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The following incorporates main spoilers for Defenders Beyond #2, accessible now from Marvel Comics.
The newest lineup of Defenders has traveled additional than some other heroes within the historical past of the Marvel Universe, all the way in which again to a time when it could not even be acknowledged as such. While this surprising trek by the cosmos has left them seemingly stranded alongside the menacing and enigmatic Beyonders, these Multiversal beings are removed from the one recognizable faces hiding within the Second Cosmos. In truth, it is likely one of the most iconic figures in all of popular culture who has simply determined to grace the Defenders with its presence, even when Taaia by no means wanted the Phoenix’s assist to face tall as an interstellar icon.
Defenders Beyond #2 (by Al Ewing, Javier Rodriguez, Wil Moss, Michelle Marchese, and VC’s Joe Caramagna) finds the staff out of their ingredient after coming face-to-face with the Beyonder and several other of his immortal brethren contained in the “Engine Room” of creation. For Taaia, this is a chance she might have solely ever dreamed of. Unfortunately, the prospect for her to check the world round her is reduce brief by the Beyonders’ wrath. Worse nonetheless, Taaia is the primary of the heroes to really feel the total brunt of that rage, leaving the staff no alternative however to retreat. As luck would have it, the obvious manner out simply so occurs to be ahead into the unknown but once more. Or slightly, into the White Hot Room, the place Taaia discovers every part she by no means knew she may very well be.
Almost as quickly as Taaia falls into the White Hot Room, she is greeted by its lonely denizen within the type of the Phoenix Force. While the White Hot Room has additionally served as a type of afterlife ever because it first appeared in “Phoenix” by Chris Claremont and John Bolton, the backup story to 1986’s X-Men #8, additionally it is dwelling to the Phoenix in its rawest kind. During Jean Grey’s early makes an attempt to restore the M’Krann Crystal, she discovered the White Hot Room linked to it. As Death itself would clarify to her, the White Hot Room exists in a spot “the place the bodily universe merges with the domains of the spirit and creativeness,” which makes it the proper place for Taaia to reach.
As the Scienceer Supreme of the Sixth Cosmos (to not point out the mom of Galan, later Galactus), Taaia was nicely versed in seemingly inconceivable conditions lengthy earlier than the Defenders got here to her dwelling world of Taa. In truth, when the Defenders first met Taaia, she was already nicely on her option to staving off the specter of Omnimax, the Devourer. Though it was with the assistance of Doctor Strange and his modern-day counterparts that Omnimax was finally defeated, Taaia did not want them to determine herself because the premiere superhero of her personal time.
Of course, this does not imply the Defenders weren’t instrumental in serving to Taaia discover fully new universes and the ideas born from them. Now that she has bonded with the Phoenix, it will seem that historical past is repeating itself in one of the best ways attainable. If there has ever been somebody suited to carrying that blazing mantle, it’s completely Taaia, though their union does beg some notably fascinating questions on simply what the Phoenix’s function within the story at hand is about to develop into.
Like all of her fellow Defenders, Taaia was chosen by the whims of actuality itself as a part of a nascent Multiversal course of. That their trajectory has successfully been set for them by forces past anybody’s management may not be so surprising for the Defenders, however that the Phoenix has been swept up in the identical journey towards its will provides a layer to the scenario that elevates its seriousness to terrifying new ranges. That is, except the Phoenix is aware of precisely what is going on and determined to step in of its personal accord. If that is the case, then that may make Taaia the Phoenix’s first alternative of tremendous heroics hosts, in addition to the primary to set a precedent that has lasted simply so long as the Multiverse followers know greatest.
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