Cradled in loving waters

Lynne, angel of oceans, stared at the daughter she would never have dared claim.

The daughter who spoke true.

Behind her, Belle wept over the body of her husband. Head bent and shoulders shaking, she would not have cared if the dragonfire burned her body. His claws had already torn out her heart.

Alisandra strode forward, barring the way between Wyrm and prize.

“Freshly forged, a fire unleashed,” Jörmungandr rumbled. His rune of Knowing flared bright, and he drank in Alisandra’s history with a luxurious sniff. “Welcome to the world, Alisandra Mishkan, daughter of angels.”

His rune pulsed over her like a tide of offal, but she clenched her fists and held her ground.

“Keep your foul magic to yourself!” she hissed.

“Born in a branded womb, a hundred years asleep in fetal prison…is that how the Archangel primed your soul?”

“My father did not breed me like some prized calf.”

“Oh? An Archangel ignorant of the price to the brand? How conveniently ignorant of its cost to mere mortals…” The Wyrm shrugged. “You block my meal, angel. Who are you to deny me?”

Her halo pulsed above her head, rusted metal smoldering against the air.

There was a Song of war in the air, and the halo beat in time with the drums.

“Like my father before me, I will stand against the darkness,” she declared.

“That’s nice, dear,” the Wyrm replied, unimpressed. “By the way…do you recognize that crown you wear?”

“A halo of war.”

“Hmm. I suppose that is technically correct…”

Lynne staggered to her feet, swaying. She pressed her palms to her belly, forcing Light into her flesh, and stumbled forward towards her daughter. “Ali…”

“I will handle this, mother,” the reforged angel assured. Warmth suffused her voice on mother, a love she finally recognized in herself. “Take your priestesses to the Cathedral. Seek refuge.”

I will fight in your stead.

The angel of oceans stopped just shy of her daughter.

“Don’t tell me to run,” Alisandra said, half-smiling.

“No, Ali…I won’t.” Lynne reached forward to brush the girl’s hair back. The halo quivered like a chained engine, a power barely contained.

A rage incarnated.

“I have bequeathed you my sins,” Lynne admitted, “through no fault of your own. Only fitting you should have the power to go with it.”

Her hand on Alisandra’s forehead, the angel of oceans blessed her daughter.

Let the storm be your power

Everything I have to give is yours

Alisandra sighed softly, leaned into her mother’s palm, and felt the Tempest rush through her mind. One lock stained like the Azure-blessed…and then another…and the color cascaded across her scalp, turning her hair to the teal of tropical waters, tipped with lighter froth like playful waves.

Lynne shivered…diminished…but that was the price of parenthood.

“You are the stronger,” she whispered to her child.

“I will be,” Alisandra vowed.

Jörmungandr chewed a claw, still gleaming with Lynne’s blood. “Mm, sea-salt. Let me know when you’re ready. Or perhaps I could regale you with the origin of that cro–”

Alisandra sidestepped – linking the here and the there as her mother had shown. A short jaunt, only the distance between her and the Wyrm’s wicked tail. She left a wake of hoarfrost and the echo of waves, darting through the tunnel between two points at speeds the lumbering dragon could not match.

His eyes, though…his eyes tracked her.

The angel latched onto the spurs of his tail with both hands, anchored her feet, and sidestepped again. This time, she stretched far distant – to mountains smoldering with lava at the western edge of the Isle of Peace. She dragged the monster like a can behind her car, and he left a bruise of crimson smeared through the atmosphere.

“–wn,” completed the Wyrm.

Alisandra twirled in the air, swinging the monster by his tail like a toy, and hurled him into the mountains with a ferocious scream.

He plowed into the slope, flinging boulders for meters, and the earth shook as far as Moros. A cloud of dust billowed outward, stinking with the volcanic sulfur, and obscured her sight.

Is that enough?

She doubted it.

The dust slowly thinned, revealing a broken mount. Thin trickles of lava bubbled through the shattered stone, pooling at the bottom of a brand-new crater.

The crater heaved.

Jörmungandr erupted, proud black scales scoured and burned. He stretched his wings, roared, and burned Life to heal the dents in his hide.

She would not give him that time! Another sidestep to grab his tail, a yank skyward, and she hurled him down once more.

The second impact cracked the rest of the mountain. A geyser of lava spurt into the clouds to her left, and the mountain peak slowly sagged inwards with a dull rumbling.

“Stay down!” she roared after him.

A streak of crimson rose from the ground behind her, and Jörmungandr laughed from behind her. “You are so very new. Good hustle, though!”

Power flared on his collar.

He batted her with an open palm like a cat with its toy.

Her entire world exploded. The air caught between his claw and her shoulders ignited; the ground suddenly arrived; even the stone heaved like water; she landed in thick and turgid magma.

If Charlotte’s little tool could send her to the Gate, then this blow should have scattered her into Reverie for a thousand years.

But Alisandra knew who she was now.

Belle weeps

Blood spilled in the sacred Conclave

A night to last until the monster is sated

Their pain was her own.

Their need could be her purpose.

She sidestepped high and hurled the Wyrm through a high peak.

He erupted from the smoke and drove her to the bottom of a deep mountain river.

They traded blows across the range, tearing a path through granite like wheat. Peaks crumbled, lava burst free from long-pent slumber, and the skies blackened with ash and soot – though no one could tell in this sunless world.

The Isle of Peace roared once more to life, hungry for Ruhum.

She ambushed him from below and heaved him into space.

Mountains crumble like castles in the sand.

The sky bled to proclaim his return, and he emerged from the wound of his passage to snap his bloody teeth around her bare foot. Then he grinned, spun, and flung her a mile deep in the mantle.

The fire does not burn.

She grabbed him by the horn and focused on the distant horizon. Then she dragged him along the sidestep, pressing his smirking visage against the rock. They traveled together, his face carving a new canyon, and the new wound of fused rock glowed from their passage.

The Light within burns brighter!

“Does your blood rush?!” The Wyrm laughed, eyes alight. His runes pulsed in symphonic coordination now: Life the steady beat that kept him grinning while Power and Fire let him clash against the angel again and again. “Does your Will sing?!”

“What does it take to put you down?!” she bellowed.

He caught her flat on the stomach with his tail, and she skipped out to sea like a stone. Tumbling head over heel, she felt the waters swirl beneath in an echo of Lynne’s own power.

Then Jörmungandr met her at the other end of her path, ten miles out to sea, and slapped her back into the mountains.

“More than you bear!” he rumbled merrily a moment later. “Your adoptive mother grasped atomic power and still failed. Do you know what a nuclear bomb is, angelchild?”

Alisandra staggered upright, shaking off a coating of dust. “I know nuclear power, monster.”

“Oh? See, I wasn’t sure. You claim to live as mortals might. Yet somehow your library hoards the secrets of heaven and earth for you and you alone!”

She spit onto the cracked ground.

“Your philosophy is a farce. You do not bleed, Lady Mishkan. You do not fade no matter how many ages weigh your spark. You need neither air nor water. You will never die. You can pretend to live among the toys if you want, but that does not make dolls real.”

Another earthquake rattled the island, and a fresh volcano erupted. As far as the angel could see, the mountains of Ruhum smoldered and burned, belching forth their glowing guts. The molten stone filled valleys and riverbeds, and the flow inexorably reached for the little villages in the mountains’ shadow.

“Suns exhaust themselves; planets grind themselves to dust; galaxies spin from their axes.” The Wyrm spread his wings, collar pulsing with bone-white power. “But through it all, little Tyrant imitators polish the gears and adjust the thermostat. For what, Lady Mishkan? What thanks awaits you from the deaf and blind?”

They call for someone. Anyone. For me.

They clashed in the skies, igniting lighting with every strike.

“This pain you bear!”

He drove her down, and they wrestled in burning pressure where no light traveled.

“This mantle you claim!”

She rammed his head into a buried crystal that had grown by the millimeter over a million years.

“Do you know how they will repay you?!”

Jörmungandr hurled her so high in the clouds that the air would no longer feed her lungs.

If she had needed to breathe.

“They rot, they age, and they die! They take their little bucket of sorrows and run home to huddle under God’s white skirt!”

The Wyrm appeared above her, inhaled, and drove her back into the shattered mountains with a gout of hellfire.

Lava did not touch her, but his breath burned cold as hells.

When she popped free of the basin, he waited, perched, atop a crushed peak. He craned his head to examine her, Life pulsing steadily beneath his jowls.

Her halo still pounded the drums of war above her temples – her power raw and demanding.

Was this the Tempest that Lynne endured for centuries?

She could understand drowning in the rage.

It would even feel good.

My aspect is mine to command, she prayed. I am daughter of Lynne, and I will learn from her example.

She would not be the next Goddess to terrorize this world.

“Face the facts, Alisandra Mishkan. You can only play with dolls so long. The only people worth mentioning in this little universe are the eternal ones.” Fully mended, the Wyrm cracked his neck. “Though I admit, sometimes even they are tiresome.”

“Then leave,” she dared.

“Oh, I will,” he assured. “Once I’ve had my fill.”

She focused on deep, careful breaths. Her aspect thundered, each beat urging her to greater deeds, but these raw blows were not enough. The drunken glory of power nearly made her swoon with vertigo, but the people of Lumia did not need yet another power-mad angel…

Mountains shatter like toy blocks. A meteor might make a nice baseball for an afternoon. No assassin’s blade will ever steal my breath, and no aeons will dim what I am become.

“Such an anomaly we have here,” the Wyrm mused. “Surely the Archangel would be better served amongst the bustling hub of humanity? Why does he hide in the far reaches, teaching all his little angels to pretend to be dolls?”

Yet the Wyrm remains.

What creature crafted that collar for him? The holy words served a profane purpose now.

In that thought, Alisandra found an anchor among the roar of Tempest power: even angels erred.

Power was not righteousness.

She reasserted herself over the drumming demand and felt her head clear.

“Most planets these days are ruled by some little demon king, drunk on his own religion. Monarchies of stunted imagination, pissing away eternity in hedonism in their sandbox. This is what remains of Eden.”

I must break that collar.

“What were you?” she demanded. “Treasured pet? Living artifact? What god granted you that collar?”

“This?” Jörmungandr asked, tapping the ring. It rang a clear, horrid note. “Nothing but a work of art. A focusing ring, if you will. The dolls no longer remember how to mold Light into solid shape, and the little demon kings jealously guard what fragments they recall.” He chuckled. “Shouldn’t you know this, little angel? Or was there not a book on this subject in your library?”

Somehow, that jibe hurt worse than his teeth in her flesh.

“That library was your world, wasn’t it? You reveled in learning what no one else could know…” He grinned. “…and yet know so little of what came before.”

He seeks a new avenue of attack, she realized. He seeks the mind.

She was Light, neither flesh nor blood. What novel injuries awaited her in doubt and madness?

“Do you truly understand what you are? What you could become? Have you even noticed that your clothes remain after a dip in lava? Your tailor must be truly astonishing!”

“You burned my tailor to death,” Alisandra snapped. She could feel this death like a hole in the world.

This death and so many others.

Children without fathers and mothers.

“So? A flash of pain, and she is gone beyond the Black Gate.” The Wyrm waved his claws daintily. “Do you recall heaven? Oh, a wonderful repose! Washed free of guilt and sin, rejoined to her greater soul. Rewarded for dipping her toenail in the dark waters of Malkuth! Tell me, Alisandra…are you grieving for a woman you barely knew or mad I broke your toys?”

They were people, you bastard! Good people who wanted nothing but peace and family!

The Tempest drum beat surged once more, threatening to drop her into a mindless frenzy, and she clenched her fists tight.

“Oh, come now. Don’t hold back. Savor the power! There’s no time like your first time.”

White-knuckled, she asserted her Will over the crown and Tempest both.

“You want to avenge them, yes? Would a few more crushed peaks sate your guilt?”

“We will rebuild after I break you!” she growled in return.

Her crown twinged painfully, and a crack appeared in the bronzed metal – like rust shed from a bumper.

“We’re running low on mountains,” he replied. “Where do you keep the spares?”

Snarling, she sidestepped to strike him in the chest.

He dodged, bounding high into the choking clouds of dust. “Actually, I have a better idea! Show me the depth of your resolve, young angel.” He laughed. “If we are to play, shouldn’t we find a better way to keep score?”

She sidestepped again to catch him in his path, but the rune of Shadow let him slip away.

“How many can you save?” the Wyrm whispered in her ear.

Then he vanished to the east.

Her crown – her Tempest – her aspect – all Sang his intent like a written confession.

“Oh, heavens above, no!”

She raced in pursuit.

They burst into the sky above ruined Lumia, the Wyrm a heartbeat ahead. He flared Fire and Death, unleashing a plume of hellfire at the base of the noble hill. His breath arced across two ancient manors, and a simple twist of his head would scour the entire ridge free of life and history…

Too many of those stupid nobles had hunkered in their homes, trusting stone and prayers instead of the Cathedral!

Alisandra tucked her shoulder like an athlete and plowed forward into the conflagration.

Oh, how it burned! Even the hellfire mocked the feeble attempts of a little angel to protect her toys…

Momentum carried her up the stream of cold fire, and she kicked him in the throat.

He let himself tumble before her, crashing into the boulevards and through a score of buildings. When he came to rest in rubble, he lifted a claw from the remains and chuckled. “I wonder if anyone died. Would you check for me?”

A glimpse of silver beneath his wing. A familiar vehicle swerved away, driven by a madman.

Alisandra heard the fear of three children in her House car. She heard the despair of the youth, barely a man, who would drive into hell to save them.

“Oliver.”

A mortal boy, foolish and brave, who would brave death to protect his city.

She felt his bravery burn bright.

An ally in the dark.

Flakes of rust fell from her crown, and the Light beneath glowed like the sun in glimpses and glimmers.

We will endure for them.

The Wyrm slithered upright, shook bricks from his scales, and raised a hand to idly smash the vehicle.

Alisandra met his blow with crossed arms in midair. The impact drove her into the road, grinding the cobblestones to rubble with her heels.

She staggered backwards to a stop right before the Mishkan car.

***

The car might not need gas, but Oliver ran on fumes.

Sixty-seven.

This was the only number that mattered.

Seventy once I get these three to the Cathedral.

Lumia smoldered, many of its fires exhausted. Such ruin and rubble clogged the streets that only the car’s surreal morphing metal allowed him to drive over the remains of the roads.

Phi still glowed from the dash, his star to light the way. The windshield itself was long shattered, and the fetid air burned his lungs with pollutants. If he planned to survive the night, he would have been quite worried about all the toxins now filling his sinuses.

Neither of them saw the dragon until the shadow-on-shadow creature crashed into the building beside them.

Then the world exploded, and luck more than skill saved them.

The dragon swatted at them.

Alisandra saved him once more.

The angel tore a rut through the road with her bare heels, stumbled, and spun on a heel to glare into the car.

A halo, cracked, rusted iron with the occasional flicker of more, floated an inch above her teal hair.

“Nice crown,” he murmured. Was that his own voice, wizened and stiff? He sounded like an old man, rasping with a smoke-burned throat. “Nice hair.”

“You should not be here,” she replied.

“That’s what Thea said, too,” he rasped. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in explanation. The children in back huddled together, too worn to even properly cry anymore.

He could explain the sight of their parents, burned and blackened. But why? They’re charcoal now. We’re all charcoal now. The whole city burns and none of us can find the strength for tears.

A giddy laugh slipped out of his lips, and he quickly strangled it. A pit waited at the end of that laugh from which he would not emerge.

“A friend of yours?” inquired the Wyrm patiently. At this distance, the monster’s voice was sonorous and smooth like a lounge singer. A strange voice for a monster from the depths of the unsealed hells.

Very little made sense in the world anymore.

Alisandra whipped around, an arm thrown protectively between them.

A strange character on the monster’s white collar throbbed, and the Mishkan car suddenly shook against a silent gale.

“Lumia’s hero,” drawled the monster. “Lumia’s martyr in fire.”

“Watch your tone, monster,” Alisandra snapped.

“Mortal martyrdom is so trite, don’t you think?” the monster replied.

Time to go, Oliver realized. He mashed the gas and spun the car. The liquid metal tires could handle a few more loose cobblestones!

The air before him rippled and groaned. The fabric of the sky bled, and worming shadows peeled apart passage for the Wyrm that cut off his escape.

Like a creature too large tearing a bleeding path to its goal…

It grinned, mouth filling the road. “What would you know of sacrifice?”

More runes flared on its collar. It inhaled.

Phi chirped to Oliver.

“What are–?”

If a bird could smile, Phi beamed.

The elemental beast felt the fire of purpose in her breast.

The bond with her mortal that made her more.

For a moment, she glowed with the same Light as the glimmers in Alisandra’s halo.

Trilling softly, she said goodbye.

She leaped through the empty windshield and flared her wings before the dragon.

Fire met fire, gold and black, and the former swallowed the latter into stillness and peace.

His friend. His companion. The one who saved his arse time and time again for the price of a warm bed and some fish.

“PHI!”

The Wyrm staggered back, shaking his head. “What is that awful ringing?”

Gone. Consumed.

But she left the opening he needed, and three children relied on him to take it.

No time to even mourn.

Oliver drove, eyes dry and hands quaking.

***

A red pinion fluttered to the ground before Alisandra.

Jörmungandr shook his head, banishing that obnoxious noise. “Do the firebirds usually explode?” His Knowing pulsed, and he frowned. “A jungle…a Will…?”

Alisandra slammed into him before he could gather those thoughts.

He rolled through a warehouse. “Excuse me, Lady Mishkan, but I was quite patient while you spoke with your comrades! Rather rude to repay me with interruptions!”

Shadow flared; he faded into mist.

“Is this because of your lover boy in the car? Again, your philosophy displays its gaps. The architects of Eden were only beginning to understand nanites, and yet your House ride is a solid block of the stuff. Did you have to apply for an exemption? ‘Let us live as mortals might – unless we hunger for sweet rims’?”

Alisandra closed her eyes, listening for his foul presence. There had to be some center to that shadow…something she could still grab.

“Are you trying to buy him time? To reach that gaudy church, perhaps?” The Wyrm laughed.

“Yes,” she admitted, still seeking. “They will be safe from you there.”

The Wyrm laughed again, shocked. “You can’t be serious!”

There.

The densest shadow; a gleam of bone-white; the origin of his voice from within the mire.

Alisandra sidestepped into shadow that fouled her with its very touch, and she rammed her fist into the idea of that cursed dragon.

He tumbled back together into the harbor, heaving a wave over the wharf.

Rising, he grinned at her. “Oh? You figured that one out? It is a bit of a one-trick pony…” The Wyrm launched into the sky. “It warms my black heart to instruct such an apt pupil. On to the next lesson! Make sure you’re keeping score!”

The air moaned and rent, and his great shadow streaked towards the Cathedral ahead of Oliver.