A/N:
I know my posting has been all over the shop recently, so apologies for that. I don't see it stabilizing any time soon, but things should still be getting posted on fairly regularly. Still working on my original fic, focusing about sixty to seventy percent of my writing time and energy there. Just as an FYI.
Enjoy!
It was like looking at a reflection in a pool of water, but without her eyes.
Min stood at the edge of Crota's throne world, once again a solitary figure in a seeming endless sea of black. The Sword was heavy, even for a Titan, but the moment the tip touched the portal and her mind was filled with that shimmering reflection, the weight seemed to be gone.
What she saw at first took her a moment to understand. Everything was incredibly distant, distorted and unclear. Then she saw the curving stone walls and realized she was 'looking' back up through the Well. She definitely didn't want to go back to the moon through that entrance.
Then her focus shifted, and the scene clarified a bit. Now she seemed to be looking down from on high. A massive space spread below her. Abruptly, she recognized the self-same ritual chamber where she and her team had been before.
It was a mad-house.
Throngs of Hive lay dead all around. Yet more were still alive, in the thick of a pitched battle. Everywhere she looked, she saw flashes and explosions, blasts of paracausal power in yellow, and purple, and blue. The Guardians were up and fighting.
A small hurricane of lightning tore up the battlefield in a twisting corona as it roared through the thralls, picking them up and sending them, aflame, in all directions. For a moment, this tempest poised directly under Min's point of view before it began to dissipate in snaps and licks of Arc.
As she looked down into this dying corona, she saw a Guardian. The lone figure looked up at her through a familiar, miasmic helmet. The terrible rifle in her hand salivated streams of green fog in anticipation.
Min felt, just for an instant, that Nara could actually see her, before the real reason the veteran Titan was looking upward revealed itself.
A gigantic form, brushing off the dying lightning like it was not there, shifted forward beneath Min. It was the great gargantuan beast, the ogre that Eris had called the 'Might of Crota'. The bulbous growth that made up most of his head and face lit up with a dazzle of light and the beam sliced through the battle, sending both Guardians and Hive reeling.
Min could not see what happened to Nara, with the thing's back now in the way, but the veteran must have done something because the Might suddenly half recoiled and bellowed, straining to look downward.
Min acted without thought. The creature's back was directly 'below' her in her vision, and she was not going to risk that monster hurting any more Guardians.
Leaping upward with a blast of her jump jets, toward the portal that the Sword was just touching, Min felt the blade suddenly grabbed, as if by an invisible hand. Hanging on, she was pulled with it and in a flash of light she wasn't just seeing the moon ritual chamber in her mind any more- she was there, falling out of thin air just over the Might's back.
The Sword in her hand swung downward and she drove it with all her weight and strength right into the juncture of the monster's shoulders and 'neck'. Blood flashed, and the Might suddenly recoiled viciously, its slavering jaws chewing at the air as it frantically tried to claw its hands upward, to grab at what had hurt him. He stumbled around, Min hanging on to the handle of the blade sunk nearly to the hilt. As the stumble steadied again, her mind and body lit up with the comfortable, familiar red-gold flare of Sol. With the help of a quick boost of her jump-jets that left blistering scorches on the thing's back, she came down again and slammed a fist wreathed in flames hard on the pommel. The Sword drove even further into the thing's back with the blow, and she felt something give way. The Might's sputtering roar was more gurgle than bellow this time, and it's stumble more of a drunk list.
As her feet hit his shoulders, she took the hilt in both hands and tore the Sword of Crota out of the Might's body, sideways. A tidal flood of blood and fluid gushed out over the floor, and now the Might was falling, collapsing onto its side.
Min jumped free as it crashed to the ground, a thick and slimy tongue lolling from its nearly severed head. It gave one last spastic twitch of a leg, and then moved no longer.
As her boots hit solid ground she could see what had been going on behind the beast for the first time. The great white stone, what they had learned was a piece of the Traveler, was still where it had been when she, Kal, and Gen had been there before. It hovered, oblivious of gravity or the war raging around it, bathed in that bright, pulsating light.
Above it hovered that same huge Wizard, the one with the eye-lights that burned with a mad intensity. Eris had named this thing Omnighul, if Min's memory served. She had been Crota's mate and 'Will', or so Eris had said.
Here, there was a difference, however. This time, the thing had something in her hands, holding it high over her head.
To Min, it looked like some kind of an amethyst crystal, about five feet long and three wide. The creature held it aloft with no seeming effort. A coiling tendril of white was rising from the Traveler's shard and winding around this crystal in a thick, misty fog. The brilliant glow of Omnighul's eyes was the same color.
Something seemed to shift in the crystal's depths, something dark and oddly fetal. Min didn't know what it was, but she suddenly expected three eyes to flash from its depths and realized the crystal in the wizard's hands was nearly identical in appearance to the one that had been in the throne room.
The one Crota had been trapped within.
A hand suddenly grabbed the hilt of the great Sword and tried to tear it out of her grip, at the same time a fist writhing with lightning slammed into her shoulder. Min's arm clenched and sung with agony, and instinctively she tried to clench her fingers down tighter, to tear the Sword back away from the one who sought to take it from her.
The blow of Arc, however, had been well used. Her fingers refused to cooperate, the muscles in her arm jumping with electricity, and she felt the wrench from her spasming hand as Nara claimed it.
The veteran's fist hit Min's shoulder again, hard, but this time without Arc behind it. Min took a lurching step backward, trying to keep her balance. Her hand was twitching open and shut, open and shut, as tiny licks of residual arc danced down her pads. She grasped her arm for a moment as the humming ache died down, as she regained her balance.
Nara was already moving. Sword of Crota in hand, blade spitting up sparks as she turned and moved to heft up its weight, Nara stepped toward the wizard and the shard.
Min wicked away the final dying licks of Arc from her pads as she turned her recovery into a lunge forward. Nara didn't manage to get all the way turned before Min grabbed hold of the Sword again with both hands, and hauled.
She didn't know why Nara wanted the Sword, didn't know what she had intended to do with it, but one thing was blazing clean and clear in her mind, as if shouted from a voice as large as a galaxy.
Do not let her.
A heartbeat later, it was a fight.
Nara turned toward her as Min grabbed the Sword again, and Min could all but imagine the unseen surprise on the other's face. The Sword was lifted up between them, both Guardian's holding on to the long hilt with both hands, one stacked atop the other, neither willing to let it go, each trying hard to tear it away from the other with all of their strength.
The Sol-fire was blazing in Min's mind again, white hot. As their struggle over the Sword shuffled them in a looping half-circle, she could see the flames writhing and dancing along her pads. On the other side, Nara's dark and oily armor was alive with white snakes of Arc, the jagged and dancing brambles of lightning streaming out behind her in a cloud mist that turned and snapped and twisted with her, a cloak made from a thunderstorm.
Min felt part of her skin sing and ache again as some of those tendrils snapped in staccato toward her shoulders and chest, and in return the roaring Sol-fire rushed up Nara's arms, licking eagerly at her.
She should have been exhausted. After the fight with Crota and all that had happened in his throne world, after the Song and the injuries and healing and sheer effort of it all, she should have been at the end of her strength.
Somehow, though, she wasn't. Somehow, she seemed to be getting stronger. And as the strength flowed into her, the Sol-fire grew more bright, more ravenous, blazing like the sun from which it derived its name.
Unfortunately, the same thing seemed to be happening to her opponent, as well. Fighting Nara for the Sword was like trying to wrench it out from under a mountain. The lightning of her Arc was growing brighter, thicker, bristling about her as brilliant and damning and white-blue as the heart of a pulsar.
They pulled, they turned, they spun in a circle with their efforts, and for the blaze of light from both of them Min could no longer see anything of the Chamber, anything of the battle or Omnighul or the shard. She saw only the coiling tempest of Sol and Arc, and the black hole of the helmet faceplate opposite her.
She's a demon, she thought. She's a hellion. Death itself.
And the final heartbeat before the struggle was over: She's a tempest.
They tore their way around each other again, swinging in a circle, and then the Sword was wrenched from Min's grip. Not because Nara had won it from her, but as if it had gained the weight of a starship and the pair could no longer hold it. Momentum sent the blade sailing away, and the moment it had left their hands the raging dance of Arc and Sol died away, the growing strength fleeing away from Min like a breath caught in the wind.
As the light drained away, Min didn't even look at her opponent. They were facing toward the Wizard, the shard, and the crystal again. Whether an after effect of her light-startled eyes or because Omnighul's attempts to steal the Traveler's Light were succeeding, the shard looked far dimmer than it had just a moment before. Instead of a bright and pure white, it now had the dingy, grey edge of a chunk of concrete. Only a faint halo still surrounded it.
Between the pair and the shard was the spinning Sword, mid-air.
Then Sword hit shard and for an instant of an instant, Min saw both shatter like glass.
The explosion was immediate and terrible. White, beyond any mortal comprehension of the color, consumed the world. Every creature within the chamber, Hive and Guardian alike, cast shadows so dark and sharp they seemed to cut the very fabric of existence.
Min's last sensation was of being hit by a planet.
Then nothing more.
"She's in there."
The sky was a soft and formless grey. The sun behind the rainclouds made slow, nebulous shapes of pearl and ash and smoke and flint. On the damp street below her, Min could see Mike and Veta hunkered in their oiled raincoats. Their cheeks were red with cold, their breath in thin mists around their ears. They walked with head's close together, murmuring to each other.
Walked away from the building to which the window belonged.
Walked away from Min.
"Good afternoon. You must be Dzyevushka Anasova."
Min didn't look around. At the end of the cobbled lane, a car was waiting for her two friends. The driver was a round faced man, blowing into his hands to keep them warm. Piles of melting snow clung here and there to the streets, slush gleaming in the gutters and running in rivulets and streams through the cobbles themselves. Veta's head hunched down a little into her shoulders, and Mike put his arm around her.
Her unseen companion moved to the window near Min. Near, but not so close as to invade her personal space. There was a long moment of silence as Mike and Veta reached the car. The driver opened the door for them, but Veta did not climb in. She looked at Mike and then bent her head forward, covering her face. He hugged her close.
"You have very good friends," the other said, her voice soft and gentle. "They clearly care about you deeply."
Min said nothing. Veta climbed at last into the car, Mike following her. The door shut, the driver climbed in, and the car turned down the dingy wet street.
Her forehead briefly touched the glass as she leaned a bit, trying to watch it. Trying to see it as long as she could. The cold pricked at her skin.
A hand reached out to her from the freezing gloom. Clutched at her. Desperate fingers tore at her neck as Erisia tried to claw upward.
Min leaned back from the glass as if the cold was a knife, one that had nearly cut her. Her fingers pressed lightly into her own throat, the motion unconscious.
A hand touched her arm as she did and for the first time, blinking as if just roused from sleep, Minerva looked at the other woman standing there.
She was shorter than Min, middle-aged, and her dark hair was threaded with silver. Lines had started to settle in the corners of forest green eyes, across a clear forehead. As Min looked at her, she smiled, and it was the smile of a mother, one that understood the deepest pains of her child's heart in a way no one else could.
"You are Dzyevushka Anasova," she said again, even but gentle.
Min nodded slowly, studying the stranger's face for a moment. Her voice was low and rough and raw as she finally spoke. "Who are you?"
"I'm Dr. Morozov. I'm the head of Project Crystal, sent on behalf of CESCO," she said kindly, and offered her hand. Min looked down at it a moment, before meeting her eyes again.
Slowly she reached out and took the doctor's hand, and as she did, the other woman smiled again, gently.
"You may call me Nastya."
Dzyevushka= 'Ms.'
