Chapter 50: Tower of Liberation
Lonnie was still there next to her; Glimmer was certain of that much despite seeing nothing except the Beast in the blue. The pounding of the thralls against a reinforced door, countless thousands of individual threads of magic leading from each apeiron in its stash to her as she drew them in, and a gargantuan monster before her in her mental mindscape, but Lonnie was there. She called Glimmers name, and her voice came muffled from above water.
"Hey, can you hear me?" she asked, shouting to be heard against an alien damper. "What's going on?"
She tugged at Glimmer's shoulder and yanked her hand away with an expression of pain. Bristling with magic as Glimmer was, touching her was tantamount to touching an open flame—Lonnie had singed her hand.
Glimmer couldn't warn her not to touch her again. That thing in front of her was all encompassing and it was taking more than she had to give just to keep from losing herself in abject panic. Maintaining the gargantuan flow of magic through her body was the only thing keeping her whole at this point—a warning shot across the bow to the Abomination not to come any closer, or else. It loomed before her in her mind, massive and pondering, and Glimmer had no doubt in her mind if it called her bluff and advanced anyway, she'd crumble.
And in the midst of this, a memory came unbidden to her. A memory of her mother.
A sailor rowed the seas in a tiny boat, Angella said to her, voice reaching through time and space to once more tell a story she used read to Glimmer before bedtime. He rowed to an island in the distance. Only, as he drew closer, he realized it was not an island at all he was rowing to, but the back of an enormous creature, the rest of it floating hidden under the water's surface.
Glimmer remembered how that story terrified her when she was young and how she loved it all the more because of it. Now, she was that sailor, having dived from that boat and into the water. There was nothing but deep blue surrounding her. No light from the sun broke through the surface to her, and the Beast was the island monster—fog dome the island visible above the surface, and the rest of it visible to her now only because she'd left her earthly vessel to look upon it.
Oh, what a mistake that decision was.
The Beast was large enough it could swallow her whole and not even realize it. She was a speck floating in a vast nothingness—an intruder in its realm. She could no better confront it than a finless swimmer could outmaneuver a shark hunting by the smell of blood.
Have you had enough? a voice in her mind—hers and not hers—asked. Let go. Let go, and every problem in the world shall fade away.
She'd thought herself nearly enthralled before when she was lost in the fog. Now that it appeared before her, its attempts to ensnare her again were both harder to fight off and easier to direct her efforts toward.
"Begone!" she said, angling her chin up as if to look down upon it from below. "Leave this world!"
Fuck, was she even doing this right? Taline had told her once, when Glimmer had asked, that the Shapers of the Daiamid could vanquish an awakened Abomination in a contest of wills, overpowering it with sheer determination to 'eat' them, as they would apparently describe it. They were the only ones capable, as far as Taline knew. Everyone else, including the most accomplished of Enclave Battlemages, needed several dreadnoughts hammering the infected planet from space, and not even that was a guarantee of victory.
The Beast shifted in their shared mind-space, expanding like a great squid, posturing and encircling her. Glimmer, vaguely aware of fighting and yelling and the firing of ignominite bullets from rifles all about her on the physical plane, reached further into the stores of apeiron crystals littering the keep and held her ground as the Beast redoubled its efforts on her.
Their surroundings shifted. The Beast subsided, its presence diminishing to a thrum in the background as the endless blue of the 'ocean' fell away. To Glimmer's surprise, the tower and surrounding castle district came back into focus. Lonnie, Rogelio, the other soldiers, the thralls, all of them were missing—she'd been returned somehow to the physical plane without them.
There was no great dome of fog obstructing her view anymore either. Instead, Scavria itself and the surrounding city of Tir stretched around her in its glory. Great spires and skyscrapers circled her like trees of a great redwood forest. Vehicles soared through the air in neatly patterned lines at different elevations. The setting sun reflected off both the glass windows of many of the buildings and against the snow of the holy mountains acting as backdrop.
Voices carried up from below and Glimmer rushed to the parapet edge to peer down. Dozens of individuals of various races, including Scavrian, wandered about the compound. Some looked at maps held out at arms-length as they walked; others pushed children in strollers. Some walked backward talking to groups that followed in their wake: tour guides, expounding upon the history of the 'old castle district.'
One person in the crowd caught her attention immediately, and from there, everything fell apart.
Her dad walked among the others. His eyes sparkled as they cast every which direction, seemingly trying to take the entirety of the area in altogether. That alone would have been enough to shatter Glimmer, but then she noticed Adora walking next to him, grinning. She seemed so carefree, so light, and so unlike the Adora she'd seen only a handful of weeks earlier through the ansible, begging for any scraps of information on the Daiamid Glimmer had been unable to dig up for her to begin with.
"It's too bad Catra wanted to stay behind for this trip," she heard Adora say before turning to a burgundy cat-shaped being padding alongside her. "You'll have tons of bragging rights about this place when we get back, that's for sure."
Glimmer recognized the thing Adora was speaking to, especially by its ephemeral mane and stark blue eyes. Krytis had been taken over by the Beast early in the first war. Taline, emboldened by the trust the war council had placed in her, had elected not to save the planet. A devastating sacrifice, Taline had written in her official report on the matter, leaving no Krytians left in the galaxy. They were all extinct. The fact Glimmer was seeing one right in front of her…
"These are lies!"
She spun back around and planted her feet. The Beast was still there, slinking in the background and almost imperceptible behind the illusion. The illusion fell away at her declaration and she was back in the endless blue. She wouldn't allow the Beast to distract her, that's how you got lost. And so, she resolved to face it head on, never blinking, until one of them burned out entirely.
Glimmer pulled enough magic into her she felt she'd sooner explode and demolish the whole keep, defendants included, before her standoff with the Beast would conclude. It reared up like a tidal wave, growing larger, looming higher, advancing on her.
Moments before the Beast struck, the scene shifted once again. She was in a room, now. The same room she'd witnessed before waking up chained to the ground in a cell. Whereas back then, Taline was standing at the window bathed in moonlight and looking out at the night view, now rays from an alien sunrise flooded through the window blinds and illuminated the room.
Deep red was splattered across near every surface of the room. Glimmer had watched a live art show once, where an abstract painting came to life as a nameless artist threw gallons of paint on wall-sized canvases. The room looked much like those canvases had, except Glimmer had a feeling someone had been turned inside out to supply the paint.
The furniture lay in splintered pieces, most scattered across the floor but some embedded in the walls. A chunk of the granite dining table had broken off, likely ground to dust judging by the dust covering every surface that wasn't already covered with blood. Glimmer spotted a body—the man who'd come to visit Taline in the earlier vision—bisected at mid-chest, laying in two opposite corners. Taline herself was slumped against the far corner, a cloth stained red in her grip-less fingers as she pulled in shallow raspy breaths.
"Gods above," a shaky voice cried out from behind. Evelyn ran past before Glimmer could react, sliding to a stop and dropping to her knees beside Taline. "What the fuck happened to you?"
Glimmer had no idea where the Beast had gone—she could no longer feel it in the background of this vision like she could in the other. Something told her this wasn't something the Beast was throwing up in front of her as a distraction. This was different, somehow.
"Get your ass in here!" Evelyn said, shouting over her shoulder at someone Glimmer hadn't yet seen. "She needs our help!"
Corynth swept through the door and strode to them with quick steps. Glimmer followed, keeping silent. Evelyn looked on the edge of hysteria as he knelt too, concern clear on his face despite the calm in his movements.
"There's so much fucking blood, just…everywhere. Oh my god," Evelyn said.
"It's not all hers," Corynth pressed two fingers to feel for Taline's pulse at her neck. It was obvious she was still alive, judging from the breathing, so then why would he need to check? "Her pulse is weak," he said after a moment.
"Even losing half this amount would be a death sentence. Can you heal her? Please tell me you can heal her."
Corynth shook his head. "She already tried to heal herself. I can't."
"But she's fucking horrible at healing runes! Why would she try and do this herself?"
Glimmer didn't know why the statement surprised her. Maybe it was the gravity of the situation. It was common knowledge Taline was the worst at healing, but Glimmer had only reckoned with that fact in a humorous light, before. The great Seraph of Archanas being criminally bad at even simple healing spells did have its comedy, but now it seemed blasphemous considering Evelyn's panic and Corynth's hard-fought rationality.
"I don't think she had a choice," Corynth said. "She did what she had to."
"And you're here now, you you can do something. Help her."
He shook his head. "It's not that simple."
"Yes, it is. Set bone wrong, you break and reset it so it heals right. This is no different."
"It's very different. She's liable to slip into shock if I interfere—its worse than resetting a bone. Magic has its consequences, especially when it comes to me."
"Then what the hell do we do? Should paramedics even move her if it's that serious? Should healers, if they even get here in time? You have to be able to do something."
Corynth reached out and placed a hand over Taline's bloody head, pressing his thumb to her forehead and two fingers to her temple. His eyes glowed and faint circuit lines of magic appeared, creeping up the stiff standing collar of his Enclave uniform. The tension in Taline's face relaxed, and her breathing came easier.
"She'll wake in a moment," he said. "It won't be pleasant for her, but it's the best I can do. We don't want her unconscious." He turned to Evelyn and said, "Did you know this was going to happen? The guards outside are gone too, I checked. Did you already see this coming?"
"I told you already, I only see what happened in the past, not the future. I've tried but…it's fuzzy. I didn't see this at all." She gripped the fabric of her pants. To Glimmer, she looked almost guiltys. "I didn't know this was going to happen."
Taline stirred, coughing hard enough she doubled over. Corynth had stopped glowing, stopped whatever he had been doing to help wake her up, and instead rubbed circles over her back to ease her through the spasms. Taline moaned when the coughing subsided, and Corynth and Evelyn both eased her back against the wall.
"You came," she said, eyes wandering lazy and unfocused between him and Evelyn. "How long have I been…?"
"Long enough the fight had already finished before we got within earshot," Corynth said. "We found you like this."
Taline hummed something noncommittal, blinking slow. "Tried to fix myself up. Don't think it helped any…" Her eyes slipped shut and she started to lean into Corynth, nodding off.
"Hey, hey, you can't do that." Corynth shook her back to consciousness, although it looked like it pained him to do so almost as much as it pained Taline to endure it. "I need you need to stay awake long enough for the medics to get here." He glanced around the room, taking in the gore. "What happened?"
"He…he came for me"—a sharp intake of breath—"Was wearing a mask."
Taline's pupils dilated and constricted seemingly at random as she followed Corynth in taking in the room. Clarity and focus returned to her eyes, and with that clarity, rage and anguish came as well.
"He said he was a member of the Daiamid. That he'd come to welcome me into their ranks because of what happened on Archanas."
Corynth's and Evelyn exchanged a look. An understanding passed between them, Glimmer could tell, but Taline seemed to interpret it differently.
"I swear I'm telling the truth," she said to them both. "They're real, I swear it. The Daiamid—"
Corynth squeezed her shoulders. "I'm not sure if—"
"He told me about what happened to the La Valettes. He…he could do what I can. He could cast magic without needing any runes. The ley lines…they w ere on his body. The Daiamid are real."
Desperation tinged her voice as tears ran ruddy streaks down her face. Corynth and Evelyn's expressions shifted from apprehension to concern.
"They're going to kill me," Taline said, voice breaking. It was the most scared Glimmer had ever heard her sound, and it broke something inside her at hearing it, too. "I refused their offer. And when he threatened to…I killed him when he…" She swallowed and shook her head. "They won't let this go. They will come for me. I'm next."
"Tal, no." Corynth wiped her tears before guiding her into the crook of his neck. "They won't come. And if they do, they aren't going to get you."
"You don't know that," she said, voice muffled against his body. "I denied the Beast itself when it came for me, yet that man—that Shaper—nearly destroyed me. Are they all like this? No one stands a chance if they're all like this. It's no wonder the emperor has remained in power this long if they are yet another arm of his power."
Corynth and Evelyn exchanged another look while Corynth worked his hands to smooth over Taline's shaking shoulders. This time, Glimmer could almost read the message they passed between them.
Are you going to tell her? About you?
Corynth set his jaw, giving his answer. He peeled Taline off him as gently as one would replace a burn victim's dressings and looked her in the eyes.
"Nothing will happen to you, I promise. As difficult as it was to endure, do you know how many other people are alive today after experiencing what you did on Archanas? How many people are still sane?"
Taline swallowed and said in a low, almost whispered voice, "Just you."
Corynth laughed. "Well, the jury's still out on my sanity, but I am still alive, I'll give you that. But you're right. Out of everyone the Beast has ever touched, it's just us that are still ourselves. The Daiamid may be real and they may be mad enough you killed one of their own to retaliate, but you killed them, Tal. In single combat. From one singular exposure to the Beast, you triumphed over folklore."
"There will be others."
"And how many times do you think I've opened myself up to the thing by now, guiding Evie in her research?"
"Too many to count." Taline still mumbled the words, but Glimmer could tell Corynth's logic was having an effect.
"You're damn right." Corynth's smile looked more encouraging than proud. "They aren't going to get you because you aren't going to let them, and neither will I." He squeezed her shoulders again and wiped more tears away with his thumbs. "No harm will come to you. If I have to stand up and declare war upon the emperor himself and all his secret assassins in the shadows then I will, but no harm will come to you. I promise."
Evelyn looked uncertain and apprehensive. Glimmer could almost hear her wondering how this would play out in her head.
The vision froze. It wasn't obvious at first, especially since the room had been so still already, but Glimmer got the sense that whatever she'd been brought here to witness had fully played out. That's why it was an especially great shock when Evelyn then turned her head, looked straight at her with a fire in her eyes, and said, "Seen enough? Are you enjoying traipsing through my memories behind my back as I'm trying to work?"
Glimmer yelped and scrabbled backward, only succeeding in landing flat on her ass in her attempt to get away.
Evelyn pursed her lips. "I swear. Hundreds of trips all across the galaxy to all sorts of different people and I have no issues when I speak to them of the Beast and who will emerge to save them, but you somehow go digging into things all on your own when I'm not paying attention."
This Evelyn was different from the one kneeling stricken with Corynth at Taline's side. This Evelyn looked older and wiser, but it wasn't additional lines on her face or sag in her skin that gave that impression. No, it was her eyes. To Glimmer, those eyes gave the impression they had seen much, much more than the eyes of the version of Evelyn she'd met in the other visions. Behind the fires of irritation that sparkled in her irises, there was a serene, aloof, borderline cold nature to them in their gaze. Almost like she'd lost her empathy.
"Why am I seeing these things?" Glimmer asked, getting to her feet and trying to wrest enough confidence to at least sound authoritative in front of this ghost of a woman. "Why are you showing them to me?"
"I'm not showing you anything." Evelyn peeled her gaze away and looked over at Corynth and Taline, still embracing and frozen in the memory. "You've gone looking all on your own, like I said, and at things I'd truly do not wish to revisit at this current time. Or ever again."
She gave a sharp flick of her wrist and the vision dispersed. They were back in the blue ocean mind-space from before, and the Beast was gone.
"Is this you?" Glimmer asked, horror creeping up on her at the thought. "Are you the Abomination?"
Evie raised both eyebrows at her, like a detached empress looking upon a servant who had done something particularly stupid. "Really?" she asked.
Glimmer scrunched up her nose and reached with her mind again. False alarm. The Beast was still there after all, in recessed corners. Evelyn wasn't the Abomination, but then why she was here now in the foreground?
"The creature had grown powerful enough it made short work of the remaining forces in the city," Evelyn said. "They stood no chance."
"But that doesn't explain this," Glimmer said, gesturing to her and their shared surroundings. "How are you here? Why are you here?"
"Someone has to keep you and your friends from succumbing to its influence." The Beast surged in the background, fighting against invisible restraints before quieting down again. Evelyn side eyed it. "Just like someone had to keep that fleet in orbit from turning you all into space dust."
Keep from succumbing? Protect from the fleet? Was she implying she was the one maintaining the protective fog dome over them?
"Why?" Glimmer asked, when she could think of no way to broach the myriad of more complicated questions she had. "Why are you protecting us?"
Evelyn tilted her head to the side and looked at Glimmer like the question made no sense. "Because you are needed."
As if that made any sense. "So, where are you right now, exactly? In the past? Taline said you couldn't cast magic to save your life, and that you couldn't see into the future, only the past."
"I couldn't see well into the future," Evelyn said, holding up a finger to correct her. "At least, not when her and I were still able to speak to one another. I'd had enough prescience to warn of Etheria's imminent coming, after all." She shrugged. "As for how I can do this? Use the Beast to traverse time and space a few hundred times yourself and you'll become a natural, too, although without the kind of chaperone I had it might take longer."
Glimmer had no idea what she meant by a chaperone, but she got the hint: the Beast had changed Evelyn beyond what even Taline had recognized. "You travelled forward in time to protect my team and I because 'we're needed'? Is that really it?"
"Don't flatter yourself too much, now," Evelyn said, shooting Glimmer a smirk that made her flush with indignation. "There are many pieces on the board—pieces I've been moving since long before the endgame you've now crossed into. Compared to some whose strings I've pulled, you are largely untouched."
"Strings?"
"The Vestamid call me their Goddess. For as much as I've influenced their inception and subsequent devotion to Corynth, I find I cannot fault them for the name. I just pray you don't take it up yourself."
Glimmer knew exactly what Evelyn was telling her. She was the creator of the Vestamid. Visions—vivid ones—came then. Visions of Evelyn, still alive over a decade in the past during the apex of the first Beast war, traversing forward and backwards in time, prophesizing to future bishops and cardinals and priests of the coming of a great evil, of Corynth, and of his ultimate triumph on Archanas. One of the most powerful organized religious cults in the history of the empire had sprung up near overnight because of her—their Goddess.
As awestruck by the revelation as she was, Glimmer held steadfast to her pride and pragmatism. She stuck her chin up a little higher and said, "Goddess is a bit much, and I have little patience for flattery, both given and received. Tell me how to kill the Abomination. You're able to hold it back, you must know how to destroy it so I and my team can get off this planet."
"You won't be able to kill it," Evelyn said. "Not even together do we have the strength to do that, but you have already broken its stranglehold over this area."
"What?" Glimmer frowned. "I have?" She reached out with her mind again and found…nothing. There was nothing there in the blue except her and Evelyn. The Beast was gone—fled to less contested parts of Scavria it could corrupt without challenge.
"I could only hold it at bay for you, and even that took a toll," Evelyn said. Only then did Glimmer notice she looked stretched thin. "You've been actively pushing it out since you first touched it, even pushing into my own memories. Taline did a wonderful job teaching you, but you are extraordinary in your own right. To lose you here would be…"
She trailed off and shook her head. Their surroundings started to pull away, as did she, and Glimmer got the feeling she was being returned to the physical plane. The contours and outlines of the keep top came back, as did the figures of Lonnie, Rogelio, and the other soldiers she'd been with.
"Be careful on your way out," Evelyn said. She seemed so far away all of a sudden. "The Abomination had fully awoken before you took care of it. That is still a dangerous thing, even with my blessing."
Glimmer didn't want to leave, not yet. She had so many questions. She didn't want to step back into a raging battlefield with the cards still stacked against them, rolling a pair of dice to see if they'd make it out alive or not.
Reality reasserted itself and Glimmer killed the firehose of magic she'd been funneling through her body and up her arm. The enormous beam of energy she'd aimed at the sky dissipated and she fell to the cobblestone underfoot. Lonnie was at her side the moment her knees hit the stone, hooking under her arms and hauling her back to her feet.
"Kyle!" Lonnie's voice rang loud, head craned as she shouted into the PDA embedded in her gauntlet as she kept Glimmer upright. "We need an immediate evac, now!"
Someone, probably Kyle, responded, though Glimmer couldn't make out the words through the buzzing in her ears. She shook her head to clear it and pulled away from Lonnie.
"You broke us through!" Glee and awe were mixed in equal measures on her face. "I think hearing from us so suddenly nearly gave him a heart attack, but he's on his way. He'll be here within minutes."
Glimmer looked up. She hadn't fully rid them of the Beast, of course, but she'd indeed broken its hold over the area like Evelyn had said: a hole in the fog dome overhead had appeared—large enough she could see it was night, the stars overhead twinkling amongst the fleet bombarding the planet.
Good. Now they only had to hold out long enough for Kyle to arrive. Glimmer had no idea how long she'd been immersed in that separate mental plane, but judging from the fact they hadn't been overwhelmed and killed by a horde of thralls in the interim, they could probably make it. Surveying the top of the keep to gauge how the fighting so far had gone, however, had only sparked more questions.
Dozens of inert thralls lay strewn around them, the stone underfoot slick with their blood. At the opposite end of the keep, dozens more still-alive thralls stood idle, just inside the doorway to the turret chamber, staring out at them with glassy eyes.
"We barely kept the first few waves back," Lonnie said. "I was starting to get nervous, then they all just stopped. They've been like this for a little bit now."
Rogelio, still missing his arm, was squatting down nearby, helping tend to the soldier whose arm Lonnie cut off in their retreat. There was something poetic about it that Glimmer couldn't voice aloud even if she'd had the time and wherewithal to try. The looks of nervous agitation and full-blown terror on the other soldiers kept her grounded.
Their survival hinged on whether or not the thralls decided to surge for them once more. With no clear understanding of why they stopped in the first place, no one could say what would spur them to attack again, and it was the uncertainty of it all that was the worst. Was it because she had helped break the Abomination's hold over this place?
The thralls pulled back into the shadows, glassy eyes like muted fireflies against the dark. A rhythmic sound came from beyond the doorway. Thump, thump, thumped, it grew louder until it shook the foundations of the keep. Something was coming.
The stones framing the doorway exploded out, raining dust and debris around them. A hulking monstrosity, three heads taller than any of the thralls, stepped through.
"What the fuck is that thing?" Lonnie asked, aiming her rifle at it and yelling at her squad to do the same when they stood dumbstruck, slack-jawed, and frozen.
Glimmer had only seen them once before, on Rinne. It had been far away, one amongst many of its lesser thrall cousins, but it was enough for Glimmer to heed Taline's advice and leave immediately. Now another one stood barely twenty feet away: an amorphous, constantly shifting mass of pure Beast matter, formed into the viscera and striated muscles of an eight-foot-tall killing machine.
"It's a Beast Trooper," Glimmer said.
Even with half a dozen rifles pointed at the thing, Glimmer wasn't keen on their odds for survival. She almost preferred the thralls rushed them, instead. Magic flared to life at her fingertips.
"Stay in as tight of a formation as you can," she said. "As soon I unbalance it, we need to keep it off balance. We won't win, but if we can hold out long enough for Kyle to get here, we might stand a chance at escaping."
The Trooper struck before any could respond. It lunged, throwing an arm out as if to grab them, and that arm elongated and twisted through the air as it lanced across the distance toward them like a missile.
Glimmer threw up both hands high and wide. A purple shield manifested wide enough to cover the whole team. The Trooper's arm crashed into the shield, sending spiderweb cracks fracturing out from the impact like electricity through a block of wood. As soon as it struck, Glimmer condensed the shield into an unbreakable cuff wrapped around the arm that anchored it in place.
Lonnie shouted a set of sharp commands. Glimmer gritted her teeth, straining as the Trooper pulled against the cuff. The soldiers split into two groups, scrambling out from behind her, a clumsier imitation of the same maneuvering she saw Salas' own mages make when attending to him personally. Her soldiers flanked, pelting the Trooper it with a continuous stream of alternating burst-fire on either side.
As inspiring as it was to see them act, none of their attacks seemed to have any effect. A note of warning sounded off in Glimmer's head, a shot across the bow, then the Trooper destabilized. Instead of trying to pull its arm free, its body dissolved, tracing along the line its extended limb cut across the rooftop. It reformed directly in front of Glimmer and would have used its inertia to follow through and shoulder Glimmer hard enough she flew off the building, except she released her hold on its arm and reform a shield once more at the last moment.
The Trooper's body struck the shield with such force it shattered and sent Glimmer flying backward anway. Instead of flying off the building, she crashed into a parapet at the far end, landing in a slump on the ground next to the injured soldier, panicked and pale.
The world spun and Glimmer's couldn't make sense of her surroundings until she forced herself to her feet. The Trooper picked one of the flanking teams and advanced on them, cutting a soldier in half with an arm it had transformed into a scythe and spearing another through their chest plate with extrusions that shot forth from its abdomen like a spike trap.
The final soldier in the group had abandoned their weapon entirely and turned to flee. The Trooper's entire central body cavity opened up like a gaping sideways mouth, revealing dozens of flailing tentacles inside. The tendrils shot forward, ensnaring the soldier, wrapping around their arms and their legs, chest, and even their neck. They struggled, screaming as they were dragged them backward and swallowed whole.
The screaming ceased, and the Trooper turned to Lonnie, Rogelio, and the last remaining handful of soldiers still alive.
Evelyn had warned her not to let her guard down—that the Abomination and its forces were still dangerous despite having broken its hold and driven it from this place. This was what she must have meant. Beast Troopers had been so controversial and damaging to troop morale during the last war that once the war had ended, their mere existence had been heavily censored. That's how Taline had explained it to her, at least.
I myself would be hard pressed to take even one singular Trooper down, and I'd need a partner to even attempt it, she'd said in the past, trying to impress upon Glimmer just how impossible it was to face one. There's a spot at their back where they have a weakness. A small spot that doesn't morph or change like they do. If you can get behind it long enough to hit it with a blow, you might be able to harm it. Either that or overwhelm it with enough continuous, concentrated firepower it can't act.
Glimmer gestured with a hand crackling with fresh magic. A line of sequential runes along the ground formed, running in an arc along the ground from her current position, past the remaining survivors, terminating at a spot behind the Trooper. She sucked in a breath and released.
Ice flooded her veins. Her body felt as if someone had scooped water from a frozen lake and dumped it on her. At the same instant, she surged forward, carving along the line of runes as if propelled on skates. When she crested the final rune in the sequence, time resumed its normal flow, and she'd emerged at the Trooper's back with only a split second after drawing the path in the first place.
She pushed more magic to her hands again, tracing the pattern for a fire spell with quick fingers. The weak point at the Trooper's back was small, but it was there, she saw it. Just as the spell finished—and not even a full two seconds after she'd emerged behind it—the Trooper spun around and grabbed her. Its hand was large enough the fingers wrapped around her torso and met at the small of her back. It lifted her off the ground with seemingly no effort before roaring at her, its shapeless head splitting open in six distinct flaps and revealing several rows of teeth deep in its new orifice.
The army of thralls that had receded from view before the Trooper's arrival surged through the demolished turret and onto the top of the keep. Even if Glimmer could somehow get free before the Trooper killed her, she wouldn't be able to make a second attempt at its weak spot with the hundreds of thralls now coming to its aid. The team wouldn't be able to hold out for very long against them either, even if Glimmer somehow monopolized the Trooper's full attention.
That only gave her one last option, according to Taline's advice long ago: overwhelm it with enough firepower it couldn't kill you.
Hundreds of munitions chests full to bursting with charged apeiron crystals still lay in the keep. What Glimmer had drawn out to bolster her in her confrontation with the Abomination had barely dented the store, at least according to her cursory feel of the stockpile with her mind.
She reached forth once more and overloaded every crystal she could feel, grabbing every chest and every apeiron within them in in the levels below, shattering all of them.
From there, Glimmer knew she had split seconds to act. She hadn't drawn the power into herself either; that would have taken too long what with how dire things were. She'd instead released their contents uncontrolled to the world, and if she didn't step in immediately to guide how that energy was released, the resulting discharge would blow up more than just the thralls and the Trooper.
Glimmer released her wings.
Again, just for a moment. It was so quick, Lonnie and Rogelio probably wouldn't have seen them even if they were staring right at her, but holy hellfire did they burn, especially since she didn't have the reserve that would have made it safe to do. Venting an enormous amount of magic from her body without having an enormous amount of magic to draw upon to begin with was a stupid thing to do, but she'd done more than enough stupid things coming here in the first place—what was one more?
The Trooper's limb encasing her minced into a hundred different pieces and the creature roared. Glimmer dropped to the floor with the chunks of rent flesh. The pieces destabilized and coalesced, pieces attempting to reform into the whole. Glimmer used the handful of seconds she was free of its grasp to reach for the magic she felt exploding in the keep, reaching for the uncontrolled maelstrom of power flowing the only direction it could: up to them.
Flames as hot as a sun barreled through the wrecked turret tower leading up to the top of the keep. Like a great serpentine dragon it slithered, shooting into the air and then crashing down to the stones underfoot, writhing along and swallowing every thrall in its path. Hellfire of an unimaginable power, and Glimmer was trying to influence its motion. She felt like a lone sentry trying to divert a river with nothing but her hands.
The Trooper had finished reforming its hand before Glimmer could get all of the thralls. It rounded on her, forming its other limb into a scythe again, poised to cut her in two.
Rogelio barreled into it from the side, knocking it off balance. It stumble to the side, then planted its foot and torqued to swing the same moment Glimmer ducked. It's blade arm missed her by a hair-length, and Glimmer somehow managed to maintain control of the energy.
Finally, with the last thrall burned to a crisp, she turned the giant fire snake on the Trooper. It shot up in the air once more and, just as both she and Rogelio rolled free, crashed down, swallowing the Trooper in a continuous inferno.
Even though they had distanced themselves enough to not get caught in the flames, they were hot enough Glimmer was certain her skin would blister within the hour. Rogelio had a gash on his leg, probably sustained while they were fighting off the first wave of thralls. Glimmer helped support him back to where Lonnie, two other soldiers, and the one with the amputated arm were waiting for them.
"Did you just kill that thing?" Lonnie asked. She hadn't lowered her rifle, and it was still pointed at the flame-snake-turned-pillar-of-fire at the other end of the keep.
"At the very least I slowed it down," Glimmer said. "That should keep it busy for as long as the power in those apeirons last. And there were a fuck-ton in those crates so I'd imagine it will last until Kyle manages to—"
Another roar—one familiar enough now it sent a shiver down Glimmer's spine—came from the flames and the Trooper stepped out of it, nearly unscathed.
"Fuck me," Lonnie said. She was out of breath, but racked the slide of her rifle and aimed down the sights as if this were just another routine training exercise.
Glimmer had no more tricks up her sleeve. She'd unleashed an entire military compound's worth of stored magical energy on the creature and it barely stalled it for a few seconds. The thralls were gone, sure, but she was running on empty. That last attack had been their best shot.
The Trooper took another step toward them when a hole the size of Glimmer's head appeared in its chest, flinging it backward with the force of the impact. Glimmer, shocked, glanced over at Lonnie. Lonnie, who looked equally as shocked, looked at her rifle.
"I hadn't fired anything yet," she said.
The squeal of stellar engines roared overhead as a figure burst through the small hole in the fog dome. Kyle's Warbird screamed toward them, then banked hard and strafed, tracing a perfect circle in line with the perimeter of the rooftop as the gimbal gun on the nose of the craft fired endlessly at the Trooper.
Glimmer, Lonnie, and the others covered their ears. Rogelio and the injured soldier tried their best with their one arm. Within moments, the massive-caliber bullets from the warbird had loosed and kicked up enough rock and dust they couldn't even see the silhouette of the Trooper anymore, although Glimmer had no doubt it was getting cut down faster than it could regenerate. And then, when Kyle seemingly deemed his efforts effective enough, he strafed another lap around until he was hovering just off the edge of the parapets closest to them.
The bay doors to the troop hold slid open, and Kyle yelled at them to 'hurry the fuck inside' from the cockpit.
Glimmer helped Rogelio grab the injured soldier under the arms and haul them inside. Just as Lonnie cleared the threshold—the last inside. Just as the doors closed and they pulled away, Glimmer saw the Trooper once again emerge from the dust, piecing itself back together again. It was a nightmare given form.
"Get us out of here!" Glimmer said, yelling to Kyle from across the vessel. "Now!"
Kyle peeled them away from the keep at a rapid clip and the doors shut. Glimmer only just managed to slam herself into the nearest bucket seat and get her harness on when he angled them up and accelerated.
G-forces stronger than she'd experienced in a long time pushed her deep into the seat and threatened to drop her back into unconsciousness; Kyle was burning them up to space, hard. The engine screamed, but they could see nothing through the tiny viewport windows, only the fog and the small tunnel Glimmer had opened in it for them from earlier.
They burst through the fog dome and Scavria's curve appeared, monstrous and titanic against the backdrop of stars and starships. Blood rushed back to Glimmer's head and her peripheral vision came back, only for her breath to squeeze from her lungs once more as Kyle angled them to the side and carved. A beam of energy as wide as the plane-tside keep was careened past them, lighting up the interior of the warbirds in a brilliant orange through the viewports.
The beam traveled down to the planet's surface and struck the dome. Pockets of black pocked the surface under the fog as it finally started to clear. Kyle let off, only to bank again as dozens of beams from the other ships in the fleet streaked down to the surface, chasing the first. He pushed them further, dodging the bombardment, zig-zagging every which direction until they were safely out of the line of fire. From there, he slowed them to a safe cruising speed, and everyone breathed easier. At least, for a few more seconds they did.
"What is going on down there?" one of the soldiers said. They'd unstrapped from the seat and were pressing their face against the window.
Everyone followed and crowded one side of the Warbird—Glimmer's side—to look. More than half the planet had been covered in a black substance, the same that had comprised the Trooper's body from earlier. A collective gasp rang out from the group as a massive face, surrounded by tendrils in the black, appeared beneath the dissolving fog around Tir.
"That," Glimmer said, pulling her attention away, unable to look at it any longer, "is what happens when an Abomination wakens during an infection."
A heaviness descended upon the group then. Scavria was lost, just like Rinne had been lost and just like Archanas had been lost. Just like countless other worlds during the first conflict had been lost. Not even the elation they'd felt at escaping with their lives could offset that.
"All the refugee megaliths made it safely to the carriers," Kyle said. The relief in his voice at having saved them was evident, the pall was still there. Billions of Scavrians, turned into thralls and burning to a crisp on the planet's surface because of the bombardment. They'd become an endangered race.
Glimmer gripped the armrests of her seat until her knuckles turned white and her fingers hurt. Her body couldn't decide whether to throw up, cry, or fall unconscious from the exertion. The pain in her wrists and joints from squeezing the chair so hard was the only thing keeping her grounded.
Kyle piloted the warbird back to the Omen-Kador in complete silence.
