Moontouched 20

Donna had been reduced to a point before, but this was the first time she’d done it deliberately to herself.  The previous time, she’d been able to move as fast as thought, and this time was no different.  Her point of view flicked through the walls of Ray’s house as if they were mist, and arrowed along the link to Gwen.  The pain echoing down the bond created as sure a guide as she could have asked for, and faster than thought she flew.  Trees and then buildings flickered past in the ghostly three-dimensional sense that her power afforded her in this state.

Donna slowed.  Something was impeding her progress, despite the fact that she could move through walls as easily as air.  She took a moment to study the darkness that was impeding her, and it felt just like the miasma she’d felt around the hospice before.  A burst of power tore a ragged gap it and she darted forward once more, slashing her way through to Gwen.

Moments later, Donna’s spatial sense revealed a familiar outline.  Gwen loomed before her, unimaginably big.  It took a moment to realize that she was kneeling, arms before her, and a moment longer to notice the gaping wound in her side.  Donna tried to heal the wound, but her power couldn’t touch Gwen.

Donna wanted to scream with frustration, but she had no mouth, lungs, or any such things.  Instead she took a moment to calm herself, and studied the problem.  There, around Gwen’s wrists.  Silver.  Donna cursed in the silence of her mind.

Worse still, she could feel the dark regard of a nearby entity swinging toward her.  Donna realized just how vulnerable she was in her current form, and darted back through the wall.  She surveyed the space that Gwen was in, and noted that there were three other humans in it, plus what felt like a mass of dark crystalline... something.  It didn’t seem entirely real, but it also seemed to be the source of the ‘gaze’ that was still searching for her.

When that gaze had swung away from the corner of the room nearest Gwen, Donna flicked herself there, and visualized the body she needed.  Strong.  Versatile.  And to deal with the silver on Gwen, some utility claws that could pinch through silvered manacles like they were licorice.  Kate’s robotic body sprung to mind, though with adjustments.  A cyborg, looking exactly as Donna normally did, but with hard metal and powerful synthetic muscles under the skin.  Once it was designed, it took a heartbeat to grow it, going from dust sized to Donna’s full height in a second.

From her perch behind the cyborg’s glassy eyes, Donna coolly contemplated the scene as revealed by the dim lights in the room.  It looked like a bunker, with concrete walls, shelves of canned goods, and rows of bunk-beds against two walls.  The only entry door was a huge slab of steel, propped open just enough for a person to slip in or out.  A forgotten bomb shelter from the war?

More importantly, Donna could see Gwen kneeling beside the gaunt form of Doctor Brown, who was staring at a phone in confusion.  Dangling unattended from his right hand was an oversize knife that matched the freely bleeding wound in Gwen’s side.

“But I didn’t tell her where to go,” he muttered.

A sweet, flute-clear voice resonated from the crystals.  “She’s here.”

Donna ignored them, staring instead at Gwen.  She wafted a mote of herself to Gwen’s side, forming into a highly adhesive, fleshy bandage inside the wound.  Gwen winced, then looked up at Donna, eyes wide.  “Look out, there’s a trap!”

Doctor Brown growled and swung toward Gwen, raising the knife.  Donna lept and slapped him away from her kneeling friend.  He hit the far wall with a sickening crunch, and fell to the floor like a broken doll.

“Oh well,” came the fluting voice again. “That puppet was at the end of its usefulness anyway.”  A lick of darkness emerged from the crystalline thing, and where it touched Doctor Brown’s body he crumbled to ash.  Donna could feel the pulse of power leaving his body as it disintegrated, and saw how some of it spiralled into the crystalline entity.

“What did you do?” asked Donna in surprise and shock.  “You... ate him?”

“Death nourishes me,” fluted the entity.  It seemed true enough, there was a dim, sickly purple glow to the crystal at the core of the formation that hadn’t been there before.  Donna shuddered, even without her other sight she could feel the corruption of that energy.

“You’ve been here all along, feeding on the deaths at the hospice?”

“Until one day, someone came along brimming with pure power, and even drew more into my domain.  It was glorious.  I’d forgotten what untainted magic felt like.”

Donna cursed under her breath, and turned back to Gwen.  The bleeding had stopped, but Gwen wasn’t looking much better.  There were burn marks on her arms, and more bruises than Donna could count.  “So you’ve done all this, killed all those people, tortured my friends... just to get to me?”

“It’s about the power.  You opened my eyes, and I took the path open to me.  So many lives, bustling around me.  So easy to take a few here, a few there.”

“You’re a monster,” Donna said flatly.

The fluting voice giggled around her.  “Yes.  Submit to me, and I won’t need to feed on death any more.  Oppose me, and your friends die.”

The other two women in the room gasped, and moved toward Donna.  She looked at them closely for the first time.  The emaciated figures hadn’t registered at first.  “Jenna?  Liana?  What are you doing here?”  A touch of power to each of them got rid of the sunken hollows in their cheeks, and they sighed with relief.

“We thought we’d never see anyone again, after Doctor Brown took us here.”

“Where is here, anyway?”

Jenna looked at Donna oddly.  “Under the hospice.  How did you get here and not know that?”

Donna looked back at the propped-open blast door, and her power flicked out to give a sense of the stairs beyond, and the rubble above them.  There were deadfalls in the passage, rigged to drop with little effort.  Traps, as Gwen had said.  Getting out that way would be impossible without dealing with the crystalline entity first.  Donna turned back to face it.

“I can’t let you do this,” Donna said, advancing toward the crystal entity, keeping her friends behind her.

“Seriously?”  A flash of power flicked past Donna, and Jenna screamed.  Her arm was ash, sifting to the floor.  

Donna lashed out at the crystal entity, delivering a punch to one of its many crystalline spires.  The punch hit like a piledriver, and the spire crazed.  A second blow shattered it.  It crumbled to dust and then vanished, its power withdrawing into the core.  “I can hurt you.  And if I can hurt you, I can destroy you.”

Donna stepped to the next pillar, shattering it as well.  Dark energy lashed out at her.  The impacts to her arms and chest did nothing but burn away the synthetic flesh, revealing polished metal underneath. The entity roared in frustration, and aimed its energy at Jenna instead.  Donna deflected it with a bolt of her own power, and it impacted harmlessly on the wall.  

As Donna advanced on the next spire, more bolts of darkness shot out.  She parried the next two, but the third struck home, and it was Liana’s turn to scream as her leg disintegrated.  She crumpled to the ground, then slowly struggled to her hands and knee.  Donna’s expression grew even grimmer, and she pulverized the next crystal pillar into dust.

The entity’s attacks came faster, and Donna’s parries weren’t always enough.  Every fourth or fifth would slip past her, drawing another moan of pain from her friends.  The effort of parrying the attacks was draining her power more swiftly than she liked.  Inside the domain of the crystal entity, lunar energy came sluggishly, if at all.

The last spire between her and the core shattered.

“Enough!” shouted the crystalline being, its voice grating like the grinding of ten thousand shards of ice.  This time, the bolt of energy was directed at a spot above Donna’s head.  Too late, she realized that there was a small sack suspended there.  It burst, scattering dust over her body.  Dust that blocked her power.

“Silver?” Donna asked in surprise.

“Stop this nonsense or your friends die, you cannot save them now.”  To illustrate the point, dark energy brushed past Donna, and half of Jenna’s torso flashed into ash, raggedly bisecting her from her right breast to her left hip, leaving her left arm as her only limb.  The pain was too much, and Jenna's eyes rolled back in her head.

Donna swore, and triggered the ejection pod of her cyborg body.  Her core flew out the back of her head and away from the silver constraining her power.  As she flew she swiftly reformed into a ghostly image of herself, composed mostly of lunar power.  She stood in front of her friends, arms wide to protect them.  “This ends, now.”  A flick of power set her cyborg body into motion once more, and it swung blindly at the enormous crystal in front of it.  A shaft of crystal impaled it, driving it against the wall.  More crystals grew around it, pinning its arms.

“You are not as strong as you think,” grated the crystal.  “Submit!”

“Never!” shouted Donna, striking out with a lance of lunar power.  The pillar touched by it evaporated, and the entity screamed.  Donna grinned ferally. “Don’t like that, do you?  Have some more!”

The entity managed to parry the bolts of power Donna flung at its core, but some of them struck outlying pillars of crystal, carving chunks out of them or shattering them outright.

A return shot slipped past Donna, and what little was left of Jenna crumbled to dust.  Donna felt Jenny's life energy explode from her remains, leaving a scorch mark on the concrete floor.  Most of the energy flared off, but some was drawn to the entity. The larger part vanished into the ether, leaving an impression of brightness and... relief?

Donna had no time to think about that.  The entity flared as it absorbed Jenna’s life energy, and three great gouts of dark energy lashed out.  One arrowed directly for Donna, but the other two arced wide, aimed at each of the woman behind her.  With a split second to decide, Donna could only protect one.  Her body flicked around Gwen’s, forming a protective shell about her without touching the silver at her wrists.  Lunar power blocked the two bolts, but not without cost.  Each impact tore away at her dwindling reserve of power.

The ash that was left of Liana’s body collapsed to the floor with two wet thuds.  More power flared, though this time something was different, a part of it refused to leave.  When the entity tried to consume that, too, Donna grabbed for it.  It flowed into her with a pulse of thanks mingled with love.

“Two gone,” taunted the entity in its grating voice.  “You may be able to hurt me, but I can hurt you more.”

Donna wailed, and sent the bulk of her remaining reserve at the crystal’s heart, a spear of brilliant white power that collided with a hastily erected shield of darkness.  When the flare of their mutual annihilation cleared, the crystal entity was still there, but diminished and only weakly glowing.

“Stop this,” it demanded in an unsteady voice.  “Your power is nearly gone.  It is the middle of the night, when magic is at its weakest.  You are helpless before me.  Submit, or be destroyed.”

Donna stared at it in confusion.  “You think magic is weakest at night?”

“Magic comes from the Sun, even the simplest apprentice knows that.   It’s nearly midnight, the bulk of the planet is between you and the font of your power.”

Donna started to laugh.  “Ah Gwen.  Sweet, brave Gwen.  You thought she had broken and betrayed me, but instead she has betrayed you.  The Moon is full tonight.”

Gwen cried, “Destroy it, now!  It killed Jenna and Liana, and Wendy before that.”

A shaft of pure white light burst through the dark miasma, filling Donna to overflowing with power.  Her eyes narrowed, and she formed an immense lance of lunar power, as broad as she was tall.  Just before it left her hands, she simply said, “Die.”

The entity shuddered under the assault.  Donna felt it reach out toward other lives in the area, but each time it did so she hacked away the tendril of power with a blade of lunar energy.

Finally the entity shrieked in despair.  All the remaining spires disintegrated as it drew upon the last of its reserves for one final thrust.  A terrifying gout of blackness lanced out at Donna and Gwen, slowly but steadily driving Donna’s beam back.   In the middle of that room, both beams annihilated each other, sending bursts of energy in all directions.  The bunks were burst to kindling, the shelves of goods shattered and scattered.  The sturdy concrete walls had terrible gouges worn out of them, and the ceiling was faring worse.  

Donna tried to open herself further to the Moon’s power and found a sticking point.  Power was flowing through her as fast as her nature allowed.  It just wasn’t enough.  She could feel that there was more power there, vastly more.  But she had to give herself completely to it, and a quiet voice in the back of her head told her that it would be impossible to step back over that line.  Every increase in her malleability when she channeled the Moon had been moving her toward this point, but she was afraid of what it would mean to be so committed.  So she hesitated.

The dark torrent stuttered, weakened.  It was no longer driving toward her.  Donna sighed with relief, and took a step away from her personal abyss.  Her brilliant lance of moonlight started driving the darkness back, step by step.

The torrent of dark energy stuttered again.  Then it flared anew, in a pattern Donna had seen three times before.  It had killed again.  Tendrils of power were leading away from it, nearly obscured by the terrifying approach of that great, dark beam.  Donna tried to cut them, but the darkness was advancing again, faster than before, and any distraction made it leap forward in a tug-of-war that she dared not lose.

So she let go of her fear, and abandoned herself to the Moon’s embrace.

Donna could feel herself stretching thin, becoming one with the Moon’s glorious power.  The surge of power altered her, and she embraced its transmutation fully.  Donna’s ghostly form around Gwen blinked out of existence, then returned as symmetric crystalline prism.  Lunar energy coruscated around it, flaring into a rainbow of arcing colours that converged on the dark crystal, destroying all of the tendrils at once.

A globe of shimmering energy formed around the entity, cutting it off from any further attempts to draw more power.  The dark beam snuffed out at once, and Donna’s primary beam slammed home.  The dark crystal evaporated under the assault, leaving only a glowing brightness.

“Enough,” said Gwen at last. “Donna, stop.  It’s over.”

The brilliance faded, all save a soft beam of moonlight still playing over Gwen’s body.  Other than that, the room was dark.  The lights had long since been pulverized by the energies released in the battle.  Gwen looked around, puzzled.  “Donna?”

A translucent, shimmering form stepped out of the moonbeam.  “Let’s get you free of those damn manacles,” fluted Donna’s voice.  Her ghostly hands pulled a pair of heavy shears out of nothingness, and attempted to cut the silver bands.  The shears passed right through without doing anything.

Donna hissed frustration, and a shard of broken concrete slowly reshaped into a cutting tool.  That worked, slicing the manacles off as if they were butter.  Yet still she couldn’t heal Gwen’s wounds.  “More silver?  Did you get some of the powder on you?”

Gwen shook her head.  “They made me swallow a little lump of it.”

The ceiling groaned, and a sifting of sand fell not far from them.  Donna swore, her voice returning to its usual timbre.  “We’ve got to get that out of you before the whole place comes down.  Open wide.”

Gwen did so, and a swirl of motes of light rushed down her throat.  While they were locating the silver, Donna plucked one of Gwen’s hairs and formed it into a tiny blob that looked like chewing gum.  Gwen dutifully swallowed it as well, and soon Donna’s motes had it bundled around the silver nodule.  Gwen’s look of surprise as she felt it travelling up her throat would have made Donna grin if she wasn’t kneeling in the ashes of her friends.

Gwen threw the lump away, and sighed with relief as Donna’s power washed through her, cleaning away the myriad injuries the entity had inflicted.  She started to shrink.  “Time to leave this house of horrors?”

Donna tilted her head.  “Not quite...”  She flitted over to where she’d heard a faint moan.  Lying where the crystal entity had been was a naked woman with raven-black hair.  She stirred, then sat up as Donna crouched before her.  “Who are you?” Donna asked.

The woman’s eyes were wild.  “What have you done to me?”  She stared down at herself in wonder and horror.  “I’m... human again?”

“You’re that... thing?  You were human?”

“I was... am... Brunhilde.  I remember...  Oh, God, I remember...”  She started to weep.  “I just wanted to live.  Magic failed us all, but death...  Death always works.”

“How many did you kill to stay alive?” Donna asked, her body actually glowing with her rage.

“None at first,” Brunhilde said, turning away from that terrible regard.  “I took what I could from those who were dying anyway.  But it just got... easier.  And I needed more.  Always more.  I didn’t mean to become a monster, it just... happened.”

The ceiling creaked dangerously, prompting a squeak of fear from Gwen.  She pattered up beside Donna on tiny feet, barely six inches tall.  “We need to go, soon.”

“Leave me.  Let me die,” said Brunhilde.  “So much blood on my hands, and for what?”

“There has been enough death tonight.  You’re coming with us.”

“What?” demanded Gwen, stamping a tiny foot.  “She killed our friends!”

“I...”  Brunhilde bowed her head, dark hair sweeping around her face like a curtain.  “There’s a little left.  The last one, the one you kept... she has a tie, here.  She won’t last as part of a mage, you’ll use her up without even knowing you’ve done it.”  She touched something that Donna couldn’t really tell wasn’t part of her, and a little strand of her energy separated.

Donna cupped it carefully in her hands, examining it.  “Liana?  What’s left of her, anyway.”  She felt it tug away from her and followed along, ending up at the pile of ashes that were all that was left of Liana’s body.  Gleaming softly from within it were two orbs, one distinctly pink.  “Zoey?”

“Donna?” called the breast implant.  “What happened?”

“Liana’s... mostly dead.  I don’t have time to explain.”  Donna nudged the fragment of spirit at the orb, and felt it merge with what was there.  It would be safe there, she hoped.  A crash from one side of the room heralded the collapse of part of the roof, destroying what little was left of a shelving unit.

Gwen yelled, then, calling Donna back to Brunhilde.  She carried the glistening orb of Zoey’s body with her.  “What now?”

“I tried to stop her, but I was too small...”

Donna stared at the growing puddle of blood around Brunhilde, and the silver dagger sticking from her chest.  “No,” she growled.  “She cost me too much to get away now.”

Donna pried the dagger away with a shard of stone.  The pooling blood poured back into the body, then Brunhilde coughed and sat up.  “Why won’t you let me die?  How can I live with what I’ve done?”  Brunhilde tried to strike at Donna, but her hands went right through Donna’s ephemeral body.

More of the ceiling crashed down, this time in front of the vault door, leaving a heap of rubble halfway to the remains of the roof.  A series of cascading crashes emerged from beyond the door as the deadfall traps were triggered by the vibration.  Their exit path was gone.

“Enough.  I don’t have time for this.”  Donna glared at Brunhilde, and the dark-haired woman started to shrink.  Her colour bleached away, her body going transparent until she ultimately compressed into a fist-sized clear crystalline heart.  Donna had just gathered the heart, insert and tiny Gwen together in her hands to spin a tough cocoon around them when the roof finally gave way.  Uncounted tons of concrete, rock, dirt and wreckage from the hospice filled the bunker.

Donna collapsed around her cargo, turning herself into part of its spherical shield.  Once she was sure they were safe, she burrowed swiftly upward.  Emerging into the night air, she was stunned to see that every building around the hospice was on fire.  She rose higher, and could see flames flickering from dozens more buildings further out.

Her grip on the crystal tightened so hard that it nearly shattered. “What did you do?” she wailed.