and forget the lost Lenore


Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.

Content Warning: Nazis. They're dead, but when someone like Glaistig Uaine is in the picture, that doesn't mean they can't still throw slurs around.


Now that Taylor wasn't panicking about the possibility of Glaistig Uaine (Morrigan? She wasn't quite sure what the situation there was, just that it was a lot more complicated than being solely one or the other) tearing the life from the other parahumans fighting with her, she could afford to actually think through her reactions instead of just-

Taylor paused as first a forest of steel blades and then a helix of actinic light sought purchase in her flesh. Neither found so much as a foothold, and as she turned to face the two capes who hurled them at her, metal squealed as she forced her way through to face the two, hovering there in all their spectral glory.

"How the mighty have fallen," said Taylor, not granting Kaiser the indignity of even a sneer. "Tell me, was it Lung or the Fairy Queen who took your head?"

"The jap bastard will get what is coming to him," said Kaiser, oddly toneless despite talking about the man he all-but-confirmed killed him. "For now, we will have to satiate ourselves with wiping a degenerate like yourself off the face of the planet. It is a shame that Hookwolf failed in his attempt, but you will find us a far more capable foe."

Taylor snorted. "For a given definition of capable, perhaps." She walked up the stream of energy that Purity's shade was attempting to strike her down with like it was nothing so much as a summer breeze. She drew on Odin's depth of experience and regal tongue to express her disdain. "Do you honestly think that you can do what an Endbringer wielding the power to rend space and time asunder couldn't, what the Simurgh failed to do before her, and claim a true victory over me, ye king of a fallen Empire and his discarded consort?"

"Even you are not immune to the power of the dead," sneered Kaiser, something like triumph in his echoing voice. "But no, we are not the true answer to one such as you."

Before Taylor could turn around, she saw as the world around her was drained of color, and she became aware of a tremendous metaphysical weight pressing down on her from every direction at once. The Administrator's connection to her grew faint and distant as Purity's energy blast petered out, and she felt a distant pressure at the small of her back, as if someone were trying to use a felt-tip marker on her.

She turned to see another shade, this one of a boy perhaps ten or twelve years old. He looked far less human than Kaiser and Purity, even despite the way their powers obscured their faces, with eyes resembling yawning voids, a gaping mouth full of half-rotted teeth, and taloned fingers that looked like someone had flensed the flesh away from bone before sharpening what remained to a point.

"Die," the shade snarled, and without hesitating Taylor reached out one hand, settled it on its head, and squeezed.

It only took a moment for the shade's skull to shatter under her strength, causing it to fade into nothingness. For a moment, the weight of the external force pressing down on her doubled and redoubled, trying to drag her back into the position she had been at its inception, but it was nowhere near as strong as the blast that the three-headed Endbringer had hit her with earlier that week. In response, Taylor flicked a kaunaz at the border of the monochromatic area. It flickered once before the colors reappeared in a manner not dissimilar to what she would expect of a painting pulled from the sea.

"Valhalla bars its doors to you," snapped Taylor, slashing a hand through both of the shades who had distracted her. Once they had discorporated, Taylor clapped her hands once.

The sound boomed out for hundred of feet as a shockwave slammed outwards, splattering some of the closer crows and knocking others out of the air. With the birds out of the way, Taylor could now see how well the other capes fighting with her were holding up.

Victoria seemed to be doing the best, surrounded by a faint nimbus of golden light that deflected birds and power attacks alike as she swooped, leaving a trail of that same golden light in her wake, and driving punches at the shades who were circling her. As Taylor watched, one of the motes connected with a shade who didn't quite manage to dodge in time, and in a flash of brilliant light, the top half of it vanished, leaving a couple of fingers and its legs behind for a moment before they vanished in a puff of feathers that were scattered in the wind of her passage.

Styx was less overtly threatening, but every few seconds she threw out a shadowy blade to carve through another shade, and whichever shade had their spectral flesh parted was forced to retreat out of sight to recover. Various specters hurled attacks, both with the weapons of a bygone age and with the powers of parahumans she vaguely remembered discussing in World Events class, but none of them did more than smudge her form, a sign of damage that didn't last.

In comparison, Night and Fog were less oppressive forces, but so far they were drawing their fair share of attacks from where they were lurking in an alley, sending specters fleeing every now and again looking ragged with claw and teeth marks.

Seeing that everyone else was doing tolerably, Taylor took a moment, punctuated by the sound of crackling lightning, and just focused on perceiving the way that the shades were connected back to the Morrigan, still concealed within the whirling storm of birds. It took multiple tries, and even her catching another shade and tearing it apart to find the link more directly, but eventually she traced the link back to the spiritual form of the Morrigan.

It was not a pretty sight.

Three bodies were lashed together at the torso with crude ropes that looked to be made of human hair and caught within a pit full of grasping limbs coming up to their knees, all of them deeply injured and bleeding from multiple places. All three of them looked like they would have been striking if not conventionally beautiful, in other circumstances, with black hair silkier than her own despite patches having been torn out (presumably to bind the three of them together), almost jadelike smoothness to their well-muscled skin, and three differently colored sets of eyes, each striking in their intensities, but the visible pain they were in put paid to that. One of them was simply staring into nothingness, her heavily bruised face slack as her feet still marched onwards while getting nowhere, and another screamed in endless agony, all of her limbs covered in horrific burns and weeping fluids. The third was the least injured, glaring hatefully at Taylor with the head of a spear driven through her side in such a way that it could have only missed her heart by a matter of inches.

"Coward!" howled the glaring one hoarsely, one hand still held to her still-bleeding wound and the other extended in a claw.

Immediately, the crows changed their flight pattern. Instead of wheeling around the battlefield aimlessly, devouring insects and otherwise blocking visibility, thousands of corvid eyes snapped to Taylor, and they all dove towards her with reckless abandon, deathly power gathering around their beaks and claws as raw hatred expanded from their bodies.

Taylor almost lost focus on the spiritual form of the Morrigan as she raised one hand, a barrier expanding from the algiz glowing on her palm, but Odin's heir did not lightly forget what she had learned.

Gebo peeled itself off of Taylor's other hand, flapping like a butterfly if butterflies glowed golden, and left the physical world behind.

She lost track of the rune as the murder of crows slammed into her barrier, cracking under the weight of so many fragments of death's power eroding through the energy she'd imbued it with, but it served its purpose, and she let it dissolve into glimmering fragments.

Before the crows could close the distance to her body, she manifested kaunaz to assert control over the energy of death that the crows carried with them. The rune turned from golden light to black, flaky solid as it became more fully a channel of what energies the Morrigan could call upon, resembling charcoal if charcoal flakes corroded away at asphalt. Taylor waited just long enough for the color to stop changing, then swiped her hand through it, feeling a chill as she shattered the physical representation of the Morrigan's power, but seeing the crows dissolve into an aimless mass of feathers and bodies, no longer driven by the deathly power of a half-dead goddess, was well worth such a minor inconvenience.

"Impossible!" snapped the one lucid aspect of the Morrigan, glaring at Taylor like… well, like she'd just usurped her power over death. "You will die for that!"

"I cannot allow that, Anand," said Odin, one blue eye meeting the Morrigan's glare with the kind of serenity that shed her hatred like water off the back of a duck. "Your agony cannot stand in the way of the greatest champion this planet can muster, not when we stand under such threat."

She sneered. "Like you would know. Earth's greatest defender, vanquished in Ragnarök without passing on the power you bore for the good of all. Tell me, has your hypocrisy blinded your remaining eye yet?"

"Even the power of the Runes could only do so much," he replied heavily. "My power to act was all but destroyed by Fenrir, and even the power of my benefactor could only do so much to avert that."

Morrigan- Anand?- opened her mouth to reply, but before she did, the butterfly-like rune alit upon the forehead of the screaming, burned body.

In a flash of golden light, and an accompanying drain on Taylor's strength, it vanished, and though both other bodies of the Morrigan flinched back from the flash, her goal had already been achieved.

Before her eyes, the weeping fluids stopped dropping, and the uncanny expanse of exposed, charred flesh and bone seemed to almost liquefy and flow together. After a moment, it had fully sealed itself, and from there, the gaunt figure of the woman filled out once again, the healthy muscle of a spear-wielder inflating into existence through the power of Taylor's will.

The screaming petered out a mere moment later, and bloodred eyes blinked down at newly restored flesh. "I am… healed?"

The black-eyed, glaring head, only intensified her hateful stare. "How dare you use his power against us!"

"His power?" asked Odin, not quite thunderous but louder than strictly necessary. "No, Anand, the Runes are more than even one such as the Golden Man could dare to bind to his will, even if they weren't aware and capable of holding a grudge that would put an Olympian's to shame."

Taylor snapped her fingers, another instance of gebo appearing for a moment before bursting into a flare of golden light. As the light faded, the battered woman stopped marching, then blinked before turning eerie yellow eyes on her, rotating her head to the side in a birdlike gesture. "Galdrafǫðr?" she asked, and some part of Taylor understood the name, a title Odin had earned centuries before Ragnarök through skill at weaving magical songs.

"Not quite," said Odin. "My heir is the one who has repaired your flesh, Macha."

The eyes grew less eerie as the woman inclined her head to Taylor, blinking twice before crinkling in a smile. "You have our gratitude, child."

Anand sneered. "She is still complicit in the death of Dagda, of Scathach, of-"

"Enough, sister," said both of the other bodies at once.

The red-eyed one reached over and flicked Anand on the forehead. "You know as well as I the constraints Odin was working under to so much as offer us what information he could. It is not his fault that we were… too proud to be cautious, in the face of incomplete information. Now, offer apologies to the girl."

"And to your host," hissed the Administrator, raising one leg and slashing a claw through the ropes of human hair binding the three of them together. Anand staggered, but both of the other two took one step and crossed the distance to offer their support to their sister as she fell out of the pit of grasping hands.

Obscured by the three of them was a girl, insubstantial and waifish in more than just build. Her blonde hair was lank and ragged, her green eyes were dull, and the pit of hands were slowly but surely dragging her down.

The Administrator hissed out a rebuke in a language beyond human comprehension, but one that Taylor understood as a rebuke to the Keeper of the Dead. The pit burbled back, whining about some form of restrictions, but the Administrator replied with a command, and the pit shrank into a bangle that attached itself to the girl's wrist, giving off the aura of a six-year-old sulking about not being allowed to have the entire cookie jar.

While everyone else save Odin were still goggling at the girl, Taylor strode over, seized the spearhead sticking out of Anand's side and tore it out, taking with it a substantial chunk of flesh.

Anand howled, but before she could really start bleeding, Taylor flashed gebo again, and the hole healed over. Another flash of gebo repaired the half inch of ragged, torn-off wood that had been the haft, and she presented the spear to the one Odin had called Macha. "Hold on to this, I don't trust Anand not to try and stab me with it."

Macha inclined her head. "I am in your debt, child," she said, taking the weapon. "I will care for Gae Bolg until it finds its new wielder."

"Right. Now then, we should get out of here before the cops start showing up." Taylor tore open a portal to the tree house. "Victoria! Styx! Night and Fog! Pack it up, we're leaving!"

The named capes came, albeit a little warily at the figure of Glaistig Uaine, who had taken to hugging herself and shivering while on a less physical plane the Administrator had taken to stroking her hair, but they went through the portal with no argument, and once Odin had ushered the triple goddess and their host through, Taylor followed, closing the portal just as the sirens became audible over the sounds of very confused crows.


And that's that!

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