Jordan did not immediately share everything he knew.
That was a deliberate choice. The Avengers under Steve Rogers's leadership had accepted his presence, but acceptance and trust were different currencies, and he wasn't naive enough to confuse them. What he'd earned so far was respect—for his combat output, for the pager, for not being an enemy when they'd needed one—and respect was a reasonable start. Trust took longer. It had to be built, not declared.
Besides, there was a practical ceiling on how much of another organization's internal crisis a reasonable person should volunteer to manage.
Had Tony Stark been present rather than drifting somewhere in the space between galaxies, Jordan suspected the whole process would have been considerably less comfortable. The man had standing protocols for threats with unclear origin points, and they tended to involve several layers of redundant defensive engineering and at least one sarcastic debrief. Former Secretary of State Ross would have enthusiastically assisted.
The Avengers of the post-S.H.I.E.L.D. era were a different organization than they'd been at the beginning—battle-hardened, independently funded, led by their own judgment rather than anyone's chain of command. Cunning, most of them. Appropriately suspicious. They had earned those instincts.
Jordan respected it. He didn't need their complete trust today.
Because there were at least twenty days before Thanos found his mountaintop and destroyed the Infinity Stones—and that was the deadline that actually mattered. If a certain perpetually-late cosmic hero needed time to arrive, she could have it. The Avengers didn't need to move the moment Jordan walked through the door.
Let that big dog fly a little longer.
Brick Street, Greenwich Village. West Side, Manhattan.
From the sidewalk, it looked like any other block in the neighborhood—brownstones, parked cars, a corner market. The addresses ran in sequence: 174, 176... then 178. Nothing between them. No gap visible. No door.
Passersby had been not-noticing this for years.
Jordan stood on the sidewalk and felt the pseudo-Herrscher Core stir at the base of his chest—the spatial authority he'd distilled from the Void Law before passing the original card to Tatsumaki. Not the full system. A simplified version, the principle compressed and internalized. But it was enough to read the space in front of him the way a musician reads sheet music: structure, folds, compression points, the elegant mechanical lie of it.
The building was there. It was simply choosing not to be visible to anyone who didn't know how to look.
He took a step forward, and the street responded.
The façades on either side rippled outward like displaced water, the carefully maintained spatial fold releasing under the gentle pressure of his authority. From between the two attached walls, the New York Sanctum grew—domed, palatial, architecturally impossible in the way that all truly important buildings are impossible—expanding outward until it occupied the space it had always been occupying.
The arcane mages of Kamar-Taj spent years learning advanced spatial manipulation. This particular protective working was considered sophisticated, elegant, difficult. The late Ancient One had installed it herself.
Jordan hadn't studied spatial magic at all. He'd started at the level of fundamental law and worked down from there. Somewhat unfair to the curriculum, but that was the nature of the shortcut.
He reached the front door and tried the handle.
Unlocked.
He knocked anyway.
Inside the Sanctum, Wong had already moved.
The spatial disturbance outside had registered the moment it began—a pressure against the folded geometry of the building's exterior, not random or accidental but deliberate, precise, operating at a level that should have been far beyond any uninvited visitor. In twenty-three years of working within these walls, Wong had never felt the outer fold compromised from outside.
He reached the main hall, the Rings of Raggadorr conjured and active around his fists—gold-threaded geometric constructs, the arcane shield that had held against dimensional threats, demon-class intrusions, and one extremely unpleasant incident involving a rogue sling ring and three barrels of consecrated salt.
The surviving sorcerers of Kamar-Taj were few. The snap had taken them indiscriminately—beings of power and beings of none, the stones did not negotiate—and what remained were scattered, shaken, and looking to Wong for stability he wasn't entirely sure he could provide. Doctor Strange had gone into space with the Time Stone. There had been no word. The logical conclusion was not a comfortable one.
Which meant Wong was, provisionally, the highest-ranking arcane practitioner on Earth. The designated administrator of the Kamar-Taj library. The reluctant pillar of a tradition currently operating on emergency protocols.
He'd had better weeks.
He stood in the center of the hall, shields active, ready for whatever had broken through the folded space to follow its intrusion with something less polite.
A knock sounded on the front door.
Wong stared at it.
The entity that had just casually dissolved the Sanctum's outermost spatial defenses—defenses that could hold against mid-tier interdimensional incursions—had knocked.
He maintained his defensive posture. Adjusted his grip on the Rings. Considered the tactical geometry of the room. Then, because there was honestly nothing else to do with this information:
"...Please come in?"
The door opened.
A tall, blond young man stepped through—athletic build, civilian clothes, the kind of easy physical confidence that tends to mean something in Jordan's experience—and his face lit up with the specific recognition of someone who has been looking forward to this meeting.
"Hello!" He was already crossing the hall, hand extended, moving with the unhurried certainty of a man walking into a room full of friends. "Your Excellency, Supreme Sorcerer—Mr. Wong, it's good to meet you."
Wong processed several things at once:
One: this person knew his name.
Two: the Rings of Raggadorr, which had held against a demon lord last spring, flickered once as the handshake made contact and then went out entirely—not overpowered, not broken, simply extinguished, the way a candle goes out when someone opens a window.
Three: his hand was being shaken. This was happening. He was experiencing it.
"Wait—I'm not—" Wong started.
"My name is Jordan." The grip was firm and genuinely warm. "I'm here on behalf of the Avengers."
Jordan finally released his hand, stepping back with a pleasant smile. "The Avengers are planning to hit back against Thanos, and they need Kamar-Taj's help. Specifically, they need the Sorcerer Supreme." A brief pause. "Someone of your caliber, that is."
Wong stood very still.
He had several things he needed to clarify immediately—his actual rank, the fate of the genuine Sorcerer Supreme, the precise mechanism by which his protective wards had just been turned off like a light switch—but the young man in front of him was looking at him with the patient, sincere attentiveness of someone who fully expected him to say yes.
Wong was deeply, profoundly certain that this conversation was going to be complicated.