Welcome to Gaia! ::

It had only taken seconds. Something so significant, the very thing she had been spending her whole second life dreaming about, and it happened in no time at all.

Out of instinct, Alkaid had closed her eyes the moment Kurma's hand had tightened and pulled her with him through reality. They were still closed as the heat of a foreign world closed in around her and sunshine beat down, intense and fiery, on her pale skin. For a moment she could only draw short, shallow breaths in response. Then, slowly, she began to calm and her eyes creaked open to a world brighter than any summer day on Earth.

Alkaid.

Her hand tensed and tightened around Kurma's as she lifted her chin and glanced around her at the world she had never seen in this lifetime. At first there was just sand, endless sand stretching out as far as her eyes could see. The wind drifted lazily around them, grating against her skin as small beads brushed it. She was disappointed momentarily as she looked at the world around them, until she turned and saw the sight behind her.

It was a city, all built from a pale white stone and touching the sky with broken towers. Grass stretched around it in patchy green and gold, with trees and shrubs that looked long since dead and mummified by the sun. At their feet was the beginning of a path, made of that same white stone, partially obscured by the shifting dunes.

In her heart she had always known it would never be a perfect world, not after what she had seen on Nemesis, but it was here. She was here.

"Kurma," she said hesitantly, dropping her hand from his and taking a step forward onto the smooth stones. Her heels clicked against them but the sound died on the wind immediately. She gave him one brief glance before she smiled and turned back towards the path, beginning her long walk into the capital.

Alkaid was dimly aware of the cosmic guide as she walked down the half hidden path that lead straight for the city's heart, but she barely had the attention to spare for him.

The outlying towers loomed above them as they passed beneath a half crumbled archway. She stepped around the fallen stone carefully, touching the larger pieces with one gloved hand to keep her balance, until she was past it and in the outskirts of the city. Around her the buildings rose like lonely monuments, casting stark shadows between bright sunlight. They threw patterns across her skin as she walked the winding path of the stone road.

Everything was less obscured here than in the land outside, though years of neglect had let sand accumulate here as well. There were piles against the sides of buildings, patches covering what was left of the dying vegetation. Some of the more broken buildings had let it blow into the interior, making any exploration inside and into the lives of the people here almost impossible.

She stopped as she came to an intersection in the road, glancing down all three paths that she could take. They looked the same. The same winding stone path, the same broken buildings, the same everything. There was no sign of life here to break up the monotony and she could feel her hope dying, slowly.

Until she saw something glinting in the light of her star.

She turned down one of the side paths and stooped to pick something up from the sands, some kind of jewelry that glinted gold among a few oddly colored stones. She used her thumb to brush away the sand from the tiny trinket (it was ring, or a pendant, she couldn't say) and was just about to stand again when she noticed.. something. She stooped back down and reached out to gingerly brush the sand from one of the stones.

Only it wasn't a stone, it was long and shaped oddly on one end, like a..

Like a bone.

Her hand snapped back away from what she could only assume was a femur, reacting more as if it had been a snake. Her eyes roamed over the 'stones' she had seen next to it, all half obscured but every one of them that same off color. She scrambled and pushed herself to her feet, stepping back onto the path and looking frantically around her. The stones she had been mistaking for parts of the buildings, they were all that color. Whatever was left of her people was lying in the streets, dozens of them, hundreds.

Alkaid's hand clenched painfully around the trinket she had pulled from the pile of bones and she turned without a word down an alley that seemed to lead out of the city. She followed it in a panic, eager suddenly to get out of the city she had waited so long to see and not even concerned if her guide was following behind her.

When she finally got free of the building walls, she stumbled over a particularly thick patch of grass, and fell to her knees in front of an old, twisted tree. She stayed that way, on hands and knees, staring down at what looked like it might have once been some kind of flower. Flowers didn't matter to her though, not in the wake of her discovery.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tightened her hand around the trinket she was still carrying, letting her dreads frame her face and hide it from view.

Her body tensed as she heard his words. Not because she remembered them, but because she hadn't noticed he had found her again. His voice shocked her out of whatever darkness she had filled her mind with to try and block out the memory of what was left of that city.

When her eyes opened there were tears brimming in her lower lids, falling uselessly to the dry, dead grass and the small flower she had found on accident. Even that was long since dead, shriveled and nearly colorless against the patchy grass that cradled it.

Everything here was dead. Yes, she expected emptiness and broken architecture, but there had been no signs of life on Nemesis' planet. She had expected complete abandonment, not signs of.. death and struggle.

She swallowed hard against the lump in her throat and rolled over to sit, using one hand immediately to rub at her cheeks and try to scrub away any sign that this had affected her so deeply. She didn't remember anything - not this place, not her people, nothing. It still hurt, though, to know that something awful had happened to them. They were stills hers.

"I-I don't want to stay here," her words broke even as she tried to be steady and her eyes refused to meet his. "This is not at all what I hoped to see. I should have believed Nemesis." She sat there like that for a moment, then finally forced herself to look up at him, not even bothering to shield her eyes against the sun. He was little more than a silhouette against brightness but she focused on him anyway.

"What happened?"

Back on Earth, there was only a voice.

It is time.

She is ready.

Deep beneath the Rift, Tanzanite stood before the towering double doors of Metallia's chamber, in the very heart of the Negaverse itself. It was a place few had ever seen, and even fewer had ever entered, but it was the closest thing to home that the Youma Queen had ever felt. Buried deep within the Earth's crust, as close as she could be to the power that now sustained her life, she felt... safe. She could feel it there, all the power of the Sun burning beyond her reach. Never before had she looked so peaceful. Never so serene as she did with her hands pressed to the twisted construct, her cheek resting against it as she whispered quietly.

“As am I,” she spoke softly, her voice steady and sure.

The doors stretched up several stories, woven into one another like a twisted, melted zipper of gold and silver. She felt the surge of power as the interlocking bands began to slowly unweave, shafts of light shattering the darkness where they parted. Wherever they touched, it was as though the Sun itself had unleashed its power. The rock of the chamber sizzled and melted where the light came to rest, liquified crystal filling the floor below. It ran down in bright, sizzling rivulets of molten rock, pooled on the floor until only the steps before the door remained safe.

Safe was not the right word.

The power was beyond her comprehension, for who could begin to imagine the source of all life? Who could understand what it meant to have consumed the energy of so many hundreds of thousands of lives? Certainly not a mere servant, whose mouth opened soundlessly as that light flowed out and pierced through her body, blinding rays that cut through skin and bone as easily as a Kunzite's blade. Even so, Tanzanite could not resist. She could not run. She could not scream, and so she did not struggle. She could not even bring her hands up to shield her eyes from that light. Tanzanite could only stand as her skin sizzled against the metal, as the fibers unraveled and filled the chamber with that blinding brilliance.

The coils wrapped around her like white-hot fingers, burning metal that set fire to her clothes and hair, pulling her into that light. It burnt her to her very core, and for a brief moment Tanzanite thought that perhaps she was finally being released from her calling. Finally permitted to die, as she should have so long ago. Somehow, though her body must surely have been gone, she could feel her starseed melting into that power. Every molecule, every atom had been broken down and distilled into a single point of energy.

A point of energy that blinked into existence on the dead planet.

A pinprick of light that widened and expanded, rippling into a blinding silhouette that was but was not Tanzanite's body. Cooling into those pale features, her hair was a fiery mass of white. Her skin glowed softly, the veins beneath illuminated by the power that ran through her. The spaces between the scales of her arm were likewise illuminated, as though that power filled her body from head to toe, moving the hollow shell like a puppet.

“You happened, Alkaid. In a life you've long forgotten.”

Her voice was not her own as she turned those fiery eyes upon the senshi. No longer was that echoing tone the supernatural rasp of the Black Phoenix. It was deep, feminine, and it carried with it a power that would forever be beyond Tanzanite's grasp. She studied Alkaid without the slightest trace of pity, without so much as the smallest scrap of empathy.

“Like every senshi. Like every world. And this is what awaits Earth.”

That gaze turned on Kurma with a hatred that made the light flare like a wildfire.

“You,” the word burned with power, as memories of Elysion flooded her mind. Memories of the invasion of Earth's holiest place. A place now forever lost to them. Here, Tanzanite's body should have shattered, so far from the Rift, but Metallia's power sustained her. It anchored her to Earth even as her footsteps scorched the ground of that forgotten place, slowly approaching the cosmic guardian.

A servant of Cosmos' precious balance.

The intense light that followed Tanzanite's arrival was indeed brilliant and blinding, but that was not the striking part of it. While it was an impressive sight, it was only a dim flicker in the darkness compared to the enormous font of dark energy that she was producing along with it. The presence of Chaos was rolling off her in thick, heady waves, so powerful that it was just about perceivable by mundane senses. Above the sensation of the dried grass beneath their feet, there was a feeling that they were all ankle deep in a rising tide of bitter cold and anger.

Kurma narrowed his eyes. It was as close to a malicious expression as he had ever given. There was still a subtle serenity about him that he carried in his stance, however: the only thing that could really compare to it was the artful silence of a clear night sky, an aware but passive presence above the life that carried on below it.

"You seem to know a lot about something you've never seen yourself," he offered, arms hanging loosely at his sides as he spoke. "Chaos... has always had that effect on people."

Then he turned a little, peering back at the troubled senshi, finally meeting her eyes once again. "I knew you before. You were not someone who would willingly lay a whole planet to ruin, nor would you have been capable of doing so." He crossed his arms and left her gaze again, bringing his attention back towards Tanzanite, cool collectedness against her confident brand of fury.

"You were a good senshi, and a good person. You have no reason to believe otherwise, Alkaid."

Alkaid's eyes opened to slits as Kurma spoke to her. His body, turned to face hers as it was, blocked the light of Tanzanite's splendor and threw a shadow over her that she could not miss even behind closed eyelids. Her eyes opened, though she wished sincerely that they had not.

She knew what was coming before he did.

Her head snapped up before she could stop herself, though she made no movement to step forward or speak. Her mind was a whirl from Kurma's words about who she had once been, contrasted starkly by Tanzanite's degradation. Though she could not imagine killing her own people or abandoning them to some fate such as this, she could not believe that she hadn't, either. She had walked the hallways of the Rift, seen the result of Serenity's power, stared into the empty eyes of people that no longer were.

For a moment, as Kurma was held trapped in Tanzanite's powerful grip, she met his eyes. Then her eyes dropped and her head dipped again. She turned her face slightly to the side and stared, empty, at the sand that shifted beneath her feet.

She had the souls of thousands of lives on her shoulders, she would not find redemption in the words of one man no matter how much she wished she could.

"I'm sorry, Kurma."

The laughter began in her throat, a soundless shaking of her body that soon tore from her throat and filled the dry air. It was as lifeless the world around them,

Before Alkaid had spoken, Tanzanite knew that she had won. She had known from the moment Metallia had called to her, from the very second that light had seared her to the bone and brought her to that distant world. Tanzanite would not have been sent at such a cost if there was any risk of failure. The seeds of Alkaid's corruption had been sown so carefully, and their roots had taken hold in the girl in a way that had not yet occurred in the other corrupts. They were far too deep to be dug out by simple words.

Metallia chose her servants carefully, and she did not choose those who were so easily swayed.

“Your words,” her voice was surprisingly soft, thick with something that could have been mistaken for pity if she were not so obviously incapable of it, “... are but lies.”

Tanzanite sighed as she let her forehead drop forward to rest gently against his, the claws of her human hand gently tracing the curve of his cheek. It was a strange action, far too gentle for a woman whose eyelids could not hide that fiery glow as they slid momentarily shut. His soul was truly lost, so misguided that no matter the truths she spoke, he simply would not understand. Could not understand. Her lips twisted into a smile, far too peaceful to fit her monstrous form.

“Countless planets, countless lives,” she echoed in that soft but heated whisper. Her eyes opened, and Tanzanite pulled him close, until her lips brushed softly against the mans ear, “and so I shall take them all.”

Drawing on a power far greater than her own, Tanzanite hooked her claws in his skin, and tore Kurma's body from the barren sands with enough force to send him spinning through the thin atmosphere and into his beloved cosmos beyond.

She spared not a moment more, and held that bloody hand out for the girl who she had accused of such atrocities.

"Only She can offer you redemption, Alkaid. You need only to accept it."

Tanzanite smiled, and though somewhere she had once cared for the girl, there was no more genuine affection in her expression than there had been when she'd looked upon Kurma. There was far more at stake here than the life of a single senshi, far more to be gained than Alkaid's long sought acceptance. They were both but pawns in a much larger game, far beyond their understanding, but they played their roles with steps that never faltered.

As Alkaid's hand settled in Tanzanite's, those claws wrapped around her delicate wrist, and one hard pull yanked her forward. Her other hand shot out to take hold of the girl's starseed. It was already cracked, darkened by an energy that was wholly unnatural for a senshi to possess, but somewhere within was still that faint pulse of light. That same glimmer of hope that had allowed Linarite to be purified into an abomination.

It was the power the senshi drew from their own planets, the very energy which enabled their wicked powers. It was an anchor to the light that Kurma had failed to lead her into. But here, it was exposed. On her homeworld, Alkaid's starseed was as powerful as it could ever be, shining as brightly and openly as it ever would.

For the very last time.

There was nothing to stop the power that flooded into Alkaid, like a hammer crashing down upon the delicate life within. All of the power that she possessed was unleashed into that small, lost figure. All of the brilliance, all of that darkness, all funneled into Alkaid. Never again would she be lost. Never again confused. Without so much as a warning, Tanzanite subjected Alkaid to a pain far beyond words, the very undoing everything she was.

Everything she had ever been.

Everything Kurma might have hoped she would be once more.

And so Alkaid's sins would be forgiven at last, washed away by the tidal wave of Metallia's power.