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Shiva
I.
When the siren's cry jolts her awake, she rushes out into the inky black of night.
When she sees the monster, that AWFUL ABOMINATION of earth (not earth), she is horrified; monsters don't exist, they're fantasies, and SHE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
When she looks down and finds the ferret from the forest offering her the garnet marble in its mouth, she begins to doubt.
When she hears the monster's ungodly roar and feels its tainted light blazing upon its brow, she suddenly realizes.
When the glow about her fades and reveals her white armor, short brown hair piled in twin pigtails, gloved hands gripping tight the elongated staff her sister-in-arms, she understands.
Nanoha Takamachi is nine-years-old. A God is born.
Her world is never the same.
II.
When she steps from the flames, unscathed, undaunted, turning the cold December air into a hellish July inferno, the Knights of the Book of Darkness is rendered speechless.
When She of the Iron Hammer blasts a blasphemous curse at God, she does not sway to sin; she judges the sinned.
Nanoha Takamachi is ten-years-old. A Devil in White emerges from her inner shade.
They shall fear God.
III.
When she lays broken and battered and bloodied in the pure white snow, listening to the ring of clashing blades, summoned magic, and shrapnel exploding, she wonders if she is going to die.
When she hears her name being called, so far, so near, echoing echoing ECHOING SO DAMN LOUD in the open, she wonders if she is going to live.
When her ears freeze over and people and machines blur to shapes and colors and sizes, she exhales slowly, softly, barely ….
Nanoha Takamachi is twelve-years-old. An angel has fallen.
It hurts.
IV.
When she appears out of the red (not blue, like before the fire, before the ever present flow of fates) and aims her flaming sword at the ceiling, she has the sudden urge to pierce the heavens.
When she takes to the sky with the girl in her arms, she breathes in the cool, crisp air and becomes ever more whole.
Nanoha Takamachi is fifteen-years-old. The angel gets her wings.
An apostle is gained.
V.
When the drone of the four magical spheres numbs her ear drums to an incessant thrum, she wishes she could go deaf.
When the pads of her fingertips, calloused, bleeding, and slick with sweat, slide over the felt material of her gloves and mold their grip on Raging Heart, she wishes she could be numb.
When she sees the strained, scared, tearful face of her daughter, the cloned Saint King of Belka, trembling uncontrollably in her binds, she wishes she could go blind.
When she hears the titanic roar of the Starlight Breakers bombing the Cradle's floor and an agonized cry, smells the ozone and sulfur of magic, feels the excruciating heat tangling in her hair, she wishes she could die then and there.
When the fog of smoke clears and reveals her precious child holding on for dear life to an erect stone piece, rising ever so slowly to her bare feet, she wants to scream and cry and run and crush the little one to her chest and never let go.
Nanoha Takamachi is nineteen-years-old. A miracle is performed.
VI.
When she watches the battle unfold on the screen, that well of fear rises her heart to her throat and tightens that worrisome knot ever more painfully.
When she watches Vivio take a swift, surprising clothesline to the face, courtesy of the Hegemon Ingvalt, she wants to pluck her hand into the screen and help the blonde-haired girl to her feet and fight.
Nanoha Takamachi is twenty-two-years-old. God's Hand can only reach so far.
VII.
When Hayate finishes reading the report and meets her fragile blue with her grim chrome, she can only muster the strength to feel ashamed, guilty, unconvinced and terribly, terribly enraged.
When the Wolkenritter confirm the authenticity of the report and Hayate has to twice repeat that it is the truth, the cold, hard, unforgiving truth, she leaves like a punishing, torrential storm sent from the heavens.
When she sits on the bed later that night, staring at the photograph of the happiness and warmth glowing within their smiles and clothing and postures, just the three of them, a perfect loving family, only then does she allow herself to cry; because they got her, they hunted her and claimed their prize, they had the ship right where they wanted it and they … they ….
When the tears dry up and fall no more, she tastes the iron red on her tongue, in the whites of her eyes, in the rivers of her veins; she wants red, she needs red, but most of all she misses red.
Nanoha Takamachi is twenty-five-years-old. They are going to pay with their LIVES.
VIII.
When she rushes into battle, the enemy is a sea of black and red.
When she clashes into them, Raging Heart rings against their ancient machines like the crack of a thunderbolt. When her blade slices into them-- marks its victims with crisscrossed slashes, severs their limbs and knocks their heads to the sky in a dizzying corkscrew-- the earth is bathed in red and drinks the life-giving liquid as if it will return the scorched land to its rolling green glory.
When their choked screams and gurgled death cries assail her, an orchestra of the mighty and the fallen plays where the world outside fades into the background to a hushed abruptness.
When she carves a reddened, corpse-strewn path deeper into the mass, the casualties start to climb: men, women, children, Familiars, Summoner Beasts ….
Nanoha Takamachi is thirty-years-old. War never changes.
IX.
When she infiltrates the building, a colossal, gothic-style cathedral that spans many fathoms from horizon to horizon, hell welcomes her with immediate, unrestrained fury.
When their ill magic homes in on her, she retaliates with equal brutality.
When she finally confronts the Großartig Kaiser, the Great Emperor, Mid-Childa is on the brink of destruction, torn and bombarded blast after blast from its vast armada of mechanical, skeletal behemoths.
When they fight, blow after blow, their power escalates, and the foundations of the cathedral and the land all around quake like the damned pushing the surface to break.
When they rest, yards away and nearing the state of exhaustion, the Great Emperor pulls a card that leaves her stunned awe, horrified, and distempered; her enemy draws upon the power instilled along the floors and walls and ceiling and High Throne and reinvigorates the warmonger of old.
When her opponent proclaims the title of King of Kings, its legendary inflection resounding in the emptiness, she curses herself that the battle has brought her to arrive at a single, inevitable conclusion; after all they warned her: Shamal and Mary and Shari and Fate and Hayate and the Wolkenritter and Riot Force Six and those two kids with the full-sized Unison Device ….
[But they're probably gone now. Gone like the music playing on the wind. Either with a bullet to the head, a blade to the heart, their bodies crushed or vaporized, it doesn't matter. Death is death. They attacked the planetary defenses as if the gateway to Hell opened. Would it matter if they lived or died? Would it matter if they were still fighting on the soil of their motherland, killing and saving and dying and praying? Why would they be left? These were the same people that created a paradise and then brought ruin upon themselves many millennia ago, what difference would it make slaughtering a completely changed world with completely changed people? Why ….]
When she waits for the final Blaster Mode to finish processing the mass amount of mana encircling her, she chides for being so cowardly, so outrageous defeatist in the raw, ugly face of danger.
When she feels the inner mechanics of her body stretch to their limits – breaking down; dissolving; falling apart – she wonders if this last act, as the White Devil of Mid-Childa, of sacrifice, will be worth it in the end.
When those twelve Starlight Breakers slam into the Großartig Kaiser and she hears the King of Kings scream a scream of finality and the light forever blinds her vision white and it's so very, very warm, she smiles and thinks it is worth it; that this sacrifice is exactly what the war needs to end once and for all; because I've taught you everything I had to teach you, I'm the only one who can do this, you're an adult now, go find your place in this world, I've reached my limits, be careful, I love you ….
When the coalition team, led by Vivio Takamachi, arrives three hours later, there is nothing left of the cathedral save a massive rubble-strewn crater.
When they return without a body, Vivio has them check again; and again; and again; and again; but the truth sets in coldly, wetly, oh so slowly; from her eyes the rain falls, but there is nary a cloud in the sky.
Nanoha Takamachi is, was, thirty-three-years-old. The Savior had come and gone.
The Great War is over.
X.
After a week has passed, Vivio and the surviving members of the Time-Space Administration Bureau erect an obelisk in the honor of the late Nanoha Takamachi, a tall, ivory pillar that reaches to the heavens. It is a beautiful thing to behold, to recall, to unite. Even more beautiful, it blazes a shining beacon upon the site it is built on during each sunrise and sunset, and it fills the weary peoples with a renewed sense of hope. At the same time, it leaves Vivio drained and uncertain; for who shall now direct Mid-Childa to a future devoid of war and death and End Day prophecies? Who shall protect the peace that the Three Admirals and the Three Aces of TSAB had fought so hard to regain?
As her gaze lingers upon the obelisk's epitaph (NOT ALL DEVILS ARE EVIL, NOT ALL KINGS MEN OF PROSPER), she wonders – truly, honestly wonders – if there is a scant chance to rebuild that lost power with those twelve of TSAB whom had survived the terrors of humanity's darkness.
A sacrifice cannot be in vain.
And without the guidance of their veterans, their elders, they will have to pave the road to a future of their own making ….
FINAL
But the world has moved on and soon the Time-Space Administration Bureau and the Great War fade into distant memory. The noble character that is Nanoha Takamachi phases into legend, and, ultimately, mythological status, where new deities and heroes rise and fall throughout Mid-Childa's history.
In the ten thousand years that have passed since the Great War, Nanoha Takamachi has become an archetype for young and old to love and fear.
In those ten thousand years, she is forgotten. Her obelisk remains, constantly maintained by the good peoples of the land, but the story of the brave God-Devil in White is now a phenomenon of much heated debate; as her body and staff had never been recovered, there float rumors predicting the Savior will return unto the earth reborn, with a garnet pearl imbued in the back of her left hand, and, upon turning twenty years of age, instill a thousand-year reign of peace after seven years of hell and suffering ravage heart, mind, and soul.
However, those millennia have delivered both hope and disappointment. The failure of prophecies unfulfilled have dimmed the fire in the theory that somewhere out there, beyond stars and planets and galaxies and multiple universes, Nanoha Takamachi will awaken from a well-deserved slumber and make the journey back to the place she had once called home.
She never came, and thus the world moved on.
The believers began to walk away.
There was no point in waiting anymore.
...But one person held out a little longer, a little more patient, and even though her faith was fast diminishing, she still waited … and prayed.
Eight years later, in an airless, weightless vacuum outside Time and Space and Reality, a plea is heard. A plea for help. Then, a glimpse: a girl no older than eighteen, with hair as red as fire, irises as green as the most open grassland; a girl who has also vanished from history in the blink of an eye for the good of humanity's safety. Cornered and with nowhere to run, she cries one last time for salvation.
Not knowing who She is or why She has stirred, She hurries to aid the one who called Her Name.
Nanoha Takamachi has Answered.
A new era has Begun.