Category Archives: Broken Horizons

Tag for posts that are part of the Broken Horizon’s series

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 13

The mirror didn’t look like the focal point on which the fate of countless worlds rested. It was, from one point of view, nothing more than a simple wooden structure with carvings of generic Tinkerbell-esque fairies around the edges and a slab of silvered glass propped inside the oval frame.

Tessa didn’t even have to step close enough to see her reflection though for it to take her breath away.

“So, is this what we need?” Rip asked. Her fingers crackled with little sparks of electricity as she reached a tentative hand out towards it.

“We may need to call the gods to verify and activate it,” Azma said.

“Oh. No, no we don’t,” Tessa said. She’d just had a [Storm of Oblivion] try to seduce her with a mind expanding power trip, so keeping a handle on the awe she felt was a bit easier, which was good since looking into the mirror felt like she was standing at the doorway to Home.

Not the place where she lived, or the place where she grew up. Home. The place where she had always yearned to return, despite never having been there.

“You okay?” Lisa moved close to her, either for support or to stop Tessa from hurling herself into the mirror.

“Yeah,” and she was. Unlike the tidal waves outside, the mirror drew her in with no compulsion or enchantment. Unlike Oblivion, the mirror offered her back everything she gave to it. “I can see why you liked to be here though.”

“How do we make it work?” Jamal asked. He’d taken up a position behind Rip that was awfully similar to Lisa’s ‘I’ll just stand here so I can grab you if you try diving in there without me’ posture.

“Like this,” Tessa said and extended her hand to trace the edge of the oval, careful not to disturb any of the faeries.

The secrets of working a [Shifting Space] into the real world weren’t ones Tessa had any reason to know. 

No Earthling did.

As she finished tracing the outline, Tessa saw herself reflected back and gazed into her own eyes.

And Pillowcase’s eyes.

And Glimmerglass’s eyes.

And so, so many others.

They were all hers, despite being different colors, shapes, and sizes. 

Even the ones which were only pools of endless night.

Hey, I wasn’t sure we’d ever get to meet, Oblivion’s words were kindly?

Because you’re not Oblivion, Tessa said. It was similar to speaking on one of the telepathic channels she’d grown used to relying on, a sense of distance existing despite the fact that she was, in every sense that mattered, talking to herself.

Yes and no. Call me Oblivion-Adjacent Tessa. Or not. Ugh, that sounds terrible. I need a better name.

Are you sure you’re Oblivion-Adjacent? All the other things we’ve run into that crawled out of Oblivion seemed like they were hellbent on going right back there. And taking all of existence with them.

Oh, I was on board with that plan at first too. Burn it all down, go back to blissful unawareness of everything. No more suffering, no more yearning, and no more abject stupidity. Blah, blah, blah.

Sure. Sounds super appealing. Tessa had heard Oblivion’s arguments before and was keenly aware of the futility of trying to debate the points. So what changed your mind. Why are you…I don’t know? Me I guess?

You did.

But this is the first time we’ve met.

Like this, yes. But I’ve been with you for a while now. My whole life in fact.

I’m gonna need a bit more than that.

I’ll give you everything I’ve got, but I do need something in return.

Let me guess, ‘the entirety of my existence’?

Yick, no. That would be…okay, it would be super complicated, but basically if I take everything you have then there won’t be a you anymore, but since you exist and I don’t, mostly, that would mean that I’d be you, so you’d still be around, but there’d be no more me. 

Strangely I kind of get that. So what do you want then?

I mean, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, and you’ve given them out before, so I don’t think it should be, but maybe I could have a real name? It doesn’t have to be a big one, or anything cryptic or special. It’s just without a name, it’s hard to be a meaningful part of anything. The best you can do is be ‘the anonymous girl’ which sort of dissolves who you are into a sea of generic possible people and…

I get it. It doesn’t seem right for me to slap a name on you though. Shouldn’t you get to pick one out for yourself.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. So pick one out already.

Uh, but what if I get it wrong?

Then give me another one. Or a nickname. Or I’ll just grow into it. Names aren’t really that important, you know, for being the most important thing in all of creation.

Can you tell me anything about yourself? I mean a bit of inspiration would be nice right?

Oh, sure. I think you know what I am right?

No, not at…wait a minute. You’re…

Yep.

The little bit of the [Formless Hunger] that I tore out of it. Your where my magic’s been coming from?

Not quite. I mean, you’re right that I was a bit of oblivion that you sort of grabbed and made your own, but that’s not where your power comes from. 

It’s not?

If your power came from me, then what did you use to rip the [Formless Hunger] into being?

I guess that is a good question. So where does my power come from then?

From you. 

But I wasn’t anything special.

You were to me. 

But that I was the first one to resist the [Formless Hunger] was just random chance.

Maybe you’re not unique then. Maybe everyone can do what you did and they just didn’t have the opportunity to try. All I know is that I’m who and what I am because I became a part of you, and that where you walk on the material side of the Dreamlit Veil, I walk on the other.

So are you my mirror then?

More like we’re counterpoints to each other, I think. I don’t have to do what you do but in reverse, anymore than I control your actions, or any of our many selves controls the others when we separated across worlds. You anchor down our existence in the places that are real and I anchor it out here, in the places that aren’t.

Okay that sort of makes sense. That’s why we can meet now, because a [Shifting Space] is where the real and unreal meet right?

That’s my best guess.

Which means, you can’t be fully real to me then? That kind of sucks.

Just because I’m not real doesn’t mean we can see each other. Case in point.

I suppose that’s…wait, you’re someone who’s not real who I can still talk to? You’re Asset! That’s your name!

You’re giving me the name of your imaginary friend from when you were five? Where you just spelled your own name backwards?

Is that okay?

Okay? That’s awesome! Asset said.

So, Asset, can you help us cross over to where we can meet with the gods of the [Fallen Kingdoms]?

Crossing over’s all you, but I can lead you to them once you all get here.

Cool! Oh, are there any dangers we need to aware of?

Not if you’re with me. Otherwise, yes, more than you can imagine. Literally.

I should bring the others over then, Tessa said. They must be wondering if I’ve lost it again.

Probably not. This isn’t exactly real, so time is what we want it to be. We could have just spent one second or one millennium talking. It’s all the same here.

I’ll take the one second this time.

Tessa drew in a breath as her hand parted from the mirror’s surface. Her reflection was smiling at her, and continued to do so even after she turned away.

“We have a guide waiting for us,” she told her team. “Please make sure to follow her. I think if we get lost that will be a more or less permanent status.”

“Who is she? The guide that is,” Yawlorna asked.

“Me. Sort of,” Tessa said. “You can call her Asset.”

Azma smiled at that and Tessa suspected that might be because she was mentally calling all of them her ‘assets’.

“You’ll explain all this to us when we’ve got time to catch a breath right?” Lisa asked.

“If we survive this, definitely. If we don’t, then probably?”

“So we just step through it?” Rip asked. When Jamal turned to see what Tessa’s answer might be though, Rip took the opportunity to hop directly into the mirror.

“Wait!” Jamal said as he hopped right in after her.

Everyone else followed suit in the order of who was nearest to the mirror or who had the fastest reflexes first.

Tessa was the last to go through, holding back for one very simple reason.

“Did you just close the door behind us?” Starchild asked.

“Yeah, had to,” Tessa said.

Azma blinked in surprise and fought a small smile that was threatening to spread across her face. “And why would that be?”

“If I didn’t Byron would absolutely follow us here and the [Fallen Kingdoms] gods aren’t equipped to fight him,” Tessa said.

Azma staggered a half step and lost the fight to keep the smile from her face. The calculating look in her eyes that followed though looked far more covetous than Tessa was comfortable with. Azma probably wasn’t considering forcibly recruiting Tessa, that didn’t seem to be Azma’s style. Making Tessa an offer Tessa might not even think to refuse though?

“We should get going,” Asset said.

“Going where?” Rip asked.

“The [Celestial Sphere],” Asset said. “We’ll need some transportation though. Yawlorna, could you help us out there?”

“How?” 

“You remember your ship still right?”

“I do. It’s in pieces though.”

“We don’t need that version,” Asset said. “Remember it like it was when you first walked aboard. Remember its speed and how it was able to take you exactly where you needed to be.”

“The [High Beyond]?” Yawlorna asked.

“No. Here. Everything you’ve done, it’s led you to where you can make all the difference in the world. In every world in fact,” Asset said.

“That not how things really work though,” Yawlorna said. “The crash wasn’t planned so I could get here.”

“Of course not,” Asset said. “The tragedies that befall us aren’t part of some grand plan to make everything better. They suck and they’re tragic and it’s right that we mourn the people we lose and rage against the injustices that happen to us. None of that changes the fact that our choices matter too though. You’re here because you chose to hold it together. And because you chose to trust these knuckleheads,” she pointed towards Tessa and the rest of her team. “So remember your ship. We have a new crew for it, and here, it can fly again.”

Tessa watched as a new smile put a crack in Yawlorna’s cynicism.

And around them the walls of a pristine spaceship began to form.

Ahead, the forward view screen. To the left, the navigators console. To the right, science and comms. And in the center, the Senior Researcher’s chair.

Which was occupied.

By a ghost.

Tessa glanced up to find Yawlorna back in her demon-esque form, though with eyes glassy with tears.

The ghost, the ship’s original Captain, gave her a silent nod of appreciation and signaled for the ship to get underway.

Which the ghost helmsman was all too happy to comply with. He flipped a lever on his console which brought the darkness on the forward viewscreen to life with stars that shifted and wheeled as the ship ship turned and found its proper course.

Yawlorna dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands until the Senior Researcher rose and placed a hand on her shoulder.

She looked up and then towards the Science Station. With a grateful smile and a nod, she rose and took her proper position, the ghosts far more than mere memories as they sailed the cosmos toward one final frontier.

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 12

Jin

Worlds that didn’t mind you splitting your attention into a thousand different shards weren’t that common. Jin was happy to see the [Fallen Kingdoms] were an exception.

“We..we made it?” Rachel, or rather Deadly Alice, asked, gasping for breath on her knees.

“Yep. First try. That’s pretty impressive,” Jin said. She had nine hundred and ninety nine copies spread out across the [Fallen Kingdoms] but each of them was holding back, observing the individual world ending events, but not interfering for now.

“I thought I was going to be ripped in half,” Deadly Alice said. “Or, no, maybe it was crushed into a singularity? Or both? How am I ever going to do that again?”

“It gets easier each time,” Beth said. “I didn’t have the torn-apart sensation that you did, but I can tell you that while everyone starts out with their own experiences in World Walking, after a while it all tends to converge and get easy. Too easy.”

“This was horrible,” Rachel said, “How can it ever be too easy?”

“If it becomes easy enough, you can do it without noticing,” Jin said. “And you can do it in your sleep.”

“So I could wake up in some other world?” Rachel asked.

“Or never wake up at all,” Jin said. “No worries though. You’ll figure it out. Now let’s go find someone for you to teach. That’s how you’ll learn the fastest!”

Mellisandra

The chasm behind Mellisandra didn’t stretch down to the core of the planet. The dead [Terravorlings] at the bottom of it had been angling for that, but both they and their [Nightmare Terravore] progenitor had made a terrible mistake. They’d developed [Supreme Fire Resistance] rather than [Fire Immunity]. The difference should have been negligible, they’re ridiculous healing factor could have easily covered the small trickle of fire damage that came from burrowing through magma to the core. 

What it couldn’t deal with was super charged [Lava Serpents].

Mellisandra had been one of the roughly 1,500 [Elementalists] who’d cast a near endless steam of max level fire spells, not at the [Terravorlings] but at the [Lava Serpents] who were able to absorb the blasts and grow exponentially stronger from them.

Even with that however the fight had still be a losing battle. Force of arms only went so far when your foe had near infinite spawning resources to draw on.

That changed rather abruptly however when Cambrell [Assassinated] the [Nightmare Terravore].

The Goblin hadn’t been alone. Damnazon, and the entire [Army of Light] under Cease All’s command had made the perilous trek up and into the Terravore.

It had been Cambrell though who’d penetrated into the swirling heart of the nightmare.

Mellisandra had asked ten different people what happened next and gotten twelve different stories.

In some, Cambrell has unleashed a secret [Goblin] technique where he self-destructed and took the monster’s heart out in one blazing explosion. In other stories, he’s carved a hole in time and space that drew in both the monster and himself. Variations of that one suggested that he’d known it would happen and resigned himself to his fate, or the monster had tried to hold on and Cambrell had pitched himself at it carrying them both through the portal, or the monster had made the portal and Cambrell had cut out its heart and carried it through to break its connection to the beast.

Whatever the truth was, the [Goblin] hadn’t made it back. Mellisandra knew that was absolutely not the same as saying he was gone for good, but she still found herself worrying about him. Just because someone might survive an impossible fate didn’t mean it would be pleasant for them.

Of course Mellisandra had plenty of her own troubles to worry about too.

With the victory over the [Nightmare Terravore], no time for rest had been given to them. Baelgritz and his crew had been recalled back to the defense of [Dragonshire], while the [Army of Light] had been assigned to act as rescue teams for parties that had been lost inside dead [World Serpents]. 

Mellisandra and Damnazon, along with the rest of their party and an raid teams worth of other parties had tasked with acting as forward spotters and dungeon cleaners for the [Wraithwing Air Assault] forces. 

“There’s a level 20 dungeon up ahead,” Damnazon said. “Not capped. Pretty small but there could be some [Death Shadows] lurking in there.”

“How’s your [Life Ward] holding up?” Mellisandra asked. Fighting [Death Shadows] was a fatal endeavor unless you had access to one of the moderately high-level charms against instant death effects. Once you took away the [Death Shadows] most prominent ability they were somewhat pathetic. An overly specialized menace easily rendered inert – provided you could get ahead of their breeding rate. With an ever dwindling number of deaths to spawn new shadows, Mellisandra felt like they were close to solving a second apocalypse in as many hours.

Then the [Phantom Coursers] they were riding on crested the hill that marked the border of the next zone over and she saw the rabbits.

In low level zones there are typically an abundance of minor enemies who are capable of respawning at astounding rates, the monsters who lack that trait having been driven to extinction by the mad stampede of beginners who will slaughter everything in sight.

What Mellisandra saw over the rise should have been the typical low level rabbit enemies that nearly all fledgling [Adventurers] tangle with many times over in their careers.

Instead however, she saw death.

As each [Blood Thirsting Bunny] died, it spawned two more, and the [Death Shadow] that killed it spawned two new progeny as well, who immediately slew the new rabbits.

“We’re going to need more [Sun Bombs]. A lot more,” Damnazon said, though Mellisandra was pretty sure there weren’t enough [Sun Bombs] in the world to stop the spread she saw before her.

Baelgritz

Being surrounded by monsters had never been Baelgritz’s idea of a good time. His strength and bulk had largely been a genetic legacy rather than something he’d trained for, at least not until recently. Despite all his recent experiences though, he still thought of himself as primarily a scholar, or if he was being honest, a student. Being surrounded by creatures out of nightmare, as he and the people he loved most in any world fought a desperate and, again if he was being honest, losing battle to save the world? That just wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Supposed to be, or not, the end of the world was where he was standing though. In a small, only partially repaired fort that had delusions of being a castle, as sentient virus named the [Brain Scourge] drew the forces it had collected up to the door.

The [Brain Scourge’s] minions didn’t need to outfight the fort’s defenders, they just needed to touch them. That was all the contact the [Brain Scourge] required to infect and corrupt a host.

Behind Baelgritz’s forces lay a stretch of barrow hills and then the all-but-helpless town of [Dragonshire]. If Baelgritz’s troops fell, the [Brain Scourge] would roll through the town and gain the power of several thousand mid-level [Adventurers] who were busy training themselves up as fast as they could in order to join the battles to save the world.

They would be too late though, if Baelgritz’s tactical assement of their situation was even vaguely accurate.

“They got Gray,” Vixali said, noting the loss of one of their least vulnerable allies. “Which settles our bet on whether it can affect immaterial beings.”

“I’ll pay you when the battle’s over okay?” Baelgritz said.

“I will expect payment when I find you in Hell then,” Vixali said.

The [Adventurers] were going to be too late, but the one ray of hope was that the monsters Baelgritz was surrounded by were on his side.

Grunvan

[Wraithwings], it turned out, had a natural [Necro Immunity] effect. A nice wizard-ish [Adventurer] had explained that meant the [Death Shadows] couldn’t directly harm scary bird things, which in turn made Grunvan very happy that she hadn’t set off the load of [Sun Bombs] she’d been hauling to the staging point in an attempt to burn up the [Wraithwings] that had been chasing her.

Of course if there had been an army at the staging point like she’d been told there would be, things would have been perfect. Instead it turned out that there was an army there, but it was not an army of [Soldiers], it was an army of [Wagon Drivers]. Specifically [Wagon Drivers] who were being recruited to become [Wraithwing Pilots]. 

Wagons, Grunvan felt it should be pointed out, kept in contact with a solid surface at all times. Should they lose contact with a solid surface, they were sure to regain it within seconds. The more seconds there were, the worse regaining contact tended to be.

By that reasoning, climbing onto the back of something that would not be returning to solid ground for several hours seemed absolutely disastrous. 

Which was why she wasn’t surprised to find herself several hundred feet in the air on a [Wraithwing] that was loaded down with as [Sun Bombs] as it could carry and still fly. Today was a day for disasters it seemed.

“Apple Plate flight team, head northwest following the [Greenling River Basin],” Ryschild said telepathically to Grunvan and the rest of the [Wagon Drivers] from her home town.

“Copy that. Changing course to [Greenling River Basin]” Grunvan said, as she’d been coached to respond.

She’d made two bombing runs already, clearing [Apple Plate] and [High Mourn Monastery] of the [Death Shadows] that had invaded and taken root there. [Adventurers] had followed in her wake and done the final cleanup while she and the other pilots moved on to blast every other location with sunlight strong enough to fry a living shadow. It was terrifying work but also strangely fulfilling. Grunvan had no interest in pursuing it as a career but pitching in to prevent the end of the world filled her with a real note of pride.

Which was quickly nibbled away by anxiety.

“Does anyone else see that cloud formation ahead of us?” she asked over the pilots’ general channel.

“It’s pretty high up,” one of the pilots said.

“It’s red though?” another asked.

“And is it growing or am I just seeing things?” Argwin said.

“It’s not you, it’s definitely getting bigger and it’s moving fast,” Grunvan said.

“Apple Plate flight team, we have a situation at the end of the [Greenling River Basin]. I’m diverting all others flight teams to join you,” Ryschild said. “Do not wait for their arrival. Begin bombing runs as soon as you arrive and drop your entire payload. No aiming will be required.”

That sounded like exactly the kind of thing Grunvan did not want to hear, except the chatter on the pilots’ channel that followed was even worse.

“The red cloud’s over the basin,” a pilot said.

“It’s over us too.”

“Is it raining something there?”

“That’s not rain!” 

“What is it?”

Meteors. The cloud was raining flaming meteors on them. Grunvan jerked hard on her [Wraithwings] bridle pulling it into evasive maneuvers she had never been taught and it was barely capable of performing as the skies rained down balls of molten, rocky death on them all.

Grenslaw

Grenslaw’s plans were falling into ruin. Which was expected. They were plans drafted from incomplete information against novel threats. The victories the [Adventurers] were able to obtain were only barely due to Grenslaw’s tactical acumen. The lionshare of the credit there went to the [Adventurers’] ability to think on their feet and adjust to changing situations at a speed no Consortium troops could have ever hoped to match.

Similarly their losses weren’t an incrimination of their abilities. Some of the apocalypses had truly unfathomable structures. Others were overwhelming within narrow channels which the forces assembled to stop them simply didn’t have the power to mitigate.

Each loss was a catastrophe of its own regardless though, requiring rapid redeployment of the available forces and the expenditure of resources which could not be replaced and by all projections were not going to be sufficient to see the battles to their end.

Which meant Grenslaw wasn’t fighting for a victory any longer.

Victory wasn’t an option, but neither was failure.

Which left only one option.

Fight for every moment the world could get.

And hope for a miracle.

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 11

Lisa’s family turned out to be just a tiny bit surprised by the arrival of seven complete strangers and their eldest daughter in the middle of their living room. That their guests’ arrival was preceded by a ghost portal forming and fine, thin ice covering every nearby surface wasn’t quite as upsetting as the two feet of fog which rose from the ground or the trio of banshees who wailed loud enough to douse every light in the vicinity.

“Are we in the right place?” Rose asked, surveying a reasonably spacious living room with walls that were chock full of a lifetime of assorted collectibles.

The handful of people who were frozen in place with eyes wide and mouths open could have passed for extra-large collectibles given the absolute stillness they displayed, but Tessa was able to pick out the bits of family resemblance they shared with Lisa which suggested that they were more than life sized sculptures.

“Yeah. It is,” Lost Alice said, her tone flat and colder than the ice around them.

“Who are you?” the oldest man in the room said, rising from the recliner he’d been resting in. Lisa’s father, Tessa guessed?

“You don’t…” Lost Alice started to say, but then paused, rolling her eyes. “Oh, of course. Why would you.  It doesn’t matter though,” she said. “We won’t be here long. We just need to visit your attic.”

“Our attic?” a woman who had to be Lisa’s mother said.

“You have a mirror up there that’s very important,” Lost Alice said.

“Wait. I don’t understand. Who are you?” her mother said.

“People who are working to save your world,” Azma said, her tone was plain and matter of fact, and while it provided no real answers, it was sufficient to halt further questions.  “Where can we access this attic?”

“Over here,” Lost Alice said, taking a step towards the stairs at the far side of the room.

“The mirror will serve as a [Shifting Space]?” Azma asked. 

“I used to get lost in it for hours. If the world is coming apart and reality is weakening, it should be very weak there,” Lost Alice said.

“Can you be sure?” Azma asked.

“My spell brought us here. I don’t think it could have if reality wasn’t significantly degraded already.”

Tessa understood that without needing to ask. Their magic was drawn from the [Fallen Kingdoms]. They’d been able to use it in the battle against Cthulhu because he was weakening the bonds of reality by the mere fact of his existence. To cast a teleportation spell though meant establishing an effect within an area where reality still held firm. 

Unless something else was weakening it.

“Hey, Lisa, is that you?” one of the younger males asked. He was taller than Lisa but shorter than Lost Alice, and younger than either.

“James? How…?” Lost Alice asked.

“No fair, you were supposed to be done growing,” James said.

“James this is not…” Lisa’s mother began to say but stopped abruptly as Lost Alice’s form melted away.

“Yes it is,” Lisa said. “You have questions, but we don’t have the time for answers.”

“I can fill them in,” Tessa said. “Go ahead and check on the mirror. See if it’s what we need. If it is just give me a shout.”

Lisa looked spectacularly torn, but when Jamal tugged on her arm, she let herself be pulled into motion, leading the other upstairs and towards the attic.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Lisa’s mother said.

“You don’t have to,” Tessa said. “Just know that your daughter has been unspeakably brave and is doing everything she can to save this world and many others.”

“But what happened?” Lisa’s father asked.

“I can only give you the short form, but if you’ve been watching the news from around the world there are catastrophes happening everywhere. One of them happened to us, but it put us in a position to help fix things. The form you saw your daughter wearing is the person she is in another world. Think of it like a mask with super powers. She’s still herself but she looks different and can do more things.”

“Like this?” Lisa’s mother said, gesturing to the rapidly dispersing fog and ice.

“Among many other things, yes,” Tessa said. “Maybe even enough to keep us all alive.”

“Wait, she’s going into danger? Our Lisa?” Lisa’s father asked.

“She’s always been in danger Dad,” James said. “You just never wanted to see it.”

“Everyone is in danger now,” Tessa said, hoping to cut off what sounded like the beginning of an old argument. “The things you’ve heard about? The cities that have been wrecked and are being wrecked? Those aren’t isolated events. People are trying to fight back, but this is bigger than any of us.”

“Why is she out there then?” Lisa’s mother asked. “Why isn’t she being smart and staying somewhere safe. Is it because of you?”

Yes, I seduced your daughter with my amazing feminine wiles, Tessa thought, remembering a vast multitude of times she’d wished she had any feminine wiles at all. What she said instead of that was, “Lisa is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I owe my life to her genius and if we, and by that I mean the population of planet Earth, manage to survive beyond the next two or three hours, it’s going to be because of her insight and brilliance. Your daughter is an amazing woman with more courage than I think anyone will ever really understand.”

“She should be here though,” Lisa’s mother said. “And her sister too.”

“She should be where she can do what she needs to do,” James said.

“We need her here though. Look. You can see what’s happening outside,” Lisa’s mother gestured to the window which showed a stark and unearthly tableau. 

Waves were cresting as tall as buildings, rather than water though, they seemed to be made of broken cars and chunks of destroyed skyscrapers. As the waves drew close to the house though they crashed down into a dusty mist that flowed outwards, never making contact with the ground or any other physical structure.

Tessa found herself drawn to the window, or to the unreasonable apocalypse beyond it, she couldn’t be sure.

“I need to go have a look at that,” she said, her gaze sliding over to the door as a storm of thoughts whirled in the back of her head.

“No!” Lisa’s father said. “You can’t go out there. It’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Tessa agreed. “It is. That’s why I’ve got to go.”

She was out the door before she was aware she was even opening it.

Outside, the roar of the tidal waves of debris was deafening. Within it though was a familiar static crackle.

“Oh. So that’s what you are,” Tessa said and felt a nameless force within the not-yet-real apocalypse reaching out to her.

She could defeat it.

She’d faced worse already and she knew this sort of foe.

It would be so easy. 

Just step into the storm and take mastery of it away from nothing at all.

She had an impossible foe coming, a creature she hadn’t been able to defeat when she held the power of a god in her hands. 

But what could she do if she claimed a power that could not limited? That could not be overcome?

Byron thought he could destroy two worlds because there was nothing and no one that could stop him.

So what if she became no one?

She still had a piece of the [Formless Hunger’s] non-existence that she’d torn away from it. If she could tear one piece loose before, what could she manage now with all that she’d learned?

A vision spread out before her as she reached the edge of the tidal waves.

She saw herself cloaked in darkness and shadows, standing as an eternal, immortal guardian sheltering the Earth in her right hand and the [Fallen Kingdoms] in her left. 

She’d dared to carrying the essence of a god before and it hadn’t been enough. Shouldn’t she dare more? Shouldn’t she sacrifice more? What was one life against the billions of lives on two worlds? If she was willing to die to protect a small party of her friends, then shouldn’t she be willing to do even more if it meant protecting not only them but everyone else as well.

The waves were calling to her. Leave behind her limitations. Leave behind her vulnerabilities. Leave behind herself.

Would it even be that big of a loss?

Had she ever loved being herself?

Had she ever even wanted to be herself? With all the time she spent pretending to be someone else?

And what was the alternative?

The vision shifted to show her.

A lifeless world. Barren rock scoured clean of even microbes, with the rock itself passing away to dust and then elementary particles and then nothing, the strings of the cosmos ringing no longer. Everything returning to nothing.

Unless someone stood against that.

Unless she stood against that.

Unless her hands held everything safe.

Only hers.

No one else could do it.

She was unique. Special. The only one who could save the world.

She wanted to take the final step forward, to embrace the destiny that beckoned her onwards to eternity and beyond.

But her feet didn’t move.

“No,” she said, her quiet word shattering the nearest tidal wave and bringing her back into her body, and herself, and the moment she was in, far away from eternity. “I said I wouldn’t go off alone.”

And then Lisa was there.

At her back.

Wrapping her arms around Tessa and crying into her hair.

Tessa wanted to say something clever, or profound, or even funny, but instead she simply breathed and relaxed back into Lisa’s embrace.

“You’re back,” Lisa finally said, without releasing the embrace.

“I am not leaving you,” Tessa said softly and hugged Lisa’s arms.

Lisa broke down into a short crying laugh before squeezing Tessa tighter and whispering, “You better not. You promised after all.”

Tessa enjoyed the embrace for another few moments before asking, “how long was I out here for?”

In front of her the tidal waves still raged, growing higher and roaring louder with every new peak.

“Not long,” Lisa said. “James came up and got me when you went outside. By the time I got here though you were just standing here and you weren’t responding and…and there was static in your eyes.”

Tessa winced. With what they’d been through, she wasn’t sure she could think of anything scarier than that.

“It was calling to me,” Tessa said. “It offered me basically everything it could. Enough power to stop Byron and save everyone on both worlds.”

“That’s a really blatant lie,” Lisa said.

“Except it wasn’t,” Tessa said. “Not exactly. What it offered, I could have had.”

“But you’re still here?”

“Yeah, for everything it could give me, it couldn’t give me you and it was going to take away everything I was to claim that power,” Tessa said. “I’d absolutely have the ability to stop Byron and all the armageddons, but without myself, why would I have any interest in trying?”

“You figured that out while it was possessing you?” Lisa asked.

“No. I’m just figuring that part out now,” Tessa said. “I was able to turn away from them because I didn’t want either of the futures they were offering me. They both suck. I want to build something much better.”

“Sounds like you’ve got plans,” Lisa said, relaxing her embrace.

“Not so much anything specific,” Tessa said. “I mean when you run into things like that, how do you plan for it?” She gestured to the latest tidal wave of debris. “More just a guiding principal really.”

“And that is?” Lisa asked, turning Tessa around to face her.

“I don’t have this, it’s too big, and it’s impossible to handle. But I don’t have to. I just need to do what I can, and trust that you’ll be there to help with what I can’t do.”

“Always.”

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 10

Tessa

There were several million reasons why riding up to a hospital on the shoulders of an building sized eldritch abomination with her entire team was a bad idea. Tessa discounted them all for one far more important reason though.

Her building sized eldritch abomination was just adorable.

“Intriguing,” Azma said, greeting them from a fifth floor window. “I presume this will serve as a guardian for the hospital after we depart?”

On the one hand it was kind of maddening that nothing seemed to surprise Azma. On the other though, it was a relief to be able to skip explaining her plan once again.

She’d brought her team, and Mel and Fari up to speed on the idea of using Kitty Cthulhu as a basically invulnerable guardian for the residents of San Francisco who’d made the hospital their last hold out. Kitty Cthulhu had been delighted by the idea and the others at least saw the wisdom in leaving someone behind after they left.

“We can stay here if you need us,” Fari said, “but Captain Okoro has detected several other escalating calamities that we can help with.”

“You should go ahead and deal with those then,” Tessa said. “We’ve got this here.”

“Any chance you can call in more reinforcements?” Lisa asked. “It’s fantastic that you can pitch in, but we don’t seem to have a shortage of disasters at the moment.”

“Our getting here was something of a fluke,” Mel said. “We were testing out a new warp drive and, well, you can see how that went.”

“Oh no, are you going to be able to get home?” Rip asked.

“”Probably,” Mel said. “If we don’t, the kids will come find us.”

“We do not want that,” Fari said, an unspoke ‘again’ plain in her voice.

“No,” Mel agreed. “No, we do not.”

“Too dangerous here for them?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Too dangerous for here,” Darius said, joining Azma at the window.

“You saw the kind of things I was doing?” Mel said. “They’ve got all my power and most of my control.”

“Some of your control,” Fari said. “If we’re being generous.”

“We shall direct them to you if they should appear in this realm,” Azma said. “At the present however, we are all running somewhat late.”

“We have schedule to keep?” Tessa asked.

“We’ve got a meeting to get to,” Hailey said. “Several in fact.”

“With who?” Lisa asked.

“The gods,” Hailey said.

“Which ones?” Tessa asked.

“The ones that can help us!” Hailey said. “Hopefully.”

“You know that I will stab you, have you healed, and then stab you again right?” Tessa said. Given the healing capabilities they had access to, it was not an idle threat.

“We’ve contacted the original developers of the game which linked you to the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Azma said. “We need to meet with them, so that they can examine you.”

“Examine us why?” Yawlorna asked, the scientist in the giant, formerly demon-ish lady leaping to the fore.

“They built the bridges between the two worlds without a conscious awareness of what they were doing,” Azma said. “With you to use as guideposts, they believe they can open the pathways so that they will be able to travel freely between the two realms.”

“And that helps us how?” Rip asked.

“Yeah, I thought the [Formless Hunger] and the other things like it were beyond the power of the gods?” Jamal said. “Tessa had ‘God Power’ in her hands a couple times and it couldn’t hurt the first Hunger at all.”

“Dealing with [Transcendent Entities] isn’t a matter of destroying or controlling them,” Azma said. “Tessa and several others have discovered a far more effective approach. [Transcendent Entities] cannot be destroyed because they do not exist. That non-existence protects them and allows them to destroy virtually anything else. What Tessa and others have done is to give them what they’re missing. Essentially ‘creating’ them as something real so that they become inexorably a part of the realm they seek to destroy.”

“Wouldn’t that mean that they would be free to ‘really’ destroy the world though?” Yawlorna asked.

“That seems to be what they’re doing now,” Lady Midnight said.

“That is what they are trying to do now,” Azma said. “There is a wide gap between ‘trying’ and ‘doing’, and in that gap is where our victory lies.”

“Where are we supposed to meet them? They’re not all in the area are they?” Lisa asked.

“They’re kind of everywhere at the moment,” Hailey said. “I wasn’t kidding when I said we’re going to see the gods.”

“Explain further please?” Starchild said.

“The metaphysics of it are complicated and likely not completely co-tangent with similar phenomena the Consortium has observed – there seems to be a high degree of variation in divine powers across different worlds,” Azma said. “The important, and useful, information is that the original developers were called to assist the [Fallen Kingdoms], just as you were. In fact it was due to your efforts that the [Fallen Kingdoms] were able to reach out to them at all. The [Fallen Kingdoms] couldn’t support their direct presence however and so rather than the Earthlings going there, their divine selves joined them on this world, in the process dragging the two worlds even closer together.”

“So they have unfettered divine power here?” Tessa asked.

“No. Far from unfettered,” Azma said. “This world is highly resistant to divine or other supernatural powers altering it. The [Transcendent Entities] are not bound by such fetters though and as they began to chew away at the fabric of this world, your Earth’s limitations began to loosen.”

“So how much can these gods do then?” Yawlorna asked.

“Within the Earth’s arcanosphere? Very little still,” Azma said.

“That sucks,” Rip said.

“No. That’s fantastic,” Tessa said. “It means the Earth’s still fairly solid and mundane.”

“We were tossing around some pretty unreal effects there for a mundane place,” Lady Midnight said. “Not to mention our new friend here.” She gestured down at Kitty Cthulhu who gave a small, shy wave of his massive left paw.

“But we’re drawing those powers from the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Tessa said. “It’s like the fence around the garden has some holes in it now so stuff that was being kept out can get in, but it’s still a garden and not a parking lot or something.”

“And the Developer-Gods want to knock down the wall?” Rip asked.

“A more accurate metaphor would be that they want to build an archway in the fence,” Azma said. “One suited to allowing them to pass through it.”

“Can’t they just use the holes that are already there?” Jamal asked.

“Not without destroying a great deal of the existing barriers around this world,” Azma said. “The divine power they carry is too large to fit through the fractures which already exist.”

“And waiting for those fractures to grow larger means letting the world wind up in even worse shape than it is now,” Tessa said.

“Worse than this?” Rip asked, gesturing to the quarter mile of flattened buildings around them. “Yikes.”

Tessa though Azma might point out that the destruction they could see, while easily in the billions of dollars, was absolutely insignificant compared to the fate that could befall the Earth. Strangely the ruthless and practical absolute overlord of the Consortium’s attack forces merely nodded in response, sparring Rip from a nightmare inducing accounting of the possible futures that lay before them.

“If the gods you mentioned are everywhere, why do we need to go anywhere to meet them?” Yawlorna asked. “Aren’t they here already?”

“They are, or at least fragments of their awareness are,” Hailey said. “To meet them in person though we need to go to a [Shifting Space].”

“I’m going to guess that’s dangerous,” Lady Midnight said.

“For anyone else, it would effectively be a death sentence,” Azma said.

“Why?” Rip asked.

“Because it we walk outside the boundaries of the world, there’s no guarantee that we’ll every make it back,” Tessa said. “[Shifting Spaces] are where reality gets a bit fuzzy, so any path we walk will change as we walk on it, both where it’s going and where it came from.”

“How do you know that?” Lisa asked.

Tessa blinked. How did she know that? The knowledge was right there in her mind, clear as day, but it wasn’t anything that had been stitched into Pillowcase or anything Tessa had ever read, not even in the lore for [Broken Horizons].

“Must be some passive knowledge that came with my [Void Speaker] levels?” Tessa said, feeling like that wasn’t the answer but coming up blank for what the real one could be.

“Your description matches the explanation the [Fallen Kingdoms] gods gave us,” Azma said.

“How did you talk to them?” Lisa asked.

“We got their cell numbers from [The Nightmare Queen],” Hailey said.

“You just called them? Just like that?” Rip asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Hailey said.

“Well, okay then,” Rip said. “Wonder what their ringtone sounds like?”

“Sounds like the real question is where we can find one of those [Shifting Spaces],” Lisa said.

“There are millions of them now,” Azma said. “At least one for every location where someone has traveled to another world.”

“We need to find one we have some resonance with though,” Hailey said. “Otherwise we risk wandering off into no one knows what.”

 “What would it take for us to have ‘resonance’ with a [Shifting Space]?” Rip asked.

“That is something we should be able to discover when we find one,” Azma said.

“We won’t need to,” Lost Alice said. “I know where we need to go.”

Azma didn’t look surprised at this.

Because of course she didn’t.

“So the next question is, who wants to meet my family?” Lisa asked.

Byron

Flying across the Pacific Ocean at wavetop level was ideal for stealth. That was also why Byron was holding his speed at subsonic levels.

Sure, he could have blasted straight up into orbit and descended like the fist of an angry god.

Or teleported there.

Why, exactly, hadn’t he teleported to the creator? Wouldn’t that have made for a better surprise attack?

No. Of course not. That would simply have been foolish.

Teleporting to an enemy who had already proven that she possessed arbitrary and undefined powers? No, no, no. Far better to approach her at unawares. Take the opportunity to observe her before striking the final, truly fatal blow. Learn her weaknesses. Strike when the moment was right. When she couldn’t strike back!

That did seem more agreeable.

Indeed. Far better than exposing himself to the risk of her corrupting presence turning him into yet another new, and lesser, thing.

He plowed face first into a wave that certainly hadn’t been that tall a moment before.

Why did he retain human nostrils if salt water would burn them?

He didn’t know.

But it would be a shame to give up such a fine nose. It was nearly perfectly sculpted.

You never wanted perfect features. Those looked too uncanny. And far too generic. Better to have some slight and acceptable blemish. Some mark of distinction and personalization.

This line of thought was leading him to the creator how exactly?

Oh, it wasn’t. It merely seemed relevant to his consideration of noses. Wasting time was not at all the plan, so back into the air and onwards.

On the edge of his awareness one of his armageddon’s failed. A school girl stood over the crumbling body of a [Master Vampire] with a broken baseball bat rammed through his chest.

So. No unstoppable vampire plague. That was a shame. Byron had been looking forward to the endgame of that scenario where everyone was a vampire and they had only themselves to turn on for blood.

He did have to commend the schoolgirl though. Even splintered as it was, ramming a baseball bat through a torso could not have been easy.

But there was no more time to consider his other armageddons.

He had arrived.

He was in San Francisco.

And his creator had already left.

Of all the cursed luck. How could she have known?

Perhaps she could sense him?

Maybe he should stick to sending minions against her? Ones she wouldn’t see coming?

A giant hand swatted him into orbit.

Ah. He’d gotten too close to his old minion it seemed.

Far below, Kitty Cthulhu glared at him, eager for Byron to return, so he could ‘play’ with Byron some more.

Perhaps minions were not the right idea.

Perhaps he did have to deal with this personally.

If only he knew where to find her?

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 8

Taipei, Taiwan

When the sky starts raining blood, that’s usually a bad sign. When the blood is more corrosive than organic acid, that’s definitely a bad sign. When the pools of blood rise up as part of a sentient blood blob hivemind, that’s pretty much the worst sign possible.

Mei-hua wished she could still believe that was true. In the streets around her, the world was quite literally melting down. The blood rain had been enough to get people indoors before it started dissolving everything. That in turn had convinced the population of Taipei that they needed to be someone else. The army of blood blob monsters had hurried that notion along even as some of the population had begun to understand just how bad their day had become.

Fleeing from a city under siege by inhuman monsters raining down from space was a fantastic idea, but it did beg the question of where, exactly, they could flee too.

It wasn’t that Taipei was the only place on the island, or that passage off of Taiwan was impossible to come by. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be anywhere that wasn’t currently experiencing its own special little slice of armageddon.

Not to mention the fact that Mei-hua had lived in Taipei for thirty five years. Watching a horde of [Blood Blobs] melting down her favorite coffee house did not leave her in the mood to run away.

And she wasn’t the only one.

She’d head of the people who’d vanished to other worlds, drawn away into virtual realities, and how some of them seemed to have weaponized the effect and dragged away the monsters that were assaulting their cities with them.

Mei-hua didn’t have any alternate worlds that she felt particularly connected to though. She’d always been more drawn to fictions around the real world, mysteries, thrillers, romances, and action movies. It wasn’t that she couldn’t suspend her disbelief enough to enjoy a good fantasy tale but her early experiences with them had been soured either by the people she saw them with, or by the atrociously bad writing of the stories themselves. She still had friends who tried to convince her to play this fantasy MMO or watch that magical adventure film, but they just didn’t feel like they were for her.

Which wasn’t to say that the games she did play were ones people would have expected her to enjoy.

“Boom. Headshot,” she said as a round from the entirely real-looking rifle that she’d conjured into being exploded the top half of one of the [Blood Blobs].

“How can it be a headshot when they have no heads?” her friend and fellow FPS veteran, Chih-ming asked.

“They have a brain somewhere in there,” she said, lining up another shot. “It’s floating in the goo, but you can see a shadow of it if you watch them for a moment.”

“Bah. I don’t have your aim. I’m going to do it my own style,” Chih-ming said.

Mei-hua didn’t need to ask what that was. Despite being separated by three blocks, she fancied she could see the fiery glare the moment he opened up with his flamethrower.

They weren’t alone, and more and more people were starting to see that they could fit back, but Mei-hua had played a lot of horde annihilation style games and she didn’t like how the numbers she was seeing added up.

Santiago, Chile

Isabella felt like she was one of the unlucky few. So many of the other players in her [Broken Horizons] guild had been drawn over to the [Fallen Kingdoms] and yet because she had a modicum of skill and was talented enough to not let her character Stardancer die, she was stuck in the real world still, though the view outside her window left her questioning just how real her world could possibly be.

[Fire Zombies].

Those weren’t a thing that happened in the real world.

They weren’t even a thing that made sense.

That didn’t seem to be stopping them from existing however.

“I may need to come over to you after all,” Isabella said, speaking to Stardancer, however impossible that might be.

“Things are not what you would call great here either,” Stardancer said as she [Shadow Stepped] away from an attack by a [Dread Wormling] the size of a bus. 

The [Dread Wormlings] were spawning at a rate of “Solidly Far Too Many Much Much Too Often”. 

“Yeah, but you can handle that. You’re amazing,” Isabella said, watching a [Fire Zombie] climbing into a second floor window across the street to gain entrance to a room where it could find more combustibles.

The inhabitants of the building had seen it coming, [Fire Zombies] were just as predictable as another depiction of zombies that Isabella has seen, and were waiting with fire extinguishers. 

Not all of the buildings on the city had such sensible defenders unfortunately.

“We’re amazing,” Stardancer said. “If I lost you now, I would be so much slower. And deader.”

“Which is why I’m thinking I should figure out how to get to you,” Isabella said. “Without you dying.”

“I’d happily die if it meant keeping you safe, but I don’t know if we’re going to win this one,” Stardancer said, two of her [Shadow Wraiths] vanished as another [Dread Wormling] landed on them. The [Shadow Wraiths] managed to do their job and drain the wormlings of the last ounce of their life essence, but by the time Stardancer had called two more [Shadow Wraiths] into existence five more [Dread Wormlings] were in play on the field of battle.

“Trust me. You are going to win,” Isabella said. “The only time you ever lost was when I let you down. You’ve always been an invincible badass.”

“Far from it,” Stardancer said. “But it is nice that you think so.”

“I know so,” Isabella said. “But I’m starting to think we’ve only got enough badass between us to save one of our worlds.”

Mumbai, India

Gita wanted to celebrate her 80th birthday. She’d been looking forward to it. Her family had flown in from the far corners of the world they’d dispersed to and she knew it might be the last time she would see many of them.

There’d been all sorts of preparations made by her three daughters and four or five of her grand daughters, but just seeing her grand children and great grand children were sure to have eclipsed all of the other efforts people went to.

It was a simple thing to wish for, a very reasonable request of life in Gita’s opinion, but instead something unreasonable had happened.

An eclipse to be precise.

Not of the moon interposing itself between the sun and the Earth. No, Gita didn’t have to worry about anything as mundane as that. Her birthday present instead turned out to be a flying sauce.

Specifically a [Gem Locust Terraforming Arc]. 

It was larger than the metropolitan area of Mumbai and so the shadow it cast rather effectively turned day into night.

The military had been called upon to deal with it, but Earth weapons were proving to be laughably ineffective against the bugs’ galaxy spanning alien technology.

The reports that Gita listened to said the Terraforming ship had spent an hour irradiating an area just short of a kilometer in radius. The radiation, if it was radiation, seemed to be creating a selective green house effect that was spreading on its own, even after the beam turned off.

The rate of growth seemed to be slow, but it was picking up speed, and at the present rate of acceleration would overrun the city within the day, the country within three day and the world sometime before the end of the week.

Gita was not in favor of this.

Nor were several others.

She was pleased to see that while many people were lost in throes of despair, there were a few bright stars leading struggling to blaze a path forward.

A young boy rose above the city riding a disc of light. From his hands lightning flared and scoured the side of the Terraforming Arc.

One boy against an alien battle force was far from enough though, and no sooner had his attack begun than he was pushed back onto a defensive footing, zooming first high above the alien ship and then down low, seeking cover in the city he was trying to protect.

“That is not right,” Gita said, standing up with only a little help from her cane.

For a moment no one saw her. It was a forgivable error. Gita hadn’t been moving around all that much lately, and there was a giant alien warship hanging over head like an omen of doom seconds away from being fulfilled.

Gita made it to the front door before her oldest son noticed and caught up to her.

“Mother! Where are you going?” Ramesh asked her.

“Out there,” Gita said, as though it wasn’t perfectly obvious.

“But what can you do?” Ramesh asked, looking utterly bewildered.

“I imagine we’ll find out,” Gita said, feeling a calling within her that she hadn’t heard for almost a lifetime.

Niamey, Niger

Amina knew what snow was. She also knew it was absolutely not supposed to be falling Niamey or anywhere else in Niger. 

The snow wasn’t what bothered her however.

It was the voices that spoke through the snow. Those were what disturbed her. 

The snow storm was burying Niamey in ice heavy enough to start collapsing some of the weaker buildings, but it was the voices that were the true danger.

Listening to them invited them to you. They seemed to know who was paying attention and they spoke louder and drew closer the longer you listened until…

Amina didn’t want to think about that, but it was difficult to ignore the once-human snow beasts that were stalking the empty streets. 

She’d seen more than one person collapse after being assaulted by the voices in the snow, only to watch them rise a moment later, their skin transformed into a crystalline blue  substance that cracked with every movement they made.

“I’ve got the door boarded shut and I found these,” Nana, Amina’s most beloved friend said, offering a pair of ear plugs in her outstretched hand.

“Will we be able to hear each other though?” Amina asked.

Nana laughed and shook her head. “They’re not that strong. They just make things a little quieter. I don’t know if they’ll even help, but I thought we could try.”

“Oh, yes, certainly!” Amina said. The voices were terrible, but somehow the prospect of sitting in total silence seemed even scarier.

She fitted the plugs into her ears after watching Nana to see how it was done. 

“They feel weird, and I can still hear things,” Amina said.

“That’s good,” Nana said. “Just try to make sure they stay in.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Amina said. “If they fall out I’m sure I’ll feel it.”

She assumed she’d also hear the difference too, except everything sounded pretty similar to how it had before.

Similar but not the same.

“You can still hear the howling out there, right?” she asked.

“It’s quieter but…” Nana paused, listening more intently just as Amina was.

“But the voices, they’re missing something,” Amina said.

“The don’t sound as threatening somehow?” Nana said. “Does that make sense? I’m going to take the plug out  and…”

Amina grabbed her arm to stop her.

“No. This might be good. We might be able to use this!” she said.

“What do you mean ‘use it’? What can we do about any of this?” Nana asked.

“I don’t know,” Amina said. “And I don’t think anyone else does either. I was so scared before you found me. I just wanted to find some rock to crawl under and hide.”

“It would be a rock covered in snow if you went out there,” Nana said.

“I know,” Amina said. “That’s why I think we can’t wait here. If we do, the snow will eventually bury us, or one of the voices will come in here and pull the ear plugs out, or something else even more horrible. Because there’s no one who can stop it.”

“And you think we can?” Nana asked.

“I think we found something that might help,” Amina said. “Maybe somebody else found something else. Maybe together we can figure out something we can do to stop this. I think that’s our only hope now. This is so much bigger than us, and if we don’t save each other, there’s going to be no one who can.”

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 7

The madness of a broken cosmos crashed down on Tessa, fetid, freezing air surrounding her as light in impossible colors filled her eyes and drove spikes of unreasoning terror into the center of her pysche.

“Absorbing cosmic interference,” Pillowcase said, bringing ghostly after images of otherworldly stitching partially into Earth’s reality.

“Wait we don’t need to use one of your [Soul Knight] powers to do that?” Tessa asked.

“For a Tier 3 Psychic Corruption effect?” Pillowcase scoffed. “Please, I was stitched better than that!”

Above them, the tentacled maw of the High Priest of the Great Old Ones loomed as Dread Cthulhu stretched forth his inhuman hands to grasp and devour them.

“[Death’s Uncrossable Divide],” Lost Alice called out, erecting a dome of necrotic force around them.

Great Cthulhu was used to death. He’d lain beneath the Pacific Ocean in the sleep of death for many strange aeons. Against Lost Alice’s spell however, his mastery over death availed him rather less than he might have expected it to. Rather than crumbling at his touch, Lost Alice’s magical barrier reach out and withered the cosmic monster’s hand.

Sadly that wasn’t even close to stopping him.

“He’s got a lot of life, that spell should be stripping him to a dead husk and it’s barely scratching his health bar,” Lost Alice said.

“He’s got a health bar?” Tessa asked, a hiccup of elation passing through her.

It was a widely known fact that the worst mistake an enemy could make in an MMO was to have combat stats. If they only appeared in cut scenes and were never directly targetable by the characters, an enemy could be as completely unstoppable as the lore suggested they should be. The moment someone gained a health bar though? As a wise man once said, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

“Not going to have one for long!” Rip said. “[Wrath of Heaven’s King].”

Above them ten thousand circles of blazing golden light flared open and from them fell a torrent of arrows made of fire and divine rage. Rip had aimed the barrage away from Tessa’s position, which was good because everything that wasn’t Cthulhu inside the radius of devastation was reduced to shattered powder and ash.

Tessa couldn’t see Cthulhu’s health bar, but from his outward appearance she guessed the attack had scuffed him at least little bit. Whether it was the damage, or Rip’s incantation alerting him to her presence, he turned his attention from Tessa and Lost Alice and over to where Rip was standing defiantly against him.

With a step that shook the city, Cthulhu moved towards his new prey, sanity blasting light swirling from his eyes.

“[Vault of Nightmares Unleashed],” Matt called out. 

At first Tessa thought the spell had failed. It wouldn’t have been surprising. As a High Priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu was proof against all but a few mortal spells.

He was not, however proof against being hit in the head with a boat.

The [Vault of Nightmares] held every fear and horror that could ever stalk the dreaming mind, and chose the manifestation of its attacks based on the target’s psyche. That Cthulhu had negative connotations concerning boats wasn’t terribly surprising. He was known for living in the ocean and as Tessa recalled the first story he’d appeared in ended with him being rammed by a fishing trawler. 

As the alien monstrosity topped onto the wings on his back, Tessa noted that ‘proof against mortal spells’ was apparently useless against [Adventurers] which somewhat confirmed that they weren’t exactly mortal any more. The idea had frightened her originally – the thought of becoming something inhuman carrying some deep seated cultural bias against it. Reflecting on the past few weeks though, she had to admit that the nonhumans she’d encountered had been some of the best people she’d ever had the honor to get to know.

Also, her own inhuman side seemed to be pretty awesome.

Thank you, Pillowcase said.

Cthulhu tried to rise but Mel, the Guardian who’d been the first wave of the battle against him, slammed the giant monster to the ground. She was probably only one millionth of his overall mass, but the energy that wreathed her fist seemed to make up the difference easily.

“She must have fairly good mental defenses too,” Pillowcase said.

“I thought you said Cthulhu’s mind whammy power was only Tier 3?” Tessa asked.

“Tier 3’s typically enough to render a planetary population into a vegetative state,” Pillowcase said.

“And you were built tougher than that? Why?” Tessa asked, a thread of anger rising in her. How dare the Consortium put her other self into a situation where she’d need that much protection? She knew it was a silly thought, but she still felt oddly protective of Pillowcase despite the [Clothwork] being far tougher than a [Human]. 

“It was considered a valid tactic to send in a small army of [Artifax] troops and then detonate psychic bombs to turn the unprotected minds of the populace on a newly opened world into jello. Costly, but less so than facing some forms of resistance would be,” Pillowcase said. “I get how horrible that is now by the way, though at the time it just seemed sensible.”

“I’m just surprised they didn’t try that with the [Fallen Kingdoms],” Tessa said.

“Azma doesn’t seem to be that wasteful. Also too many [Adventurers] could have resisted the effect.”

“How is your spell going?” Fari asked, appearing within Lost Alice’s protective dome.

“I’ve found three threads so far,” Tessa said. “If I can find twelve more, I should have enough to bend around all the many angles in his core. Once he’s all wrapped up, I’m pretty sure I can kick him back to his own world and the threads will keep him bound there.”

In the wasteland beyond them, Cthulhu swatted Mel hard enough to send her into the stratosphere, before rising on membranous wings to eclipse the sky.

“What threads do you need?” Fari asked.

“Bits of his essence,” Tessa said. “Our friend Pete pulled one of the [Void Walkers] out of this world because he understood it enough to form a bond with it. He was able to grab the bits of that had become real here and carry them over to the world they were supposed to be in. Where they kind of want to be by their very nature. I need to do the same thing with the bits of Cthulhu that have become real already.”

“That sounds like data,” Fari said.

“It is. My working theory is that where things on Earth are built from fundamental information such as the spin of quarks and the waveform for the speed and velocity of particles, things like Cthulhu are built from another form of information – basically the data invested in him through the imagination of those who know his story. Up until a little while ago, that sort of information wasn’t substantial enough to be ‘real’ here in any sense, if that makes any sense?”

“Yes,” Fari said. “One moment. Processing feeds.”

“[Broken Horizons] had a storyline like that about four years ago,” Lisa said as Fari’s gaze went distant. “Creatures from the [Dreamlands] were manifesting in the [Fallen Kingdoms] when people slept near [Ruby Dreamstone Fragments]. The idea was that the fragments weakened the integrity of reality in general blending the two worlds together. If you slept near one though, the creatures that emerged were able to change from illusory to fully real by using the sleepers as a template on how to be real. We wound up having to fight them on the border between the two planes so that the two parts of them would go back to their right places when they were destroyed.”

Cthulhu renewed his attacks on Lost Alice indestructible shield.

Which began to crack under the pressure.

“How is he so aggro’d on us?” Lisa asked.

“It’s the spell I’m working on,” Pillowcase said. “He can feel me grabbing onto bits of his essence and he is not happy about that.”

“You haven’t been speaking any invocations though?” Lost Alice asked.

“That would be because I’m inventing this spell on the fly,” Pillowcase said.

“I’m sorry, what?” Lisa asked, justifiably concerned.

“The [Fallen Kingdoms] had banishing spells – well rituals typically – but nothing that could handle [Deity] class opponents,” Pillowcase said.

“But you can?” Lost Alice asked.

“If I can gather enough threads of his essence, and if we’re on a world the deity in question is not supposed to be on? And if I don’t mess something up? I think I can give it a solid ‘probably’ in that case,” Pillowcase said.

“You needed twelve threads of essence, is that correct?” Fari asked, her gaze returning to the present and her immediate location.

“If we can get them,” Pillowcase said. “I can try it with fewer but that’ll leave him a bigger opening to escape through.”

“Perhaps these will help then,” Fari said. “May I transfer some data to your mind? Directly?”

“Sure. If you can,” Tessa said.

Links to twelve fundamental truths Cthulhu had been able to make real on Earth so far flooded into Tessa’s mind.

Followed by twelve more.

And twelve more.

And twelve more.

The stream of information became a torrent and her mind reeled at the breadth and scope of the details on offer.

Under the onslaught, the spell she’d been working on frayed, but Pillowcase was there to grab hold of fragments that were threatening to tear apart.

And still more truths, and more data came pouring in.

We have to tell her to stop, Pillowcase said.

No! Not yet, I can deal with this. Just gotta chunk it all up.

Bits of information on Cthulhu’s weight and size and mass and heat and overall physicality went into one mental box. Details of the magic he bore, both active and passive, integrated with Tessa’s Earth and not went into another mental box. 

As more data came roaring in, Tessa gave the weaving of the spell over to Pillowcase and focused on simply sorting and classifying what the information pertained to.

As each box filled up and she couldn’t hold any more data about that topic in mind, she dumped it into the banishment spell.

Outside her awareness, beyond the curtain of her eyelids, the battle raged on with ever increasing fury.

Mel descended from the stratosphere with enough impact to wipe out the dinosaurs. She could have erased San Francisco with her punch, but her magics focused and channeled all of the force squarely into Cthulhu, starting from his head down.

The ancient horror exploded under the blow, vaporizing into a cloud of toxic miasma.

From which he then immediately reformed.

“Aww, I hate things that can do that,” Mel complained.

Starchild called forth a [Subduction Earth Elemental] as large as a building to encase Cthulhu in an eternal tomb of stone, but at Cthulhu’s touch the elemental crumbled away as though exposed to an unfathomable gulf of time.

Eyes blazing once again with impossible light, Cthulhu rose again into the air, and this time when he opened his maw, a discordant chorus emerged and the space around him began to waver.

“Dimensional nexus forming,” Fari said. “We’ll need your spell online soon or I’ll have to unleash some of our ship’s guns to contain this thing.”

“No worries,” Pillowcase said as Tessa opened her eyes, from which light in the same impossible colors that radiated from Cthulhu shown.

You okay in there? Lisa asked on their private channel.

Yep. Sorry. Just took some extra time to handle all the data Fari dumped on me, Tessa said, a somewhat manic edge tinging her voice.

Was it enough? Lisa asked.

More than, Tessa said.

How so ‘more than’? Lisa asked, concerning rising in her voice to match Tessa’s mania.

I see him now. All of him. Tessa said. He’s not a giant anymore. Everything he is? I can hold it all in the palm of my hand! 

She laughed, mad glee filling her to bursting.

I’ve done it before in fact! she said.

I don’t know if you should, Lisa said. You’re not sounding like yourself. Maybe you should drop the spell?

Tessa turned to Lisa, fighting to suppress the mirth she felt. Power was definitely a rush, and divine power even more so.

I’m okay, she said. Really. It’s just that this is so fun and its going to mess Byron up soooo much!

What is? Lisa asked.

Look! Tessa said, gesturing to the cosmic horror who was no longer hammering on the protective barrier in front of them.

The cosmic horror who was no longer either cosmic, or a horror.

“Did…did Cthulhu just get a makeover from Sanrio?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Who?” Yawlorna asked.

“He’s a Hello Kitty now?” Rip asked as the giant, and suddenly cute and cuddly puffy creature in front of them reached up to adjust the adorable pink bow at the top of its head before letting out just the cutest of squeaks.

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 6

Byron watched an island sink beneath the waves as the ground beneath it crumbled under the onslaught of the minion he’d placed at the center of the world. It was a victory of the concept, and the first tangible proof of the world’s inevitable demise. 

It was also blandly disappointing.

“I wouldn’t mind if had been a big island,” he said. “Or had people on it, but really, what’s the point of sinking some a tiny little dot in the ocean that no one cares about. If people can’t see what’s coming, and know I was the one responsible for their glorious dissolution into oblivion, then where, please tell me, is the joy in it?”

Arrayed around him the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Taft stood at attention, alert to his every word, not out of choice or inclination but because he’d invaded the ship as a memetic virus and overwritten their minds. It really made for the best audiences when the people he was speaking to were incapable of do anything except listening to him.

Of course, the existence of people in general was something of a problem, but until he was ready for the big wrap up, Byron found having an audience an acceptable allowance.

Static ran through his mind at the thought.

Why was he a ‘he’ still? Shouldn’t ‘he’ be an ‘it’ at this point? Or something even less defined than an ‘it’?

The argument was one he’d be having with himself since he adopted the name Byron again.

Not that he was Byron.

An actual person? Even the thought brought a wave of distaste rolling through him, which in itself was wrong.

He wasn’t supposed to feel disgusted. Or delighted with his audience. Or anything.

Static, or Oblivion to be accurate, raged along what should not have been his nerves. It was agonizing, and terrifying, and a typical part of Byron’s day by that point.

He was a creature of nothing, something that did not and could not exist. And yet he most definitely was breathing in salt air, absorbing sunlight on his skin, and experiencing a variety of conflicting emotions.

Principally there was aggravation. He knew his current form was superior to the ones he’d worn earlier. As a [Formless Hunger] he’d managed to consume one tiny village before a perfectly normal woman had ripped him to pieces. That was embarrassing and as clear proof as any might need that reverting to a non-sapient existence before his task was done was not going to accomplish anything except offering his adversaries the chance to recast him into some other form once again. Worse, based on the evidence of the fragment that became Unknown, it seemed entirely possible that any new form might lead to embracing a continuing existence, and just how would the static that was trying to tear him to pieces like that?

The static quieted, Byron’s destructive essence lulled into temporary quiessence once again. He couldn’t tell if it was growing surlier or if he was simply losing patience with the process as well. Quite possibly both.

“But of course, what do I have to be concerned about?” he said, stalking across the deck in front of the mindless zombies.

It was a safe question to ask. They couldn’t know the answer, and were incapable of voicing it even if he let it slip.

And he was not going to speak those words, was not going to name his foes, not even to himself.

“I knew she would come,” he said. “I was prepared. That’s not why you’re here of course. I don’t need any of you to protect me.”

The hundreds of miles of ocean which separated them from the nearest land mass was something of a comfort, Byron had to admit. On Earth, he was sure her transportation options would be limited.

“She’s not even going to have any of her powers!” it was important that he convince the crew – his crew – that she was harmless. That they had nothing to fear from her.

It was true too, Tessa – damn don’t even think the name, he scolded himself – the woman wasn’t going to be the indestructible menace with powers designed expressly to thwart him. She was just a human here, just like all the humans he had assembled on deck. He could add her to their roster with no effort at all.

And then he could sail the ship into the whirlpool formed by the sinking of the next island to deliver her directly to the beast that was eating the world’s heart.

A chill ran through him at the thought.

She would defeat it.

No!

Worse!

She was convert it! She would somehow turn it against him, and turn it into something harmless. Perhaps even cute. 

In place of the world destroying ally, there would be a planet guarding entity.

Byron screamed and tore at his hair.

It was so damn unfair!

No. She wasn’t going to come for him. She didn’t know where he was. And she didn’t have the power to stop him. Or the power to change him.

He vomited a wave of static onto the ship that promptly obliterated the decks beneath and the hull. It wasn’t enough to sink the ship though. He was still okay.

“This place is so revolting,” he told his crew. 

It hadn’t been weakness and fear that overcame him. It was anger. Anger was a good emotion. It destroyed things. And that was what he did. What he was.

Artfully though. It was important to destroy things artfully. To make a proper presentation of it.

Why? They were going to be obliterated. Not only to no longer exist, but to never have existed in the first place. The entire cosmos around him was going to be unwound and undone, from its pointless beginning to its meaningless end.

So what was the point of art?

The static within Byron stirred. Was he tricking himself? Playing some game he couldn’t look at directly without it falling apart?

No. Of course not. That would be silly.

He played with other people, confused, deceived, manipulated. Those was all quite enjoyable pastimes, but he was never anything but scrupulously honest with himself. It was what gave him the edge to win. If he bought into his lies, he would be as vulnerable to them as his targets were. It was only by seeing himself as he truly was and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was committed to the evaporation of all the universes he could worm a path into that he would have the tools to survive…to overcome…to unmake that woman.

The static quieted, pleased to know that there was definitely no spark of the original Byron that still existed.

He was a new creature. A self-made one. No trace of the disgustingly real man he’d once been.

Why, even if he had retained aspects of the original Byron, it wouldn’t have mattered. Not really. Byron had always hated the world around him. No matter which world it was. There wasn’t anyone the original Byron would have had the slightest reservation of consigning to the depths of oblivion.

Except for himself of course.

Byron had found all manner of amusements in his life, and clung to it rather tenaciously. 

Which was only to be expected of course. All living things are wired for survival. Those that weren’t, didn’t.

Which was nothing to worry about.

No living thing could resist the touch of the [Relentless Hunger] that had consumed Byron. The original Byron. Who wasn’t in existence at all anymore.

The crew of the ship were proof of that.

Well, the crew and the various hordes of followers Byron had left behind to cause general chaos and excitement. It hadn’t been especially artful, he had to admit that, but as camouflage, a means to ensure that she couldn’t catch up with him? Top notch work.

He mustn’t think of her though.

But hadn’t she resisted the [Formless Hunger’s] touch?

No. Of course not. It had been a fluke, a weakness of that form, by the time he evolved into the form that met the original Byron he’d changed more than enough to be free of that frailty.

But he’d attacked her three times on the satellite moon.

Three times was more than a fluke.

Especially since she’d hurt him each and every time.

Forced him to change, each and every time.

If she could do that…

That wasn’t something to worry about. No one else had ever resisted any of his previous forms like she had. It was a fluke and nothing more.

And she was going to come back to the Earth and be destroyed here. So it wasn’t going to matter. When he unmade Tessa – no! “that woman” – her whole history would be erased along with her. There would never have been a time when she, or anyone else, resisted a Hungers effects.

It was a calming thought, but the static inside him still burbled and grumbled.

That was a bad sign for it. The heart of oblivion within him shouldn’t be aggravated. It shouldn’t be anything. It should focus on that first, destroy its own worries since it shouldn’t have them at all. Not if it was going to be what it was supposed to be.

As for the original Byron? He certainly wouldn’t be opposing the creature he’d become. He would be aiding it. There wasn’t anything worth fighting for after all and those who did choose to fight were simply deluded fools.

Life had no meaning. Byron had always known that. People created meaning from nothing and then were so surprised when their illusions crumbled away. 

So much angst and unpleasantness proceeded that though. It was the great struggle of those who couldn’t accept reality, that they beat themselves to pieces insisting that the world was what they wished it to be. That there was something, anything, anywhere in all the worlds that would answer their plea and complete them. That those with the power to change the world ever used it for anything except chasing a future that could never be, or, more often, forging a replica of the future they desired from the bodies and souls of those beneath them. 

“What we need is more monsters,” Byron said, which his crew gave their silent agreement to. “Do you know why?”

They did not. They didn’t know anything in point of fact.

“Monsters are not what people imagine them to be. Real monsters are not merely creatures who are terrifying to look at. Real monsters are terrifying to understand. A proper monster doesn’t just scare you, it violates your belief in the fundamental nature of the world. You all so desperately need to believe you understand your world, that your experience allows you to place what happens to you into an intelligible framework. That, on some level, everything makes sense.”

Byron spun dramatically a cast his arms out to encompass the vast ocean around them.

“But it doesn’t. And it never has. Effect follows cause, but you can never know all of the causes? Then how are you to know that sometimes, things don’t just break down? That sometimes, your safety is a lie? That sometimes what you are is a lie?”

“I could unmake you all, right this moment,” Byron said. “And I should. Click clack and gone you are. All your loved ones left with gaping, unexplainable holes in their lives. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

“I could do that, but not yet. Don’t feel bad. It won’t be long. She’ll be here. Far too soon. Maybe that gives you hope? A rescuer approaches? No, that’s not how it will be. When she arrives, you will first play the role of hostage. They you will play the role of horror. She needs to see just how monstrous I am. She needs to understand what I’ve done. What I am going to do.”

Because, Byron absolutely did not dare to think, how else could she stop him?

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 5

Walking towards the collapsing building was not, by any conceivable measure, a good idea. Pillowcase knew this. She also knew that the enemy who towered over them despite being a half mile distant wasn’t one they had the option of running away from. Not when there was an entire hospital of injured and frightened people behind them, none of whom could possibly escape the cosmic horror that was currently demolishing the city.

Also, the woman she loved was right beside her, and Pillowcase was not going to look like a chump in front of Lost Alice.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Claire asked.

The rest of her team was there too, marching across the parking lot without an erg of Darius’s magic supporting them.

“We’ll protect you if it doesn’t,” Yawlorna said from their left flank. She tossed a nod over to Starchild who had taken the defensive position on their right flank and looked, if not certain of the result of their gamble, at least certain of her roll in it.

“That’s Cthulhu though,” Claire said. “You know that right? I mean there really aren’t many other big monsters with bat wings and tentacles on their face.”

“Mel and Fari seem to be doing okay against it,” Rose said.

She and Jamal were behind Pillowcase and Lost Alice. Tessa had made some very compelling arguments for them to stay behind in the hospital and help out there, arguments which Rose and Jamal had flat out ignored. Putting them in the rear of the party hadn’t seemed like anywhere near a responsible, adult decision, but if Pillowcase was correct, she reasoned it might turn out to be the safest place they could possibly be in a world on the verge of destruction.

Not that the local agent of destruction was faring terribly well against the defenders who stood against it. Slightly less than a half mile away, Mel picked herself up and out of the ruins of third story office Cthulhu had slapped her into.

Pillowcase watched as something like black fire ignited around Mel’s fists and then wreathed her whole body. She wasn’t able to follow Mel’s next move but she was fairly sure it wasn’t teleportation. One moment Mel was burning in the building and the next Cthulhu was falling backwards as the thunderclap from Mel’s punch sent him flying farther than he’d sent her.

“Are we really even needed here?” Lisa asked.

“She’s more than a match for him, but their battle is going to wreck a fair portion of San Francisco,” Pillowcase said. “We can help with that.”

“I checked the buildings. They’re all empty of sentients,” Fari said, appearing at the edge of the parking lot.

“That’s its own class of problem,” Pillowcase said. “Not something we need to solve now but, when we get them back, the million or so missing people are still going to need places to live, hence why we need wrap this fight up sooner rather than later.”

“We’ve been doing this a while,” Fari said, “which means we know better than to turn down local help. What do you have in mind?”

“Banishing him to the void, or at least his home plane,” Pillowcase said. “If we can access them, Tessa and I have some abilities that should do the job. We’ll just need enough time to reconnect with them and then cast the effects.”

“And we’re here to keep her safe while she does that,” Rose said.

“If our idea works,” Jamal said.

“And that idea is?” Fari asked.

“Starting to work already,” Pillowcase said.

She didn’t mean to be evasive. She had been sewn together with clear compulsion stitches to provide succinct and accurate reports at all times.

Except she didn’t have any stitching compelling her here.

She could do whatever we wanted.

Not without consequences though.

Consequences like putting an exasperated frown on the blue hologram woman’s face.

“Short form, we have powers we can’t access freely here,” Pillowcase explained, being cryptic was kind of fun, but tormenting potential allies seemed mean and foolish. “We’ve each done so already though, but it was in the presence of something from outside this world. Our theory, or my theory if it turns out to be wrong, is that if we get close enough to Cthulhu over there, his reality will start to overlap with the one we’re in now, and once we’re in a situation where we’re not locked into the Earth’s rules, we can call on the ones we know from the [Fallen Kingdoms].”

Fari blinked at the strange sound that accompanied Pillowcase’s last two words. Everyone else’s eyes lit up though.

“She was right!” Jamal said.

“Yeah! It’s working!” Rose said.

“Your anima auras are going wild. What are you doing?” Fari asked.

“Basically if he gets to cheat by existing here, so do we,” Lost Alice said, her cold hand clasping Pillowcase’s still human one.

“You transformed!” Claire said.

“It seemed wiser,” Lost Alice said.

In the distance another building fell and an inhuman, sanity destroying roar announced that Cthulhu was not at all happy with the abuse he was suffering.

Pillowcase shook her head as Cthulhu’s roar tried to burrow in behind Tessa’s eyes and fry the neurons of her brain.

It was a cute trick. It drew on deeper mysteries of the universe than any humanity had uncovered and blasted the unsuspecting mind with “Secrets Man Was Not Meant to Know”.

Compared to the [Formless Hungers] assault though it was laughable. Pillowcase’s earliest defenses easily shielded her from the paltry attack.

“Heh. That almost tickled,” Rip Shot said. In her hands a bow of lightning crackled with enough power to destroy not just a building but an entire a city block.

“It is a relief to have you back as you were,” Starchild said. 

“Agreed. I was not looking forward to tanking that thing,” Yawlorna said.

Pillowcase smiled. Yawlorna hadn’t transformed back to her demon-esque appearance but she was holding balls of [Scorching Soul Fire] in each hand. Pillowcase took that as confirmation that assigning her as one of the party’s damage dealers had been the right tactical evaluation. True, she towered over Pillowcase even as a human woman, as well as outmassing Pillowcase at least two to one, but size wasn’t the primary quality a tank needed.

“I am,” Pillowcase said, though she suspected Mel had that role handled well enough. “Fari can you tell Mel we’re going to be joining the melee. I can’t get a level reading on her, but I’m guessing we don’t want to get hit with the attacks she’s throwing around.”

“Already told her,” Fari said. “And no, you do not want to get hit with those Void Anima attacks. Mel’s good with them though. She also wants me to tell you not to worry about her, and that it’s her job to keep you all safe.”

“Noted. Let’s keep everyone safe though,” Pillowcase said.

“If you have traversal abilities, there is a parking structure two blocks in that direction. I can have Mel steer the monster over there. It should provide you with sufficient line of sight for any anima working you need to do,” Fari said.

“We can setup on the Subway beside it,” Rip said. “Our fallback will be the Starbucks and then the parking garage with you.”

Pillowcase felt bulbs of joy rising up. It had been a lifetime ago that she and Lost Alice had drilled Rip and Matt in the basics of positioning in battle. A lifetime or a handful of minutes, each felt equally true despite neither being as accurate as the Consortium would have demanded of her recollections. 

“Starchild, can you setup with them. You can act as an off-tank and backup heal if they need it,” Pillowcase said. “That will help them stay remote where they can land the best damage.”

“How about me?” Yawlorna asked.

“You and Lady Midnight can setup a crossfire from the top of the Western Union. Fall back directly to Lost Alice and me if you draw aggro though,” Pillowcase said.

“I’ve got the [Gravewalker] spells to stay mobile with,” Lady Midnight said.

“I know. There’s an apartment building across the street from the Western Union though. If he chases you there we can kiss goodbye to a few hundred people’s homes.”

“Good point,” Lady Midnight said.

With their plans in place, the party split up, dashing off with [Lightning Chariots], and [Celestial Transporter Beams] and similar powers which the Earth would never have accepted if there wasn’t a literal cosmic horror from another universe destroying one its cities.

“You are a wonder,” Lost Alice said after carrying them to the top of the parking garage. “I don’t know why I didn’t let myself see it sooner.”

“I think I’m still becoming myself,” Pillowcase, or Tessa, or both of them said.

“Speaking of that, shouldn’t you be transforming too? You were the one who showed us it was possible after all,” Lost Alice asked, stepping back to inspect the very human, very fragile ‘Tessa’ body that Pillowcase was still wearing.

“I would but I’m feeling greedy,” Pillowcase said.

“Greedy? Explain please?” Lost Alice asked.

“We saw what happened when Pete took the Void Walker away right? He went with it. Marcus did the same thing, except we saw him on the other end of things,” Pillowcase said.

“You’re not planning to sacrifice yourself though,” Lost Alice said. “You’re not,” she repeated her eyes growing harder.

“I’m not!” Pillowcase assured her. “That’s the greedy part. I want to fix this problem, but I’m not willing to give you up to do so. Or to drag you with me and give up the kids, or our other new friends, or anything here. We got lucky finding a path back to the Earth. Until I know we can come and go as we choose, or that the Byron problem has been thoroughly solved, I’m not giving up on anything or anyone here.”

That won her a small but delighted smile from Lost Alice.

“Marcus and Pete were both in their Earthly human forms when they vanished though?” Lost Alice said after a moment’s thought.

“They were,” Pillowcase said. “And I think I know how they did what the did. To bring their opponents away they had to reach out and connect with a world strongly enough that they could not only bring themselves there but their opponent too. I’m betting that Marcus dragged Byron back to the [Fallen Kingdoms] because that’s where Byron was from. Pete recognized the Void Walkers, so he probably dragged it back to wherever they come from.”

“Cthulhu comes from Earth though?” Lost Alice said.

“Yes, but not from this Earth. Lovecraft’s books take place on an Earth where the Old Gods are real and ridiculous levels of racism are supported by anyone who wasn’t just like Lovecraft being some form of inhuman monster. That’s where we can send Cthulhu back to, but unlike Marcus and Pete, I plan to use a blend of [Soul Knight] and [Void Speaker] abilities to do so.”

“And being an Earth human puts means you can mix the two power sets without one dominating the other. I see,” Lost Alice said.

“I think my Earthly body can also act as an anchor to keep me here too,” Pillowcase said.

“And if it can’t?” Lost Alice asked.

“Then I’ll break whatever I need to in order to make it work,” Pillowcase said.

Lost Alice rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“No. You will not break yourself,” she said. “You will however take me with you. I can lose my place on this Earth, but I will not lose you.”

Tessa gulped and fought down the lump that was forming in her throat.

“If we wind up on Lovecraft’s Earth, we’ll find a way back here,” Lost Alice said. “You know between the two of us we can manage that.”

“It’s not an especially nice version of Earth,” Pillowcase said.

“That will be its problem,” Lost Alice said, to which Pillowcase had to chuckle.

“Yeah. It will,” Pillowcase said, a fear drifting away from her and leaving her charged for victory. 

Cthulhu burst through the gas station two streets away, with Mel in hot pursuit and the party’s damage dealers beginning to unload sky shattered havoc on him.

The cacophony of fire and thunder seemed like the end of the world unfolding before Pillowcase’s eyes.

So she stepped up to save it.

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 4

Tessa couldn’t run a mile without winding up hopeless out of breath. If she was being honest with herself, she couldn’t even run a hundred dash without feeling like her lungs were going to implode. The hospital she currently stood in front of was 1.2 miles from the deli where they’d encounter the Void Walker. Tessa wasn’t sure how she knew that, but was more confused to discover that not only had they covered the distance in, at most, a half a minute, she also felt ready to do it again at a moment’s notice.

The man holding the shotgun aimed squarely at her center of mass seemed to prefer that she not act on that particular impulse though.

“Who the hell….,” he started to ask.

“I’ve got another incoming air drop,” Fari, the blue hologram woman, cut him off to say.

“More Void Walkers?” Mel asked.

“Don’t think so,” Fari said. “This one’s bigger.”

“Void anima based?” Darius asked.

“Yep. I’m only seeing them from the disturbance in the air currents,” Fari said.

“How long?” Mel asked.

“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…” Fari began to count down.

“Inside the building,” Mel said. “Reinforce it.”

“I can’t let…” the man with the gun started to say but was cutoff by Mel stepping up to him, taking his gun away, and swinging him around so she could send him stumbling towards the hospital’s entrance. That all took about a quarter of a second.

Time seemed to slow again as Darius refreshed the spell he’d cast on them. Ten seconds was far too short an interval of time for people to react, must less run inside the building. Whatever his spell did though, it seemed to accelerate their thoughts as much as it hastened their running speed.

Mel was led, but Tessa made sure to follow, and pull the others along with her, including the gun guy since whatever ‘bigger’ was, it was probably a gift from Byron and that wasn’t something he deserved was ready to face.

“We need to regroup somewhere,” Lisa whispered to her.

“I know. Azma’s got a plan, and she needs to share it with us, like about an hour ago,” Tessa whispered back.

The lobby of the hospital wasn’t a large area but Tessa saw there were plenty of people waiting for them inside. Plenty of people who weren’t reacting much yet. Or at all. The reason was fairly clear though. Time seemed to be ticking far slower than it should have.

At Mel’s gestures, her squad spread out, each placing a hand on a wall and joining in a chant that was not translated for Tessa’s ears. She didn’t need to understand the words to work out that they were responsible for the glow which began to emanate from the walls.

Darius joined their effort and his hastening spell unwound, decelerating Tessa’s team back into normal time. That let them feel the the rumble that passed through the floor as the tectonic scale rattle that it was. 

Outside, Tessa saw that the world had gone dark, a thick cloud of dust and debris obscuring everything beyond the hospital’s terribly fragile seeming glass front doors.

“What was that?” Rose asked, her body as tense as a violin string.

“Earthquake?” Claire asked. “Are we in California?”

They were. Again Tessa wasn’t sure how she knew that? Some residual gift of Darius’s mind enhancing spell? It didn’t really matter, except that getting home was going to cost her more than she had on any of her credit cards.

She shook her head.

Seriously? That’s what came into her head first?

Feeling a little scrambled from that spell, Pillowcase said. But maybe for the better?

Uh, what? Tessa asked.

That spell felt familiar, Pillowcase said. I’ll let you know if I can work anything out. Or if we’ve already worked something out? Don’t worry about it for now.

“I think we are in California,” Lisa said. “But that wasn’t an earthquake.”

“Correct,” Fari said. “That was our new arrival landing.”

“He hit us with a comet?” Jamal asked.

“Comets can’t get back up onto their feet after they land,” Mel said. “Our new friend out there seems to doing just that.” She paused for a moment. “And of course he’s heading right towards us.”

“Boss, why do you sound surprised by that?” one her squad members asked.

“Because it’s fun to complain,” Mel said.

“How do you want to handle guarding this place and fighting that thing?” Darius asked.

“Easy…” Mel began.

“Nope. Don’t say it. Don’t you dare…” Darius interrupted her.

“Sorry Darius,” Fari said. “She’s right. This thing’s power level is reading at Jewel level. Mel’s the only other one here who can handle that.”

“Other one?” Rose asked, but no one seemed to be listening to her.

“We’ve got this covered,” Mel said. “You and the Black squad stay here to find out what we’re dealing with okay?”

“Just make sure you come back to me, or I will sic your mother on you,” Darius said.

Mel offered him a quick kiss of reassurance before vanishing away as though she was stepping into her own shadow.

“What…what’s going on here?” gun guy asked, abject bewilderment filling his eyes.

“Your world is under attack Mr. Findley,” Darius said. “We’re here to help with that.”

“He’s definitely psychic,” Lisa whispered to Tessa.

“I kinda miss that,” Tessa said, thinking fondly back to their private telepathic channel.

She turned to give Lisa a warm smile only to find that in the mad rush inside the hospital they’d somehow gotten separated. Lisa wasn’t right behind her like Tessa had thought she was. She over near the door farthest from Tessa, staring out into the rapidly clearing cloud of dust.

“Hey, you can hear me still, right?” Tessa asked, subvocalizing the words so that it should have been impossible for them to carry to Lisa’s position.

“Yeah, of course” Lisa said, fondness wrapping the words like a hug. She turned as well, clearly expecting to see Tessa standing right behind her. When she didn’t, her gaze darted around the room until a moment later she met Tessa’s gaze. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Tessa said on their private channel. Her mind swam with the implications of what they were doing for several seconds before the next obvious question occurred to her to test. “Hey, group meeting everyone. Can you hear me?” she asked, picturing the party channel she’d used to speak to the rest of her team.

“Oh my god! Tessa? You got your powers back?” Rose said, her voice as clear as if she was standing right beside Tessa.

“Not all of them,” Tessa said. “Just this. I think we all did. Unless there’s someone who can’t hear us?”

“I can,” chimed in Jamal, Starchild, and Claire. Hailey, Yawlorna and Azma seemed to be left out of the chat channel though.

Because they hadn’t been part of Tessa’s team.

Is this what you were looking into? Tessa asked Pillowcase.

No, but I probably should have been, Pillowcase said.

“Who are you all?” Mr. Findley asked. Tessa gathered from his uniform that he’d been part of the security crew assigned to the hospital. She wondered what he’d planned to do against one of the Void Walker mechs if it showed up. Probably run, but that would at least have given the staff some warning, assuming he ran in the right direction.

“My name is Darius. My team is  from the Empress’s ship the Horizon Breaker. My wife out there is one of her Crystal Guardians. Trust me that you could not be in better hands,” Darius said.

“The Empress? Crystal Guardians?” Findley said, his confusion was mirrored in the faces of the rest of the staff. 

Tessa had to admit she had no more idea what Darius was talking about than the hospital staff did, but her psyche had been so thoroughly wrenched out of its familiar comfort zone that the ambiguity didn’t bother her in the slightest.

“There’s a lot going on here that’s going to take a ton of time to explain,” she said, to Findley and an older woman, Deborah McDaniels, the lead trauma surgeon on duty. She was also the hospital’s, and the city’s, disaster coordinator after the official ones were…consumed by the Void Walker? Suborned to Byron’s cause? Away from home and coordinating efforts in Peoria, Illinois and Spokane, Washington? All of the above? Yeah, all of the above.

Tessa blinked and shook her head.

Where the hell had all that information come from?

That you? she asked Pillowcase again.

Nope, and wow, I think we picked up a lot more about Debs and the other disaster coordinators than just that. Pillowcase said. Tell you what. I’m going to stop looking my stuff for a moment and see if I can figure out where we’re getting this meta-information from, okay?

Sounds good. I’d be afraid I’m losing my mind, but this feels like the opposite of that. Like I’m finding other people’s minds too or something.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of time,” Darius said. “Fortunately I’ve got a spell that can help with that. It’s a mind reading effect though, so I’d like your permission before I use it.”

“Are there any dangers to it?” Lisa asked, returning to Tessa’s side.

“For me? Yes. Lots of dangers and Mel and Fari will scold me for using it, but they’re not here, so that’s what they get. For you? Also yes, but only minor ones. Worst case scenario if I really botch the casting is you’ll have a migraine for a couple hours, and it will need to heal naturally,” Darius said.

“Go for it,” Tessa said. “Be aware though, you’ll find two minds up here.” She tapped her head. “My other self is named Pillowcase. If you read her memories, they won’t line up with mine at all if you go back farther than about a week.”

It was Darius’s turn raise an eyebrow in surprise, but he seemed used to a high level of general weirdness too, and shrugged it off.

Tessa saw his eyes fill with a shifting field of lights and then she felt a feather light touch inside between her eyes.

Darius’s head rocked back the moment Tessa felt the mental contact and blood burst from his nose. He stumbled a few steps back before recovering himself and putting up his hand in a placating gesture, which held his squad from leaping to support him.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just wasn’t expecting that.”

“What? What happened?” Tessa asked.

“You have some exciting mental anima defenses,” Darius said. “I’m guessing you’ve been psychically assaulted fairly often? Like everyday?”

“No,” Tessa said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been…” 

She cut herself off and amended her statement.

“The entity that’s responsible for the attacks we’re seeing? We met him when he was something a lot more dangerous but less refined. It tried to basically erase us from reality, and we fought back. That gave me a power that left me more or less immune to him. It might have been that, since it I think it works without any conscious input from me.”

She expected to see confusion and disbelief in her audiences faces but Debs McDaniels simply nodded along in understanding.

“If you know what’s causing all this, we’ll need to get the message out on how to fight it,” McDaniel said. 

“We’re still working on that part,” Tessa said.

“Give us what you can,” McDaniels said. “It’ll be more than we’ve got now.”

“Has someone begun coordinating a resistance effort?” Azma asked, joining the ever widening circle.

“There’s not just one resistance effort,” McDaniels said. “We’ve got disasters all over the world. Thank god the internet’s still up though.”

“It is?” Lisa asked. “Our phones can’t get any service!”

“Oh yeah, cell towers are shot. Analog voice lines are down too. VOIP and digital lines are fine though. Better than fine. We’re getting ridiculous download rates.”

“We’ll need to inspect those,” Azma said. 

“You think Byron’s corrupted them?” Lisa asked.

“No. I’m sure he hasn’t,” Azma said. “This world would have fallen already if he had. I have a suspicion I know what stopped him but I want to confirm it. Quickly if we can.”

“If you’re here to help, we’ve got plenty of computers you can use,” McDaniels said.

The ground shook again and through the clearing dust cloud, Tessa watched a building down the street collapsing in seeming slow motion.

“Go,” Tessa said to Azma and Hailey. “Find us a key to winning this. We’ll deal with whatever new problem’s coming.”

McDaniels nodded and drew Azma and Hailey with her in a brisk trot past the gathered hospital staff and through the doors that let to the office areas.

“We’re going to deal with this? Got any ideas on how?” Lisa asked on their private channel.

“I think I might,” Pillowcase said as Tessa watched a familiar heads up display settle over her vision.

Broken Horizons – Vol 13, Ch 3

She was magic. And fire. And starlight. Tessa had spoken to the cosmos and the cosmos had listened to her. She held the power to the change worlds. She knew that and yet, it seemed so very distant.

So very unreal.

With her noodly human arms, and her sadly ignored physique, Tessa barely felt like she could move herself. The thought of being able to wield the kind of power she did in the Fallen Kingdoms sounded wonderful, but on Earth she just wasn’t that special.

Well, except for having you with me, she said inside, speaking to the other fragment of her own consciousness.

Uh, you’re a lot more special than I am, Pillowcase said.

How? You’re a badass Soul Knight! You can fight gods and monsters and win! Tessa said, a flash of her Earthly battles against tyrannical bosses and rude coworkers seeming so paltry and meaningless by comparison.

I am a broken failure of a Soul Knight. I couldn’t even fight the standard troops of a mostly unprepared and technomagically inferior enemy, Pillowcase said. I was abandoned by my creators as a generic and expandable resource. Highly trained and respected analysts looked at me and determined that I literally had less than zero value. 

And they were idiots, Tessa said, the echoes of Pillowcase’s self doubt ringing all too in synch with her own.

No. They weren’t, Pillowcase said. Without you, I was a husk. I had no drive, no purpose, and no imagination. I was a weapon that real people could point in a direction and unleash, except when they did, I broke and failed them. 

But…Tessa began. Pillowcase cut her off though.

That’s what I was. It’s not what I am, she said. Just like you’re not what you were either. When I was the Consortium’s weapon, I was locked into one vision of what I could be. When they discarded me, I didn’t lose that. I was still trapped by it, still stuck thinking that what they wanted me to be was all that I could be. I’d broken and so that’s what I could do, was be broken and rot away.

Tessa saw Pillowcase’s memory play through their mind’s eye; the empty fields of the High Beyond where Pillowcase had collapsed swallowing them in darkness and eternal silence. Energy fading, fading, and fading as a dwindling spark that asymptotically approached oblivion.

Then you came, and you changed everything.

In their mind’s eye, it wasn’t that two sparks joined together. They weren’t two people after all, but rather two parts of the same person. They’d both been dimmed by loss and rejection, but from their first whisper thin contact, as Tessa logged into Broken Horizons and as awareness returned to Pillowcase, it was the single spark which united both of them which began to burn brighter.

I didn’t really do anything though, Tessa protested. All I did was start playing a game for fun.

It didn’t feel like that, Pillowcase said. To me it felt like you were taking a big step. Reclaiming something that had been lost to you for a long time. I thought it was me at first, me that you were redeeming. Except you were as surprised that I was real as I was surprised by you. 

Tessa remembered hearing ‘Pillowcase’s voice’ for the first time and how it had been an impossible revelation and yet unquestionably right too. Pillowcase had been someone who couldn’t possible be real. Video game characters weren’t real. Tessa knew that.

And then, suddenly, Pillowcase wasn’t a video game character. She’d been the skin that Tessa was living inside and it was more impossible to doubt that she existed than it had been to believe in her.

When we met Glimmerglass, I thought she was the one you were reclaiming, Pillowcase said. Which would have made a lot more sense to be honest. Except that wasn’t it either. 

It wasn’t, Tessa said, looking around at the others. Everyone was pondering the miracle of Starchild’s magic, and the miracles that they’d all seemingly worked and, for a moment, the whole group seemed to be speechless. I’d been away for a while. Climbing back into Glimmerglass’s skin didn’t seem right.

But it was only a game wasn’t it? Pillowcase’s tone was lightly teasing.

It was and it wasn’t. The events weren’t real, but the people were. I knew I hadn’t raised actually the dead, but when Glimmerglass raised BT that really meant something for Hailey. I changed her world, a tiny little bit, by helping her have some fun.

She remembered you after years apart, and crossed over to the Fallen Kingdoms to help you get home, Pillowcase said. It sounds like you changed her world by more than a little bit.

I think the little things just add up, Tessa said. At one point she was my best friend I think. 

And then you lost that. But you came back anyways. You opened yourself to making another connection like the one that had hurt you so deeply. I don’t think that’s as trivial as you’re thinking it is.

Maybe not, but it’s not the kind of thing that’s on the level of wresting fire from the gods, Tessa said, the magic within her still as distant as the farthest stars.

“You look lost in thought,” Lisa said. “Coming up with any good ones?”

“I don’t know,” Tessa admitted. “Might be having an existential crisis? Or an epiphany? Or just navel gazing. My thoughts sometimes get away from me like that.”

“It is to be expected,” Azma said. “Your minds as remarkably plastic, but these events, and the ones which must follow, require stretching beyond your normal limitations, and so a degree of backlash is to be expected.”

“And how do you know that?” Claire asked. “You can’t have been in this kind of situation before?”

“Can’t I?” Azma asked. “I suppose that will remain to be seen. It’s possible that my experience does not align sufficiently with reality before us, and that my vision isn’t wide enough to encompass the threats Byron had arrayed against us.”

“You don’t sound upset about that?” Rose said.

“Why would I be?” Azma asked. “Being presented with the unexpected is an opportunity for growth and that can be a true delight.”

“Not if the world ends,” Jamal said.

“If the world ends, I shall leave behind a very disappointed ghost,” Azma said. “And I have no intention of doing that.”

“I hope not, because I’m going to leave behind a really pissed off ghost,” Claire said.

“We should decide what our next course of action will be,” Starchild said. “My mana reserves are full once more, so if my talents can of any use, name what you need me to do.”

“At present, nothing,” Azma said. “It is worth noting too that each use you make of you abilities sends up a signal flare for Byron to see. Perfect obfuscation of our position or goals is impractical, but the fewer data points we provide our enemies, the better. Obviously in a case such as the one we were faced with, do not hesitate to use your abilities though. This world is likely more hostile to reviving the dead than yours was, and none of you are expendable.”

“If Byron might know where we are, then shouldn’t we get moving?” Lisa asked.

“Byron is not the only one who might have noticed the magical surge from Starchild’s invocation,” Azma said. “Fleeing from his approach might delay our reckoning with him by a meager amount of time, but it would also make it more difficult for our allies to locate us.”

“Allies?” Tessa asked. “Who do we have here as allies?”

She didn’t even know what city they were in, and no matter where on Earth they were she couldn’t think of a roster of people they’d be able to call on for aide against the Apocalypse.

“That might be us?” a woman said, stepping into the backroom of the deli through its brand new gaping bomb hole. “Sorry, all I heard there was ‘allies’ and, well, you’re not a giant building destroying robot, so I’m guessing we’re on the same side.

The woman was dark skinned, and older than Tessa. Her voice had an odd lilt to it, and Tessa wasn’t sure if the woman was speaking English, or if that’s just how the words sounded after some translation effect ran on them.

Is that you turning what she’s saying into English? Tessa asked Pillowcase.

Nope. I think I could if we needed, but that’s coming in pre-translated.

She’s not speaking English though, is she?

No she is not. I’m not sure what she’s speaking in fact. I can hear the original words, I think, and they’re not in any of the languages the Consortium stitched into me.

Behind the woman, a lighter skinned man stood close by with a small squad of people in ultratech body armor who were, for some reason, holding crossbows at the ready.

“You expected them?” Lisa asked, pure disbelief framing every word.

“In specific? No,” Azma said. “I have a frightful lack of data concerning this world. Despite rather intensive scanning efforts I must note. In general though? Yes, though I must admit their arrival is more timely than I would have planned for.”

“Does that mean you know what’s going on here?” the woman asked.

“Apart from a general disaster,” the man beside her said.

“We do,” Azma said. “In the broad strokes. My companions can provide a summary and fill you in any details relevant to your capabilities or interests. For now however, we should seek a more defensible position.”

“We saw some other people gathered around a medical building,” the woman said. 

“I thought there would be,” Claire said.

“Let’s get going then,” Lisa said. “Maybe we’ll run into Obby and Rachel. Didn’t they head in that direction?”

“If we are very lucky we will not see Oblivion’s Daughter before this matter is fully resolved,” Azma said.

“Why? What’s wrong with Obby?” Tessa asked.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I believe we have much to thank her for,” Azma said. “Unless my understanding of her is wrong however, she has far more important things to deal with and if we see her again it will be because our situation has become so dire that she will feel the need to intervene directly.”

“Intervene? Like a god or something?” Rose asked.

“Nothing so small as that,” Azma said. “Though the consequences may be similarly severe.”

“This sounds like our kind of mission, doesn’t it?” the woman said, speaking to the man beside her.

“Unfortunately,” he said.

“When does it not Guardian?” one of the women in the squad behind them said.

“We have more of the Void Walkers incoming,” a blue holographic woman said, appearing beside the woman who was leading the squad.

“Right. Time to move then. Would one of you take point with me? Preferably someone who can fill us in on what’s going on here,” the woman said.

“I’d like to chat with the anima caster too,” the blue hologram woman said.

Tessa wasn’t familiar with the term ‘anima caster’ but she was pretty sure who the hologram woman was talking about.

“Starchild, I think that’s you, and I can give them the details on the worlds that are ending here,” Tessa said. 

She reached over for Lisa’s hand and found that Lissa was already reaching for her. They shared a quick nod and then started moving out of the deli and back towards the hospital. 

Leadership sometimes involves inspiring speeches, or making difficult decisions. Other times it’s literally a matter of moving forward and setting a pace for others to follow. Tessa didn’t understand how she’d wound up in any kind of leadership role at all, but she knew the people with her had gotten used to looking at their tank to set the pace for them, and she wasn’t going to fail them at this point. Pillowcase had shown her that she was better than that.

“My name’s Tessa,” she said as the squad’s leader fell in step beside her. “Though you might hear people call me Pillowcase too. I’m her as well. You’re ‘Guardian’?”

“That’s my title, you can call me Mel though. Now let’s make some better time, shall we?” Mel said. “Darius, if you would please?”

Darius, the man jogging along beside them nodded and cast a hand forth. From it a blue light blossomed and spread around everyone in the group.

Power flooded through Tessa’s body. Strength and speed and glorious freedom, as their jog became a world blurring surge forward.