Chapter Text
“...monitor here until the clearance…”
The nurse’s sonorous voice bled away into a haze of white static.
Her hearing came in bouts; voices and the beeping of machines faded in and out, struggling to remain constant. Lightning floated in an endless void, filled with neither dark nor light, and with no sense of time or space.
Lightning pushed against it, and felt her body respond sluggishly, as though a great hand had clumsily enveloped her, and was pressing down as she tried to stretch against it. She swam against the void, trying to follow the fragments of voices and sounds that occasionally filtered through, trying to link her consciousness back to her body.
“...Etro…Bhunivelze...”
“...who knows...pray…”
The sense of a weight pressing against her chest grew. For a moment she could feel that she was laying prone, could hear the steady rhythm of mechanical sounds. Then the formless void enclosed her again.
Lightning could have sobbed, equal parts despair and frustration. She needed to get back, needed to wake. Pushing even harder, Lightning struggled. When she reached out and felt herself within her body again, nothing happened. Her body felt as though entrapped in the grip of a giant, weighted in place and unresponsive even as her mind continued to fight vainly against it.
Part of her, exhausted, wanted to slide back into the peaceful void of oblivion and rest. Lightning steeled herself and pushed a third time, straining to break free from the invisible grip…
And her eyes cracked open the barest amount before falling closed again, drained of energy.
Some time later—far longer, she knew, than the few seconds it seemed to her mind--her eyes managed to open again. They rolled open briefly, giving only the barest yet disorienting hint of the world around her.
Lightning closed her eyes a second time, pushing down the nausea that rose up from within her. Her body felt strange and disconnected, as if someone had opened her up and stuffed her with cotton balls.
What a ludicrous idea...stuffed with cotton balls...like an inside-out sheep.
Her lips tugged downward of their own accord as the thought hazily floated through her mind. That made no sense either. What was going on?
With what felt like a colossal effort, Lightning slowly but surely opened her eyes fully. The world swam, ever so gradually starting to sharpen from a foggy blur into vaguely recognizable shapes and objects.
A ceiling, a wall, a window. A blanket laying over her. She was laying down, yes. Laying on a hospital bed. There was a slow and steady beeping beside her. A monitor of some sort. An...I.V. line...hooked up to her.
Yes, her.
Lightning jerked her head back to her body, and the colors of the world lurched and moved with her. She blinked slow and hard, though it did little to help the swirling in her vision.
She was...alive?
There were no casts, no sign of surgery or traumatic wounding. Every limb was in place, and the silhouette of her chest appeared whole and unharmed beneath the white blanket that covered it.
She appeared okay, and yet…
Her vision continued to shift, colored fractals shifting no matter where she focused her vision, as if a kaleidoscope had been overlaid on the world. Blinking did nothing to ease it. Lightning shook her head once, twice, to no avail. Then something caught her attention.
Vases of live flowers covered the bedside table next to her, cards with handwritten notes presumably wishing her well. Lightning barely even registered the cards. Her focus was instead wholly taken by the flowers, but not for any normal reason. Her vision bent and reshaped itself around each individual flower, like a Rubix cube reforming itself into a new pattern, different from anything else she had looked at in the room. The shards of color turned and twisted, lines coming together into a single focal point for each flower.
But why? What was she seeing?
Lightning raised one heavy hand, reaching out to the flower closest to her, a full and blooming rose. Her fingertips hovered over the epicenter of the shifting and glittering fractals of color, which moved ever so slightly, as if it were a living thing.
Without even meaning to, one finger brushed that exact point, and then the flower suddenly fell apart into pieces as if cut apart, petals browning and dead, the fractals now gone from it.
Lightning stopped breathing for a moment, and her hand began to shake. She reached for another flower, touching the strange epicenter of it that her vision showed her, and watched the same death happen. Again. Then again. And again.
In the background, she only vaguely heard her heart monitor start to beep in an increased tempo.
She moved the tip of her index finger to the next flower in the bunch, first touching around and away from the strange epicenter of geometry. Nothing happened. She pressed her finger into the fractal center, and then the flow crumpled and died, too. The next flower, the same result. The same. Again. And again.
There was a movement at the doorway, and a nurse appeared.
“Oh, thank the gods! You’ve finally woken. The doctors will be so excited…”
The words faded away into a buzz, unintelligible and unimportant.
With dawning horror, Lightning stared at the nurse, and at the sharp fractals that coalesced and centered on her, revealing points no differently than the flowers.
No...no...
The nurse was continuing his job, entering the room and tending to a chart at the foot of Lightning’s bed, oblivious to her own panic and terror.
Slowly, Lightning raised both hands above her in the air, staring. Patterns moved and intersected across her palms, lighting up hot spots just like on the flower, just like on everything else. She blinked hard as the nurse continued to busy herself. The beeping from the heart rate monitor increased in frequency.
No no no.
This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening.
This couldn’t be happening.
She had to make it stop.
Curling her fingers in, Lightning slammed her hands down to her eyes.
“No!”
Lightning’s brain moved as if through a deep fog. It was the effect of the sedatives, she knew, even if they had stopped the I.V. drip with them earlier. The low-level remnant effects of the drugs in her bloodstream made her feel distant and listless.
Still preferable, however, to the madness it staved off.
Perhaps preferable, too, to the misery of waking thought and those who were now included in it.
They brought in specialists, wizards, even priests, but to little avail. No one had ever heard of the affliction that Lightning now suffered from, let alone of any human-based oddity that might match her newfound powers.
They were at an impasse, and every day seemed to only bring more questions than answers.
Today was no exception, but it brought a uniquely terrible blend of both her personal and professional life that Lightning supremely despised even though the fog of drugs intermingled with fatalistic despair.
Jihl had returned today; if there was one thing to be said for her and the SCS, they furiously protected their own, and Lightning was one of their own, even if she was bound to a hospital bed. At least two members from the squad had been at Lightning’s side since she had first awoken from her coma, and today it was technically three.
At the captain’s side was Yaag, ever loyal as a watchdog and lookly quietly frustrated by the fact that whatever problem it was Lightning was victim to had not yet been solved. Not that Lightning was looking closely at him. In fact, she was studiously trying to avoid looking at anyone in the room--and especially not at her sister, who was also present--while forced to have her eyes open and her strange death-indicating sight overlaid on the world.
Keeping her eyes open was, for the moment, an unfortunate inevitability. Cid was here today, back in the same six-eyed and alien skull that they had used to keep him mobile when they did the Red Light District sting a few months back. All six sockets were filled with dancing blue flame, and even that--even a spirit housed within a shell—could not escape the cursed vision that Lightning now bore in her waking gaze.
Yaag had smuggled him into the hospital with a secure metal suitcase, removing him only once in the privacy of Lightning’s patient room so that the spirit-housing skull could better try to diagnose her.
Not that he had managed much more than anyone else thus far.
Lightning at last closed her eyes and pulled back over the now comforting weight of bandages across them, providing a more effective cover to her vision as Cid reluctantly admitted his own ignorance.
“It’s not any sort of oracle’s gifting—the Third Eye is technically a constant, but it doesn’t perceive in that way, not in a constant overlapping of realities. And there’s no sort of systemic damage to her brain or central nervous system, so it can’t be hallucinatory.”
There was a sound of vexation, which never boded well coming from Jihl.
“This grows frustratingly repetitive. Tell me, would possessing her help to elucidate any further answers?”
“What?!” yelped Lightning.
“Iron and bone, no!” exclaimed Cid at the same time. He continued first. “Me? Try possessing someone who is either already being possessed by some other power or not even fully human anymore? No offense, Farron, but even if you were willing, I’ve got no desire to get chewed up by some power we don’t even understand. I haven’t spent the last few millennia dodging the Faerie Courts just to burn away on a casual attempt at possession.”
While his refusal to possess her body—particularly when he owed her no life boon as before--should have given Lightning a sense of relief, instead she felt her mood slide back into an even deeper pit of depression.
Great. She was so messed up that not even Cid wanted anything to do with her.
Jihl was not so easily deterred, however.
Her heels clicked on the linoleum floor as she walked over to the bedside and grabbed Cid’s skull off of the tray where it had been resting.
“What good is it being a spirit of intellect and knowledge for all those millennia if you can’t even tell me what’s going on?” Her voice ended in a low and irritated hiss.
“I don’t know everything!” Cid protested.
Whatever else he might have said is his defense was scoffed away.
“Well, and what do you say, Etro’s Seer? Can your goddess see that which my spirit of intellect does not know? What does your Third Eye tell you about your sister?”
Despite the derision present when she spoke of the gods, Jihl still managed to address Serah with some degree of respect (or what was respect coming from a dragon).
Serah’s voice poured over Lightning; normally a person to calm her, but the occasion and the situation only furthered her own helpless despair. She was meant to protect Serah (something she had already recently failed at doing), not to be so helpless that her baby sister had to be called in to try to fix her up.
And Serah couldn’t fix her, no differently than Cid.
“A seer’s vision isn’t just a convenient telephone to ask the gods for easy answers, ma’am.”
That was Noel, who had accompanied Serah along with Snow for this trip to the hospital. It wasn’t Serah’s first visit to Lightning’s sick bed, but it was the first in the days since Lightning had woken where she was present not simply as family, but as a representative of Etro’s Temple. Between the three of them alongside Jihl and Yaag, the room was filled to capacity, all focus honed in the question that no one could seem to solve: Lightning.
It was an unanswered question that had tensions running high.
For all that Noel had spoken respectfully, Lightning could practically feel Jihl’s disdain.
“I would have the Seer of the Dead Goddess speak for herself, if she would.”
Lightning could sense the shuffle as Serah approached her now. She dared not open her eyes to look at her sister, horrified even at the thought of how her vision might show her in unrelenting and pitiless detail exactly how she could kill her sibling. Yet it was hard to strain her other senses, to blindly and constantly see where she knew Serah must be.
As if sensing the struggle, Serah found Lightning’s hand and slipped her own against it, squeezing lightly.
“I…” Serah started and then paused.
Lightning furrowed her brow. She could imagine Serah gathering herself, her gaze either growing distant as she tried to meaningfully use the the gift of her Sight (something Lightning still wasn’t comfortable with), or distressed as she found herself at a loss of what to do with her infirmed sister (something that Lightning was even less comfortable with).
Hadn’t their positions only just been reversed recently? Lightning grappling with the old and hard memories of hospital visits as she came to check on Serah, now switched around as Serah visited daily only to find that her older sister showed no signs of recovery or wellness, kept to her sickbed and sedated for her own greater good.
But Serah didn’t show any hints of the stress that must be pressuring her to the breaking point at her seams. Her hand was cool and reassuring as she held Lightning’s, without the faintest hint of sweat or tremor.
Lightning heard her sister draw a breath, slow and deep, before continuing.
“I see nothing.”
Jihl clucked her tongue against her teeth in vexation. “Well, that is about as helpful as—”
“No,” interrupted Serah, a touch more forcefully.
If Lightning had been her normal self, she would have been more surprised. Serah never interrupted anyone, and no one cut off the captain.
“I didn’t say that there is no vision, I said I See nothing. It’s like...a blind spot. I know there should be something there, but every time I try to focus on it...nothing.” A tinge of rare frustration bled into her voice. “I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s Etro but...what could be veiled from a goddess?”
“What indeed…” That was Yaag, his pen scratching away as he took notes on his clipboard. “Does the Temple of the Dead Goddess provide any such guidance to this?”
“A blind spot to a goddess?” repeated Noel, sounding both heavy and incredulous. “I’ve never heard of it before. I’ve already sent word asking for expertise from the central clergy, but I don’t expect much. Maybe the churches to the other high gods might know something.”
“Then see to asking. At your earliest convenience.” Never mind that Noel was a civilian, Jihl still gave the clipped order without pause, and no protest was offered.
The quiet grew painfully awkward.
“If that is all you needed us for…?” Noel left the question open-ended.
There was little more that they could do beyond what had already been tried. As difficult as it was to be around Serah in her given state, Lightning also found herself deflating at the thought of her sister leaving again so soon, though she would never admit as much aloud.
“Yes, I believe that is all.” There was a pause. If it was possible, Jihl sounded a hair gentler than her usual bite. “I will give you a moment of privacy with your sister. Farron, we will be just outside for a bit.”
Lightning swallowed and nodded aimlessly to the air.
Serah held her hand tight while four sets of footsteps left the room, waiting until the door closed after them.
“Light…”
In her sister’s voice, Lightning heard all of the unspoken pain, fear, and helplessness that she had kept under control while others were present, and it killed a part of her to know she was the uncontrolled cause of it.
“It’s fine,” Lightning responded automatically, trying to sound lighthearted. “Nothing has really changed, and it’s not like I’m—”
Serah cut her off sharply. “Don’t even say it like that. Don’t.”
It took a moment to find herself.
“Sorry. I just meant...I’m sorry.” She never was one for quick apologies, but now that she had opened her mouth, the words tumbled out, uncontrolled and hectic and afraid. “I’m sorry, Serah. I’m sorry.”
And for just what, she wasn’t even sure anymore. She was sorry for not being strong enough to pull herself out of this; she was sorry for the years of conflict and pain in their relationship; she was sorry that now she had to place the burden and reliance on Serah.
They held onto each other for a few long seconds before Serah began again, sounding more hesitant than before, as if she knew what she was about to say would be contentious at best.
“Please...could I just look at you? Maybe if I could look at your eyes directly, if I could see you, then maybe Etro could...and then I could See answers…”
Fear shot through Lightning, and the monitoring machine she was hooked up to increased in the frequency of beeps and whirs. Not once, not once since she had awoken here and Serah had visited had Lightning dared to look directly at her sister and see those awful lines of impending death crisscross all over her.
She couldn’t bear the thought of it.
“Please, Serah!” Lightning heard her own voice break. She turned her cheek into her pillow, in the opposite direction of where she knew her sister was standing. Hot tears leaked from her eyelids, hidden away from sight as they were absorbed into the cotton wraps that she had only just replaced over her eyes earlier.
But her sister didn’t push the point.
She gave Lightning’s hand a final and reassuring squeeze. Then she smoothed back the hair from her forehead and placed a kiss there.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, okay? We’re going to figure this out. You, me, and your whole squad. You’re not going to be alone in this, Light. I promise.”
“I know,” she said, but the words rang hollow in her own ears.
Then Serah was leaving, and as she walked out the door, the booted steps of Jihl and Yaag sounded back in, presumably still with Cid in hand. If they had overheard or guessed at any of the turmoil, they knew better than to comment on it.
“So…” ventured Lightning, staring into the blackness that was the backs of her own eyelids.
She tried not to slip back into the pit of lethargic depression, and felt herself failing.
“Tests continue to remain inconclusive, Captain,” stated Yaag.
“And Cid has provided no more insight than the Seer of Etro.”
Cid interjected. “I will be looking into it, Farron! You have my word!”
None of it helped.
“Captain...just what...what even?” Lightning couldn't even formulate her disjointed and chaotic thoughts properly. She blamed it on the sedatives...and the lack of will to live.
What was supposed to come next? What were they supposed to do? What was Lightning supposed to do?
Jihl gave a low hum, verging on a growl, but it was directed at no one.
“If one thing is abundantly clear, Farron, it’s that you should be dead. In that, I believe we are all in agreement. And yet you are not. Yet nor are you immortal or some higher being that can evade and counter the effects of a doom spell.”
Jihl tapped her foot in a slow and deliberate staccato as she spoke. It was unusual to hear the captain present the order of her own inner thoughts and musings, and Lightning felt no need to interrupt.
“Something must have intervened, or at the very least, errantly caught you--pulled you out a spell that would have been your one-way ticket to Etro’s realm. Perhaps that is why the Dead Goddess cannot See you directly? Because you have escaped her touch when you should be cradled in her realm?” Pure speculation. “That, or whatever power intervened supersedes even her word...but to what end? And to whose benefit? And why now? To say nothing of your newfound condition, of which no one seems to be any the wiser.”
She did not speak of just what sort of power could possibly overrule a goddess’s perceived jurisdiction, as none of the possibilities inspired a measure of relief...least of all the concepts of Primordial Chaos.
“Rest assured, Farron, we will continue to seek answers.”
Fang nearly jumped to her feet when Jihl entered the waiting room again, Yaag at her heels and carrying the metal safety case that they had used to transport Cid and—more specifically, the skull he was currently inhabiting to the hospital.
Both the lukewarm and burnt free coffee she had been nursing was completely forgotten about, as were Ashe and Kimhari, even though she was aware they had also stood up behind her.
“Well?”
Jihl approached without immediately answering, and there were lines around her eyes that Fang didn’t remember from before. She looked far better than the haggard and tired visage Fang had adopted over the past week, but then, everyone did by comparison. Fang was about to repeat her question when Jihl finally spoke.
“Cid had no answers or knowledge either, nor did the Seer of Etro. The nurse just sedated her again.”
The response struck Fang like a physical blow, and she nearly reeled from it.
“What do you mean he has no knowledge? What...what is this?” hissed Fang, and her anger was an excuse to cover her own dread sense of growing and powerless fear.
Still, posturing and lashing out at her captain of all people was, perhaps, not the most advisable course of action.
The waiting room for the hospital ward that Lightning was being held in—nearly a week after the field incident that had incapacitated her—was filled with almost all the members of the SCS. The perp had been handled and defeated, his black magic stopped, but the cost...what had been the cost?
With Lightning bound to a hospital bed, the department was practically running on a skeleton crew, manning just enough personnel to handle the office and any emergency calls while their rest of their caseload ground to a painful halt as they faced the specter of having one of their own straddle the veil of death.
They knew the risks of their job, the ultimate price they might all someday pay in the line of their work. But there was knowing and then there was knowing.
And there was having her partner, her friend, and her lover all in one suffering the price while Fang remained horribly stuck outside of it all, unable to do anything. She wasn’t even allowed to be at Lightning’s side in the patient room for longer than standard visiting hours. Ever since she had woken and tried to claw out her own eyes, the medical staff had kept her heavily sedated, blindfolded, and only off medication enough when examinations were required.
Yet nothing had changed. The days had bled together while Fang remained on paid leave and at the hospital at nearly all times, leaving her shift of watching and waiting only when her colleagues and Vanille demanded that she go home to shower and at least try to sleep.
Getting Cid in was supposed to have done something, anything. They were the SCS; there wasn’t anything they couldn’t solve.
Until now.
Jihl’s eyes narrowed and she raised a finger, stopping Yaag from reprimanding Fang.
“We simply don’t know. And it appears the asking is no small thing in and of itself, even for the Dead Goddess.” Jihl’s nostrils flared before she continued. “She should be dead, and you know that as well as I.”
Fang bared her teeth in a silent snarl, or what was a rictus of pain. Jihl’s eyes sharpened a fraction more behind her glasses, and the rebuke could be felt on Fang’s skin. She tried to look away but found her gaze forcibly pinned.
“We all know this.” Jihl spoke a fraction louder, deliberately so that all of the members of the SCS could hear and turn their attention to her. “The magic that mage cast was a doom spell. It would have killed any of you caught in its radius when it went off, to say nothing of the one human in our group. Or perhaps I should say ‘formerly’ human.”
That was the sticking in it, and as much as Fang instinctively bristled, she knew Jihl was only speaking the truth. The symptoms that Lightning now suffered were simply not human, and Fang ached for Lightning; she also feared for whatever it was that Lightning was now becoming, and the unknown loomed over them all.
“We don’t know what her...condition is.” The momentary furrow in Jihl’s brow as she looked away into some immeasurable distance betrayed enough their captain’s own concern and frustration, but Jihl allowed them no room to dwell on it. “But if anything is apparent, it is that something is clearly at work here that exceeds the normal bounds of humanity. Though she might have been a simple human before, there is no denying that Lightning Farron is now an oddity. The matter at hand is simply what oddity, or more prominently, why?”
The was no direct answer to that, and the question was not an invitation for any of them to attempt it. Jihl briefly straightened her glasses, and then reached for the case of cigarettes that she always kept on her person. Fang stood aside as their captain glided toward the exit, the furrow in her brow a new fixture that felt horribly out of place.
“I have a few calls to make,” she announced before walking through the door. One cigarette was almost to her lips, still unlit. Her voice dropped to a low whisper, deliberate and somehow threateningly jealous in its intensity. “I don’t leave loose ends undone for my own. And make no mistake, human or...other...Farron, just like the rest of you, is mine.”
Fang only remembered to keep breathing after the dark and moving dragon’s shadow exited the waiting room entirely. Only Jihl had that disturbing ability to make a promise sound like a threat.
Another day found Jihl returned to Lightning’s bedside, accompanied both by Yaag (usual) and also by Fang (a generous allowance).
The nurses had been weaning Lightning off of sedative, gradually trusting her not to do something—as Rygdea had bluntly put it—colossally idiotic again. Whether she accepted it or not, Lightning was forced to grow used to the new routine that was her life, one that increasingly seemed without recourse.
“You can hardly stay bedridden like this. The doctors have assured me you are physically healthy and hale.”
The captain was pushing today, and part of Lightning recognized it; she was pushing at the limits of Lightning’s own tolerance, aggressive whereas others were politely and reservedly sympathetic. But Jihl had never been a creature of sympathies.
“It’s time you get back on your feet, Farron.”
“Captain,” began Fang, trying to strike the right balance of respectful disagreement.
It wasn’t her fight to have, though. Lightning gritted her teeth. Her eyes bandages were off, but she still refused to open them. She refused to see the indication of death painted over people she knew and cared about.
“Get on my feet and do what exactly?”
It was the first that Lightning had pushed back at Jihl, and her captain seemed to alight on that first flicker of fight in her.
“Get on your feet and keep walking forward. You were injured, not killed. You are more than capable of—”
Just as quickly, Lightning felt any resolve in her snap and crumple.
“Capable?”
She permitted herself an awful attempt at a chuckle.
“Capable of what? I-I can’t work like this, boss,” Lightning felt her voice slide into something that sounded like a fragile plea. “I can’t even—”
The words caught and choked in her throat. Yet what was she supposed to do? Jihl would have it sound as though everything could just slide back to normal when Lightning couldn’t even stand to open her eyes longer than ten seconds at a time. How was she supposed to return to active duty if she couldn’t even use her eyes? There was only so long she could be put on medical leave before a decision would have to be made about the future of her career.
“Don’t go and panic on me now, Farron,” chided Jihl, but if Lightning had her eyes open, she would have seen the glimmer of true uncertainty in Jihl’s normally calm and controlled gaze. She would have seen the hint, foreign and rare, of fear.
As it was, she saw nothing, and so the family admonishment from her boss had a strangely calming effect on her. If there was one thing still certain and unchanging in her world, it was Jihl Nabaat’s casually dismissive tone of absolute authority.
Lightning took a breath, exhaling before answering. She managed not to stutter over what she said next. “Captain...this isn’t tenable. You and I both know that.”
The silence was interrupted only by the beeping of the vitals-monitoring machine and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall.
“Light…”
That was Fang, just nearby, but Lightning didn’t want to hear the feeling and sympathy in her voice. What she needed was to hear from Jihl. She couldn’t keep living in a lie. If this was to be the end of her tenure in the police force, she needed to face it head on, no matter how far outside her experience or anyone else’s it was.
“Look at me, Farron.”
Unwilling though she was, Lightning cracked open her eyes. The overhead lights were blindingly bright, and she had to blink rapidly to adjust. As always, the strange fractal geometry spiked through everything she saw, arraying and rearranging over everything, painting patterns across Jihl and Yaag and even Fang in her peripheral.
“Do you trust me?”
Did trust even really matter at the end of it all? What other options did she have?
She nodded her head the smallest bit, and the fractals shook with her field of vision. “Yes.”
“Good.” Abruptly, Jihl stood and stepped away, leaving Lightning dizzied as her vision rapidly readjusted. By the time she had recentered her focus sufficiently, Jihl had turned away and was speaking to Yaag. “Show him in.”
Whoever ‘he’ was became quickly apparent as Yaag first stepped out of the room, and then re-entered with a familiar man in tow.
“Get out.”
Bedridden or no, Lighting seethed with sudden fury. For once, the moving fractals in her vision ceased to bother her. As her gaze honed in on Yojimbo, the geometric shards spun and rotated into several, prominent points. Fire burned beneath her skin, and for a sudden and terrible moment she wanted nothing then to leap from her bed and touch those points, and to watch Nautilus City’s longtime criminal mastermind crumble to nothing before her.
“Manners, manners, Ms. Farro—”
“I said, get out!”
She was sitting upright, her hands knotted into the sheets with rage. Anger made her feel human for the first time, made her feel normal.
“Farron, I—” That was Jihl, beginning to offer either a reprimand or an explanation, and Lightning was unwilling to hear either.
Instead rounded on Jihl, her fury erasing any fear of giving disrespect to her superior. “How could you bring him here? How could you?”
How could she bring Yojimbo of all people to see her when she was like this? Bedridden and at her weakest? She was at her most vulnerable, and Jihl had brought him into her sickroom under the guise of a guest? Even if Lightning recovered, now he had this to hold over her, and she despised it so much that her blood felt like it would boil.
As if reading her mind, the crime lord intercepted before even Jihl could respond.
“Contrary to what you might believe, I am not here to gloat, Ms. Farron. Quite the opposite.” Disturbingly, he sounded genuine. Sincere, even, and that took the fire out of Lightning faster than anything else could.
She scoffed, closing her eyes again. Just as quickly as it had set on her, her fury had receded back to manageable levels, and she was too exhausted again to manage the strangeness of her new vision. She fell back into her pillow, sneering as she spoke, and closed her eyes again. “I don’t want your pity either.”
“I would hardly presume to pity you, of all people. I like to think we understand one another better than that.”
Yojimbo’s pleasantly resonant voice floated to her ears, and Lightning could just picture the look on his face. She hated it just as much as everything else about him, and her jaw clenched. She was not about to give him the satisfaction of arguing.
After a few tense moments of silence, he continued. If there was one thing she could appreciate about Yojimbo, it was that he was forthright.
“I believe I may know someone who may be able to shed light on your condition.”
It was barely discernible, but he paused on the last word. Lightning noticed, and her voice nearly snarled out when she spoke.
“I don’t want help from you or any of your goddamn ‘associates’!” That was her instinctive response, but she had the presence of mind to follow it up with something more logical, even as she kept her eyes tightly closed. “Besides, why should I believe you know something that no one in the SCS or any of our network does.”
“You shouldn’t believe I know anything more, because you would be right.” Yojimbo said it so plainly that Lighting almost—almost—snapped her eyes back open to stare at him; she resisted the urge.
“I, personally, don’t know anything. But no matter what tight ship your department might run,” There was a brief pause, and Lightning could imagine him inclining his head in deference to Jihl. “Word gets around, particularly when a human member of such a specialized division gets put up and no one can seem to figure out why.”
Great, so all of the city knew her condition by now. The papers must be having a field day. At least Internal Affairs hadn’t come to see her at all.
“That said,” Yojimbo proceeded, his voice adopting a humming and delicate quality to it. “The underworld shelters purveyors of many sorts of knowledge, and not all of them are cold-blooded killers you would make us out to be. I have become acquainted with one such individual, and while I can provide you no clarity, I firmly believe that he can.”
She heard him start to move, not toward her or the bed, but toward the door and exactly where she wanted him to go.
“What’s the price?” Lightning barked out the accusation, even though thinking on it too much already chilled her to the bone. If Yojimbo had found someone, if this mystery man could help her...what cost would be held over her head? What debt would the mafioso of Nautilus City extract from her?
How on earth could she justify it to herself?
She could feel Fang tense beside her, no doubt thinking the exact same things.
“The price? Nothing.”
The words sounded so foreign that Lightning didn’t even have a response ready. It was Fang who spoke in her stead.
“Nothing? You really expect us to believe that? That you would provide for any cop without expecting a favor back...least of all…”
She trailed off without saying Lightning’s name. Yojimbo, however, persisted.
“As I said, I expect to be owed nothing for this, should the help even prove useful. Your captain and I are already clear on this matter...unless you don’t trust her leadership?”
It was an unnecessary barb, but it wouldn’t have been Yojimbo without it. Jihl cleared her throat and spoke, her voice certain but tinged with faraway worry.
“Farron, Fang...if anything is becoming clear, it is this: something, or someone, is trying to blind us--to blind this city. To what, I don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence, Farron. Let me be perfectly clear. You should be dead and in your grave right now, and it would be a far tidier affair for me to wrap up. You should have died from that Doom spell, but instead you lived, and you’ve been given a new sight, the likes of which no one can seem to explain or understand. I’d be a fool not to pursue this, no matter where the help is being offered from. I might be many things, but a fool is not one of them.”
Lightning gritted her teeth, cracking one eye open and sliding her hallucinatory vision toward where Yojimbo stood by the door, and watching the lovely temptation of those weak points dance on him.
“And you?”
“Consider it a debt repaid, if you will, Ms. Farron. For the help with vampires, if that makes you rest easier.” Yojimbo stood suddenly, brushing the nonexistent dust off of his immaculately tailored suit. He paused for a moment, his gaze strangely concerned for once. Was that a glimmer of...fear? “Incredulous though you may be at the concept, I do consider myself something of a patriot of this city. It has been my home as much as yours, and if someone truly does seek to undo it for their own goals...well then…”
Here his iron gaze constricted, and he was no longer a gentleman, but a cold killer simply garbed in the skin of a man.
“Then I would do my part as much as you in seeing them put to rest. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a great many other matters which require my attention, and I doubt any of you wish me to be here for any longer than necessary. If I might…?”
It wasn’t really a question, of course, and Yojimbo showed himself out. Lightning caught a glimpse of two tall, heavily muscled men in suits—his good squad, of course—but was only able to catch the profile of one of them talking to someone else.
Then, as Yojimbo took his leave, the door reopened enough to allow someone else entirely in.
A man shuffled into the room, hunched over and wearing a heavily oversized red coat that was draped over his shoulders. He wore small spectacles of smoked glass that did little to hide the scar that had blinded one eye, and his jawline boasted a heavy coating of stubble that was too generous to be deemed a five o’clock shadow by anyone’s standards. Even from the distance that still separated them, even with the headache-inducing distraction of her hallucinogenic vision, it was impossible to miss the cloying scent of stale alcohol around the man, with hints of something sickly sweet hiding beneath it.
Lightning closed her eyes as her headache intensified.
“You’re Yojimno’s expert?”
She tried to cast as much disdain as she could manage into her voice, but all it sounded even to her own ears was exhausted. For once, she longed for the oblivion of drug-induced sleep that the nurses would give her.
A gravely and low chuckle greeted her ears and she almost cracked open her eyes again. “I’ve had better greetings, I’ll admit. Also had plenty worse.”
Lightning heard him shuffle closer to the bed.
“Come on, now. Open up and let me have a look at those eyes of yours.”
Lightning turned her head toward where the voice was coming from, and after taking a deep breath, she opened both eyes fully. The man stood by the foot of her bed, and while his one good eye was only lazily half-open, the gaze behind it was piercingly sharp with intelligence and knowledge.
Lightning kept her eyes open this time, blinking only as the strange geometry of her vision moved and rearranged around.
“What do you see when you look at me, darling?”
She voiced the same, tired explanation as always. “Light, shards, and lines. They move around, coming together at points—centers, really. If I touch them, then…”
Here her voice hitched. She felt her heart rate explode up with anxiety, and her back pressed into the pillows behind her. She wanted to close her eyes now, to tuck her face away and out of sight, to remove the cursed vision so she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.
The man caught her before she could, and his low voice commanded the air despite being gentle and measured.
“None of that now. I need you to keep looking for me. Look at me, only at me. There we go, ‘attagirl.”
Normally, Lightning would have bristled at being referred to as such, but his orders helped to focus her, to calm her. Through her rising panic and fear of looking at Fang, she seized onto the command, staring steadfastly at the stranger before her.
“Is that all you see when you look at me?” His voice came as distant, from outside her tunnel of vision.
Then she noticed it, the disturbance to the normal patterns she saw. On the left side of his torso where he cradled that arm, the fractals dissipated entirely. Nothing moved or coalesced over that portion of his form, strangely devoid of the motive geometries she had come to expect.
“No…” Lightning felt her brow furrow in confusion, and as she studied him, the tension at having her eyes open and engaged faded away before the curiosity of what she was looking at. “I...I don’t see anything over your left side. Along your torso and ribs. Like a void.”
She jerked her gaze back up to his face, where the points ebbed and flowed across him.
“Why? Who are you?”
It occurred to her that the more pertinent question, no matter how rude it might be, was instead to ask what he was.
Nonetheless, for the first time since walking into her room, the man smiled. It was a small thing, and wry in an oddly familiar self-deprecating way.
“You can call me Auron.”
“And you know what this is?” It was hard to keep the desperate hope from her own voice, so Lightning tempered it. “Even when no one else does? When has no one else has even seen anything like this before?”
Auron gave a wry and passing smirk at that, short-lived. He reached out and slowly traced one nicotine-stained fingertip over the ridge of Lightning’s orbital. She let him.
“No surprise there that you haven’t gotten answers. No one has seen the likes of what you’ve got in centuries, maybe even millennia.” His voice changed in cadence, became introspective, almost academic. “And even then, it was an unheard-of state to attain. A blessing? A curse? Perhaps one in the same. There are no writings left behind that explain it, only references and more questions. I just happen to be a man who is a purveyor in such things. Or I used to be.”
Lightning stared, waiting, her heart suddenly in her throat.
Auron cleared his throat and withdrew his hand after a moment.
“There used to be an old, ancient name for it, but it’s long since crumbled to dust along with whatever civilization bequeathed it said-name. What you have, Lightning Farron, are best called ‘Eyes of Death’.”
“Eyes of Death?” repeated Jihl, her slender brows raised skeptically. “So she can better direct a blade or a bullet?”
Auron hummed at that.
“Perhaps ‘death’ isn’t the best word. A lot gets lost in translation. What her eyes now detect, what shifting lines and intersecting points they see in things both living and not...what you can now perceive is not simply the way to death, it is the very essence of a thing itself, its longevity given form, and thus the way to dissolute its very existence.” He paused to turn back toward Jihl. “Do all things die so easily as with a single bullet or blade? If you cut off a lich’s head, does it still live? This is different. Undo the fabric of its own existence, and end it with but a touch.”
The skepticism was gone from Jihl then, replaced by something akin to wary curiosity. “And Farron can see all that now?”
“Irrevocably.” He returned his attention to Lightning, addressing her directly again. “As far as I know, the only boundary to your power is what your own mind limits your perception as...that, and whatever is truly already gone. Of course, you’re straying outside of my realm of knowledge now. You asked me before what was wrong with my side, why your vision couldn’t see anything over it.”
Here, Auron pushed his red coat partially open with an arm and pulled up his shirt. Lightning caught a glimpse of a horrific, lethal would. But no putrid smell of decay emanated from the man, nor any dripping of red blood. It was almost like an image from a movie, frozen in time and space. Even now, while the fractals danced in ineffable patterns over the rest of him, nothing persisted across his mortal wound.
“Are you undead?” Lightning blurted out unthinkingly.
He gave a low and tired chuckle.
“Not exactly. Suffice to say I used to be a wizard, but now I’m something else. Not quite alive, but not quite dead either. My brethren wizards are equally as quick to jump on the whole “necromancer” and “undead” boat, so I’ve laid low for the past few centuries, trying not to draw too much attention to myself. I expect if I were truly undead, your pretty eyes wouldn’t have any issues deciphering just how to end me either. But, no. This?” He began to roll his shirt gently back down, shrugging his coat over his shoulders again. “This is long since gone.”
So...Eyes of Death. A quiet descended on the room, everyone seeming to digest just want this new information was and what it meant.
Lightning reached her own conclusion first: knowledge changed nothing.
“I don’t want it.”
They were the words she had thought along, but that she had never allowed herself to voice.
“Wanting is exactly—”
“I don’t want it!” she yelled, feeling something rise up out of the emptiness. Hysteria, sudden and monstrous, threatened to overwhelm her entirely, replacing the apathy with an intensity that was drowning her, never mind Fang at her side.
Auron’s voice cracked through the air like a whip, more commanding than any order uttered from a superior, perhaps for how strange it seemed coming from him. “Calm down!”
Lightning sucked in a sharp breath, felt her body tremble once, but hold, slowly pushing back the worst of the loss in control.
“You know as well as I do that these ‘gifts’, be they blessings or curses, can hardly be cast aside.” His voice grew softer, more empathetic. “Why you were chosen for this burden, why now, and by whose touch, I know not. I’m no priest of the gods, and like you, I wish only for the gods to stay out of my life. But once they’ve touched your brow, there is no turning back.”
Lightning felt her body go tight with tension. She had seen enough of what the touch of the gods could do. She had only just watched, powerless, as her sister was forever changed under the hand of a so-called blessing. Was this another instance of a god interfering in her life? And why?
“So that’s it?” She finally breathed out between her teeth. “I just...I’m supposed to live like this? To walk around like normal while I can see how everyone around me can die at just the wrong touch from me?”
Embracing her own death sounded easier.
“In essence? Yup...we all have to live how we are. You get used to it one way or another. But...sometimes there are tricks to help ease the burden.” He reached into the folds of his cloak, clearly searching for something. After a moment, he found it. “Here.”
Auron offered a small object out to her.
Lightning accepted, reopening her eyes to find a set of what appeared to be tinted sunglasses. Slowly, hesitantly, she closed her eyes and then put them on. She didn’t need the machine by her bed to let her know that her heart rate had risen again, and that her blood pressure had increased.
“Until your mind grows used to your newfound ability, this will provide you some measure of relief,” Auron encouraged her.
Nothing felt different, but Lightning could tell the weight of focus in the room lay on her.
She dared to open one eye, and then the other.
Surprised, she allowed her gaze to open fully and unabashedly for the first time since she had originally woken in the hospital, taking in her surroundings.
Fang was seated but right at her side, one hand anxiously knotted in the sheets on the edge of the bed, while the other remained as a fist atop her lap. There was Jihl in the corner, for once—miraculously—not smoking. Trying to look disinterested, but her lips were unusually thin and drawn, and not from displeasure. And across from Lightning, near the foot of her bed, she was now able to fully and properly examine Auron.
With the added tint from the sunglasses, of course.
Auron, for his part, reached into one deep-pocketed sleeve and drew out a flask, flicking open the cap and taking a deep swig. It could have been a potion, surely, but Lightning was just as certain that it really was hard liquor.
Only after swallowing and licking his lips did he speak, looking at Lightning over the rims of his small glasses. “Well?”
“How?” Her voice broke in relief over something she was not yet even certain to trust. Her fingertips ran over the edges of the sunglasses, and she trembled, half beginning to reach for the hand Fang had gripping her sheets before she stopped short, afraid.
Auron nodded with his chin toward the inches that still separated Lightning from touching Fang’s hand. “You’re fine with the glasses on. If you can’t see the points of death, you won’t be able to activate them.”
Then he shrugged, hiding his flask back into the folds of his robes. If he noticed or even cared, then he didn’t show it when Lightning and Fang closed the distance in a convulsive grasp, gripping hands tightly.
“As for your question? Damned if I know. Those aren’t my invention, but they are the only pair I know of. Not made of normal glass, and definitely not plastic, but still. Do yourself a favor and try not to break them or lose them. I’d be hard pressed to find you a replacement.”
Lightning felt her sinuses run thick from the surge of emotion, relief so sharp that it prickled at her eyes and in the back of her throat.
“I...thank you,” she croaked. “How can I thank you?”
Auron was taking one last swig before tucking away his travel flask, and he waved away Lightning’s words.
“Don’t thank me. Just lucky I was able to help at all. Besides...trust me, I may not know what the gods want, but I do know one thing for sure.” He stopped, his one good eye peering over his glasses to fix Lightning into place. “These aren’t the sort of abilities the gods idly hand over. If you have this power, it will be for a reason, one where you’re gonna need whatever power you have...Eyes of Death and all. Here’s to hoping we never have to see each other again.”
Then Auron was turning and walking out, waving his goodbye with one casual hand in the air.
Lightning awoke, her heart pounding loudly in her ears and her breathing rapid.
She wasn’t sure what had woken her. Had it been a dream? A noise? At least she would hopefully soon enough be discharged, returned to the peace of her own bed and apartment and released from the stress that was a sick ward.
Keeping her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Lightning blindly reached for the pair of sunglasses until her fingertips stumbled over the frames and lenses. She shoved them clumsily onto her face, and only then allowed herself to see.
It was night, that much was clear.
The main source of light in her room came only from the flood lamps and moon outside, trickling in between the window slats.
There were still hours left till dawn would arrive, and all the more reason to roll over and go back to sleep.
Lightning would have done so, but she paused.
Something wasn’t right.
It wasn’t just that she had woken up close to two in the morning, possibly because she was no longer being drugged to sleep through the night. Something had changed, and the more she focused on the sense of otherness, the more her body grew discomforted and on edge.
Lightning looked around, alert and awake and searching.
The clock on the wall had stopped entirely, the second hand frozen in place as if the battery had died. One fifty-four in the morning. Stuck.
It was then that Lightning realized the second thing out of place: the silence. Everything was quiet, far too quiet for a trauma level one hospital that had a constant rotation of nurses and doctors on call.
Though Lightning was no longer on an I.V. drip, the nurses had kept all manner of EKG and EMG sensor pads stickied to her skin. She ripped them off, and nothing happened. The machines that should have been beeping and alerting the floor staff remained still and dead.
Had there been a power failure? But then...hospitals had emergency backup generators, she knew. Even a total power failure from the grid shouldn’t cripple the hospital, and she would have heard the commotion associated with it.
Drawing aside her covers, Lightning got up from her bed. She had nothing on but for her hospital gown, but she wasn’t about to stay laying in place and pretending all was well, not when the growing sense of wrongness had become impossible to ignore.
Dammit, but she wished suddenly and strongly that Fang was here, or anyone from the SCS; someone she could rely on, someone who could give her sanity check.
She opened the door from her room and into the hallway, poked her head out, and looked down the long corridor.
There was no one. Not a soul was in sight, not a nurse, not a doctor, not even another patient. Nothing.
Lightning frowned and was about to step out fully when something happened.
At the far end of the hall, the overhead lights flickered once, twice, and then went dark. She stared, but they did not turn back on. Then the next closest lighting panel did the same, the fluorescent bulbs flickered tiredly, before giving way to darkness. It crept it down the hall, consuming each source of illumination light bulb by lightbulb, even the emergency exit signs going out.
Lightning slammed her door shut and barricaded the handle with a chair.
She picked up the room phone, but there was silence. No dial tone, nothing.
In a near convulsive fit, she reached for the leftover dinner tray that had still not been picked up, grabbing the flat and dull butter knife, as if that would do anything helpful. Still, she clenched it in one fist.
Was this a dream then, or a nightmare, to explain why everything felt so unreal?
The light coming from the hallway under her door was nearly out, and there was the unmistakable sound of slow but heavy footfalls...too heavy and too strange to be human.
In a fit, Lightning bit the inside of her cheek until it bled, and then pinched herself for good measure.
No, this was no dream world then. Not if she could hurt and bleed. Which meant that whatever had infiltrated the hospital was real, and real meant dangerous. What had happened to everyone else was a minor detail now: the reality was that she was on her own.
The footsteps grew louder, and the light went out.
Lightning darted toward her window, her heart pounding heavily.
She was on the second floor of the hospital wing, with a lawn and some scant shrubs below her. Not to mention, she couldn’t even seem to get the window to open.
The first inklings of panic began to rise. She didn’t have her weapons; didn’t have her sword or her gun or even her badge. She didn’t have her squad mates or her partner. She was a bare cry beyond bedrest.
The sound of crazed static sparked wildly outside in the hallway, and her door began to rattle with increasing violence and intensity.
“Shit!”
A primal sort of fear raced up her spine. It was the fear that a child has of the dark, the fear of the unknown, the fear that had kept humankind alive for countless millennia from those nameless things that might otherwise eat them whole.
The chair wouldn’t hold much longer at the door.
Propelled by an instinct older than thought, Lightning ran toward the window, dropping one shoulder down and in front of her.
The thick glass pane shattered as though spun from sugar.
She flew through the air, and down to the ground below.
Lightning tumbled and rolled as she landed, absorbing the force of her drop as best as she could and doubtlessly decorated with bits of grass and dirt in her hair.
Any thoughts of vanity were eons away.
Whether it was the power of adrenaline sustaining her body or pure luck, it didn’t matter. Stumbling to her feet, Lightning began to run.
Her breath puffed out clouds of steam in the cold air of late autumn and early winter. The first creepings of frost had set into the grass, and it crunched beneath her bare feet and under the moonlight.
Her body felt unwieldy and slow, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the effects of her own fear, her time spent under bedrest and sedative, or something else.
Lightning stopped to turn back around.
The broken window she had crashed through was dark, no light shining from the inside. In fact, none of the windows of the hospital were illuminated now. There were no sounds, either of the city that existed beyond the hospital ground, nor even of what confines of nature should have been present here on the green.
There was only silence and darkness, and the clouds from her exhaled breath that remained hanging in the air like a trail rather than dissipating into the night.
As Lightning watched, something came out of the window after her. It didn’t leap so much as it slid out like an oily shadow, too difficult to discern, particularly as the external lights on the building died and went dark, too.
Panic surged then.
She needed to run, needed to get away and find help, to find someone, anyone—
In a time-defying surge, the darkness shot across the green and was on her.
Lightning hit the ground hard, and her glasses went flying from her face.
“No!”
She shut her eyes instinctively, trying to reach for where the glasses had been flung but grabbing only grass and empty air.
A hoarse and murderous wheezing noise grew louder at her back, and Lightning threw herself sideways, rolling against the icy ground to instinctively dodge a blow she was certain she was coming.
Something thudded heavily against the earth where she had just laid.
Scrabbling to her feet, Lightning turned around and did the only thing she could: she opened her eyes.
The fractals, dizzying and bright, exploded into her vision despite it being nighttime, and she nearly shut her eyes again to close out the sudden sensory overload. Yet there was no time—no time to coddle herself, no time to adjust or equilibrate.
Before her was something that wanted to kill her (or eat her or steal or her soul or whatever else the oddity might want—regardless, the intents did not bode well for her).
Lightning looked at her foe.
A creature of shadow and darkness, it seemed halfway between both corporeal and incorporeal form. Wisps of shadow coalesced into a vaguely humanoid form with arms and claws, the impression of thick and weighted legs, but a blank face except for two pale eyes. A gorget of old and tarnished armor sat around its throat and shoulders, and it stared at her, unblinking and somehow hungry despite the lack of any apparent mouth.
The armor itself was embossed with a symbol, not one that Lightning knew the meaning of, but that was familiar. She had seen it somewhere before, on something different.
Just as she recalled the coin from the vampire matriarch, the specter attacked.
Lightning slashed wildly at it, trying to keep space, but the butter knife simply slid through the shadow substance of its hand with no effect. In contrast, the claws raked across her arm with ease, immediately drawing blood.
With a hiss of pain, Lightning avoided the next claw swipe, trying not to think about how royally screwed she now was. Something that could hurt her, but that she couldn’t hurt back. Not that having a name for it was particularly helpful at the moment. Whatever this thing was, it was trying to kill her.
There was no time to think about it, only to do her best to survive and not get disemboweled.
The creature reached for her with both hands, unafraid and eager.
Lightning responded instinctively, bringing the small knife up and driving the blade in a defensive strike toward a coalescence of fractal lines that moved along the creature’s arm. Despite it being little more than a butter knife, it pierced the epicenter easily. This time it did not pass through, but it struck, burying into a target that only Lightning could see.
A pained screech shattered through the air.
Immediately, the arm became corporeal and solid and very real against her.
Training took over without a second thought, and Lightning locked the injured arm into a grapple designed to incapacitate. Instead, the limb crackled and then cleaved off entirely, amputated. The shock of it was so sudden that Lightning very nearly took another claw swipe again as the specter attacked her and tried to ghost backward.
Blinking, she focused—truly focused for the first time—on what her strange dual-vision was showing her.
The arm she had so unerringly and casually amputated was truly destroyed—undone, as Auron had said. A glance showed no more fractal lines across it as it began to disintegrate into nothing. But the specter itself was not so undone. It had lost a limb, but it was still very much alive and aggressive.
The claws on its feet and other hand grew dark and longer, more wicked and threatening.
Lightning saw as much, but also saw the way the alien and geometric patterns flowed over it, showing no less than four different and pulsating epicenters, like the hearts of miniature galaxies, vertices of certain death.
She adjusted her death grip she had on her butter knife.
It wasn’t her ideal weapon, but it would have to do. Time to test everything that Auron had told her.
Clearly more enraged than cautious, the specter attacked again.
This time, claws shredded through some of her gown, but she avoided taking a direct blow, stepping aside quickly enough.
She couldn’t afford to play defensively, though. Even if her vision showed her where the weak spots lay, she still had to maneuver to get there. Even one-armed, the creature had a sizable reach advantage on her. The more she prolonged this, the greater advantage played against her favor.
Lightning tried to dart in and took a kick that nearly sent her sprawling. She rounded quickly, measuring up her odds and her chances. She took the next opportunity as soon as she could, eyeing which mark to strike most readily.
This time, she paid for her attempt with another gash across her shoulder, but she closed the distance. Immediately, Lightning slammed her knife down into where one of the epicenters glittered and reflected at approximately hip height. Again, the dull knife blade found its mark, and again the creature let loose a shriek that made her blood run cold.
Three of the other epicenters suddenly shifted and coalesced even as her knife was hilt deep stuck in her enemy, coming together in one sky-bright target. Otherwise still occupied where she was continuing to stab it, Lightning acted accordingly, lest the moment pass her by. With her off hand, she formed a flat palmed strike, but instead drove her fingers in first as if slicing into water instead of a shadow fiend.
She felt a resistance around them, shockingly cold, then tingling and hot, then nothing.
Everything slowed to a full stop.
Rather than screeching again, there was a slow and drawn hiss that sounded like the air escaping from a balloon. The black mists of its form seemed to shudder and then fall apart, like dust being scattered to the wind. It disappeared into nothingness, and Lightning knew it was finished and dead, whatever it was.
The single piece of armor it wore fell out of the empty air and to the ground at her feet, the only physical evidence left behind of Lightning’s one-time attacker.
Time suddenly shifted back into being, striking like a physical blow to the chest. Lightning felt her lungs burned as she gasped for air. Her arm stung and throbbed from where she had sustained injuries. Behind her, the lights in the hospital were all back on, and she could hear alarms going off. Sweat dripped from her brow, and she blinked and shook her head to clear it.
The knife was still in hand, and somehow, she had managed to not lose or destroy her precious sunglasses, which lay on the ground a few paces away.
For the first time since she had awoken in the hospital bed, Lightning felt unbothered by her strange new vision. Maybe she was still too busy trying to make sense of what exactly had just happened.
She had been attacked--more than that, she was certain she had been targeted, though it was unclear why. Attacked in the dead of night, by a supernatural assailant the likes of which she could not even begin to identify, which she fought off in a state that she could only describe as a time anomaly.
And about that whole bit...even with her limited knowledge, Lightning knew that it was no small thing to be able to convolute passage of time, even for the most high-ranking of wizards. To cast haste or slow on a single creature was one thing, but to shift the entire fabric of the world around them, even for a microcosm, was something she had never even heard of.
A frown of consternation tugged at her lips. Whatever it was that had attacked her, it had not seemed like the sort of being that could slow or halt time...unless it had spent all of its power doing so and expected to find Lightning as weak prey.
Yet that didn’t feel right, not in Lightning’s gut, though she couldn’t make head or tails of it all. It was all too strange, too much to take in still.
Better to focus on the immediate.
Dirty, sweaty, and still wearing nothing more than her hospital gown, Lightning tried to take stock of herself. She had a few minor cuts and what might be some bruising after jumping through a second-story window, but she was otherwise remarkably unscathed.
Inhumanly so, a part of her remarked.
That line of thinking brought on a whole other sort of questions and doubts and anxieties that would have had her shaking and falling to her knees, sucking dry the momentary delight in her own perseverance and victory.
For once, all of the years of training and practice and repressing the more inconvenient parts of herself served Lightning well.
Nothing good would come of letting her mind wander back into a quarter-life crisis at two in the morning while having just fought for her life in a weird and time-defying sequence of events. For once, it really was better to shove any of her existential questions firmly into the back of her mind for examination later. Ideally with coffee and daylight and another voice of reason involved.
Lightning sat down in the grass near the forensic remains of her attacker, calmly replaced the sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose, and waited for the hospital staff to come find her.
Report filed. Case closed.