Note: The X-Men are the property of Marvel Comics. They are used without permission and for purposes of entertainment only.
Silent Amber
Chapter 1 – The Demoness Unbound
Peter Rasputin kneeled and watched Ord of the Breakworld burn. He had no idea if the proud warrior ever heard his final words to him, but if so, he hoped they brought him some small measure of comfort in his waning moments. The proud alien warrior who had restored him to life only to torment him for years no longer existed in Peter's mind. Whatever rage he held for what Ord had done had been exhausted after Katya had helped him escape. All that remained now was sympathy, for a man he knew would do anything to preserve his planet and his people, had tried and not only failed, but discovered he was naught but an unwitting pawn, used by a madwoman to bring about the very prophecy he sought to prevent. His final sacrifice had undone that damage, however, and saved the world. It was something he deserved to know before the burning light of the energy field surrounding the planetary power core disintegrated his body into nothing.
When it was over, Peter stood and walked away, himself immune to the fiery corona surrounding him. Nothing more remained for him here. His mission was done, Aghanne now one more life to add to the list of those taken by his hand, a list already too large in his opinion, and had been so since the very first name inscribed. There was no time to dwell on such things, so he shunted the thought off to the side in favor of more pressing concerns. Emma's last words to him had been as dire as they were urgent. The missile launch had not been prevented in time and it was on its way to Earth. Stopping it before it reached its target was now everyone's only concern and priority.
He did not expect them to be waiting for him on the other side.
"Glad to see ya back, Petey," Logan said. His voice lacked much of its token gruffness, sounding more grim and weary, as though each word were an immense weight. He was standing on the walkway bridge, a short distance from the energy field. Next to him Hank managed to look very much like a pacing cat despite not moving from his spot. Hisako hung close behind, saying nothing, her posture and expression pensive and uncomfortable. Their uniforms were riddled with tears and scorch marks, evidence of the ferocity of their recent battle.
Peter checked himself, pausing just past the outer edge of the energy field as he regarded the trio assembled before him. "Something has happened to Katya," he said. There was no other way to interpret their behavior combined with her absence.
Logan and Hank's faces tightened as they wrestled with how to explain what had happened. Hisako beat them to it. "She was inside," she said in a small voice. The words may as well have been thunderclaps beating through the air around them.
Even in his steel form, Peter felt as if his blood had suddenly been replaced with ice water. The smooth metal of his face drew down into a grimace of frustration, worry and tightly controlled anger. Succumbing to the urge to express his fury and loss, even in the smallest of ways, would accomplish nothing to undo what had been done to his beloved. "Is she…?" He left the question hanging, fearful of what the answer might be.
"She's alive," Logan said, and a wave of relief washed over Peter as the fist around his heart unclenched slightly. It was the smallest of mercies, only enough to give him the kernel of hope he needed to fully master himself and not succumb to the icy fingers of despair and loss clawing at him.
Hank stepped forward and placed a reassuring paw on his shoulder. "We're doing everything we can to save her," he said, yellow, felinoid eyes meeting Peter's steel grey gaze. All the words offered was an anemic hope, empty of any real promise of success. He didn't doubt his friend's sincerity, but stopping the missile now that it had been fired had already seemed a formidable task. To do so without bringing harm to Katya could prove impossible. It would be too difficult and dangerous for her to phase herself free. The past few days had proven how taxing the metal of Breakworld was on her, rendering her at times barely able to speak, stand or even think clearly. Her rescue would have to come from without, or not at all.
The image of their final conversation before parting was still fresh in his mind; He could still see the worry in her hazel eyes, the feel of her arms around him as they embraced, the smell of her hair. She was the only pearl in this fetid oyster of a planet. Perhaps this could have been averted if he had objected to her part in Scott's plan. It was a tempting thought, but just as he had chosen to follow along over her concerns, he knew she would have insisted in fulfilling her role as well. It wasn't in her nature to do anything less. Peter forced himself to remember that it was also the nature of the X-Men to do the seeming impossible, especially when the world or even the universe was at stake. If a way existed to save Kitty, it would be found. With that thought to cloister away the threat of despair swelling in his heart, Peter answered Hank with a slow nod. "What is the plan?"
"Slim and Frost are off chasing the bullet," Logan growled. So it wasn't a missile after all. Peter frowned at the unexpected term and what its implications might be, but said nothing. "An' almost every hero on Earth's at the Peak working on it from their end. Our job is finding out what the thing's weakness is."
Hank took a moment to adjust the spectacles perched upon his broad, furry nose. "So far it's proven to be quite the endeavor. Agent Brand tells us our good friend Kruun will know of any flaw in the bullet's design." He inclined his head to where the emerald haired officer was supervising a cluster of SWORD agents restraining the fallen Powerlord. Her verdigris hair was a tangled mess and though she disguised it well, Peter detected a slight twinge of pain wash over her when she took a step. She had not escaped the battle unscathed, not that it seemed to affect her stoic demeanor or bulldog authority in the slightest. Hank caught her eyes – it seemed strange to Peter to see her without her signature green shades – and she responded with a curt nod and moved toward them. "Unfortunately, thus far he has refused to speak on the matter."
Peter needed no further explanation of what his teammate was driving at. A shadow of menace fell over his face. "He will talk to me."
"You're right about that, and only to you," Agent Brand said, interposing herself between Hank and Logan as if their existence was no concern of hers. The walkway was becoming overly crowded in Peter's opinion. "But not just yet. You up for a quick lesson in Breakworld culture? "
) – (
The mansion was wrapped in silence but for the soft footfalls and rustling of skirts from its lone occupant. Ruth Aldine wandered, but not aimlessly. Despite the thick, dark cloth covering her eyes, the blindfold for which she was named, her steps were slow and sure, as aware and familiar of the halls as any lifelong resident of Xavier's. The still air was pleasantly warm, but the young mutant clutched her purple shawl close to her body, as if warding off a chill no other could sense.
Shadows from the recent past played around her in each room she passed. A beam of lambent energy enveloping the X-Men to spirit them away, her friend Hisako caught in it as well. Miss Pryde aiming a gun at Emma Frost's head. "A bullet and a bullet," Ruth whispered as she passed the scene. Doctor McCoy tearing apart the bathroom where she'd hidden, his mind reduced to bestial savagery. Colossus in the medical room, locked in a furious battle with no one. Headmistress Frost bursting into the kitchen, a tear running down her perfect cheek. Headmaster Summers on his bed, glassy eyes staring vacantly. Mister Rasputin lifting Miss Pryde into a fierce, passionate kiss. Each new vision was thinner than the last, as though time were passing through a mesh filter.
She paused outside the day room, canting her head to the side as if she were listening to a distant sound. "I am, thank you, alone here. Pardon, in the Institute." Turning in place, she passed through the doorway, easily navigating the crowd of furniture in the room. "The others, yes, have all left."
Her head turned sharply, facing over her shoulder. "Yes, thank you, to the black." Ruth hugged herself tighter, squeezing her arms slightly through the shawl.
"The Earth, I'm sorry, is in danger." Her voice was soft, distant and lightly musical. She walked around the couch, slowly, as if in a trance. "They will try to stop it. They will, yes, try to save her."
Ruth breathed a soft sigh of regret. "They are going to fail."
Her hand dropped down to the arm of the couch, fingers tracing along the soft fabric. "I do not, please, understand," she said.
She glanced curiously toward the flat screen television hanging from the wall other end of the room. "I see, thank you. That is not how I, no, expected the world to end."
As if beckoned, she approached the television, one hand rising slowly to reach toward it. A horrified gasp escaped when fingers brushed the screen and she snatched her hand back as if it had touched a gout of flame. "Gone, but not gone," she whispered hoarsely. "Into the waking darkness."
Tears began to roll down her cheeks and darken her blindfold. Her knees folded out from under her and she dropped, clumsily holding herself from the waist up by clinging to the nearby entertainment center. "They think she will be, yes, lost, but they are wrong, pardon." She trembled violently at her private vision, weaving in place as her tears continued to flow.
"She will be found."
) – (
Deep within the infinite pits of Gehenna, atop the highest Hashmal Pillar, the demoness stirred within her onyx bastille, sensing a ripple in the fabric of Destiny. Eyes which had never known mercy opened and bent their malachite gaze beyond the Veil and Firmament, into the mortal world and further, until it reached the limitless void where the stars died. There it fell upon a silver tower forged of alien metal and the malice of a proud warrior race, bearing down upon the Earth like a dagger in the night. How such a crude promise of global ruin could serve also as the vessel of fate the demoness did not know, but it afforded her no small amount of dark amusement as she considered its inherent audacity.
She rose from her ivory seat, eyes never wavering from the mountainous bullet which grew ever closer with each passing second. Mystic chains hung from her wrists and ankles like heavy braids, binding her to her gilded cage, thrice-nine wards and enchantments spitting white fire around each link with every step she took. She walked as though they weighed nothing, stopping only at the ornately wrought arch which marked the prison's threshold.
The demoness gave voice to a single syllable of power from an ancient, lost tongue. Her eyes were bathed in a flash of golden light as the divinations she employed were magnified threefold. Strength enough to confirm her suspicions about the alien weapon; it was the source of the wrinkles in Destiny's web. Wrinkles which might tear enough for her to exploit. She stood, awaiting her opportunity at the moment when weapon and target were joined. By this doom would she cheat the forces which had cast her down, a punishment she had endured for shemittah, seven thousand years by mortal ken.
A new presence intruded upon her awareness, momentarily interrupting her preparations. Her lips peeled back to reveal teeth braced in a snarl as she turned her focus upon these new players. It seemed there were others aware of the bullet as well, ones who feared its approach as much as she welcomed it. Even now they sought a means to stop or destroy it before it reached the Earth, and this she could not allow.
Her focus centered on one amongst the champions, a man regarded his generation's Sorcerer Supreme. He had power enough to be worthy of the name, but it was waning, and he was not yet aware of her own mystic probings. It would be through him she would stay the quest of those who would contest the bullet's progress.
Again she spoke, striking him with a special glamour of her own design. By the time he realized the danger, it was too late. He was quickly overwhelmed and the feedback radiated from him to all in his presence like chain lightning, extending the effects to each of them in turn. She left them, trapped in their own minds, victim to their heroic desires to save their planet. Mere illusion, but one they easily accepted because of the boon it granted. They would pose no further interference, and what little opposition remained was far from equal to the task, as they quickly proved in the remaining minutes before impact.
The tellurian world never felt the bullet's sting. It passed through the Earth as if no more than a terrible dream. Few saw enough to do more than draw a single breath of mindless fear. It was gone from all sight in less than the beating of a hummingbird's wing.
All of Gehenna, however, trembled and quaked with its passing, which was as the eclipsing of the sun in its duration. Whatever force had rendered it harmless to the planet itself ripped instead through the underworld with an unstoppable wrath. Coals vast as the Dead Sea split and toppled like mountains torn asunder. Streams of gall and poison churned and bubbled and overflowed to coat the landscape with their fowl broth. Pitch and sulfur flowed like rivers and boiled over, filling the air with black smoke. Fire became ice and ice became fire and from every corner of the boundless landscape arose the wails of the Eternal Damned as they knew torment greater than all the punishments of the abyss.
While the rest of the unholy writhed in lewd agony, the demoness spread her arms wide and set forth her enchantments, one for every accursed tzaddikim who had banished her to this place, each spell more powerful than the last. Her voice could scarcely be heard above the furious cacophony around her as the phantom bullet ravaged through Gehenna, yet she endured every torment, knowing if she slipped for even an instant she would lose her chance at escape and be left with naught but eternity. With the voicing of the final spell she cast them forth, wielding them like harpoons against the alien weapon, until they were as a mystic lattice binding her to it.
Immediately the bullet's passage carried her aloft, her feet rising slowly into the air while the chains she wore thrashed about, vomiting fire from every link until they were pulled to their fullest span. There they remained, taut and straining against the inexorable force now bearing the demoness. For one agonizing moment they held, and it seemed the struggle would end with her split in twain, snapped apart like so much hollow bone. Blazing light flared around the onyx floor where the chains were bolted, a spiderweb of ochre flame spreading from their centers until at last they failed and the chains were torn out of them in a roar like thunder and a rain of shattered stone and dust. The chains, no longer fixed to the demoness' prison, lost their enchantments and dissolved away in a spray of glittering powder, drifting into oblivion.
The demoness rose higher, until she reached the polished surface of the great monolith, the net of magic drawing itself around her until she was fully encased and clinging to the bullet like a drop of morning dew upon a leaf. All around her the sundering of Gehenna increased threefold as its hidden gates bulged against pressures beyond any they were built to contain and the Foundation Stone cracked. White-hot agony exploded through the demoness as the bullet tore a rift in the barrier between the Planes and she was drawn through it as if through a sieve. She heard an anguished, guttural scream and dimly realized it was her own voice making it. Her anguished cry became victorious a moment later, as the barrier finally reached its bursting point and yawned forth to permit the bullet and its new cargo to pass through.
Time sped to mortal keening, and when next the demoness opened her eyes it beheld the infinite black of the Void, Olam ha-Zeh little more than a rapidly fading blue speck in the distance.
Diminished by her efforts, the demoness melted into her otherworldly salvation, seeking the hollow tip so that she might properly recover. The silvery metal looked solid, but she was able to pass through it as easily as mist and soon found the spacious chamber inside. Immediately her eyes fell upon another within the bullet, a young mortal woman wearing strange clothing, her prone form splayed along the floor in a semblance of death, one hand thrust ahead as if she were attempting to claw her way toward some illusion of grace before she'd succumbed. Yet life still remained, balanced on a needle's point, her very essence seeming to pour into the metal around her. This, then, was the true vessel of providence, the demoness realized. She would not have thought it possible for one mortal to take herself so far beyond her limits, to bend this ore-hewn behemoth to her will, thus rendering it harmless to all save herself. An entire planet, it seemed, now owed its continued existence to one of its daughters, as was the demoness indebted for her new freedom.
Seeking a better look at this remarkable young woman, the demoness gestured forth and uttered a simple cantrip. She rose as though lifted by invisible hands, gently, until she hung two cubits high. The connection severed, both mortal and bullet resumed solid form with such violence she cried out in anguish, though her eyes remained closed, skin pale, body rigid, a scant breath from death's shadowy embrace. The demoness set her back upon the floor and studied her with quiet interest.
She was of a delicate build, lithe and slender, yet clearly possessing fortitude enough to conquer the enormous ark bearing them hence. A blood iris carved from sapphire could not so perfectly blend such liquid grace and unyielding might into one deceptively fragile form. Her body was sheathed in finery of fuligin and sunlight, clinging to her like a second skin, boots and gloves completing the ensemble. The fabric was unlike any the demoness knew, strong and flexible, able to withstand the rigors of battle and the extremes of nature. A warrior's raiment. Most curious of all, her face was framed by soft silver waves, each lock of hair a match for the alien metal surrounding them. Not the natural hue of the young woman's tresses, an apparent legacy of her great sacrifice, more becoming than any battle scar.
The mortal's mind was as broken as her body and the demoness was cautious in sorting through so as not to damage it further. She beheld a confusing maelstrom of memories and emotions, but one name in particular bubbled close enough to the surface to catch her notice. Ariel, the Lioness of Wrath. It was surely a sign, for this young woman to have once carried the name of one of her sisters among the Fallen. Indeed there was buried deep within her soul an ember of evil, one which might be fanned into a glorious inferno. She saw that others had tried to possess her, greatest among them three women with golden hair and a devil-man from the Far East, but she had resisted them all. One more patient and skilled, however, might succeed in bringing her to her dark potential.
Such as herself.
Thus was the decision made, and the demoness bent her will to the task of mending the shattered patchwork of the young woman's mind, subtly weaving it into a form of her liking. Next she bent down and brought forth the Breath of Life to her waiting lips, infusing her with it until color slowly returned to her cheeks and a weak, trembling cough arose from her.
The demoness took one of the mortal woman's hands by the wrist and held it open, palm out. She made a fist over it with her other hand and from it poured tiny dewbuds of bread the color of coriander seed. The flow did not end until her hand was full of the sweet smelling resinous grain. She cradled the young woman's head with her hand, tilting it upright. "Eat of this manna," she said. "It will restore you."
Still too feeble to open her eyes, she meekly obeyed, taking in the magical food with slow, blind nibbles. With each small bite her skin lost its deathly pallor and her breathing became regular and strong. So too did her appetite as she consumed the manna with increasing fervor, down to the very last speck and even then she gave her palm one experimental lick, an almost feline gesture, hoping to find just a little more. When the demoness guided her to her feet she drowsily obliged, as if lost in a dream.
"Thank you," she said when she came back to herself enough to lower her hand. Her voice was raspy and thin as still air. She opened her hazel eyes in slow degrees, carefully feeling out her growing vitality. A soft gasp of wonder escaped her lips when she looked upon the demoness standing before her, for she knew at a glance that she was in the presence of a being who bordered on the primordial.
Most would have seen a regal, statuesque woman with hair of silken jet, long enough to brush her ankles and smelling of fresh jasmine. Her tea and honey skin glowed with a soft, pale nimbus of morning light, as if the glamour within were too much for mere flesh to contain. The young woman was no stranger to those beyond mortal seeming, the demoness had gleaned that while sifting through her fractured memories. It would take much to unnerve this one, and far more than that to inspire awe, an ideal quality for her purposes. What she saw in the demoness went to places deep and primal, an undeniable recognition privy to few, one which rippled through her soul with the force of an earthquake.
"Am I dead?" It was not the first time a human had asked that question upon encountering the demoness.
The demoness canted her head and shook it slowly. "Very nearly." Her eyes sketched an indifferent survey of the plain metal surface surrounding them. "However, I can assure you the Bosom of Abraham is not so pedestrian as this."
For a moment it seemed the mortal's legs might fold beneath her. "What happened? Did it work? Is everyone okay?" She spoke in a rush, barely aware of what she was asking.
"All will be answered in due time," the demoness said, staying the inquiring flow. For now, she had answers of her own to procure. "Tell me who you are," she said, locking eyes with her. No question passed her lips where a command would suffice.
The woman made to answer, but her mouth staggered closed before any sound escaped. She tried again, only to fall into another unexpected silence. Confused eyes fell upon her benefactor, who said nothing as she looked at her expectantly. What slowly dawned within her was not so much realization as awareness, a new sense of purpose she willingly surrendered to. At last she spoke, sure and strong, her voice unwavering and with exactly the proper amount of humility.
"Your servant."
The demoness smiled.