These stairs were far too long.
The mountain steps built along the ridge numbered in the thousands. Wanda Maximoff had to use her cane to support herself as she struggled to keep up with the Emperor's increasingly rapid pace. Dull explosions seemed to echo one after another from the valley below, somewhere ahead where she could not see. Smoke from the blasts nearly blocked out every ray of starlight Kamar-Taj could receive. The farther Wanda Maximoff walked, the more keenly she felt the despair surging through the Sea of Aether. Anger and fear shimmered in the air. Each time she touched those glittering emotions, she felt the satisfying sensation of her mind being filled. The Emperor's anger flickered through the air like flames, turning the highland wind scorching hot, hot enough to burn her fingers.
She lowered her head to look at her fingers and found that it had been an illusion. Her fingers were still clean and whole.
This was merely a metaphor used to describe the Sea of Aether, not a physical phenomenon that truly existed. Just as someone with sight could not explain the color of the sky to someone born blind, Wanda Maximoff was using a form her mind could understand to interpret the formless, indescribable things she saw. Just as a thousand different readers could draw different conclusions after reading the same work, every person's Sea of Aether was different. The only certainty was that it was a mad and dangerous dimension, a chaotic, mind-dominated mirror reflection of the Material Universe.
"I'm having trouble telling them apart."
She muttered, tightening her grip on the Serpent Bone Staff as she silently recited the Hermes incantation to seek her inner truth. Yet she really could feel the Emperor's anger, because it truly existed, a physical phenomenon manifested