CoXFic: Solstice (Unwillingly Mine)
Follow: 12 million light-years distant from our average sun. A small green world marred with a hazy, foul black and brown sky. There: at the center of the largest jigsaw continent. A mountain whose summit is so sharply flattened it appears as if a god struck the top with a sword. Within: beyond the alien-scraped slate arches and iron trestles spanning howling depths. A hidden sanctum, a ruined temple, a last hope. Now: An alien creature, only vaguely humanoid, bronze overlapping scales and chitin girding tangerine, gas-pressurized flesh. In each upper extremity, a long spike of crystal - a weapon held against the approach of the slow marching creatures even now defiling the last prayer for life on this ruined world.
The Champion sees them approach, the horrid, unclean ones sowing death, lingering pain, and the consuming miasma that now sickens the sky and rains disease on the innocent harmony of their world. His world. Even now, his body betrays and fails him: the white ash covering his proud armor, his thick maxillary plates flecked with brown bile teeming with infection. All the weaker, vulnerable guardians have fallen: one by one, like a child's tumbling cascade. Only the Champion remains to face the Plaguebringers, he and the pain-maddened Sorcerer he was charged to safeguard to this place. Only the sorcerer may commune with what entities and powers exist beyond the realm of the material - and there beg for the lives of his precious little world, now so close to utter extinction.
To think so few of these whispering, inexorably approaching creatures (only seven: not even enough to count on his antennae) had been responsible for so much tragedy and murder. Yet their conquest had been hard fought, for this beautiful world on whose behalf the Champion now suffered (and undoubtedly is now dying for) was not without its Guardians. Their combined might did stagger the alien's approach, for what it was worth. As each of the disease-pilgrims fell to their defensive line, their plagues and poxes went unchained by their masters. Death and ruin gushed forth and decimated cities, clogging rivers with corpses of the defiled. Such uncounted, needless suffering as to beggar the imagination. The Champion weeped before the leaders of this bleeding, oozing world. If he can only guessed at the cost of such a victory, perhaps it would have been different. As it stood, now there were but three. And yet three were enough to lay waste to whole races of life, to burn nations in fever, and widow continents.
At one time, he would have plead for reason, to argue caution to these creatures. At one time he was a champion of order and law, and disdained needless violence, even toward his most vicious rivals. Now, instead, in each extremity he carries one of the forbidden, unhallowed artifacts of lore: the Blades of Hunger and Thirst. In the past, he fought against those who foolishly thought they could master these weapons only to find themselves corrupted and devoured in turn. Only at the greatest extremity of desperation did he finally turn to these unthinking, consuming horrors for strength against the unstoppable Plaguebringers. Only with great resignation did he accept the shriveling of his own ethical and moral code, to embrace evil against evil. The Champion hefts these condemning spikes charges along the causeway toward the first of the Death Missionaries.
The foremost rises to meet him, thick ropy strands of disease and infection pouring out from its monstrous, fleshy forelimbs. The Champion ignores this - having finally accepted that this will be his final battle - and strikes true. The diamond blades bury deep into the monster, eagerly devouring the matter cell by cell, adding its victim's own horrible, burning, failing strength to the Champion's. The final two plaguebringers trill out a inhuman noise from behind their bone and cartilage masks, a roiling keening dirge for their fallen brethren. As it fades into echoes, the monsters spare a glance to each other before their bodies explode into nightmarish revenants of blood, offal, and weeping wounds. They each stretch new-formed bone-and-gristle wings, flapping them wetly against the cavern's screaming darkness.
The smaller one, whom the Champion believes is the youngest of the invaders, lifts into the air and harries the Champion, pushing him backward toward the temple. The air around him thickens and grows cloying with bacteria and viruses, more of a soup than anything else. The Champion can hold his breath for a long time, but the infection he has suffered these long weeks have whittled him down. Even with the Blades bolstering him, he knows he is losing ground gradually, inevitably. The cruel truth assails him as surely as the winged plague-templar, that as each living thing falls he grows weaker, and these blasphemies grow stronger. Long before this desperate ploy had been formed, the nations and populations of his tender, peaceful world had fallen into despair. Great armies of self-annihilation rose from the boiling corpses of cities, embracing suicide-gospels and euthanasia philosophies. Better to end the suffering now, they preached, than put our faith in vain heroes and frail weapons of war. The Champion mourned them once, but wonders now whether he had misjudged their wisdom.
The duel fairs poorly for the Champion, now felled to one rotting pivoting joint as the winged creature closes in on him with fangs and poison spines bared and quivering. But this is misdirection and an overestimation of the Champion's weakness - crippled though he may be. The Champion summons the strength within the Hungry Blade and hurls it toward the floating, hissing creature. The desperate lunge is not in vain as the blade sinks into its rubbery lower extremity. The blade eats and eats at the matter within the penultimate Plaguebringer, dissolving it in screaming pain. The creature wildly attempts to flap its way back to the bridge span, struggling against the blade's insatiable hunger. It manages only to scrape one bony claw against the bridge slates before tumbling into the abyss.
"You lost your blade, Champion," the final adversary states flatly. As the Champion rebalances himself, it gestures a benediction toward the gulf where its compatriots fell.
"I have another," the Champion spat, the yellow-flecked, purulent sputum burning his now-moldy chitin as it flew from his mandible. The last of his wonders, the Thirst Blade spun his grasp.
The Plaguebringer cocked its head, reappraising the Champion's resolve, then dug its claws into the flesh of its arm as it whispered, "As do I."
With a wrench and a tear, the abomination stripped the muscle and rotten tendons from its own arm. The de-gloved bones fused and sharpened until the limb formed into a spiny, ugly, wicked weapon nightmare-born imitation of a sword. It swung the plagueblade across the metal rails of the causeway, fouling even the steel as it touched. With its spare, clawed hand, the Plaguebeast beckoned the Champion to battle.
"It is done," the ancient voice of the Sorcerer wheezed from the alcove of the temple. The Champion did not waver his gaze to look back, although the infection-priest retreated one step in response to the declaration.
"It is done, and it is done well." The Sorcerer declares before walking placidly back into the temple.
The contagion-master pulls back itself into a more guarded position. "All you have done is bargained more time for your world to suffer. We offer a holy peace, magician. The peace of the Grandfather is all consuming, all welcoming. Our work here is holy. You seek only to extend the ordeal your world faces. It is a pity that..."
"It is I who pity you, Minister. I have denied your god his prize. Our gods are more powerful and have a greater love for their people. They will not abandon us to endure your rites of destruction. And their justice is... thorough." His voice, though weak and pleghmy with sceptic rot, is a cruel balance between pity and contempt.
The Champion spares a glance back and begins a limping retreat back toward the temple. "When...how will they save us, Sorcerer? Where is our aid, where is the miracle?"
"It comes. Soon. Not long at all. A few minutes, perhaps." The sorcerer stands at the center of the small temple's ritual space, and points to the light, scattered to this place from many, many hidden fissures throughout the mountain. "It's already beginning."
The Champion stepped back into the temple, the Minister not far behind him. "I see nothing, Sorcerer. The light fades, where is the power you said would save us?"
The Plaguebringer drags its limb-sword behind itself, scoffing throatily. "It appears your sorcery will be of less use than you expected. I am afraid our theological debate will conclude in my favor."
The Champion bristles his antennae with a keen of rage and charges the beast before him. In almost perfect synchronicity with the Plaguebringer's first defiling step across the temple's threshold, the last of the temple's light dies, leaving only faint florescence from the cracked-glass globes arrayed about the perimeter of the ritual space. The Champion's and the Minister's blades meet, clacking together loudly as the two battle: smashing the censers, cleaving the altar, shredding the holy banners to tatters even as the room fills with malodor and miasma.
At last, the Champion raises his blade to strike at some telegraphed weakness in his opponent; the Minister's blade is faster and bites deeply into the armor and organs beneath. The Thirst Blade falls limply into the monster's clawed hand, the diamond cracking, deep veins of black-brown contagion spreading through it. "A crystalline organism," the whispering monster notes. "Very unexpected, Champion. Few of my brothers would have known how to combat such as creature. But they did not have my experience. It must be rare on this world; more's the pity as it must be unmade as well." The blade snaps and crumbles, falling into a roiling mass of consuming microbes. "Just as you will be unmade, here and now in the darkness..."
The Minister reaches forward to take the throat of the Champion in hand when the mountain shakes with the sound of a thousand thunders. A thousand-thousand thunders. A sound to deafen rocks, to cause oceans to leap from their beds, the explosion of all the world's winds at once.
With lesioned lips, the Sorcerer smiles. "...And now you are trapped, PlagueBringer."
Champion glances at the Sorcerer, his wounds exploding with infection, riddling his organs with rot and ruin. He opens his mandibles to speak, but only a blackish froth oozes out, choking and strangling him. The Minister drops the mortally wounded hero and spins on the Sorcerer, shredding the air with cartilage spines and viral poisons. "Our gods are mighty, whispering infidel," the Sorcerer promises as he staggers forward on crumbling flesh and snapping chitin. "You will tremble at the wrath of our gods. Soon. So soon. And you will marvel at their sublime justice."
"Let your gods come, then. Even one of us may begin the unmaking. The difference is only time, and suffering." The Minister watches as the Sorcerer melts into bacteria and proteins, shakes his head in pained disbelief at the opposition he has had to endure on this world. The Minister takes the time to absorb the great rioting pathogens left in the wake of his fallen brethren, swelling him almost to bursting. Once able to secure them, the Minister floats back toward the hard, crystal rain now falling from a clear night sky outside.
The Minister pauses at the threshold of the mountain passageway, kneading his brow as he considers the sky. Was it not day when they reached this last bastion? Their battle raged all night, into the dawn, pursuing his last resistance here as the sun rose over this mountain range? And now night again? Had the sorcerer bent time? Some trick of causality which caused him to be thrown out of sync? Perhaps some kind of temporal trap, as he had hinted?
And where was this rain coming from, pelting the ground in thick beads? From what clouds... and what had become of the holy breath and incense of the Grandfather, that should coat the sky with his promise of communion? The Minister steps into the rain, peering up at the strange, concentric aurora growing larger in the sky as it watches it. He steps into the rain then immediately repulses as the rain bites into his flesh, tearing at disease-swollen tissues.
Not rain, not liquid at all. He pushes a claw through the brittle matter piling up on the ground before him. Tiny crystals, little glass shards falling from the sky, shredding anything before it. A coldness spreads through him, disregarding any fever he may carry. He looks again at the aurora, still closer, and growing. He looks where the sun should have been and sees only the light of stars and that of the horrific tempest where a star once was.
"No, in the name of the great father, no," he gasps as the realization settles in. "It is not time. There are too many to save... Too many...too little time...." The Minister races forward, allowing the glass to slice him to ribbons. He forces his nurturing plagues to give him strength, to give him quickness. The Unmaking must occur, he must channel all the power of his martyred alcolytes, and all wisdom the Grandfather has provided him. His brothers and sisters would not balk at such a sacrifice, his life is borrowed and unworthy in comparison to the Great Work.
The Minister rises higher into the air with a massive beat of his tattered wings, reaching up with a hand ground down to bone and ruined ligaments to tear his mask away. As he struggles to draw breath into his punctured lungs, the last surviving Plaguebringer hears words in a language he is only barely familiar with. A scrap of verse in a strange language he knows as English from a world known as Earth.
In starlit nights I saw you
So cruelly you kissed me
Your lips a magic world
Your sky all hung with jewels...
The Minister hears this for what it is. A counter-spell, a desperate, unholy curse on the world masked as a blessing. The Unmaking would purify this place, to make it clean through utter destruction, to pave the way for new life and matter to emerge. What madness would summon such a potentate, to thwart the cycle of death and rebirth. What is this blasphemy that only sows annihilation in its wake? The Minister howls harder, screaming the great tone of Unmaking across this special piece of creation the Grandfather has graced with their presence and his attention. He feels the touch of the divine in his heart, but also the crawling cancer of despair as the world glistens, glazes over with consuming crystal and crumbling destruction.
"The killing moon
Will come too soon..."
The strength of the Minister is far from infinite, and the Goddess of Shattered Glass was not called here to relent in her holocaust-incarnation. As the Minister bloodily streaks to the ground, his desperate orison incomplete, he glimpses through mirror-blinded eyes the rise of a human form formed of the glass fused by the power of a pulverized star. The female form glances at him and breathes in a language he understands but has no mind to comprehend.
Once it touches the tender atmosphere of this nameless world, the nova's shockwave leaves nothing behind: a grim salvation.
-------------
Return: a slate-grey floor glowing orange, wood panelled walls convection-blackened and smoking. The unprepared domicle of a unwilling host to reckless cosmic power. See, then, the curled body of the young woman dashed to the floor in a moment of a desolating reverie. Her sapphire hair rustles as if moved by starlight itself, or perhaps just the thermal tides of heat and oxygen. Her eyes are tumultuous with mirror-skin as she whispers to something outside of her, or perhaps inside of her, or both.
Fate
Up against your will
through the thick and thin...
The Champion sees them approach, the horrid, unclean ones sowing death, lingering pain, and the consuming miasma that now sickens the sky and rains disease on the innocent harmony of their world. His world. Even now, his body betrays and fails him: the white ash covering his proud armor, his thick maxillary plates flecked with brown bile teeming with infection. All the weaker, vulnerable guardians have fallen: one by one, like a child's tumbling cascade. Only the Champion remains to face the Plaguebringers, he and the pain-maddened Sorcerer he was charged to safeguard to this place. Only the sorcerer may commune with what entities and powers exist beyond the realm of the material - and there beg for the lives of his precious little world, now so close to utter extinction.
To think so few of these whispering, inexorably approaching creatures (only seven: not even enough to count on his antennae) had been responsible for so much tragedy and murder. Yet their conquest had been hard fought, for this beautiful world on whose behalf the Champion now suffered (and undoubtedly is now dying for) was not without its Guardians. Their combined might did stagger the alien's approach, for what it was worth. As each of the disease-pilgrims fell to their defensive line, their plagues and poxes went unchained by their masters. Death and ruin gushed forth and decimated cities, clogging rivers with corpses of the defiled. Such uncounted, needless suffering as to beggar the imagination. The Champion weeped before the leaders of this bleeding, oozing world. If he can only guessed at the cost of such a victory, perhaps it would have been different. As it stood, now there were but three. And yet three were enough to lay waste to whole races of life, to burn nations in fever, and widow continents.
At one time, he would have plead for reason, to argue caution to these creatures. At one time he was a champion of order and law, and disdained needless violence, even toward his most vicious rivals. Now, instead, in each extremity he carries one of the forbidden, unhallowed artifacts of lore: the Blades of Hunger and Thirst. In the past, he fought against those who foolishly thought they could master these weapons only to find themselves corrupted and devoured in turn. Only at the greatest extremity of desperation did he finally turn to these unthinking, consuming horrors for strength against the unstoppable Plaguebringers. Only with great resignation did he accept the shriveling of his own ethical and moral code, to embrace evil against evil. The Champion hefts these condemning spikes charges along the causeway toward the first of the Death Missionaries.
The foremost rises to meet him, thick ropy strands of disease and infection pouring out from its monstrous, fleshy forelimbs. The Champion ignores this - having finally accepted that this will be his final battle - and strikes true. The diamond blades bury deep into the monster, eagerly devouring the matter cell by cell, adding its victim's own horrible, burning, failing strength to the Champion's. The final two plaguebringers trill out a inhuman noise from behind their bone and cartilage masks, a roiling keening dirge for their fallen brethren. As it fades into echoes, the monsters spare a glance to each other before their bodies explode into nightmarish revenants of blood, offal, and weeping wounds. They each stretch new-formed bone-and-gristle wings, flapping them wetly against the cavern's screaming darkness.
The smaller one, whom the Champion believes is the youngest of the invaders, lifts into the air and harries the Champion, pushing him backward toward the temple. The air around him thickens and grows cloying with bacteria and viruses, more of a soup than anything else. The Champion can hold his breath for a long time, but the infection he has suffered these long weeks have whittled him down. Even with the Blades bolstering him, he knows he is losing ground gradually, inevitably. The cruel truth assails him as surely as the winged plague-templar, that as each living thing falls he grows weaker, and these blasphemies grow stronger. Long before this desperate ploy had been formed, the nations and populations of his tender, peaceful world had fallen into despair. Great armies of self-annihilation rose from the boiling corpses of cities, embracing suicide-gospels and euthanasia philosophies. Better to end the suffering now, they preached, than put our faith in vain heroes and frail weapons of war. The Champion mourned them once, but wonders now whether he had misjudged their wisdom.
The duel fairs poorly for the Champion, now felled to one rotting pivoting joint as the winged creature closes in on him with fangs and poison spines bared and quivering. But this is misdirection and an overestimation of the Champion's weakness - crippled though he may be. The Champion summons the strength within the Hungry Blade and hurls it toward the floating, hissing creature. The desperate lunge is not in vain as the blade sinks into its rubbery lower extremity. The blade eats and eats at the matter within the penultimate Plaguebringer, dissolving it in screaming pain. The creature wildly attempts to flap its way back to the bridge span, struggling against the blade's insatiable hunger. It manages only to scrape one bony claw against the bridge slates before tumbling into the abyss.
"You lost your blade, Champion," the final adversary states flatly. As the Champion rebalances himself, it gestures a benediction toward the gulf where its compatriots fell.
"I have another," the Champion spat, the yellow-flecked, purulent sputum burning his now-moldy chitin as it flew from his mandible. The last of his wonders, the Thirst Blade spun his grasp.
The Plaguebringer cocked its head, reappraising the Champion's resolve, then dug its claws into the flesh of its arm as it whispered, "As do I."
With a wrench and a tear, the abomination stripped the muscle and rotten tendons from its own arm. The de-gloved bones fused and sharpened until the limb formed into a spiny, ugly, wicked weapon nightmare-born imitation of a sword. It swung the plagueblade across the metal rails of the causeway, fouling even the steel as it touched. With its spare, clawed hand, the Plaguebeast beckoned the Champion to battle.
"It is done," the ancient voice of the Sorcerer wheezed from the alcove of the temple. The Champion did not waver his gaze to look back, although the infection-priest retreated one step in response to the declaration.
"It is done, and it is done well." The Sorcerer declares before walking placidly back into the temple.
The contagion-master pulls back itself into a more guarded position. "All you have done is bargained more time for your world to suffer. We offer a holy peace, magician. The peace of the Grandfather is all consuming, all welcoming. Our work here is holy. You seek only to extend the ordeal your world faces. It is a pity that..."
"It is I who pity you, Minister. I have denied your god his prize. Our gods are more powerful and have a greater love for their people. They will not abandon us to endure your rites of destruction. And their justice is... thorough." His voice, though weak and pleghmy with sceptic rot, is a cruel balance between pity and contempt.
The Champion spares a glance back and begins a limping retreat back toward the temple. "When...how will they save us, Sorcerer? Where is our aid, where is the miracle?"
"It comes. Soon. Not long at all. A few minutes, perhaps." The sorcerer stands at the center of the small temple's ritual space, and points to the light, scattered to this place from many, many hidden fissures throughout the mountain. "It's already beginning."
The Champion stepped back into the temple, the Minister not far behind him. "I see nothing, Sorcerer. The light fades, where is the power you said would save us?"
The Plaguebringer drags its limb-sword behind itself, scoffing throatily. "It appears your sorcery will be of less use than you expected. I am afraid our theological debate will conclude in my favor."
The Champion bristles his antennae with a keen of rage and charges the beast before him. In almost perfect synchronicity with the Plaguebringer's first defiling step across the temple's threshold, the last of the temple's light dies, leaving only faint florescence from the cracked-glass globes arrayed about the perimeter of the ritual space. The Champion's and the Minister's blades meet, clacking together loudly as the two battle: smashing the censers, cleaving the altar, shredding the holy banners to tatters even as the room fills with malodor and miasma.
At last, the Champion raises his blade to strike at some telegraphed weakness in his opponent; the Minister's blade is faster and bites deeply into the armor and organs beneath. The Thirst Blade falls limply into the monster's clawed hand, the diamond cracking, deep veins of black-brown contagion spreading through it. "A crystalline organism," the whispering monster notes. "Very unexpected, Champion. Few of my brothers would have known how to combat such as creature. But they did not have my experience. It must be rare on this world; more's the pity as it must be unmade as well." The blade snaps and crumbles, falling into a roiling mass of consuming microbes. "Just as you will be unmade, here and now in the darkness..."
The Minister reaches forward to take the throat of the Champion in hand when the mountain shakes with the sound of a thousand thunders. A thousand-thousand thunders. A sound to deafen rocks, to cause oceans to leap from their beds, the explosion of all the world's winds at once.
With lesioned lips, the Sorcerer smiles. "...And now you are trapped, PlagueBringer."
Champion glances at the Sorcerer, his wounds exploding with infection, riddling his organs with rot and ruin. He opens his mandibles to speak, but only a blackish froth oozes out, choking and strangling him. The Minister drops the mortally wounded hero and spins on the Sorcerer, shredding the air with cartilage spines and viral poisons. "Our gods are mighty, whispering infidel," the Sorcerer promises as he staggers forward on crumbling flesh and snapping chitin. "You will tremble at the wrath of our gods. Soon. So soon. And you will marvel at their sublime justice."
"Let your gods come, then. Even one of us may begin the unmaking. The difference is only time, and suffering." The Minister watches as the Sorcerer melts into bacteria and proteins, shakes his head in pained disbelief at the opposition he has had to endure on this world. The Minister takes the time to absorb the great rioting pathogens left in the wake of his fallen brethren, swelling him almost to bursting. Once able to secure them, the Minister floats back toward the hard, crystal rain now falling from a clear night sky outside.
The Minister pauses at the threshold of the mountain passageway, kneading his brow as he considers the sky. Was it not day when they reached this last bastion? Their battle raged all night, into the dawn, pursuing his last resistance here as the sun rose over this mountain range? And now night again? Had the sorcerer bent time? Some trick of causality which caused him to be thrown out of sync? Perhaps some kind of temporal trap, as he had hinted?
And where was this rain coming from, pelting the ground in thick beads? From what clouds... and what had become of the holy breath and incense of the Grandfather, that should coat the sky with his promise of communion? The Minister steps into the rain, peering up at the strange, concentric aurora growing larger in the sky as it watches it. He steps into the rain then immediately repulses as the rain bites into his flesh, tearing at disease-swollen tissues.
Not rain, not liquid at all. He pushes a claw through the brittle matter piling up on the ground before him. Tiny crystals, little glass shards falling from the sky, shredding anything before it. A coldness spreads through him, disregarding any fever he may carry. He looks again at the aurora, still closer, and growing. He looks where the sun should have been and sees only the light of stars and that of the horrific tempest where a star once was.
"No, in the name of the great father, no," he gasps as the realization settles in. "It is not time. There are too many to save... Too many...too little time...." The Minister races forward, allowing the glass to slice him to ribbons. He forces his nurturing plagues to give him strength, to give him quickness. The Unmaking must occur, he must channel all the power of his martyred alcolytes, and all wisdom the Grandfather has provided him. His brothers and sisters would not balk at such a sacrifice, his life is borrowed and unworthy in comparison to the Great Work.
The Minister rises higher into the air with a massive beat of his tattered wings, reaching up with a hand ground down to bone and ruined ligaments to tear his mask away. As he struggles to draw breath into his punctured lungs, the last surviving Plaguebringer hears words in a language he is only barely familiar with. A scrap of verse in a strange language he knows as English from a world known as Earth.
In starlit nights I saw you
So cruelly you kissed me
Your lips a magic world
Your sky all hung with jewels...
The Minister hears this for what it is. A counter-spell, a desperate, unholy curse on the world masked as a blessing. The Unmaking would purify this place, to make it clean through utter destruction, to pave the way for new life and matter to emerge. What madness would summon such a potentate, to thwart the cycle of death and rebirth. What is this blasphemy that only sows annihilation in its wake? The Minister howls harder, screaming the great tone of Unmaking across this special piece of creation the Grandfather has graced with their presence and his attention. He feels the touch of the divine in his heart, but also the crawling cancer of despair as the world glistens, glazes over with consuming crystal and crumbling destruction.
"The killing moon
Will come too soon..."
The strength of the Minister is far from infinite, and the Goddess of Shattered Glass was not called here to relent in her holocaust-incarnation. As the Minister bloodily streaks to the ground, his desperate orison incomplete, he glimpses through mirror-blinded eyes the rise of a human form formed of the glass fused by the power of a pulverized star. The female form glances at him and breathes in a language he understands but has no mind to comprehend.
Once it touches the tender atmosphere of this nameless world, the nova's shockwave leaves nothing behind: a grim salvation.
-------------
Return: a slate-grey floor glowing orange, wood panelled walls convection-blackened and smoking. The unprepared domicle of a unwilling host to reckless cosmic power. See, then, the curled body of the young woman dashed to the floor in a moment of a desolating reverie. Her sapphire hair rustles as if moved by starlight itself, or perhaps just the thermal tides of heat and oxygen. Her eyes are tumultuous with mirror-skin as she whispers to something outside of her, or perhaps inside of her, or both.
Fate
Up against your will
through the thick and thin...