.

Supergirl: The Elegy of Stars

Chapter 5: Modulation

Kara Zor-El was no stranger to the sounds of gunfire.

On Krypton, she had studied and beheld the use of plasma weapons. She had witnessed the gun salutes of the Sapphire Guard in front of the Council of Five in Kandor. While in that very city, she had beheld the stockier variants utilized by Sagitari, and once, seen them use such a weapon on an uppity Rankless. Even in her home city-state, the Argonautica had been scarce more accommodating. And while she had fortunately not lived through any period of strife on Krypton sans Zod's short-lived coup attempt, she was well aware of the rare but intense conflicts that had blighted Krypton over the last 100,000 cycles, not to mention conflicts fought beyond its gravity well.

While the nature of Earth's weaponry was less advanced, the principle of "point, pull, shoot" remained the same across time, space, and species. Greater death, always unleashed at greater distances. Entire worlds reduced to ruins by projectiles fired from millions of miles away, from primitive mass drivers to the dreaded nova javelins – weapons powerful enough to shatter entire moons.

She had beheld guns on the monitor at her adoptive parents' home. She had seen guns held by soldiers, terrorists, and militants, she had seen weapons of war unleash their payloads from afar. If a kryptonian force ever came to Earth, it would be like Pizzaro's conquest of the Incas, but in the end, war was war, and weapons were weapons.

People bled. People screamed. People died. While on Krypton she had been kept at arm's length from violence, sequestered inside El Spire for most of her life (and certainly during Zod's coup), on Earth, she had come to view the images on the screen in dread. Arguably, it was even worse here, as unlike kryptonian plasma weapons, human ballistics tended to maim rather than disintegrate. Death still occurred, but not nearly as fast, and nowhere near as painless.

And now, the sounds of war had returned. Even stripped of her powers, unable to see beyond the door of her cell, Kara could hear them all the same.

The rat-tat-tat of gunfire. The siren. The shouts. The screams.

She crouched on her bed and cradled herself, rocking back and forth like a child. Even a day ago, she would have shed no tears for her jailers. No doubt many of them hadn't chosen to be here, but as firm as the chains of command could be, her own chains had never been loosened. And as the blood at the end of her mattress reminded her, there were plenty of men here who'd done things of their own volition.

Like the scientists, they had made her bleed.

But she could still hear the sounds of battle, and in it all, something else. A sound not made by bullets, but something heavier. Harder.

There were other sounds as well. The 'thomps' of explosive weaponry. An intercom voice that was mentioning a containment breach on level six.

She closed her eyes, but listened all the same. Before long, the siren remained, but all else had fallen silent.

It was silence that lasted an eternity. Silence that reminded her of her pod – that moment when she'd left Krypton, and beheld the golden sphere in the void. The silence that had assaulted her when she'd emerged in Earth's star system. Silence unlike anything she had known on Earth, as from the moment she'd arrived, she'd started to hear things her ears weren't made for.

Silence that was broken by the sound of an impact. As a fist-shaped (and sized) indent appeared in her cell room door.

She screamed. Screamed again come the second blow as she scrambled back against the wall. Like a child hiding from a parent, or the hellgrammite in the closet. As she well knew, there was no shortage of monsters in this universe.

And as the door was kicked down, as the woman stepped forward, Kara could not shake the fear she was looking at one.

"Told you I'd get us out of here," the woman said in Kryptonese.

Kara stared at the woman as she walked in. The woman that she'd spoken to before she'd let sleep claim her.

The woman walked into the room, beneath the glow of the red lights, apparently unaffected.

She watched the woman look up at the LEDs before she smashed them with her fist. "Quaint," she murmured. "They tried something similar on me."

The question of why the woman was unaffected by the lights was added to Kara's questions list (most of them began with "how" and "what"), currently increasing at an exponential rate. But actually asking any of those questions was put on hold, as Kara stared at the woman before her.

The woman was kryptonoid. Pale skin. Striking blue eyes. Red lips. Golden hair that fell down the back of her neck like a waterfall of light. A muscular frame. Like Kara, she wore a prison suit, but unlike Kara, she brimmed with energy, showing no signs of muscular dystrophy or any other malady that Earth's environment had inflicted on Kara when she'd first arrived. The way she carried herself, the tone of her body…this was a woman of power, and not just the type a yellow sun could bestow upon a child of Krypton. The air itself felt alive with her presence.

Attractive too, in a sense – youthful perfection that only kryptonian medical technology could achieve. But despite the smile, despite the light that danced in her eyes, Kara felt no relief in being free. There was a feeling to this woman. A cruelty. A feeling that, even after spending a decade in this abyss, caused the gene-scion of Zor-El and Alura In-Ze to shiver.

"Has your tongue failed you?" the woman sneered.

Kara remained silent. Even as the woman extended her hand.

"Come," she said, her tone now warmer. "There is nothing these worms can do to harm me, but the shooting will resume soon. And if you do not wish to suffer the effects of lead passing through flesh, sunbathing is in order."

"It's night," Kara whispered.

"Your point?"

"You might be able to take bullets, but I can't."

"The full moon is out. The sun always follows."

If the woman was trying to reassure her, it failed. After her first six months on Earth, she'd indeed felt the light of the moon upon her skin, but compared to the sun, it was a candle to a bonfire. And yet, weak as she was, perhaps welcome…if she lived to see it.

Maybe this woman was a kryptonian. Certainly there was no reason not to think so at this point. But the hand that remained extended towards her was covered in blood - the same blood that coated the woman's prison garb. None of which was her own.

"This is your only chance," the woman said, her smile fading. "Take it, or stay in darkness."

Kara took a breath, and took the woman's hand in turn. After ten years of darkness, she was willing to take a chance on freedom.

She stumbled to her feet – ten years of isolation had cost her. Her body, thin and frail, not just from malnourishment or lack of sunlight, but from the effects of Earth's weaker gravity. Without a yellow sun to charge her muscles, they had atrophied over the last decade. Her heart weakening, her bones becoming all the more brittle.

She had felt it take its toll on her, but now, to actually walk in freedom, or as close as she had come in a decade?

She walked. She stumbled. The woman let her fall.

"How much has this world cost you?" she whispered.

Kara wanted to say it was not so much what the world had cost her, but the people in it. She also wanted to ask for help, if only for a moment.

Still, she bit her tongue – she had learnt on a distant world the value of being able to fall and rise again.

And rise she did. Even if the sight she beheld within the corridor caused her soul to fall.

Bodies. Blood. Blood on bodies, bodies separated into pieces, blood so far away from the bodies that it didn't seem possible. Bodies of soldiers.

Also, shell casings. Lots and lots of shell casings. The smell of gunpowder drifted through the air, and Kara knew it wasn't some case of super-smell. She was smelling what anyone could. Seeing what anyone could.

By Rao, was that hand still twitching?

"Come," said the woman, as she began to walk through the valley of death. Footsteps that Kara did not follow – this woman was not King Wenceslas, there were no footprints within the snow to warm her. And even the thought of seeing snow again could not get Kara Zor-El to wade through this sea of blood.

The woman stopped, and looked back at her. Contempt rather than cruelty clouded her features, though the line between the two was blurring.

"You did this?" Kara stammered.

"Of course I did. Who else on this world has such strength?"

"Why?"

The woman frowned. "You of all people should know that answer. Or can you honestly say that in all these years, you've never dreamt of vengeance?"

A retort died upon Kara's tongue, for indeed, her dreams had often been this dark. She had sampled the strength Earth's sun had gifted her, and dreamed of turning it against her captors, like she had on that day ten years ago. Of doing to them that they had to her a hundredfold.

But to actually see it? This carnage? She'd fought her captors once before of course, the day her world had changed, but Was this what she had truly wanted?

Kara had no answer. And as if the universe itself was offering providence, she could hear men's voices, despite the klaxon. Men with guns, with grenades, and if they knew what was good for them, prayers.

She flinched, and the woman scowled. "They've tamed you," she whispered.

"I'm not…" She trailed off. She wanted to say that she was not weak. That she was not afraid. But both would be lies. She was as weak as she'd ever been since arriving on this world. Her legs barely supported her, and her arms were thin as reeds.

And there was the gaze the woman gave her. That look of pity and simmering contempt. It was a gaze she had seen from her gene-sires on more than one occasion back on Krypton, as their daughter's shortcomings became apparent. A daughter that was adequate, but not exceptional. Fit, but not strong.

But if this was what strength meant…

"Very well," said the woman. "Cower if you like, or follow the path I lay before you. It is your choice."

With that, she turned and began walking down the corridor. To face the fire and fury of the soldiers up ahead.

"Wait," Kara asked.

The woman stopped and glanced back.

"How are you doing this?" Kara whispered. "You're kryptonian. Why didn't the lights affect you?"

The woman cackled. "My dear girl," she whispered. "Did I ever say I was kryptonian?"

She hadn't, Kara realized.

But if she wasn't kryptonian, and she wasn't human, then what in the name of Rao was she?

Her only answer was the sound of boots. Shouts of "on the ground!" and "hands up!" Demands spoken in Russian rather than Kryptonese. Demands that weren't synchronized. Demands that betrayed the soldiers' fear.

The golden-haired woman muttered something about worms, before flying towards them.

Before there was a flash of red light, causing her to fall to the concrete ground.

Kara winced, and hid behind the wall of her cell before peeking out. Somehow, the base had developed some kind of energy grenade – one that synthesized the light of a red sun. How was a question she had no answer to.

"Why," however…that was obvious.

The woman screamed. Staggered with each detonation. Kara shielded her eyes from the detonations, but beyond that, they did her no harm. She had been born under a red sun, she had spent most of her life beneath a red sun or a simulacrum of it, this radiation made no difference to her now bar suppressing the powers she'd gained from Sol.

Still, the woman kept coming. She had claimed not to be kryptonian, and indeed, the lights in the cell didn't seem to have affected her. But she was still being slowed. The bullets fired by the guards weren't penetrating her flesh, but she was being affected by their impacts.

Had she lied? Had she overestimated her own abilities? Or was she still affected by red solar radiation, just not to the same extent?

Kara had no answer. And finally, the woman reached the guards.

Broken bodies. Broken necks.

Screams. Shrieks.

Blood. Most of it human. Some, Kara noticed, from the woman herself.

Blood that was still red. Mixing.

The guards were falling back. Dragging their wounded. Firing.

Not just bullets, but grenades. Not just red sun ones, but standard explosives. Fired in close proximity, they cut through flesh, cloth, and even stone.

Kara screamed, and took cover. The door of her cell had been opened, but all that lay beyond was a slaughterhouse.

There was a cry from the woman. Kara couldn't understand it, but she could hear the 'thomps' of bodies being thrown.

Of the floor beginning to collapse due to the impacts of the explosives and the woman's blows. A giant upon whose shoulders none stood.

How? Kara wondered, as the cracks began to spread. This is the lowest level. It can't-

The floor gave way. She screamed.

For a moment, through the darkness, Kara saw something beneath her.

For a moment, she fell.

She hit the ground.

And the moment after that?


"Kara."

She didn't know it then, but she was standing on the abyss.

"Kara."

Not just the abyss before her feet, but the abyss facing her entire species. Two fractocycles[1] since the birth of her cousin, and by extension, Krypton's first natural birth in ragnars.[2] One fractocycle since her uncle's excommunication by the Council as he pleaded they begin an evacuation of the planet. One fractocycle before said planet would endure an attempted coup by the Sword of Rao, and macrorhels[3] later, its destruction.

"Kara."

Not that she knew any of that would happen – how could she? The Voice of Rao had claimed powers of prescience, but he was long dead, and with it, his brand of religious fanaticism. Science had proven a better ally than religion, but not even kryptonians had the ability to see the future. If they had, perhaps the impotent Council of Five would have listened to her uncle rather than stripping him of his title, and letting Krypton continue its long march of decay before its final explosive breath.

But hindsight was the luxury of the fortunate. At this moment, she was but a child of five cycles, standing on the edge of the abyss. Her eyes wide in fear, as her long black hair billowed in the wind.

"Karanizu Zor-El, are you listening to me?!"

She let out a yelp – the volume of her father's voice had been enough to break her stupor, but rare was the moment when either one of her gene-sires used her full name, and in her five cycles, Kara had learnt that "Karanizu" meant "pay attention." Perhaps it would mean something else in the future, but like much in this world, that day was beyond her sight.

What was in her sight, however, was her father, who her shadowed eyes looked up towards. Like her, he was wearing a skinsuit. Unlike the black, featureless skinsuit that clad her tiny body however, Zor-El's skinsuit was one of red and blue, and upon his chest, a golden glyph. The sigil of House of El.

Unlike her, it fit him.

Not for the first time in her life, she could tell that her father's belief in her capabilities was lacking. And all the more so when she asked him whether she needed to make the leap into the abyss below.

"Of course," he said, his eyes hard, his voice harder. "You shall make it, as every El before you have. Your brother and I included."

"Uncle Jor-El is under house arrest in Kandor."

Zor-El scowled and looked back at the city on the horizon – not Kandor, with its old, decrepit grandeur, but Argo. The second greatest of the city-states of Krypton (third, if one included Kryptonopolis of old). A beacon said to eclipse the light of Rao itself. A bastion of progress and ingenuity. Located on the eastern coast of the continent of Lurvan, its crystal spires reached ever upward.

To its west, the great Argo Lightbridge, which connected Argo proper to the continent and its arid wastes. So different from the jungles of Bolneth in the south, with what little flora Argo knew to be found in the Infinity Gardens.

Lurvan was beautiful in its own way. Argo was beautiful in its majesty. But it was to the sea that Argonians had more often than not turned their eyes towards. In antiquity, Bur-El the Navigator had sailed across the Golden Sea of Eiu, returning with tales of gold, gods, and glory. While cities like Kryptonopolis were reclaimed by nature, while the likes of Erkol and Xan destroyed each other in long-forgotten wars, Argo remained eternal. Argo remained the shining beacon of Krypton – a lighthouse upon the shore, its brilliance extending into the heavens themselves.

And yet the glare of the sun eclipsed it, and not all of Argo's ingenuity could find a solution to the groundquakes that continued to beset the planet.

Ingenuity that she knew would not come from within her mind. Her genesis chamber had not made the perfect genetic specimen Zor-El and Alura In-Ze had desired their daughter to be – "not enough juice in the chamber," as the saying went. Her body less muscular than what was expected, her mind less sharp than what was expected of her, given that genesis chambers were designed to build both brain and brawn in-vitro, improving on what natural reproduction had once allowed for.

At five cycles, her face was like what the people of Earth called a cherub – round, pudgy, soft. The type of face that the incubation process should have eliminated. If the perfectly chiselled features of Zor-El were akin to stone, the face of his daughter was akin to clay.

Hence why, as long as she could remember, she had strove to make her parents proud. She had hiked the Jewel Mountains, she had applied herself to her studies, and yet, atop the cliff named Hadred's Head, she could not jump.

Zor-El looked back at her. His mouth contorting like a muad'gisan. His red cape billowed in the wind – a cape that she would not have the right to wear unless she completed the ritual, and even then, not of the same colour.

In one eye, disappointment, in another, sympathy. So different from the look her mother had given her when they'd departed El Spire in their skimmer a rhel ago. In her eyes, hope that her daughter would return from this task, and in the other, fear that she would not. That yearning upon her tongue, unspoken, to be with her daughter, yet forbidden by rite, for only one gene-sire was allowed to attend this rite of passage, and by tradition, a father. The one whose name she bore, as was tradition for kryptonian females among the Great Houses.[4]

"Perhaps we can do this later," Zor-El murmured.

Kara could not deny that such words lifted her heart, just as the wind blew upwards from the abyss before her. Could not deny she was tempted to take her father's hand.

And yet she stumbled, be it from the groundquake, or her own guilt. She fell into her father's arms, but this time, there was no disdain in his eyes. Only fear.

"They're getting worse, aren't they?" Kara whispered.

Zor-El let his daughter go, silent.

"Uncle said they would destroy Krypton. Uncle said-"

"Jor-El said a lot of things. He…" Zor-El sighed. "Your uncle was a brilliant man, Kara."

"Is," she corrected.

"Is," her father conceded. "But even he could be wrong."

"And is he?" she whispered, daring to hope. Daring to embrace that which was emblazoned upon her chest.

Again, there was no answer. A hardness in her father's eyes, when only a fractocycle prior, he had wept at his brother's incarceration. Siblings weren't uncommon on Krypton, but twins were a rarity – one of the few elements of chance the genesis process had not eliminated, and in a holdover of less rational times, the coming of twins was cause for celebration in kryptonian society. The children of Seg-El and Nyssa-Vex had emerged over sixty cycles ago, shining brighter than binary stars, drawing all into their gravity in awe as they strove to unlock the mysteries of the universe, and prove themselves better than the other. To prove themselves the 'real' child,' in a sense.

Yet how different they were, Kara recalled. Jor-El, his gaze ever downwards, Zor-El, his eyes ever to the stars. These days, to the origins of the universe itself, past even the cosmic background radiation that not even Krypton's technology could penetrate. At his recent lectures at the Argo Scholasticium, he had put forward his theory that the universe itself had 'grown' from an older one. Mitosis on a galactic scale. A copy, perhaps.

A lecture that, like so many other times, Kara had watched from afar, and one that her uncle had failed to attend.

It was not to say that the interests of the sons of Seg-El were mutually exclusive. Zor-El had told her many tales of his youth, when he had taken his skimmer to the jungles of Bolneth, and Jor-El had named his son Kal, which literally translated as "Star Child" in Ancient Kryptonese. Be they in Argo or Kandor, there had been times in Kara's life where the Els had gathered as one, undivided, be it in the Citadel of El or El Spire.

But those times had passed. As the groundquakes had begun to shift the earth of Krypton, so too did they break her family's bonds. Jor-El had claimed the planet was apocalypse, yet his brother had begged the house's head not to upset the natural order of things.

"Let it go, Jor-El," he'd said, on more than one occasion. "Just let it go."

But Jor-El had done no such thing. Her uncle had spoken out, had paid the price and now, his twin was the de facto head of House El. With naught but a gene-scion right now for company who had disappointed him more often than not – never able to run as far as they should, or score as highly on tests as a daughter of a Great House should be able to. And despite his efforts, her gene-sire had not always been able to hide it.

Kara decided she would not disappoint her father today.

"Very well," he said, as she told him she would undertake the ritual. "But understand what you are about to do."

"I know what this means, father."

"Do you? Do you understand what it means to fall and fly? To call out to a war kite? To soar through the air as our ancestors did at the dawn of the Golden Age, when the Great Houses of Krypton were in their infancy? As the names of El, Zod, Em, Ur, and a hundred others swore allegiance to Jo-Mon the Uniter? Defeated even the Children of Juru?"

"I know my history," Kara said, glad to be able to show her intellect for once, even in the shadow of a greater mind. "I know of the dark magics the Children wielded. I know how on the sands of Urrika, the desert bloomed from the blood of witches, as their dark reign was finally ended. They had used dark magics to enslave and to eradicate the tribes of Krypton's first continent, practicing dark rituals, worshipping alien gods such as Yuda Kal, the Beast. While kryptonians learnt to forge weapons of gold, to take tepid steps into the seas of their homeworld, the cult ruled for close to fifty-thousand cycles until Jo-Mon ended their terror."

"And now you honour Jo-Mon's sacrifice, and the sacrifice of every El before you" her gene-sire said. "You will jump without the safety of a grav-belt and call out to my war kite. H'Melar knows your scent as well as your voice, and if both hold true, she will fly from her den and let you ride upon her back."

And if not, Kara Zor-El reflected, I will be permanently married to the ground.

She wasn't sure how she felt about the inevitability of marriage. Like all the heads of Great Houses, her parents had been patched through political and genetic compatibility through Matricomp, but Zor-El loved Alura In-Ze as Krypton did Cythonna – small, white, most beautiful of the four moons that orbited the second world of Rao.

What she didn't like however, was risking H'Melar rescuing her. A war kite who, the first time she had beheld Zor-El's daughter, had nearly bitten her arm off.

Still, she stood at the cliff's edge. The cliff had been named after Hadred – a Rankless who had given his life to save that of Son-Ja during the Eiu War, which had preceded Argo's founding. Unlike Son-Ja, there were no monuments to Hadred inside the city itself, given his low standing, but in defiance to the norms of kryptonian nobility, Argo's founder had named this landform after his saviour.

Still, many called it the Cliff of Fate and Faith, and it was well named, for it was here that Kara Zor-El's fate would be determined. It was here that generations of Els and other scions of Great Houses based in Lurvan had made leaps from the Head in the manner she was about to. More than one child had failed their gene-sires, only to be replaced by another product of a genesis chamber.

The ground could not be seen – the cliff was so deep, the light of Rao never reached its depths. There were legends that pre-dated Krypton's unification, of heroes such as Hyp-Axic climbing down and defeating Artrides, the Many-Headed Muad'gisan[5] or her favourite story of Val-Ro slaying Dramonicus.[6] Much to Alura's despair, Kara had spent more time than her mother had cared for running around the levels of El Spire with a play sword and shield in hand, hitting Kelex units while pretending they were monsters to be slain.

Legends from times long past. Legends that every child of Krypton grew up on, to even the lowliest Rankless. But as much allure as monsters of myth had, there was no disputing from the footage sent by probes that the darkness at the cliff's base was not meant for any child of Rao. Creatures more akin to those found at the bottom of Krypton's seas dwelled in that darkness, and if the fall somehow did not kill her, the spawn of darkness would.

Still, she readied herself to leap. She was the future of the House of El, she reminded herself. She was a child of the brightest minds of Argo – not a child of accident as her cousin was. As much as she loved him, as much joy as she'd found as she'd held little Kal in her arms, it was she who would lead her house into the future…provided there was a future to be had at all.

She nearly leapt then and there. But another groundquake struck. She nearly fell off the edge, but managed to fall backwards instead.

She lay there, perspiring, her fear warmer than Rao itself.

"Get up," Zor-El said.

"I can't," she whimpered.

"Kara, you have walked to the edge of the abyss. It is too late to step back."

She struggled to get to her feet. She remained there upon the edge until her father knelt down beside her.

"I know you can do this," he said kindly.

Still, she remained silent. No words could escape her lips, for all her effort was directed to stopping water escaping her eyes.

"What have I said to you, Kara? Get knocked down, get right back up."

Kara finally rose to her feet, her ears stinging as much as her eyes. She looked into the darkness of the chasm below, remembering her gene-sire's words spoken two cycles ago. A fight – she couldn't even remember what it was about, some pampered heir of a Great House harassing a child of a House Minor – and one that proved that for all her failings, she could throw a mean punch, and block punches thrown at her in turn.

It was, strangely enough, one of the few times her parents had been proud of her when she'd forced Zeta-Rhee to tend to his broken nose, even if she'd later admitted to her mother that she hadn't found any joy in the fight itself, unlike her pretend monster slaying. In turn, Alura had smiled, hugged her daughter, and whispered, "never bemoan a gentle heart."

A brawl, and one that had made its mark. But this wasn't some scuffle between the gene-scions of noble houses, this was a rite of passage that would see her move to the next stage of her life, or find her life's end.

"Jump, Kara," Zor-El whispered. Sometimes all it takes is a leap of faith."

She looked into her gene-sire's eyes. Brown, like hers. His hair the same colour – the colour of good earth, her mother had said, even if Zor-El's eyes were more often directed to the stars.

She took a breath of Argo's air. As idiosyncratic as it was, she prayed to the gods for strength, wisdom, and mercy alike.

Then she jumped.

Then she-


…woke up.

On Krypton, she had jumped. On Earth, she had fallen.

Fallen further than she had ever thought possible.

The base she'd been kept in had six levels, or so she'd believed. Now, lying atop the rubble (and thankfully not under it), Kara Zaryanova, once named Kara Zor-El, realized she'd been deceived.

She looked up at the hole above her. Too high to climb up through. Beyond, she could hear the muffled sounds of gunfire, explosions, and screams. The woman who had rescued her was making her way upwards – an angel escaping from Hell's depths, perhaps. But then, if she was from Krypton, as she had appeared to be, had she not originally fallen?

She said she wasn't kryptonian.

And people like Councillor Ro-Zar had called her uncle crazy, and Dru-Zod a loyal servant of the state. Saying something didn't necessarily mean it was true, no matter how silver the tongue.

Kara groaned as she tried to get to her feet. The fall by itself hadn't harmed her. Earth's gravity however, had. Her captors had always escorted her out of her cell for blood extraction, but now left to walk by herself, she was able to realize just how much Earth's low gravity had affected her without the light of a yellow sun to offset it.

Her bones brittler. Her skin thinner. Her heart, weakened, and forever wounded from what had transpired on that dark day ten years ago. When OVO soldiers had come to the Zaryanova farmstead and had…

She brushed dust and water from her eye. She couldn't afford to think about that right now. She had to move, or at least try to.

She leant against the side of the corridor – concrete, hard and cold. She shivered in the gloom, alone.

Free?

Not yet. But…

Up. The only way is up.

She looked upward, remembering how once, she'd been able to leap through the air. An ability granted to her by a yellow sun, and one she hadn't had access to since she'd been subjected to a barrage of red solar radiation. Which meant that-

Guess the only way right now is forward.

Forward. Had she ever moved forward, she wondered? On Krypton, she'd remained in the place her parents, nay, her entire culture, had laid out for her. Kryptonian society had remained static for millennia, and every attempt to change it, be it from her uncle, Zod, or every saint and sinner in-between, had met with failure. A world stuck in past glories, with no-one wise enough to lead it onto greater ones.

Earth was different. Perhaps it was because the planet was younger, perhaps it was because of humanity's shorter lifespans, but things changed rapidly, even if for her, it hadn't felt that way. She'd spent one cycle (year, she reminded herself) with the Zaryanovas, and another ten in this prison. Like any child of Krypton, she knew that Fort Rozz was used to contain the most depraved members of her species, and she'd considered it a fate well deserved.

If this prison was a taste of what they had gone through however…

She groaned, and leant against the wall for support, shivering. Earth had done things to her. A soft planet populated by a soft, primitive people, who wouldn't know what truth or justice meant if it bit them in their collective…

She threw up. Brown liquid impacted the floor. And not for the first time in the last ten years, Kara missed Earth's sun.

Faith, she told herself, as she stumbled forward. Faith is the shoe we wear on one foot, while on the other, we wear reason. Both are needed to cross the desert, and find the waters of wisdom.

She couldn't even remember the source of the quote – some kryptonian author from the Artisan Guild, long dead, doomed to be forgotten. She had never put much stock in religious faith, but what was that human saying about atheists and foxholes?

Scowling, she couldn't even remember that. Small wonder, for stuck in a cell for ten years, many memories had turned to mist. Shivering, she counted herself lucky for being kryptonian, for while her species was as frail as any human without the light of a golden sun, their minds at least were superior. A human girl her age might have gone mad, kept in isolation for a Terran decade, but somehow, she'd managed to keep herself sane in this iron prison.

Or maybe she was insane, and this was all some mad dream. Had she not wondered what the third sign of madness was mere hours ago?

Third sign, fourth sign, dream or reality, she resolved to deal with what was in front her all the same, as she turned the corner and faced a wall of glass, content in the knowledge that she was not yet Alice.

Because while there were neither queens nor rabbits behind that wall, there was a lab.

Behind a wall of glass was a lab. She knew it was a lab, because despite Earth being millennia behind Krypton, science was still science, and humanity still understood the scientific method. Its devices, however primitive, were still used for everything from observation to manipulation. Indeed, this country had been the first in the world to break the bonds of the planet's gravity, and no matter how far it had fallen (at least according to her parents), some scientific legacies remained.

From the corridor, the lab was separated by a glass wall and a sliding door. One that was already open. A quirk of the base's security protocols?

She walked inside. Rational thought dictated that she keep moving. Curiosity prompted her to enter. According to her adoptive mother, curiosity had a nasty habit of killing cats, but Kara had spent the last ten years ready to welcome death, and before that, she'd had a pet isix[7] named Stree-Kee, thank you very much. If she was going to die, best to do so with an open mind.

Kara Zaryanova had never seen a real life cat before, but she had seen labs like this. Indeed, some of her happiest memories of Krypton were the times spent with her father and uncle, helping (or at least attempting to help) on experiments ranging from genetic acceleration to gravitic manipulation, be it in the Citadel of El or her home in Argo. However, the lab she'd always been taken to upstairs had no such amenities – the scientists had never been cruel per se, but taking her blood on a regular basis, they had never been kind either, as the needle marks on her arm attested.

This lab however, at least by human standards, was more advanced. White walls rather than drab concrete and various scientific instruments, among which was a centrifuge holding vials of blood.

She stepped forward and took one of them – it was labelled simply with a date, and the source of origin – "Subject Zero."

Kara didn't have to wonder who "Subject Zero" was. It only took slightly longer for her to throw a vial against the wall in disgust, landing near a refrigeration unit.

She'd never seen this lab before – her blood had always been taken elsewhere. She supposed they had one lab for extraction, and one lab for testing. But why the separation between the two?

Scowling, she looked around. Nothing appeared out of place – Bunsen burners, beakers, microscopes…beside the blood samples, only one thing caught her eye. A giant glass case – one concrete wall (for the case was against it), and three glass ones, making it only slightly larger than a shower (her captors were bastards, but they still allowed her to wash once a week under armed guard). Unlike the shower, and like her cell however, the case's roof wasn't made of glass, but iron, and attached to it, row upon row of LEDs.

Some kind of prison, she wondered? More synthesized red sunlight? Perhaps she'd have the answers in time.

Perhaps she'd get them from the soldier.

The soldier who had just walked into the lab – he was missing his helmet, he was covered in blood splatter, but physically, he was unharmed.

The soldier who, as he finished taking a sip from his canteen, looked up and saw her. His eyes wide.

"Um, hello," Kara whispered.

The man gawked at her.

"Listen," Kara said, trying to smile. "I get it. I'm an escaped alien, you're a dumb human who's probably drunk too much vodka, but there's a crazy woman up above who's tearing this place apart and we need to-"

He raised his rifle. And moving at a speed Kara hadn't thought possible, especially after being cooped up in this prison for the last ten years, sprang into action.

Or, more accurately, she threw a beaker at him.

She didn't know what it was filled with, but it hit the bastard, causing him to shout in pain. and open fire. The bullets might have hit her if he hadn't fired upward as he recoiled.

She heard the 'ping' of the bullets ricocheting, and she nearly froze. She'd heard the sound of gunfire before this day. She'd seen what bullets could do.

But unlike on Hadred's Head, she didn't freeze. She acted. She dashed towards him and grabbed his rifle.

He was young, Kara noted. Almost as old as Aleksander had been when he'd become a soldier

But that meant little as she screamed, as he screamed, as they struggled to hold the weapon.

As one of them pulled the trigger, bullets hitting the roof like the water of a shower moving upward. Some impacted the ceiling, others bounced off, hitting everything in the lab bar the human and kryptonian locked in this dance of death.

Kara had been shot once before. Her abilities had saved her then, to a point. But now, she was as vulnerable as any human. Moreso, for without the light of a yellow sun, starved, abused, subjected to Earth's lower gravity, she was but an oregus attempting to wrestle a rondor.

The universe was ruled by the strong, and once again, the stronger opponent prevailed. With the butt of his rifle, the soldier hit Kara on the chin, causing her to stumble back. It took but a few seconds for her to regain her bearings, but that was all the time the soldier needed to point the gun at her.

His finger on the trigger. His eyes narrow, as only a hunter's could be, yet not cruel.

"Please…" she begged.

She walked along the edge of a table.

He didn't fire.

Not until her hand touched a second beaker, and she threw it at him.

The beaker hit him. He screamed. He fired.

He didn't hit her.

She screamed in turn and tackled him to the ground.

She punched him, but to no avail. Her blows were only as strong as a child's.

His face, bleeding from the beaker's glass, was contorted in rage.

He yelled. He pushed her off.

She staggered to her feet.

He fired.

She jumped.

Straight into the glass case.

It shattered – not because of her, but because of the bullets.

She screamed as she landed. Not from the impact. Not from the glass cutting her skin.

But the lights that came on as the booth activated.

As solar radiation bombarded her.

Not the light of a red sun…but yellow.

Kara writhed like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. Glass of a different kind cut her flesh. The solar radiation ravaged her body. The first six months she'd spent on Earth compressed to a few seconds.

She felt like she was dying. She was dying. And indeed, if she hadn't spent a year in the light of Sol, she might have. For a normal kryptonian, this level of radiation from a yellow sun would have been lethal. Moreso even than the Green Death.

But Kara Zor-El was not a normal kryptonian. For better or worse, she'd ceased to be normal the moment she'd stepped out of her pod all those years ago.

So as she screamed, as she writhed, as her skin sizzled, something miraculous (or terrible, depending on one's perception) happened.

The pain was still there, but the bleeding stopped.

Her wounds began to heal before her very eyes. The light of this simulated sun super-charging her cells, allowing them to heal her wounds in mere seconds. Not just the cuts from the glass, but the marks on her arm from the blood extractions.

Her cells energized by yellow light.

There was no shortage of sun deities across the cultures of humanity. Like kryptonians, humans had worshipped the sun as soon as religion entered their minds. And like Dazhbog or Khors, like one of a hundred gods of a thousand names, Kara rose with the light.

Rose to her feet. Rose into the air itself, as she began to levitate. Hovering only a foot above the ground, but levitating all the same.

Kryptonian scientists had theorized about this. That among the powers a yellow star could give a kryptonian that flight would be among them – a bio-electric field that would hold them aloft, or alternatively, manipulation of their own gravitational field to 'fly.' Hypotheses that would never be tested of course, because what sane kryptonian would expose themselves to a yellow sun?

Kara Zor-El, however, was quite sane. And she knew what the opposite to sanity was.

Insanity would be not using this power to her advantage.

To not use it against the worm who'd dared attack her.

Eyes wide with fear, he raised his gun to fire. And with a yell, she darted forward.

Her flight had more force than grace, but it mattered little as she slammed him against the wall.

Her bones, once so brittle, were now as strong as steel. His, however, were as frail as any human's.

She could feel his bones beneath her fists. She could see them as her x-ray vision returned to her.

She could hear his heart beating like a rabbit's. Long had she cowered by one of those insignificant creatures, but now?

She was the hunter.

The man, no, boy, struggled to speak. Begged for mercy, perhaps. Amazing. These primitives hadn't shown her mercy for ten cycles, why in Rao's name would she show any in turn?

No. Not in Rao's name. Hers. Rao the star was very real, Rao the deity was but the figment of a species' collective imagination.

She, however, was flesh and might.

She was real. And she would act as a true god would.

She tightened her grip around the alien's neck. She could hear his every breath. She could see his heart beginning to slow.

As her old powers began to return, she could hear far beyond this lab as well. Levels above her, the battle continued. There, men like him were being slaughtered by a woman who was just like her. Another goddess. One who had offered her hand, only for it not to be taken.

She was magnificent. She was divine. She was what Kara knew she had, nay, deserved to be.

And her consecration would begin with this sacrifice, as she tightened her grip even further. As the mortal struggled to breathe.

She…

…felt something behind her eyes. An irritation.

"Frail," she sneered. "All of you, so frail. So alone. So…so…"

She trailed off.

She screamed.

She felt it inside of her. A burning. Where once the sensation of burnt flesh had been from without, now, it was from within.

She dropped the alien and staggered back. Her head.

It was killing her.

Her eyes. They were burning.

She closed them.

That only made it worse.

She screamed. Her entire body was on fire. The sounds from above overwhelmed her ears.

Death. Despair. Terror. Once, beautiful music, but now, discordant.

She opened her eyes and-

GAAAAAH!

A pair of red lasers, as hot as the surface of the sun, burst from her eyes. Her head twisted from side to side as she stumbled, blind. Drunk on solar radiation. The lasers tore through concrete, through glass, through steel.

A supernova from within, let loose upon the world.

The reason why the two labs were separate was clear now – the scientists didn't want her anywhere near this thing.

She could feel her flesh burning around her eyes. Her veins throbbing. Her head pounding as she pressed her hands against her skull. She could feel it all.

Every moment of pain she had ever felt.

Ever tear every shod, evaporated upon light's fury.

It was as if her body spurred the very idea of tears, if not grief, as she screamed.

For her home. For her family.

For her years of isolation. Of testing. Of torture.

And it wouldn't stop.

The light never stopped.

The burning never stopped.

Her screaming never stopped.

Not until, at last, her eyes cleared, even if her vision didn't.

For a moment, she stood there. Healed and wounded both. In the ruins of an alien lab, destroyed by Krypton's wrath.

Alone, bar the cowering alien before her, who gingerly got to his feet. Staring in horror at the monster before him.

At the monster she'd become.

Or perhaps the monster that had always lurked within, waiting to be released.

"I…" Kara Zor-El whispered, feeling like a child again. "I didn't…I wouldn't…I didn't mean to…oh goodness, if I hurt you, I-"

Her eyes closed and she collapsed to the ground. Her fire gone.

The world silent as she lost consciousness.


Footnotes

[1]: Roughly equivalent to a Terran month.

[2]: A Kryptonian century.

[3]: Roughly equivalent to a Kryptonian day, though the concept did not exist on Krypton as a human would understand it, given how the planet was tidally locked with its star. There were 36 rhels to a macrorhel.

[4]: Tradition that was more common in Great Houses than Houses Minor. Alura In-Ze was so named after her father (In, of House Ze), and similarly, Kara Zor-El was named after her own (Zor, of House El). Only if a female was head of a Great House were they allowed to keep their own name, such as Lyta-Zod of House Zod. In Houses Minor, such as Houses Li and Vex, females were allowed to keep their house name rather than their male gene-sire's name (such as Ta of House Li, and Nyssa of House Vex). Some saw it as a reminder of their lower status, others as a sign of their freedom.

[5]: A gigantic worm creature found in the deserts of Krypton's equatorial strip.

[6]: A great beast not dissimilar from the Terran myth of the Chimera.