Moontouched 21

“What did you do?” repeated Donna, shaking Brunhilde in her grasp.  The crystalline heart creaked slightly under the pressure, but whatever it was trying to say was unintelligible.

“Donna,” said Gwen softly.  “I’m feeling awfully exposed up here.  Can you go opaque or look like a cloud or something?”

With a thought, Gwen’s tiny body started to pale, and then become transparent.  Gwen giggled a bit nervously as she stared through her fading hand, then wiggled her fingers to be sure they were still there.  “I’m invisible?”

“It solves the problem.  Are you OK, Zoe?”

“I... think so,” mumbled the transparent pink orb.

A loud whoosh from a nearby building heralded one of the fires finding some more flammable fuel, followed by a scream of panic cutting through the night air.  Donna darted toward it without thinking.

The fire in the apartment had found the kitchen, and was merrily consuming cooking oil and other supplies.  Between the fire there and the original fire in the hallway, the woman screaming in the bedroom had no escape other than a four-story jump to the pavement below.

Donna’s first instinct was to try to snuff the fire directly, but she couldn’t get enough traction on the flames.  One part might start transforming, but before the change could even start to make a difference, there were new flames rising up from below, displacing the ones Donna had focussed on.  The firefighting triangle came to mind: heat, fuel, oxygen.  Removing the heat didn’t seem viable, and removing the oxygen in the air could kill the woman.  Donna briefly considered transforming her into a statue to shut her up and keep her safe, but she was wearing silver and Donna’s power couldn’t touch her.

That left the fuel.  Transforming the contents of the kitchen to stone took a generous amount of power, but the Moon provided more than enough to see the job done.  It just took agonizing seconds before anything seemed to change.  Donna could feel the transformation progressing, but it took almost half a minute before the fire started to subside.  Once the kitchen and hallway were entirely made of stone, the fire died.

There was no time to relax, as another scream came from an apartment further along the floor.  Donna flitted past two other blazes to hover outside the window where the screams were coming from.  This time, the flames had nearly found their quarry.  The bed was on fire, and the rest of the bedroom was doing its best to join the party.  The screaming woman had barricaded herself in the closet, but the flimsy wooden doors were burning.

Donna couldn’t change this woman either, so turning her into protective stone was once again out.  She flicked a small part of herself out to form a fireproof barrier between the woman and the doors, and started transforming the rest of the bedroom to stone.  “This is taking far too long,” she muttered.

One of Donna’s passengers cleared her throat.  “You’re doing it wrong.”

“What?” Donna growled, sounding fiercer than she intended.

Zoey whimpered at Donna’s voice, but Gwen wasn’t cowed.  “Attack it indirectly.  Can you make firefighting foam the same way you made that barrier?”

A fleck of Donna’s shell spun out into the room, expanding explosively into a cascade of foam.  The first try crackled and burned, and Gwen explained the properties of the foam Donna needed to make.  The second shot quenched the fire and covered the room in goop.  In moments, the flames were gone.

“Better leave it there for a bit, so the fire doesn’t restart,” noted Gwen.  “Good work!”

Donna darted to the previous two windows, and flecks of herself again became bursts of foam.  The fires died, and she moved on.  There were at least a half dozen more windows showing flames or smoke just on this side of this apartment building, and no time to waste.  But by the time she’d attacked the fifth one, one of her previous efforts had flared up again.  Gwen pointed it out, and when Donna returned to the site of the flare-up, she could feel that she’d let her attention to that batch of foam waver, and it had dissipated.  So she spread her attention as wide as she could, keeping all five sets of foam in place for long seconds.  When Gwen declared it long enough, Donna moved on.  The other side of the apartment building had eight sites for her to extinguish, and she managed to do all of them at once.

Donna sighed with relief when she could release her attention from the one building.  Then she looked about.  Every other building she could see was on fire.  “Damn it!  How many?”  The crystal heart shuddered under her assault. “I know you can talk like this.  HOW MANY!”

The heart whimpered.  “I don’t know.”  Quietly, almost a whisper, “All of them.  All I could reach.  Hundreds.  So much power... it was glorious.”

Donna’s scream was incoherent, and in her rage the crystal heart splintered, its scream of pain joining her own.

“Donna!  Enough!” yelled Gwen at the top of her tiny lungs.

Donna stopped, but Gwen could still feel the seething rage boiling around her.

“There are people to save,” importuned Gwen.  “Deal with them first, then her... it.”

As they moved toward the next building, Donna bound the shattered and still-screaming crystal in  layers of sound dampening material, so none of her other companions could hear.

The next building had ten flaming apartments on the side closest to them.  Donna spread herself thin, dousing each with foam in turn, fractions of seconds apart, then waited for long painful seconds while the fires died and went cold.  Then the next side, a dozen more.  Then the next building, and the one after that.

Donna spread itself thinner and thinner, letting Gwen guide it to the sites that needed foam, ignoring everything except the need to keep the foam in as many places at once as it could.  Each building was worse than the one before it, as each extra minute the fires ran unchecked took its toll.

“Oh God,” muttered Gwen.  “Donna, what can we do?”

Donna’s mind roused.  So many buildings, it could barely separate the memory of one from another.  The one in front of it was worse than any before.  There were no individual fires, they had met up and the entire structure was ablaze from end to end.

The fire trucks had arrived, but a stoic fire chief was directing his men to the surrounding buildings, hosing them down to protect them from a fire that was far beyond his team’s abilities to control.

“Are there more?” whispered Donna raggedly.  “I...”

“This is the last.  I’m sorry, I should have sent us here sooner.  We’re too late.”

“No.”

Donna grew larger then, still invisible.  Tall as the building, four stories.  Wider, deeper, as big as an apartment block built on the cheap to house two dozen.  As it moved through the building, settling itself around the whole thing, it could feel the handful of survivors, trapped in the heart of the dying building.  Like the other survivors she’d encountered, they all were wearing silver.  Magic could not touch them.  Instead, a crystal orb formed around each one, sheltering them.

Once they were safe, the rest of the building instantly filled with foam.  The fires died as one, but the damage had been done.  The added weight of the foam was too much, and the building tore itself to pieces as it fell.  Donna felt every broken timber, every fallen brick, and guided the path of the destruction as best it could to shelter the survivors.

Slowly, it moved aside the worst of the wreckage, then released the five survivors from their protective bubbles.  They to huddled together in incomprehension, staring at the devastation around them.  Donna reduced herself to a more manageable size, appearing as a small cloud in front of the survivors.  She whispered, “go”, then guided them along a safe path, disappearing again once they were safe.  They stumbled to a stop in front of a shell-shocked fireman.  He stared at them, confused that anyone could have survived the destruction.  Then he smiled smiled.  Oh, how he smiled.

Donna’s heart warmed ever so slightly at that, then it carried itself and its three transformed companions up and away.

“It is done,” Donna whispered.  “Now what?”

“We deal with that thing,” Gwen said in a tired voice.  “Somewhere safe, somewhere with silver.  Rowan has some chains that other girls left behind.”

Donna said nothing, but it turned unerringly toward the Blue Vixen and arrowed through the darkened skies to the sanctuary within.

Barely a minute later they were inside the green room, and Gwen was growing herself back to full size and full visibility.

“Rowan!” she called.  “We need the silver chains.  And... a box, a sturdy one.”

Rowan stared at the floating orb beside Gwen, then nodded.  “Of course.”

Gwen set the box Rowan provided on a cleared-off section of the makeup counter, and gestured to Donna.  “Put that thing in here, and we’ll bind it once Rowan returns with the chains.”

The crystal heart floated toward the box, and settled down inside it.  The muting bindings around it vanished, and the box’s bottom layer thickened and reshaped into a receptacle for the crystalline mass.  The crystals were weeping, still broken from Donna’s assault.

“Aren’t you going to fix it?” asked Gwen softly.

The crystals shards shifted and shuffled against each other, then fused.  The result was far from the heart’s original form, it was shattered and crazed, with gaping flaws within.  The weeping softened, but didn’t stop.

Donna set Zoey’s glistening pink orb beside the box, as if to say “this is why”.  Gwen nodded her understanding, then nudged her friend to become human once more.

Donna blinked back into human form, blinking owlishly at Gwen.  “What?”

“Get a hold of yourself.  You need to be human for this.”

Donna looked briefly confused, then she nodded at her friend.  “Right.”  Softly, she whispered to herself, “if I remember how.”

Rowan approached then with three thin silver chains in her hand, ones that appeared to have been intended as necklaces.  “The girls that left these behind didn’t want them any more.  They liked their new bodies well enough without using silver to keep them.  Call them a bonus.”  She smiled, and offered them out to Donna.

Unthinkingly, Donna put her hand out to accept them, but when Rowan let go of the chains they fell straight through Donna’s hand as if it wasn’t there.  Donna stared at her hand as it flickered in and out of existence.  Her attention wavered, and other parts of her body went in and out of focus as well, sometimes reappearing with scales instead of flesh.  More often, what reappeared was a crystalline version of Donna’s limbs, and that is how she finally stabilized.  A moving, crystalline version of herself, naked and flawless as a marble statue.

Gwen picked up the silver chains without apparent hesitation, then carried them toward the box.  As the crystal saw them approach it wailed, “No, I beg of you, not like this.  Not like this!”

Gwen hesitated and looked toward Donna, who growled, “Do it” in a voice that sounded like the grinding of broken glass.

“Please, don’t condemn me to this agony, not after a taste of my lost humanity.  Death would be kinder,” begged the crystal.

Gwen looked to Donna again, eyes pleading.  Donna advanced on the broken crystal heart, lying in its box.  “After what you’ve done?  I will do far, far worse than kill you.  I will leave you wallowing in your own agony, your own guilt, your own shame forever.”  Donna turned away, her glowing gaze fixed on Gwen.  “Do it,” she commanded.

Gwen laid the silver chains on the screaming crystal, silencing it.  She closed the case and bowed her head.  “This seems... extreme.”

Donna recoiled from the accusation in Gwen’s voice.   Her form flickered, worse than before.  When it stabilized, all that was left was a ghostly pillar of crystal.  “What have I become?” it whispered.  “What am I?”

Gwen stared at the pillar, searching for something she’d lost.  Then she stepped up to it and hugged its hard angles.  “You are my friend, and despite all this, still loved.  Trust that, if nothing else.”

Donna made a sound like a soft sigh of relief.  Then her crystalline body faded away into nothingness.