…a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore…
Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.
"Taylor," said Victoria, eyeing the former Night and Fog warily. "Who are your new friends?"
"My name is Joanna," said Fog, scratching at their jaw irritably. "I'm what happens when you give a Nazi a cookie as a trans person."
"Same boat," is all that Night said, clenching and relaxing their fists rhythmically.
"Right, yeah, that would do it," said Victoria. "Alright, let's get out of here before someone decides to take issue with us being here."
"You can say that again," said Bella, frowning as she wiped the blood off her fingers on Krieg's shirt. "Did Clausewitz piss off fuckin' Felix Swoop or something? The whole neighborhood is absolutely covered with crows, and it's giving me the heebie-jeebies."
A chill ran down Taylor's spine. Something was wrong, here, and while she wasn't sure what was going on, she did know that they had to get the innocents out.
"Styx," she said, "can you take Night and Fog with you when you teleport?"
She snorted. "I wish. No, it's just me."
"Right, okay. I-"
"Hey, we can fight!" objected Night, flesh rippling with her agitation.
"I'm not saying you can't," said Taylor. "What I am saying is that you're not the one who can make an Endbringer hurt, and you're not used to fighting with me like Styx and Glory Girl are, so it would be a good idea to make sure you can disengage and escape if the need arises."
Night looked mutinous, but she backed down, so Taylor was willing to count that as a win. "Right, stay behind me," said Taylor, calling her helmet back from where she left it on the table and planting it firmly on her own head. "I can't promise that I'd be able to fully negate any attack that might come our way, but I should be able to slow it down enough that you could do something about it."
With that, Taylor hopped out the window, landing lightly on her toes and then slamming her heels down firmly, sending a shockwave radiating out from her, ruffling the feathers of the birds all around her as she drew a spear out of thin air and raised it into a high guard.
The other four capes followed her out of the house with less theatricality but no less wariness, forming a wedge with the two formerly brainwashed capes at the back.
Taylor strode forwards, barely paying attention to the chunks of Crusader that had been hastily hidden in a bush or the bloodstains they left behind.
The instant that her foot hit the asphalt, she felt something change, and it took a moment to realize that all of the crows perched all over the neighborhood had all turned beady gazes to Taylor.
They all rose from the houses at once, wings flapping in eerie unison, and converged, forming a writhing, almost hateful ball of flapping wings before vanishing in a burst of not-light.
In their place stood a girl.
She was petite, almost gaunt, her yellow hair lank and stringy and framing an unhealthily pale face. She stood unnaturally, appearing half an inch from tipping over backwards and smashing her head on the blacktop, and her limbs were stiff, too-thin fingers twitching at irregular intervals as her head tilted to the side in a curiously birdlike motion inside the cowl of her dark, ragged cloak.
She opened her mouth, spilling out fog, and though it didn't move, she still spoke, voice coming out in a broken chorus of disharmonic voices. "So," came the discordant sound, "this is the child who believes that she can bend the will of the interlopers to serve us."
Taylor noticed the divine pressure radiating off of the girl immediately, but it took her a tad bit longer to place her face. After all, Glaistig Uaine had gone to the Birdcage before she was really old enough to understand who she was and what the situation around her entailed, so she'd not had much cause to look her up, but she had found one picture when she was doing research a while back, just after Myrddin had sought her aid in the matter.
"Morrigan, I presume," said Taylor, gesturing for the others to stay behind her. "Is there something I might do for you?"
"So courteous," she echoed, lips stretching so far that the skin splits and blood seeps out to coat her teeth. "Unfortunately, polite child, all I can- all I must ask from you is your life, yours and that of your companions."
The other capes bristled, with Bella's form shrinking into a single point before expanding into a hulking mass of shadow in the rough shape of a bear and Fog already starting to drift apart, sulfurous smoke on the wind. "I'm afraid I cannot allow that, my lady," said Taylor, breathing in both physically and mystically.
The Morrigan's (and she was the Morrigan, now, no hint of the child whose body she wears or the whimsical cape who spread fear like butter on bread, just war and death) eyes leached black as Taylor drew in magic from the world, a chill spreading from the Morrigan as she tutted theatrically. "Children these days," she said, dismissively. "Did not the old one-eyed spirit teach you to obey your elders?"
"What can I say," Taylor replied, her very voice crackling with the weight of the phenomenal cosmic power that permeated every inch of her flesh. "Last time I offered blind obedience to authority, I lost an eye."
Then, she moved, and battle commenced.
The first and most important thing that Taylor needed to do in this fight, she thought, allowing the conjured spear to return to wherever it existed before she called it, was prevent the Fairy Queen's power from simply reaching out and tearing the life from the other combatants.
The crows were a problem, yes, and so were the ghosts of parahumans and warriors past, but they weren't the kind of problems that the other parahumans couldn't handle. Already, Taylor could hear the heavy pawsteps of Styx's ursine form and the deforming of flesh that Night brings to bear as she took her own battle form, Victoria's blows causing thunderclaps in both the material and the spiritual foes she strikes and the sizzle of caustic gases eating away at feathers.
But those were problems that the others could solve, and this was not.
A moment of thought had Taylor inscribing berkanan into the air, power bound into the shape of the symbol of birth, the creation of life in face of its cessation.
Morrigan flinched back, a hint of green glimmering in her eyes for a moment before she snarled and straightened her body, unnaturally rigid. She screamed, a sound far beyond any mortal's ken, and through her scream her power resonated.
It washed over Taylor harmlessly, nowhere close to the power of the Damsel of Distress' power, but the other four capes fighting with her were all staggered somewhat. Fog ceased their expansion and Night froze in human flesh, staggering back with blood trickling from her ears. Victoria was the least affected, her power's protections not insurmountable but able to blunt what the divine mantle she bore could not withstand. Styx, though, her reaction was odd- she froze for a moment, head pulsating, before roaring her own defiance in turn and rending a spirit of an old Frankish swordsman in twain, something about her seeming to drink in the dissipating power contained within the specter.
Taylor was jolted back to the battle at hand by an impact against her armored torso, and turned to see an echo of the departed Crusader attempting to run her through.
One punch was enough to dispel the apparition, but the message that he brought with him was taken to heart- distraction was death on a battlefield like this, even with divine fortitude, and with a momentary exercise of will, sowilo flashes briefly into existence before detonating in an orb of sunlight, doing nothing to the physically incarnated but eroding the tenuous hold that the summoned dead had upon this world.
"What," sneered Morrigan with a too-small mouth, "do you resent the loss of your einherjaren so much that you cannot allow me the use of my sworn servitors?" Without waiting for an answer, she lunged forwards, claws grasping, and unlike Hookwolf, her clawing hurt.
Not a lot, mind, Taylor had been hurt worse both in this body and in Odin's memories, but enough that she could not afford to dismiss this foe as she had others.
"I have never known the servitude of the fallen," said Taylor, shoving the blonde that Morrigan was inhabiting back outside the reach of her shorter arms.
For a moment, they circled one another and Taylor attempted to understand what the situation was with the Morrigan- the exact way that the dying goddess had latched onto a child bearing a shard of Parahuman might, the way in which their spirits intertwined in horrible pain, the raw pain of god and child and shard, all bound together- but she barely understood her own situation with the power of the Runes bolstering and reinforcing her beyond her spellcasting, and before she could ask the underpinnings of the universe to lay bare their secrets in this case, the Morrigan lunged forwards again, claws grasping at Taylor's face.
The talons that the girl's flesh had been twisted at sparked as they sheared through her helm, but the enchanted metal gave her enough time to grasp the grasping limb before it could inflict more than scratches on her.
Taylor bore down, feeling as bone splintered and broke under her grip, but the girl's flesh went gray for an instant and her arm restored itself to wholeness in Taylor's grasp.
"Like it?" she asked, bloodstained smile once again too wide and weeping droplets of blood. "This is the power that you could have had were you not so foolish, had you bound the unquiet dead to your service against their master."
"I see no need," said Taylor, lifting one leg to kick backwards and shatter a former Alexandria Package that Taylor vaguely knew had been one of many heroes who had failed to stop the Fairy Queen from exerting her will, "to rely on the unquiet dead. The living are capable are more than unswerving service- they can be true friends, and it is that power more than any other that will bring about the downfall of the Golden Man," she continued, a flicker of unbreakable will leaking through into her voice at the prospect of fighting the first superhero.
"Foolish girl," Morrigan sneered. "You lack the tools to stand against the Adversary. Only through the Sting of his mightiest weapon can he be slain, and only under the utmost secrecy to prevent his mighty Eye from scrying the truth ere my design comes to fruition."
Taylor allows herself a moment of theatricality, speaking in the lowered register of the man who originally said the like she borrowed: "I find your lack of faith… disturbing."
"Arrogant child! You cannot hope to understand a design decades in the making, not one of this complexity!" Morrigan drove her leg up between Taylor's legs, weakening her grip enough to slip away and drive Taylor further back with a spray of hardened, bladed crow's feathers.
"I am no less capable of understanding your designs than I am Loki's," she said, feeling Odin's disappointment at how far the Phantom Queen had fallen in the back of her head swelling until she wasn't sure where her pity ended and his sentiment began, "and more to the point, I have the power to stand up to him that you lack! You cannot survive the baleful power of an Endbringer turned to your destruction, as I can! You lack the will to persevere through thick and thin without anything anchoring you to life save spite and disdain!" Taylor wasn't sure how she knew what she was saying to be true, some aspect of Odin's power perhaps, but she wouldn't look this particular gift horse in the mouth now, when she was already fighting off an ancient being who had lost themselves. "You are fallen from what you once were, and by clawing your way up by destroying a mortal mind, fallen even further!"
"Speak not to me of falls," Morrigan spat, "ye who could have stopped the Golden Man before he even landed were you not playing at retirement! I will take no counsel from the hoary Hangi, whose time upon the noose has not brought him nearly the wisdom he thought it had!"
With that, she shrunk and twisted with the sound of popping bones, taking the form of a crow and vanishing into the circling flock with another spray of razor-sharp feathers.
And that's that!
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