Voidhearts Chapter 10: Fight
Alicia has a heated argument and experiences the void in a new and scarier way as disaster strikes.
There were times when Alicia thought she was a skilled de-escalator. Her efforts to live a life free of strife and as low on injustice as possible had taught her many a trick on how to speak your mind without appearing to. Especially online, she had a knack for the soft power of framing and wording an argument in such a way that you’d be forgiven, indeed expected, to believe you came up with it and thusly support it fully. It wasn’t her nature, not by a long shot, but through painful and frustrating experience, Alicia had learned to channel her opinions and her passions in such a way to leave herself less vulnerable to the world at large. It helped, she figured, to imagine herself as Superman, or Wonder Woman if she was feeling particularly #feminism that day, and having to behave as if the world was made out of cardboard or brittle glass, vulnerable to the full burnt of her strength. It was cowardly, in a way, but most days, Alicia preferred the real-world benefits of this more practical-minded approach to the triumph of showing her full strength at all times.
Today was not a day like most days.
“Well Lia, I’m right here,” she said, spreading her arms as to further emphasize the fact. It had the slightly comical effect of making her feel like she was cutting a wrestling promo on the barren rock fragment that housed the Port Crystal. “What does the Council want with me today?”
Lia didn’t quite sniff in disdain at that, but there was a subtle shift in her, a noticeable change in approach that caused her to straighten up a little bit higher, the cold flame in her eyes steeling to this new challenge.
“As I said, I have some concerns about your participation in Scavenger duties, Mountain Wind.”
“Concerns huh, and what are those? That I’m getting my weird non-thereafterian stink all over it?” One word followed the other now, Alicia had no idea she even meant all the things she said, or if it was the angriest parts of her that kept angry, unchariable ideas coming.
“Your status as an earthling has nothing to do with...” Lia hesitated there, she wasn’t quite sure where this angle was coming from, and while Alicia couldn’t blame her, she did feel a surge of triumph that felt good. Entirely too good if she was honest with herself. It wasn’t a fair point to make, and yet…
“Then what does it have something to do with? Huh? Lia?”
“We… I just feel that your talents are best used elsewhere.”
“Bullshit,” Alicia snorted. She couldn’t help herself. This “chat” had been a long time coming, and while she could easily concede this wasn’t the best place to have it, it wasn’t her who had come all the way out here just to start something. She could be the bigger person, it wouldn’t even be all that hard, but by God she did not want to. “I’ve been running laps around the castle for weeks now, and you damn well know that.”
“Oh, and here I thought you were too busy cavorting with crime lords to do anything useful.” What sympathy existed on Lia’s face withdrew, hardening her features. While Lia was torn on this talk, she had no love lost for Michael.
“Michael is NOT a crime lord,” The response burst out before Alicia had the time to think it through. Technically there was no crime in Thereafter since there were no laws, but on the other hand Michael’s “network” was plenty shady enough that Alicia would be lying if she said she didn’t find it mildly uncomfortable. The fact that part of the accusation rang true did not change Alicia’s reaction one bit. If anything, the fact that Lia kind of had a point only made Alicia angrier. Out of the corner of her eye, Alicia could see the rest of the scavengers, sans Ade, withdraw.
“So might it be, Mountain Wind,” Lia conceded, it was one of those “yes but” turns of phrase that Alicia couldn’t stand. The point might stand but it had no importance. “But you can not deny that Michael’s position is hostile towards the Council…”
“Of fucking COURSE it is hostile towards the council, you made him a murderer.”
“The Eltern incident is regrettable but Exalted Michael’s choices was, and continues to be, his own”
“I can’t fucking believe you. How can you stand there and claim any kind of authority with all this bullshit.”
“I claim authority based on my experience and my power, and you’d do well to remember that.”
“Uh, you guys I think this may not be…” Ade started, but interrupted herself with an awkward grunt. Alicia didn’t know what that was about and she didn’t particularly care if she was going to be honest. She was too fucking mad. The fire of rage burnt in her chest, spreading like rings in water, from her lungs and outward. She knew what this meant, she was channeling the Deep Song, and she didn’t care that it was both strong and off in some small way she couldn’t quite explain. She was too mad to care about that, just like she was too mad to notice the faint tremor in the ground, and entirely too mad to notice that the rest of the party had grown deathly still.
“I’m not scared of you,” Alicia all but snarled.
“If you were a little bit wiser you probably would be,”
“Then I’ll gladly be a fool. Come on then, let’s settle this, like they did in the beforetimes. Fight me! Right here right now!”
“You can’t be serious. Are you a child?”
“Do not call me a….” Alicia did not get to finish her outburst, as disaster struck first.
Like so many things too fast and too destructive to properly understand, it started with something little. Unlike most other things too fast and destructive to grasp, the little thing escalated fast, too fast. The ground rocked, first once, then twice, and suddenly, with the sound of cracking rock, came apart, shattering along a hitherto unseen fault line. The chunk Alicia was standing on started spinning wildly away from its former mates, and through the absolute vertigo of blackness, Alicia could see something dark, large and fast, followed by a trail of detritus complete its impact, really its journey through the port crystal asteroid.
Alicia had never been in a real life disaster in her life. She’d lived a life blessedly free of natural disasters, and she moved to New York long, long after The Big One. Not having any evidence to the contrary, she’d liked to think she’d do decently in a crisis, balancing bravery to do what is necessary with the wisdom to not get in over her head.
Standing now on a shard of a formerly decent-sized chunk of void rock as it spun wildly into the detritus cloud, Alicia knew deep down that this had been a convenient lie that she’d told herself. She was terrified. It was an odd feeling, being scared while pulling on the Deep Song. It was like feeding every thought she’d ever had into an ever-growing fire in her mind, preparing to do or die even as the part of her brain that did the planning screamed at her to not make an already chaotic and dangerous situation worse.
Alica drew a deep breath, both to further saturate her body with the Deep Song, and to steel herself for what she was about to do.
Time flew oddly in the voidspace disaster, and as Alicia prepared herself to launch herself off, she felt her brain twig with it oddly. Some rotations seemed to fly by, while others flowed in the sticky flow of treacle. Surely, the fragment did not change the speed with which it corkscrewed through the void?
With stored power burning in her every limb, Alicia launched herself off the fragment, aiming for the faint light she was pretty sure was the port crystal. Even with her limited experience in moving without gravity, this leap felt like something else. For a brief second, Alicia didn’t even believe she had moved at all. Then she looked down, or what to her had been down, to see her former fragment rocket off away from her, propelled backward by her leap every bit as much as she had gotten pushed away.
The first rock almost got her. While the light from the fragment that contained the port crystal provided some illumination, it wasn’t nearly enough to see the person-sized chunk of detritus before it damn near was upon Alicia. She shattered the interloper with an open-palm strike, the follow-up good and ready for the next one. It was different, “fighting” in zero gravity, and the considerable velocity added further kinks, but Alicia felt she was getting the hang of it.
The problem, as so often is the case, came at her from behind, and at an awkward angle. Alicia wouldn’t even have seen it were it for the recoil of a shattering backhand rotating her enough to catch the massive spherical shape in the corner of her eye.
In a word, it was massive. In two, it was massive and fast
There was, Alicia realized in an endlessly extending millisecond of perfect perception, something odd about this fragment. No, Alicia recognized, this was no fragment. For one it was almost round, and although she couldn’t see much of it, it appeared entirely too uniform in distribution to have formed through impacts and random chance, at least without some kind of intervention.
The millisecond, as intervals of this size is known to frequently do, passed faster than Alicia could interpret it all. Back in regular time, it wasn’t as much that Alicia acted, the thing moved too fast for thought or agency being involved at all. No, Alicia reacted, pouring every spare speck of Deep Song that she could into the action, a desperate strike from the depths of her hindbrain. Alica’s balled fist connected with the massive shape.
Steppefolk warriors used weapons despite being quite capable of pulverizing a man’s skull with their bare hands. There were, Alicia learned in her childhood adventures to the bleak but beautiful plains of the steppe, two main reasons for that. For one, it extended a warrior’s reach considerably, allowing them to easier strike foes at a distance, such as the exceedingly rare mounted warriors or the underbelly scales of the Dragon Thane. Another good reason was that the weapon functioned as a fracture point that was much easier to replace or mend than the bones that a Steppefolk warrior might shatter while punching a foe with somewhat more armor or resilience than expected.
The impact sent white-hot shards of pain up Alicia’s arm, a straight run of agony that ended in some sort of tangle in her elbow. It wasn’t that the pain ended there oh no, far from it, it just seemed like the “momentum” of Alicia’s surely shattered arm got hung up in some small but irreplaceable part of the elbow join, while the pain continued on through her shoulder, into her skull, into her brain, into her soul. Alicia spun wildly from the momentum of the worst punch she’d ever thrown in the darkness of the void. She was decently sure she threw up at some point. Time came in stops and starts, along with the waves of agony throbbing through her in a rhythm she couldn’t help but think of as cardiac. Through the tears in her eyes, Alica could swear she saw the large, unusually round shape fly away in a distinctly unnatural-seeming pattern, not one bit helped by the rotation her punch had imparted on it.
Alicia wasn’t sure if it was the pain from her surely shattered hand, delirium from flying through the void for a period of time that was either measured in minutes or hours, or the low light inherent to the area, but either way there was a terrible, revelatory moment when she could swear that she saw what the round thing was. There was no way, chided her rational self, speaking through a thick fog of confusion and pain, after all why would such a thing even be out here, let alone flying through the void in such a strange fashion? It didn’t matter to Alicia. For but a second the object had faced her at exactly the right angle, and some cold light or other had bounced off a particularly reflective piece of detritus at exactly the optimal angle to provide some small measure of illumination.
Alicia’s eyes widened, and even through the pain she could notice her body stiffening, for all the good that would do bereft of fulcrum point and lost to the laws of physics as it was. It couldn’t be helped, the remnants of animal fear that humans still carried did not listen to logic, which was good because logic had nothing to do here, and nothing to do at this time. Or so Alicia thought as she stared down a single, rocky, unflinching eye the size of a 747.
What little of Alicia’s actively thinking brain knew all too well that the best thing that she could do for herself in her situation, fucked though it may be, was to stay awake, stay conscious. If she allowed herself to slip under, she might never emerge again, even if she didn’t think her wounds were bad enough to kill her, constant pulsing pain at the edge of her perception at all time notwithstanding. The problem was she’d have no control, no ability to navigate, no chance to save herself. Then again, whispered the part of her that always wanted her to give up, it’s not like she had that great of a chance of that right now anyway. Alicia wasn’t proud of that little thanatosian whisper that had followed her in her darkest moments for as long as she could remember, but as the edges of her vision grew blurry and eventually dark, ironically a lighter dark than the void around her, there also was no denying it had a point.
Author’s Note: This chapter didn’t end up quite like I had planned it, but I think the changes for the most part are for the better. In general I’m having a bit of a tough time writing these days, as my (now operated upon) back problem still prevents me from sitting upright much, and there’s more than a couple keys on my laptop’s keyboard that are less than cooperative. Still, it beats using my cellphone, and writing still keeps my brain churning more or less like it always does, so I won’t complain too much.
Catch you next time, as we learn exactly how cooked our protagonist is, and perhaps even what there is to be done about it.
VSD