In which things aren't quite as they should be for our reluctant Guardian.
Taffer Notes: Hi! HELLO! I've gone back and edited the last section of the previous chapter, as I've noticed that the majority of my readers didn't pick up on what exactly was happening to Nicole. The section should now be easier to digest and understand. For those who would rather not read that bit again: She's found her Void Light, which manifested in her instinctively blinking away from the Fallen.
Thank you all for reading. I appreciate every single one of you.
On a road of broken glass.
She doesn't know peace.
She'd like to. Really would. Even if, for a moment, she doesn't know why. Why the shadows choking the light from her eyes fill her with dread. Why the shreds of diluted purple seeping from her hands, as if she'd dipped them in slow churning fog, startle her. Why she grieves.
Then she remembers. It's really simple, too: She died.
Nicole stands in a well of darkness and grapples with knowing that she's dead. It bugs her, because it makes no sense. You don't die, she thinks, and then still… think about how you're dead. You die and you're gone. Done. She's lived a life convinced of that.
This? This isn't right.
When she tries to call out, her voice won't answer. It's lodged at the base of her throat, bundled in a heavy knot, and no matter how desperately she wants to scream it doesn't come loose. She tries, wordlessly, until she's out of breath.
But not everything is bound to silence, and while she claws at her throat with her eyes squeezed shut, a noise scratches at her ears. A tap-tap-tap against the hollow void, like a dog— a large one —trotting nearby.
She opens her eyes again. Sees nothing. Again. It's not just the nothing of a pitch-black night, or that of a mask pulled over her eyes. There is, instead, an absence. A lack of anything and everything.
The tap-tap-tap fades. She gives up searching for it. Instead, she looks down. At herself and she's somewhat glad that, at least, she is here. She's wearing her favourite sneakers; the slate ones with the dark red stitches and the one black and one grey set of laces. Her good old jeans, too. And the warm, soft flannel shirt, its cuffs folded in on themselves. They're the same clothes she had on when—
She died.
Nicole winces. Jerks her chin up.
A cold, jerky shudder climbs her spine and then she sees it. It's the mere idea of Light in the lack-of-all; the washed-out imprint of a white brush pressed to a black canvas. It's also very, very far away.
Nicole doesn't know peace, no. But she knows a deep-rooted yearning, grown tight around her heart. It tugs on the knot of fire burning in her chest and it wants her to walk. So she does.
Tug.
The first thing he felt when his sensors came back up was a quick, sharp jostle. Ghost's eye shuttered open. What'd happened? Oh. Yeah. Right. He'd been shot. Out of the air. And now he was being— dragged? He got pulled backwards, shell scraping over jagged rock until it lodged in a wooden twig, only to be yanked free again with a hard tug.
"Ow," he complained, noisily, while he gave himself a testing spin. Whatever'd been dragging him let go.
A fox, as it turned out. A small narrow thing with mottled red fur. Ghost squinted.
"What is it with you damned critters." He shot up a few inches, away from its nose. Tumbled. And realised how there was something seriously wrong with his shell. "You're everywhere. Now shoo. Shoo."
The fox told him off with a high pitched bark, leapt back, and vanished under the gnarly, dark branches of bushes that'd grown over the bits of Ketch strewn all around.
The Ketch.
The Fallen.
"Oh no. Oh no."
His Guardian.
Swaths of light bloom in the absence of all, surrounding her. Too many to count. They're thick flurries of bright, shattered crystal. Like snow leaking from the globes they ought to be in, dancing and swirling and ever out of reach. At times, she can hear them whisper. Talk. Sometimes one laughs. Or cries. Though it all sounds so very far away, like she's behind a thick concrete wall and they're neighbours too noisy past midnight.
And in-between them, always parallel to her, walks the wolf. Yes. Wolf. Not a dog after all. It's massive, has a coat of pitch black fur readily soaking up the faint glow falling from the swaths of light, and sharp, brilliant green eyes. When it fixed them on her once, she'd shrunk in on herself, terrified.
She makes an effort not to think of it. Pretend she's alone, she and the strange, whispering lights. She's tried walking towards them but can't ever reach them, as if every step pulls her away — or them away from her. Like the space between them distorts. Stretches. Until her stomach flips, makes her sick.
So, rather than driving herself to insanity over and over again, she sticks to her path. The one pulling her towards the first Light, the one fixed in the nothing. It grows bigger with every step. Round. Stronger. Not by much, but it does.
She doesn't know how long she's been walking when the wolf rumbles up a growl so deep it rattles her bones.
The first light dies.
His shell was ruined. Busted. Wrecked. Kaputt. Did he know just how badly? No, because he wasn't going to go ahead and drop it to look, not with how he still hadn't found his Guardian.
He'd (carefully) circled back to where he'd seen her last, but there'd been no sign of her. The Fallen were gone though. That was good. Or bad. What if they'd caught her? What if they'd taken her? What if— what if— what if—
Frustrated, he climbed high— yeah, so that made him a target in case the Fallen hadn't all left, but shut up and mind your own business —and flared his shell out to push a scan out across all the ketch debris. It pulsed once, then twice, before he caught it.
Her Light.
"Gotcha…" Shell clicking back together, and hope soaring about as quick as he was rushing over to where she ought to be, he... found... absolutely nothing. Okay, maybe not strictly speaking nothing nothing, because her Light signature was right here. An imprint of it. An echo. Void Light, his readings indicated.
He twirled once.
She'd used it.
His Guardian had found her Light.
The wolf doesn't frighten her near as much as what crouches in the Deep. It lives — is — wants in the absence of light. Of warmth. Of life. And it hungers. There, it spins a seeping siren song that drags at her heart with promises of ending what's begun and beginning what ought to end. It tells her it can unmake her. Remake her.
The wolf growls. Another light dies. Snuffed out with a hollow, sharp intake. Then another. This one cracks. Tears. Comes undone like a rush of moths parting, carried on silver wings — until they're shredded by a vortex built of malice.
It screamed.
One by one lights die. Some with a quiet whimper, some in wails of agony. Nicole knows that the Deep takes them. That it'll take her, too.
She runs.
The wolf keeps pace.
Blood. He found blood. Proooobably hers, considering it was human and, hello, there weren't any other of those around here. He was 99% certain, anyway.
Should have recorded her biosignature, Ghost, he thought while he stuck his proverbial nose closer to a particular patch of grass, the tips of its blades coated in muddy red. A single set of footprints laid under it. One. Not a bunch leading to them, but literally just the one, as if she'd dropped right out of the sky. Which finally made perfect sense, considering he'd been guided here by another spike of residual Void Light, this one especially strong.
His Guardian had blinked.
He turned around, his shell sinking over his eye (not entirely on purpose, the blasted thing was acting up), and looked back the way he'd come. Addendum, she'd blinked pretty damn far. Not just once, either, and each blink had taken her farther away from the Fallen.
He shimmied back. Good. Great. Perfect. That meant two things. A, his Guardian had the stuff of champions in her, and, B, he was on the right track and all he had to do was... was…
His eye caught on more grass as he passed over it, ready to track the faint trace of Void Light to the next burst. He stopped. Turned. Scooted up in the air a little more to get a better look, and stared down at an almost perfect circle of vivid green.
Because there wasn't much green elsewhere else nearby, really. The grass at the circle's edges was long and wilted, while the one inside it was short and thick. Like it was spring and it'd only just sprouted and not had to struggle— year after year —against all the crap that'd leaked from the crashed ketch.
Eight white buds poked from the ground inside the circle. Daisies.
"Okay, this is getting weird." Ghost swung back around, kicked off a bunch of queries to help him explain this all, and hoped he'd turn something up before he found her.
Since she'd have questions and he ought to have the answers. That was his job, yeah?
Her limbs are heavy. So heavy. It calls for her. From all around. The Light and the Deep, they sing their song until she shatters. And falls.
There.
His Guardian had collapsed beyond the ketch's impact zone, where weed-choked grass met mossy rock. That was where he found her, laid out on her side and very, ah, dead.
"Oh dear."
He dropped to a few inches off the ground and swept a scan over her. Shot to the gut (Ouch). It'd torn right through the shirt, left a gaping hole in it and her. And she'd bled out. That was the sort of thing that happened when you left your Ghost behind. Or when your Ghost didn't give you proper armour and told you to just throw on a too-big coat instead before running from a pack of Fallen. Guilt pinched at him. And then pinched harder just as he got himself ready to reignite the soft thrum her Light tickling at his core.
He fell lower, enough to touch the ground, and hesitated. If he could have, he'd have held his breath.
She hadn't wanted this. She'd told him. Fiercely. For all intents and purposes, his Guardian had been at peace and he'd pulled her from it and into a world made of everything but. So maybe he shouldn't. Maybe he should just leave her here? Let her have the peace he'd taken from her?
Ghost shivered, sections of his busted shell sliding together noisily.
He'dreallywantedaGuardianthough.
He looked her over again. At the half-dried pool of blood soaked into the ground under her. Her right hand, stretched out awkwardly, fingers coated in dirt. Grasping for nothing. Her left, hanging there as if she'd clutched at the hole in her, maybe to try and stop the bleeding.
Her eyes were open. Sightless. Her mouth twisted open and features stiff. Pained.
She didn't look peaceful. She looked scared and desperate and he couldn't fathom leaving her like this.
. . .
She'd just have to shout at him some more later. He could handle it.
Nicole falls through her own making and unmaking. She loses count on how often she goes around and around and around, but it feels like she falls forever. Until the warmth under her heart erupts in a white-hot blaze.
She'd not realised she hadn't been breathing actual air until what felt like a fistful of it got stuck halfway down her throat. She sat bolt upright, clutched at her stomach, and blinked through the splotches and dots dancing in her eyes until they finally cleared out. All except one, the whirring one.
It all felt horribly familiar; the disorientation, the blurry vision, her lungs needing to find their rhythm again, and Ghost.
"Welcome back, Guardian."
Nicole's fell back down, her hands still clutching the shirt at her midriff and stared at the sky. They were dry. Her hands. And the pain? That was gone. Along with the darkness. The nothing. The absence.
"I died." She kept staring up at the clouds. So many clouds. Never had she thought she'd be happy to see a bunch of grey clouds promising rain, but here she was, thinking they were the prettiest things ever after all she'd seen for good as forever was darkness.
Ghost rolled into view. "Correct."
He looked a real mess, his once mostly white shell covered in black scorch marks and deep gauges for scratches. A wide, frayed crack ran along one of the triangular tips at his front. When he leaned to the side, it wobbled slightly. She half expected it to break right off and land on her face.
"Again. I died again. People don't die twice and... and... live."
"Guardians with Ghosts do," he supplied. And when she anger flared hotly— because how did he fucking dare give her that Guardian bullshit again —his eye flicked to the right, and then the left, to her fingers digging into the ground. He backed off. Though not by much.
"Look— look, I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do, alright? It's my fault you're here and it's, uh, partially, my fault the Fallen got us. Got you. I couldn't just—"
"Partially?"
He froze and, bit by bit, sunk to the side and down.
"Partially? This entire thing is your fault!" Nicole pushed herself up, got her feet under her, and felt her voice cracking up her throat, hoarse and hot. "Me being here is your fault." She jabbed a finger at him. He shrunk back. "Me getting chased by a bunch of four-armed things is your fault."
"Falle—"
"Shut. Up! I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear any of it I just want to go home, but I can't and that's your fault too just like it's your fault I got fucking shot—" She took a step towards him and the anger boiled over. Drummed heat from her heart to her bones. Set her arm on fire. "—that I died!"
Nicole yelped.
The bit with her arm getting set on fire? Yeah. Not some pretty turn of phrase to put words to how she felt. No, it literally did just that. A vortex of flame spun from her wrist. Wrapped around her hand. Lashed out with greedy tongues, aimlessly licking at the air. One barely missed Ghost. Oh, and her coat sleeve caught fire.
She stared at it. Dumbly. A heartbeat later, the flames that'd sprung from her arm dissipated, leaving a searing sting behind. The coat kept burning.
Why... how…
"Take it off! Guardian— Guardian! Your coat. Take. It. Off."
Fire—ouch—hot!
She shrugged out of it. Peeled the burning sleeve off, threw it all to the ground, and (because what the hell else was she supposed to do?) started stomping on it. Wildly. She kept stomping long after the fire was out and then gave it another twist of her heel just for good measure.
At some point, she'd started screaming.
"I think it's dead," Ghost said, all of a sudden hovering entirely too close again. She sucked in a breath and shot him a look. His shell twitched. "Sorry. Ah, are you feeling better?"
. . .
"Am I feeling better? I just... made fire. With my hand. Fire," Nicole said, flatly. And then the pain registered, made her hiss and whine and shake her hand out uselessly. The skin on it was an angry red and covered in blisters.
"You did." He scooted closer by half an inch. "Hold still."
Nicole grunted, but did as instructed, warily watching how his shell bloomed open, spilling all that blue light from it again that'd chased off the bone-deep cold last night. The sting on her hand faded — and her skin was good as new. She blinked.
"That fire, Guardian, was your Light," he said while she stared at her hand, pumping her fingers into a fist. He sounded… what? Proud? She wished he didn't. "Or a manifestation of it, anyway. It's also how you got away from the Fallen."
"I didn't. I didn't get away." But something in her chest squirmed.
Ghost turned to her, fast enough to make the half-cracked-off piece of his shell wobble again. He didn't say anything though. Just stared.
She huffed, a sudden flush creeping up her neck, and stooped down to pick up the coat. Patting it down, she tried to corral her thoughts back together, which had run off into all sorts of unhelpful directions.
"I don't know what happened back there," she admitted after a while, slipping back into the coat. Sure, one sleeve was ruined, but a coat was a coat. Suppose. "It was weird. Everything was… purple. And felt like I was getting pulled through my bellybutton, over and over again. One moment I was here—" She gestured lamely to the left, then the right. "—the next I was elsewhere. And it wouldn't stop."
"You blinked."
"I what?"
"Blinked. Teleported. Which! Which means you're either a Hunter or a Warlock and—" His words picked up speed, like someone'd popped a hole into a dam, and Nicole threw her hand up. The one that'd been a blistered mess a moment ago. He fell silent, trailing a quiet, whiny electronic whirr.
"Stop," she said before pinching at the bridge of her nose. A dull pain throbbed behind her eyes. "I'm getting a headache…"
"Well, Warlocks are prone to headaches—"
She glared at him.
"Got it. Stopping."
Nicole grimaced and turned on the spot. Fire. She'd made fire. She'd teleported. Blinked. She'd died. She'd wandered at the edge of the Deep with nothing but a wolf and dying lights for company. And now she stood out here in the middle of a no-where that'd been her home once and was now everything but. Swallowing, she shrunk deeper into the singed coat that'd belonged to someone else once. Someone who was dead now. Someone who, hopefully, knew peace.
Not like her.
She didn't know peace. But she knew a deep-rooted yearning, one grown tight around her heart. Nicole's eyes fixed to the horizon. It tugged on the knot of fire burning softly in her chest. Willed her to walk. So she did.