Doctor Strange: The Eternal Flame *DISCONTINUED*

Chapter 6

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

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Above is a picture of Samrah. For anyone who is wondering, yes, I drew that.

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Samrah didn't know how long she sat cross legged in front of the giant window, all she knew is that it was calming. It dulled the voices in her mind down to a whisper. She had to deal with the Sanctum's intimacy on a daily basis, even at night. The only time she got a decent sleep was when she put earbuds in. Stephen bought them for her, along with a phone. How he afforded it she had no idea. He didn't work anywhere but at the Sanctum and keeping reality safe didn't seem like a high paying job.

Stephen had gone out today. Maybe to go to his mysterious job where he got his money from? Samrah didn't know, she didn't think it was her business to know where he went or why he was doing it. She didn't question what he did or what he asked her to do. She knew it was for a reason and from what he told her about the world he lived in, one wrong move and you could lose everything. She took everything Stephen said like her life depended on it. Because it probably did.

Samrah's eyes were shut and she was breathing slowly. She was trying to channel the Sanctum's energy into a blockade, to keep the voices out of her head. Stephen hadn't taught it to her, he hadn't shown her anything even close to what she was trying to do. She just hoped that she could figure it out on her own. If she imagined it happening hard enough, maybe it could happen. Stephen had taught her how to connect with the Sanctum's mystical energy so she could use the wards to sense anybody approaching the Sanctum directly. He told her to picture the energy like a web of light. Pulsing and flowing through the magical house like multiple connected rivers. She told Stephen that she could feel it but she didn't tell him that when she did was she told him, she could actually see it.

The flow, the light, the energy ebbing and twisting and turning in every room. Every staircase, every wall, every fiber of this house. It spread like spider webs across the floorboards and stretched like the currents of a river up the walls. It was hard to explain. The light was always contrasted by bleak darkness. A pit of unfathomable black and cold. If she didn't focus on a strain of energy, she could feel her concentration slipping into the black void. It was chilling and required her total attention. If anything snapped her out of focus she'd either come back to reality or find herself falling in a swirling pool of darkness.

The process of taxing and extremely tiring so by the time Samrah could actually see the magic flow, she was already breathing hard, a bead of sweat trickling down her forehead. Samrah found it, the string of magic that existed as the wards. It felt different from the rest of the strings. It resembled the essence of Stephen and that was to expected. She could sense a little but of Wong's but most of it was Stephen's doing. It was overly complex and far beyond Samrah's understanding. Afterall, she could barely open a portal with her sling-ring, which resided in her front pocket. It wasn't the most ideal place to put a rather large and metal magical artifact but it was the only place she knew she could put it and not forget.

Samrah enveloped herself in the mystical energy and searched through its properties. Samrah saw a spell a lot like code in a computer. The code could tell the computer what to do through instructions that were typed in. A spell was kind of the same concept. There little bits and pieces of magic that had different meanings and purposes to form a spell. It wasn't hard to find the individual piece that alerted anyone of an approaching entity. It was colored different from the rest, that made it easy for her to find. But then again, it made it easy for anyone to find. Samrah used her own magic as a tether. It connected a part of her consciousness with the alerting ward so that no matter where she went or how little she thought of it, she would always be able to feel the ward work when someone approached the door.