What Is the Witches' Road? Inside Wanda's Journey of Penance in the Scarlet Witch Comics

The Witches' Road is, at its heart, a story of penance for Wanda. The road has a lot of forks, some of them leading to light and some leading to dark, and walking it forces her to face her past, her heritage and the damage she fears she has done to magic itself.

The run takes her from New York to Ireland, Spain, Paris, Japan and Serbia before she finally reaches the end of the road. Along the way she meets a version of her mother she never knew, and the final stretch asks her to confront the mistakes she has made.

Wanda starts over in Manhattan, seeking to redeem herself

The comic opens in Manhattan, where Wanda is talking to the ghost of Agatha. Agatha thinks the city might not be so good for Wanda, but Wanda sees it as a fresh start, even though she feels like something is wrong with the city.

Wanda explains that she has made a lot of mistakes in her past and is working on trying to redeem herself. She speaks really highly of her magic. She knows it has been called chaos magic, but that is not necessarily how she sees it. To her it is something a lot more personal, something that men might fear, which is witchcraft.

A string of possessions and dead cats points Wanda to a demon of envy

Wanda goes to a crime scene and tells the detective that she thinks these moments of momentary insanity, where the attacker has no memory of what they did, are actually caused by magic. She connects this to cats dying in New York, which she says is also about magic and not a feline disease outbreak like everybody seems to think.

She suspects somebody is sacrificing the cats to summon a demon, one that embodies envy, hate and the need to punish. When the detective asks if she knows who will be possessed next, she says he will. That is why she asked him to meet her at the crime scene alone, so she could protect him and other people. She does exorcise the demon, but she points out that something feels really weird about her magic when she does so.

Hecate believes magic has been broken for a long time

When Wanda returns home, she brings this up with Agatha and expresses her interest in trying to fix it, despite the cost and despite Agatha's concerns. She then goes to talk to Hecate, the goddess of witches, to ask whether she feels anything off about magic.

Hecate says she has not cast a spell in years because she has been running a cafe, but she still feels like magic has been broken for a really long time. Wanda wonders whether her own fragile mental state has done some irreparable damage to magic as a whole. Hecate then asks her to take down a Minotaur that has been attacking the island, and Wanda agrees, since Hecate points out it would be a very good idea to have a goddess indebted to her. Wanda strips the creature of the powers bestowed upon him.

Someone is casting huge spells without paying the cost

Agatha asks whether Wanda thinks Hecate created the threat. Wanda does not believe she did, but she does fear whoever is casting these spells, because they are very big spells and it does not seem like anybody is paying the cost for them.

In Marvel Comics, the cost is usually what somebody gives up to have the ability to cast spells. Stephen Strange, for example, has to eat a lot of weird foods because he cannot stomach human food anymore after what the spells have done to his body.

We then see a man with Hecate and a void-like entity. Hecate has withered and decayed and is probably not alive anymore, because it seems like this lifeless void is absorbing her magic and her life force. This man, we find out, is the Emerald Warlock.

Ireland sends Wanda onto the Witches' Road

Wanda goes to Ireland after hearing of a plague sweeping through the countryside. She is led to a bar on the grounds of a really big battle and tries casting a healing spell on all of Ireland, but she is stopped by the ghosts of the people who fought in that battle.

Agatha and Wanda conclude that the answer to who is casting these spells could be found on the Witches' Road.

Wanda meets a younger version of her mother on the road

Wanda immediately comes face to face with a woman introducing herself as the Scarlet Witch. Wanda worries it might be an illusion meant to test her fragile mental state, but what she does not know is that this is her mother. Because time is so weird on the Witches' Road, this is a version of her mother from before she had even had Pietro and Wanda. Agatha cautions her that if this is a ghost, learning she is a ghost might actually harm her.

Her mother says she is on the road to protect Wanda from something she is about to face. She takes down an Irish creature that appears, then starts to fade away, only then realising she was talking to her daughter the whole time.

The Emerald Warlock declares himself Wanda's archenemy

Agatha and Wanda soon run into the Emerald Warlock and see that he is the one who has been casting these powerful spells. He had also been killing the last of the bloodline of the wizards who banished him from Ireland.

While he talks about his past and his plans, Wanda, without him realising, leads him further down the Witches' Road, taking him from a realm ruled by a male Celtic deity into the world of the mother goddess. She says she has the upper hand there because, as a witch, she knows the road so well. He declares himself her archenemy and disappears.

Spain, Paris and a partner who needs no magic

Wanda then heads to Spain to help a nun with a ghost possession inside a church. She finds out it was a curse left by a nun who was burned at the stake, at a time when many nuns were being killed and falsely accused of witchcraft. Wanda exorcises all of the spirits.

In Paris, she helps a local hero who had lost hope in life by summoning the spirit of his dead wife and letting him talk to her one last time, rekindling his love for life and for heroism. She then teams up with a hero to stop the man heading the operation her ally was trying to shut down. Wanda holds off his lackey while her ally fights him. As he taunts her lack of magical abilities, she simply kills him with a normal bullet, because he is so unsuspecting.

Therapy forces Wanda to face Billy, Tommy and her heritage

Back in New York, Wanda has a really good conversation with her therapist. She talks about how her heritage was a lie and how nervous she is about figuring out who her mother is. She also explains why her relationship with Billy and Tommy makes her so uncomfortable: the souls of her sons either took the lives of two children and lived in their bodies, or went back in time and lived their lives after being born to another parent. Either way, she was absent and they had new parents, or they took somebody else's life by possessing those bodies.

She finally admits she keeps herself so busy because she does not want time to deal with the things she is afraid of. At the next session, she confronts her therapist about being the leader of the crime circus. He had been using the sessions to hypnotise her into stealing jewelry for him. She gets him arrested, but not without thanking him for being a really good therapist despite his ulterior motives.

Wanda cuts ties with Pietro over the new Civil War

Shortly after, Pietro visits and tells her about the new Civil War. He would side with Tony because he does not understand why people would fight over what has not happened yet. Wanda reminds him that, as a witch, her people have done a lot of future seeing, and she would choose Carol's side if she were choosing sides. She is not, because she feels Pietro is just trying to use her power to make their friends stop fighting against their will.

This leads her to call Pietro out for always treating her like a scared little girl who would follow him blindly. She tells him he is a sociopath and kicks him out of her home, saying she never wants to see him again.

A murder in Japan becomes a welcome distraction

In Japan, Wanda investigates the murder of a mystical master. She interviews a detective, his ex-girlfriend and his archnemesis before finding the killer: his servant, who murdered him to steal his mystic power. She defeats him and helps the master, now reborn as a fox, find peace. She admits she is really glad to have had this side quest to distract her from her main problem, finding out who her mother was.

Serbia reveals her mother fought monsters

That leads her to Serbia to track down her mother, or at least her legacy. She finds a priest who traded her and Pietro to the High Evolutionary, who then performed his experiments on them. The priest gives her the name of her mother's best friend, who shares stories revealing her mother did not fight petty criminals. She fought what we would call the universal monsters: werewolves, vampires, ghosts and other witches.

Wanda also learns that the aunt who raised her after her mother died is still alive, even though she understood her aunt had burned in a fire. During their conversation, her aunt is possessed by a demon. After Agatha appears to help Wanda exorcise them, her mother possesses the aunt, explaining she wanted to talk to Wanda and the demons jumped in first. She tells Wanda to go back to the Witches' Road and walk to the end to find her answer and save magic as a whole.

At the end of the road, Wanda leaves her past in the past

For the first stretch back on the road, it seems like somebody keeps sending monsters after her because they know each spell is taking years off her lifespan, maybe hoping she will die before reaching the end. Her mother's ghost returns and tells her she just has to face her worst fear: her past and the mistakes she has made. Creatures appear looking like Simon, Vision, Wiccan and other Avengers, berating her for things she has done. As she defeats them, she says she knows they are not the real people and that she has made these mistakes, but she will not have regrets and will leave the past in the past.

She wakes at the end of the road with Agatha and her mother beside her. They find the goddess of witchcraft bound by a snake-like creature that is the embodiment of chaos. Wanda tries to defeat it alone and starts losing, and even together they are not enough, so her mother summons Pietro to help. Chaos is banished, not defeated, because chaos will never be fully defeated. The goddess is released but still dying, and her mother sacrifices her life so Wanda can live, reviving Agatha and reversing the cost Wanda had paid.

Free of the cost, Wanda starts over, helping someone whose son has been possessed, again by the Emerald Warlock, who is trying to regain the power she stripped from him. The run ends with Vision and Wanda talking civilly at a table. She explains that she always wanted to be an Avenger because she did not know what else to do with herself, but this time she is asking because she believes it is the right choice for her.

Why I think the Witches' Road is worth the journey

I found this comic "a really fun Deep dive into a multitude of different topics." It gives great insight into Wanda's character and explains the Witches' Road, which is a really fun world to play in. It also shows how important her Romani heritage is and the women who came before her, along with the hardships these women face as witches and from society in general just by being women, especially when Wanda deals with men who feel they have some sort of power or self-importance.

It is also a nice deep dive into the connection between witchcraft and women, and how it empowers Wanda, her mother, Agatha and the other witches alike. Seeing her walk down the road and face these hardships is really cool, because it is "a trial of sorts a kind of a trial by fire."

Do you think Wanda made the right call in choosing to leave her past in the past rather than carry her regrets forward?