Darkness in the Sky

The moment my lips touched her skin, my own heart hammered with a force that was a pain, a pleasure, a perfect and terrible union of opposites, like drinking fire and ice in the same instant… like alcohol and coffee at once. A sublime sickness bloomed in my gut, a nausea that was pure, undiluted power. The world did not slow, but rather, I felt myself step outside of its normal procession, the forms of Xiao Ru and Lalika becoming beautiful, sorrowful statues in the periphery as the venom’s gift with my battle against Melody, now infused and magnified by the raw potential of ki, became something more… profound. I looked to the center of the crater high in the air, and now Marissa and Marvalyn moved with a comprehensible grace. The creature’s form was a thing of flowing, petrol-slick horror, a substance like congealed shadow, solid and yet not, but its resonant warmth now burned like a beacon in my new sight. Marissa’s skeletal hand was sheathed in a crackling membrane of energy, yet each blow she landed was a strange and beautiful failure, a silent, flowering detonation that rippled across Marvalyn’s form but left no wound, no true mark of its passage.

All around them, the remaining army of insectoid and human-shaped horrors was absorbing the mirrored walls of the crater, the great, curved surfaces seeming to dissolve and flow into them, turning the arena into a great, swirling whirlpool of fractured reflections with a pit of absolute black at its center. My head swam with a new and terrible vertigo; I knew I could leap the distance, but a fall into that central void felt like a final and irrevocable erasure. I had to help her. And so I did. With a single, explosive push, I launched myself from the crater’s edge, a silent arc of intervention, cutting off the blow that would have carved a ruin across Marissa’s face. The force of my interception sent Marvalyn reeling, a discordant shudder passing through its impossible form, and bought us a precious second of stillness. I fell back to the crater's edge as Marissa descended to the floor, Marvalyn flowing down to meet her. The three of us stood in a triangle of impending violence. Marissa’s gaze, sharp as a shard of obsidian, found mine.

The three of us stood in a triangle of impending violence. Marissa’s gaze, sharp as a shard of obsidian, found mine. "One of us appears to be hallucinating," she stated, her voice a blade of ice. "Explain why it is not me."

"The world is slower than it used to be," I answered, the words feeling strange and true on my tongue. "I simply walked.”"

A faint, dangerous smirk touched her lips. "A charming sentiment. Let us hope your newfound philosophy is as durable as your bravado."

Then the creature attacked us both, its form a cascade of terrible new ideas—blades of sharpened bone, the segmented arc of a scorpion’s tail, fangs that wept a dark, viscous fluid. It was a beautiful and obscene storm of creation, and my gloves were burned from my hands as if by a phantom fire, the hem of my skirt fraying into ash.

"Shit," I heard Marissa hiss, her voice a controlled fury. "You must concentrate Mei-Ling… to gather the strike of a nuclear resonance. Your ki is like mine… able to manipulate the vacuum fields that allow us movement… You must protect yourself, lest you be absorbed in a matter of moments." I nodded, understanding as she met the creature’s onslaught, trading blows that were like the striking of cracked, discordant bells.

An idea formed in my mind, a desperate piece of music. I turned and ran, Marissa’s curse a lash against my back. If she could manipulate the core of things, the great and terrible reactions… then what if I was the binding force to its chaotic particle? My ki was malleable, and I had left a faint, resonant residue of it upon the creature with my first blow, a sympathetic string waiting to be plucked. I could feel the pull, I was the quark to Marvalyn’s gluon—I flung myself forward as the force beckoned me—just as Marissa unleashed the last of her worn and battered energy, and my own strike was not a punch, but an act of conceptual unification, the strong force made manifest. My knuckles screamed in protest as our two fists met upon Marvalyn’s core, and together, they sent the creature down into the center of the crater, a shockwave cutting through the lower crater, slashing through everything in that layer as mushroom of silent, grey fire rising in a perfect, terrible pillar.

I felt myself tumble back across the crater, landing near Xiao Ru and Lalika, who were now moving with the familiar grace of the world I had left behind. Marissa collapsed to one knee, her energy spent. “What just happened?” Ruru asked, her voice a fragile thread in the sudden quiet. But before any answer could be given, the crater’s heart erupted, an army of Marvalyn reigning from the epicenter to spread in all directions, and above us, the sky did not fall, but simply fractured, like a pane of black, infinite glass struck by a final, impossible blow.

But the rest of Marvalyn was still spreading. An army of its humanoid echoes began to bubble up from the crater floor. A blade of wind sliced through the glass, creating a scintillating wall of sound and light, a constant, high chiming of a million tiny collisions that dissolved the world into a glittering haze just past the fingertips.

For just a moment, the chaotic fragments would sometimes align, forming a brief and fractured mosaic of the world beyond—and in it, the dark stitch of a distant form, and the wet, arterial gleam of something red…  

As the whirlwind of razers subsided, in the torn open wounds of the crater, I could see the flaming hair of an angry, snow white, oupire—though my time in the Makai ought to have taught me to stick with vampire—Serena was there, frail, holding an unconscious Ashley.