MAGIK vol 3 #3
“Pacts”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Germán Peralta
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

MAGIK

While in Liminal’s domain, she can’t teleport and can only use simple magic. This seems to still be enough for her to put up a fight against him, but he gets back in control quickly enough that he may just be stringing her along. Liminal claims her magic is impaired in his domain because it’s so closely linked with him (and that he’d be in the same position in Limbo, which is equally closely tied to her) – but he also suggests that her bigger issue is a refusal to access Darkchild’s power.

She hates being trapped in Liminal’s domain, evidently because it reminds her of her origin story – something that Liminal goes out of his way to play up with “constructs” of characters from the first Magik miniseries. Belasco seems to particularly disturb her.

Initially she sees Liminal as a Belasco-type figure, but after his explains his back story she can immediately see the parallels with her own (see below). For her, the parallel is that they were both children who begged to be saved, and who had to corrupt themselves in order to take on that burden when nobody else would rescue them; she sees him as a version of her who had no equivalent of Ororo and Cat to help her maintain her humanity.

Liminal claims that her biggest fear is that no one will ever understand her, and that there’s something fundamentally wrong with her. Naturally, his pitch to her is that he understands her experiences, but she’s not buying it.

To escape Liminal’s realm, she agrees to have him remove the mental barriers that lock Darkchild away. This doesn’t in itself give the Darkchild control, but does mean that it isn’t actively being contained and that Illyana has to listen to it all the time, presumably making it much easier for Darkchild to seize control. Liminal believes that the Darkchild is the “true” Illyana, who is currently being suppressed and denied, and who will eventually take control, and considers this not so much a deal as an exercise in letting Illyana become Darkchild and join him willingly. However, if she stops him within three weeks, he promises to remove the Darkchild persona.

When she realises that Cal has come round to trusting her as she’s at risk of corruption, she does tell him candidly what’s happening. She justifies her deal to him on the grounds that she needed to return to Earth in order to stop Liminal – but she also claims that she couldn’t stand being trapped in his realm any longer, no doubt because it reminds her of Limbo.

SUPPORTING CAST

Cal Isaacs. He’s unhappy to learn that Magik put a magical tracker on him without his consent. He offers to let Magik look over his grandmother’s journal (something he was cagey about last issue) but backtracks when Magik tells him about her deal.

Mirage shows up right at the end.

VILLAINS

Liminal. He manifests as a stone / ceramic shell containing the black chaos ooze thing from issues #1-2. He claims to be hiding “the uglier parts of my form” in order to present himself to Magik, and implies that the shell also contains his emotions. His domain is a sort of ruined, bombed-out city, which is not especially liminal in itself. Magik claims never to have seen a being so intertwined with a dimension, other than herself in relation to Limbo.

He can read Magik’s mind; he implies that this is only because she tried to scan him in issue #2. He knows that calling up images of characters from the Magik miniseries will push her buttons. According to Magik, these constructs are aspects of Liminal himself. She claims that he’s been haunting her with such manifestations for weeks. Despite this, Liminal behaves as though Magik is unreasonably refusing to talk to him and “purposely misinterpreting my words”.

According to Liminal’s account, he was a child sacrifice for a group of mages who wanted power. The time frame seems to be centuries ago. This somehow led to him bringing “all life under my control” – presumably briefly – until he was bound by a different society of mages and banished to his domain. These are the ancestors of Agnes from issue #1. Liminal regards them as “just as cruel”, presumably because they banished him to a demonic domain when he was a child. At any rate, the upshot is that his back story is broadly similar to Magik’s, as a child who was corrupted by evil magicians – the difference being that he embraced his demonic side, and got stuck in the demonic realm.

How reliable this account is may be open to question. Aside from the fact that he’s a villain, Liminal himself says that his memory is blurry and that he doesn’t really remember his transformation – although with hindsight he regards it as a transformation into something more powerful. Also, he’s read Magik’s mind by this point, so it wouldn’t be too difficult for him to contrive a story with parallels to hers. Nonetheless, we should probably take this at face value – it doesn’t contradict anything we’ve seen, it fits with “liminal” being thematically linked to “limbo”, and it explains why he’s specifically a Magik villain rather than just another demon. Also, his perception of the parallels between himself and Magik provies his basic motivation, so the story kind of falls apart if he’s simply lying.

He’s become aware of Magik since issue #1 and is struck by the parallels. He claims to be “lonely” and says his human agents on earth are mere “puppets” under his control. He’s impressed by her, and considers her a threat, but also views her to be a version of him who has failed to reach her potential by embracing her demonic side. He seems to think that they’re so similar that they must be destined to be soulmates. He seems genuinely surprised by her hostility towards him, and seems confident that she’ll join him willingly once her demonic side – which he regards as her true personality – is fully in control. He seems to think that because he turned into a “monster”, and Illyana’s back story is so similar to his, it must be inevitable that she’ll come to the same end point in time.

He claims that the creation of more and more liminal spaces in the modern world has empowered him and weakened his restraints. To escape, he needs power from human sacrifice; any human will do, but mutants release more energy, which is why he’s been targetting them. He insists that the mutants he has killed are “alive and well” in his domain, “happy and blank, ready to serve my will”. Understandably, Magik regards this as nonsense.

Magik believes that she spends three weeks in Liminal’s domain, but she returns to earth only three days after she left. It’s not clear whether that’s because time moves slower in his domain, or whether it’s simply outside time and space, and you can enter or leave at whatever point you choose (as with Limbo). Another of Liminal’s seals is broken during these three days.

OTHER FOOTNOTES

Page 2 panel 1: There’s nothing to add to the footnote about Cat, since Magik herself explains the plot.

Page 2 panel 3: The flashback here is to the previous issue, when Illyana used her magic to “stare at [Ren’s] soul” and felt that “something stares back”. Liminal interprets this as Magik “peer[ing] into my head” – not into Ren’s – but that isn’t how Magik experienced it at the time.

Page 3 panel 4: Two of the demons that Liminal conjures up are S’ym and N’astirh from 1980s New Mutants, and the others seem to be generics.

Page 4 panel 1: This is a flashback to young Illyana hiding from S’ym and N’astirh while growing up in Limbo. N’astirh was a later creation, but there’s no reason why he can’t be around for this.

Page 9 panel 1: This is a flashback to the end of Magik vol 1 #3, shortly before Ororo dies; the glowing thing on Illyana’s chest is her bloodstone medallion, which is about to show that two of the five bloodstones required to corrupt her have been created.

Page 11 panel 2: The three panels in the background show:

• Magik and Ren on page 12 of issue #1. Ren looks like she’s crawling here, but the art in the orginal scene makes it look more like she’s just picking herself up off the ground.
• Magik and Cal at Ren’s show last issue
• Magik at the X-Men’s Factory base.

Page 14 panel 3: This is a flashback to issue #1.

Page 14 panel 4: This is a flashback to issue #2.