Warning: contains spoilers for Inferno #1!
The X-Men's warring masterminds appear on variant covers for Inferno #3, the epic concluding event of Jonathan Hickman's wildly successful reinvention of Marvel's mutants. Beginning with 2019's House of X and Powers of X, Jonathan Hickman took up the position of Marvel's Head of X, charting a new course that saw Professor X, Magneto, and the long-believed-dead Moira MacTaggert found a mutant nation and even develop a new system to resurrect their fallen allies and enemies. But even as their project changed the world, the three shared a secret, and in Inferno, they're finally facing the price of their duplicity.
Moira's mutant power is that, on death, she returns to the start of her timeline and lives her life again. In every lifetime, she's seen the mutant race go extinct, spending centuries exploring the possibilities of how to prevent the deadly AI known as Nimrod taking control. Keeping her on the straight and narrow has been Destiny, a precognitive mutant and the partner of Mystique, whose ability to see forward in time (and the fact that she is born long before Moira) allows her to brutally cut short any life in which her rival fails to properly serve the mutant race.
In this version of her life, however, Moira finally believed she was ahead. With Destiny dead, Moira offered Professor X and Magneto everything they needed to build a nation, but on the strict condition that no precogs would be resurrected. While the mutant leaders secretly accepted her terms, Inferno #1 (from Hickman and Valerio Schiti) ended with the bombshell that Mystique has resurrected Destiny, with the event set to reveal whose vision for the world will actually come out ahead. To celebrate Moira and Destiny's prominence in the series, CBR has revealed that two of Inferno #3's variant covers will showcase the characters, with a Moira cover from Jeff Dekal, and a Destiny cover from Oscar Vega.
Presented against a stark background, Dekal's art of Moira depicts her as the hidden queen of mutantkind - a chess master whose ambitious end goal has so far created more deadly problems than it has solved. Vega's Destiny cover stands in direct contrast, as the mutant seer's flowing cape becomes a body of water where every ripple can be felt. So far, the X-Men comics have prompted readers to feel sympathy for Mystique and Destiny, kept apart by ruthless scheming and forced to suffer in what was promised to be a mutant paradise, but the two have a habit of putting others at risk to achieve their goals. As is characteristic of Hickman stories, tales of real power have little room for outright heroes.
Since the founding of Krakoa, Moira has operated mainly from the shadows, with one of her biggest coups the recent reveal that she had acquired Destiny's fabled diaries, which give a spotty account of the future. Of course, with two different types of precog going to war - one who has lived multiple variations of the future, and another who has seen glimpses of what will happen this time around - nothing is for certain. As Mystique and Destiny finally begin making moves against Moira, the X-Men will be caught in the middle, and so far Inferno is keeping its promise to be an era-defining confrontation.
Source: CBR