48 — DOWN ONCE MORE
Hyoga, the Cygnus Saint, walked that slow funeral march with his eyes fixed on the ground; his long arms at the sides and the wavy back like a hunchback. An infinite line of sad souls wailing inaudible words and always walking forward, as if impelled.
Shiryu called his friend's name more than three times, trying to get his attention anyway; she asked where they were and asked for his help, but the Cygnus Saint was catatonic and paid no attention to her. Shiryu then jumped off the gray boulder she was on to run towards her friend in that line, but a familiar voice called to her side.
"Don't go there, Shiryu."
The girl turned to the side and saw Saori.
She had sad eyes and a downcast face, looking at the ground in a lost way. In her right hand, however, she still held the Golden Staff, which there seemed to have lost its divine luster. A shadow of its beauty.
"Miss Saori!" Shiryu despaired.
The girl went to her aid and took her in a long hug; she felt, however, that her body was extremely light, which left Shiryu very disconcerted. Her hands were also strange to touch and her stance was similar to that of all those souls who walked in that infinite line. Her voice, however, still carried the vitality from before, which contrasted with that weak figure in front of her.
"Those people are going to the Underworld. If you go there, you can never go back." She spoke to alert Shiryu. "Your body is still in the House of Cancer, but your spirit came here, to the threshold of the Underworld."
The threshold of the Underworld, Shiryu repeated inside her head. That smell of death, the Cosmo of Hyoga that burst on the horizon, the arrow in Athena's chest. She finally understood with amazement.
"That means that Death Mask's cosmo really is capable of throwing people to the door of the Underworld."
"Come back, Shiryu." asked Saori beside her.
She, even with her eyes lost on her feet, brought her Golden Staff in front of her.
"But what about you? And Hyoga?" Shiryu asked, worried.
"You can't do anything for us here." She spoke firmly, though her body was fragile.
Shiryu saw how the Golden Staff in front of Saori regained its golden glow and sounded a distant bell on that threshold of the Unerworld, lighting up her eyes with its huge Cosmo.
"Come back, Shiryu." asked Saori's firm voice.
The House of Cancer, with its mists and blue torches, had many faces scattered across the walls and floor. A smell of death and the eternal feeling of a living cemetery. Before the eyes of many imprisoned faces, a wisp floated suspensely illuminating everything around it until it nestled in the chest of Shiryu's fallen body.
"I can't believe." Death Mask spoke to the faces around her, her only audience. "Shiryu has returned from the threshold."
With amazement, she saw Shiryu's body in front of her shift on the ground, regaining consciousness.
"Shiryu came back to life again." she stammered.
Gradually the girl got up, her voice affirming.
"I'm sorry, Death Mask. I've already come back from the dead twice. It seems to me that I'm not welcomed there."
The Dragon was on her feet again.
"And now, Cancer, it's my turn to send you to Hell!" her voice was finally firm and decisive. "There are two very important friends who also need my help to get back from that place."
Shiryu raised the arm of her Dragon Shield high and brought it down violently, causing her Cosmo to ascend, powerfully, raising her huge lock of hairs in the air.
"And there is someone else, for whom I need to make you feel my wrath! My Cosmo will burn to the limit! "she said. "My Rising Dragon will hit your Cosmo, I'm no longer that Shiryu you fought in the Five Old Peaks."
The Bronze Saint ran towards Death Mask and threw her dragon fist forward in fury.
"Rising Dragon!"
A cosmic blast erupted from Shiryu's fist in the figure of a wonderful Chinese Dragon who furiously charged towards the Gold Saint. The woman, however, just raised her right hand and stopped all the mighty of Shiryu's Cosmo with a shaking hand, causing that cosmo-energy to evaporate and disappear.
"That's not possible!" Shiryu was amazed to see that her technique, strong enough to reverse the flow of the most powerful waterfall in the world, simply made no difference to that woman.
But that's exactly what happened. Her Cosmo was a far cry from making a Gold Saint need anything more than a hand to stop her most powerful technique. She was in shock and, before she could devise any other strategy, she found herself held down to her feet by many arms around her.
"What is this?" Shiryu asked, trying to free herself from those bodies that held her.
"It's for the best that you can't see, Shiryu. These are the ones who are trapped in the House of Cancer."
"Let me go!" asked Dragon.
"These are the Faces of Death that rise to seek peace." said the Gold Saint. "Their faces peel away from the House of Cancer and their rotting bodies rise to serve me, hoping that I will free them from this purgatory."
And Shiryu heard her laugh.
"Free yourselves, faces of death!" shouted the woman's gravelly voice to the House of Cancer. "Evocazione di spiriti!"
Shiryu ceased to feel those many arms gripping her, for the decaying bodies had turned into will-wisp spirits that surrounded her, pressing on her like a snake that constricts her prey. She was then lifted by the force of the spirits and thrown against the roof of the house to fall again in front of Death Mask. She noted, with amazement, the faces that she could once feel with her feet were now gone.
"If you want to defeat me, you'll have to make your cosmos shine as brightly as the Gold Saints, but that's impossible!"
She walked towards the fallen Shiryu.
"Now it's time for you to go to the Underworld once and for all. And this time, I'll make sure you never come back! Strati di Spirito!"
Again Shiryu looked to where she imagined that woman was and saw the opening to that hill that was the threshold of the Underworld. She tried to hold on to the recesses in the floor, to plant her feet as hard as she could, but the force of death sucked at her violently. And Shiryu's body was finally pulled into Death Mask's body and deep into Hell.
Again that threshold, Shiryu thought as she opened her eyes and noticed that she could see again. The line continued to walk along an infinite trail and, from where she was, Shiryu searched, but did not find Hyoga as before. Around her she no longer saw the silhouette of Saori and everything that her eyes could see was totally different from what she had seen before. The only thing she hadn't changed was the endless line of wailing souls on the horizon.
Desperate, Shiryu fell to her knees thinking that the Gold Saints were really strong. She could do nothing for those friends of hers who marched if she also were to stay there, just as she could do nothing for Seiya, waiting for her in the temples ahead.
She did, however, heard a wonderful voice. A female contralto voice with impressive, operatic vibratos as she sang the verses of a powerful song.
Tornerai nella cella della mia follia!
Scenderai nell'abisso che c'è in me
Dove mai via d'uscita c'è per te!
She looked at the owner of the voice and saw, with amazement, that it was Death Mask, interpreting with pain and a smile on her face the powerful notes of that beautiful verse. And at the end of her dramatic spectacle, she let out a laugh with open arms as she walked towards Shiryu.
The woman kicked her in the face and stepped on her back.
"Death Mask, how can you be here?"
"So that you can't go back to be alive ever again. So you can go to the Underworld once and for all."
Shiryu tried to free herself, but she didn't have the strength to do so. Death Mask's laugh was low and mocking.
"This is like a garden to me and I can come and go whenever I want." she said gravely. "But there's a hole that even I can't go back if I were to fall on it. And I'll show you, Shiryu."
She kicked the girl's back and pulled her hair back to her feet. She hanged her from behind with an armlock and Shiryu noticed her feet no longer touching the ground. They floated higher and higher on that hill of the dead and her eyes could see the gigantic line disappearing on the horizon, it was so big.
"Open your eyes, Shiryu, and look very well." asked Death Mask from behind her. "That's Yomotsu Hirasaka. The hill of the Underworld."
From that huge height, Shiryu realized that they were actually on an eternal climb that led to an abyss at the top of a hill; the line that walked forever below actually followed a high path that wound enormous distances from somewhere she couldn't see, but certainly to a huge mouth of what appeared to be the entrance to an abyss.
"And where are they going?"
"If this hill is the boundary between the World of the Living and the Dead, the Yomotsu is the abyss that will lead straight to the Underworld, the World of the Dead."
Even far away Shiryu could see that the line was interrupted there and ended, for in fact the specters who walked lifeless simply threw themselves into that abyss.
"When you fall into that place, you can never come back to life."
Death Mask held Shiryu at that height just by her huge hair and released the girl's body, who fell from that height to crash against the hard, cold stone of that hill.
"I will personally drag you to the Underworld pit, Shiryu. So you can savor the terror of death slowly. With every step, you will be more closer to the end."
The Gold Saint turned Shiryu's body and pulled her by the hair, dragging the girl across the gray earth of that terrible hill.
"Shiryu, you better start praying."
Praying, she thought.
And she remembered Shunrei who, with all the certainty in the world, was praying for her in the Five Old Peaks. How she had been by her side when she was found, raised, when she lost her sight and when she left that place to fight again.
She wanted to forgive herself to her for all the suffering, but now her end was near. She felt her body being lifted by the force of that woman wearing her Gold Cloth. The cold breeze she felt and, opening her eyes, she saw before her the huge mouth of an abyss into which, on all sides, countless people and ghosts fell to finally meet their final destination.
"Addio, Shiryu!" said Death Mask.
She would die.
But she didn't die.
For a stellar glow lit up the hills hitting Death Mask, who was unaware, letting Shiryu's body fall to the side too close to the entrance to Death's moat. She looked up looking for what had happened and saw beside Death Mask someone who made her chest heat with longing. It was Xiaoling, the Saint of Ursa Minor.
She had her body covered in bandages, her left eye covered, and her Cloth full of cracks.
"Now, now, look who's back!" she said mockingly to the Cancer Saint. "If it isn't Signora Morte!"
ABOUT THE CHAPTER: I wanted to use the singing Death Mask from the Legend of Sanctuary movie, but done in a different way. Within the femme fatale/Sofia Loren personality that I used to make my Death Mask, it suited her, her debauchery in the form of music. So I put the ideas together and made her sing. But to define the music, I went further: I remembered that I love Omega's Cancer Schiller and how Schiler's mask reminded me of the Phantom of the Opera, which I love dearly. I wondered if there was any music that fit and the first few verses of the final song in the musical fit perfectly into the character's idea. But she is Italian; I know the passage in Portuguese and in the original, in English. But I had to search underground sites in Italy to find out how the musical was adapted in Italy and how the verses stayed. I loved it!
NEXT CHAPTER: THE WRATH OF THE DRAGON
The terrible attack on the Palaestra and Xiaoling's triumph with her best friend.