She screamed. It was involuntary and unrestricted, like the scream of a woman condemned to burn at the stake. Metallia's power was like molten lava, pouring into her starseed and swelling up within her body like a volcano. Every inch of her being felt like it was on fire and yet, it kept coming, that energy kept pushing. Even when Alkaid felt like she should have melted into that power and been destroyed to the core, she was still aware of her own screams ringing in her ears.
Her head whipped back unbidden and her eyes, lost behind a mask of pain, stared unseeing into the sky above. The crack of her chest, through which Tanzanite's burning arm was plunged, began to shift. The small lines that marred her porcelain skin began to spread outward like cobwebs, crawling along her skin and peeling it back to make room for the energy her body barely contained.
As the fissures grew and threatened to take over her entire form, the ground around them began to shift and groan beneath their feet. Loud snaps and cracks echoed through the air like thunder on top of the violent, sudden earthquake. The buildings in the distance heaved and tossed, losing more and more of their structure by the minute. Then it began - long, core deep cracks that encompassed the planet around them, snaking out and scarring the earth as surely as the cracks in her skin.
The shattered skin of the senshi began to glow, hot and burning above Metallia's power and a fault line shot out between the the feet of the General-Queen and the senshi in her grasp. Still the two remained twined together with the horrific power. One last, long scar snaked its way up the center of Alkaid's face and her bright orange eyes, open and unseeing, began to leak tears that evaporated the moment they touched her skin. As her screams reached a pitch that would have made most mortals shy away and grimace at the sound, Tanzanite held steady with her purpose.
At long last, the power burst from Alkaid's body.
The senshi was swallowed in a light so fierce that she was no longer aware of where she was, or how close the General-Queen was to her. It surged into the air in one thin, long line that shot straight up into the low-hanging sun: the source of Alkaid's true power, her star. She remained swallowed in that light, lost in the surge of Metallia's power as her world was thrown into turmoil and the chaos seed claimed Alkaid, all of Alkaid, for herself.
The star overhead grew in light, stronger and brighter and hotter than before, until that light suddenly burned itself out like the last flash of a bulb and all that was left was a glowing red ember of what had been before. The planet was washed in sudden darkness, except for the slowly fading power that surged beneath Alkaid's flesh. As the river of energy withdrew from her starseed, so too did her pain.
She was left in Tanzanite's supportive grasp, her fingernails slowly unwinding from where they had tried to dig gashes into the General-Queen's skin. Her chest was heaving with breaths she felt would never come and everything about her felt different and uncomfortable. It was that discomfort that told her she was alive, that she had survived whatever Metallia had done.
Even if she had survived though, her definition of life was about to change.
