectic sight of wooden furniture and fixtures, books, mismatched colors and drapes, long halls, narrow stairs and old carpets. The space is certainly bigger on the inside than what it looks like on the outside; of the many doors that open in the house, there is a piano room, a kitchen, dining room, a plant nursery, a living room with a functioning TV (but only playing sitcom reruns!), and a bedroom. It's all an amalgamation of someone who never had a place to call home, of pining for dream homes and dream rooms, caught somewhere in the middle between her Eastern European childhood and American adulthood, unable to find a solid personality to blend the two. If one were to carefully look through the assortment of pictures on the walls and shelves, one will stand out, inconspicuously placed amidst everything.

But not everything is upward. Wanda spends many hours in her domain, casting spells and performing incantations—none that would affect the Singularity—all to practice her magic, to keep at bay those darker impulses, and attempt to fend off the withdrawal of the Darkhold. A staircase leads to the back of the house, into the woods, past a gate the opens only in Wanda's presence (or a magical push), where the world is a little darker than everywhere else in her domain. Shrines decorate the spaces between the trees, eternal candles kept alight, runes on trees, and other decor. The ravens bask in the fountain here, keeping her company as she treads this section of the forest. In an unexpectedly sunny clearing, there sits a graveyard, fresh flowers always blooming by the tombstones. Another door stands in the distance, but not even Wanda wishes to approach it, marking thus the end of her domain.

CODE BY MARWOOD