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It didn't take long for the chaotic energy to make itself known - the initial draw of a Prince hadn't gone unnoticed and the sing-song challenge helped pinpoint the exact location with ease. The closer it got to Castor, the more eclectic the energy seemed. It didn't carry the power of a Genera-King, but it's mass was so much larger. It was like an infection, pouring into the energy field and tainting every particle it touched.

When its face finally hit the light of streetlamps, it was also one familiar to the Prince.

"Castor," Alkaid's voice was full of chilling delight as the heels of her nega-couture pumps clicked gritty steps into the asphalt. The smile on her face wasn't warm, or welcoming, but rather surprised in her own wicked way. She'd known him once and had noted his absence from the enemy ranks over the many years he'd been gone.

As she emerged entirely from the shadows, a dull orange light was fading between the cracks in her rocky flesh. It dissipated and left behind the hollow crags, dozens of interlocking scars that marked her entire body. She didn't seem to be in pain or even to care very much at all. As she took a few steps forward her translucent cape billowed around her before it settled at her feet in a pool on the ground. She was obviously something quite different than a corrupt though still not completely a negaverse soldier - she bore a uniform somewhere between the two. Her eyes drifted over the form of someone she had once called ally, then rested back on his eyes.

"Are you lost, little duckling? Did you need my help?" As sincere as the words could have been, her wicked smile had never wavered. There was no kindness there.

Alkaid's smile widened at his questions. She could hear the tone in his voice, the way he stopped just short of accusing her of being the monster that she was. In a timeless Alkaid fashion, she tucked her hands behind her back and let them rest there, intertwined. She wasn't going to attack him, this was much more interesting.

"I don't think I'm either of those things," her head tilted as she considered it, one of the long dread braids falling to swing at her side. "I'm nothing that lives by the light of the sun."

She took a few steps forward, slow and careful so that he wouldn't interpret them as a threat. Her haunting, orange eyes swiveled up to stare at the crescent moon overhead. She'd lost so many hours wondering what Princess had left her here, forgotten her. All along her answer had been with Metallia, in a mother that claimed her in place of the senshi of the moon. No, Alkaid did not want to be saved.

"I noticed," her eyes fell back to him, "they've been lacking a certain.. 'oomph' without you. I do hope you've come back to shake things up a bit. It's boring to hunt the helpless."

At Castor's comparison, she could only laugh. It was a good mimicry of true pleasure - her eyes crinkled at the edges, her lips curled and the broken planes of her face contorted with the gesture.

"Yes, I'm the huntress," her feet took her closer to the eternal, until she could stare up into his eyes. She wasn't going to attack him, she had always been a ranged fighter. Up close there was nothing but vulnerability but she needed him to see her lack of fear. She just stared out at him through heavy, slightly luminescent eyes.

"But I'm also a watcher." One of her hands uncurled from behind her back, reaching out to adjust the collar of his fuku. Her hands were too warm in proximity to his skin, over heated by the energy pulsing inside of her core. "I don't eat, or sleep. I don't need water or love." She smoothed his collar out and retwined her fingers at the small of her back.

"I'm Metallia's perfect soldier, Castor. Where are yours?"

One impossibly delicate brow raised as the man before her extended his hand and for a long moment, she said nothing.

Castor was the picture of someone that had beaten and broken, smashed into pieces and reforged into something that was not yet strong - but would be. She could see the empty eyes, but with them came resolve and a knowledge that things could really not be any worse. She knew what it was like to have her souls stripped apart and reborn in someone's image. The jester she had once known was gone, destroyed by a man older and wiser.

In that moment she recognized Castor as many things, but above them all was the knowledge that he was a threat. Her surprise faded and a respect ignited deep in what was left of her broken, shattered starseed.

"I have watched many things in many years," she answered him finally, narrowing her eyes on his, "but none so surprising as those few that keep rising from the ashes to challenge me."

She untwined her hands and placed her rough, cracked fingers in his offered hand. "Show me what you have to fight for."

Though Alkaid no longer felt temperatures to the extremes that human flesh would, she was aware of the chill as the cold wind whistled across her hardened flesh. Her light weight cape was caught and whipped around her, snapping in the air as it tossed and each step she took caused her heels to sink partially into the cold ground beneath her feet.

Even as he was speaking, giving her a small history lesson in grief, her eyes were taking in all that had been done in the name of Chaos. Her emotions were hard won. The broken face remained mostly impassive as it took in the sight of the slaughter. Her gaze drifted to the root, then down to the chain mail that had been lost to time.

"Chaos doesn't need your mercy," she said softly, voice barely rising above the whistle of the wind. But something was different in her now.

Her brows had drawn a little as she walked past him, stepping delicately between the decay scattered around them. She was observing with more than an ascendant's eye - in that brief moment, Alkaid had surfaced from wherever she was hiding inside the monster.

"Before my deal with Metallia, I walked the sands of my world one last time." She didn't turn to face Castor. The way she stared out at the world was trance-like, as if the wastes of Alkaid's sands had been imposed upon the frigid landscape. "The bones of my people were buried in the streets, half-entombed in the sands that had been our home once. They baked in the sun of our star until there was nothing left." Her gaze fell to the petrified stub of a plant, stark black against the snowfall. "Just sand in time."

The Ascendant General finally turned to look at him again, standing there in all his royal glory. She could not fault him his hatred for Chaos, but two wrongs did not make a right. She came back to herself, filled with the purpose Metallia drove into her through the very energy coursing in her crystal veins. "Chaos did not strike down my people. Chaos has not invaded earth. The last world belongs to Earthlings, Castor, and we will make sure the Senshi presence does not win claim of it. That is what I fight for."

Once, Alkaid might have walked the sands of her planet and known who had slain her people. If she had not been swept into Metallia's grace, she might have been walking the same path as Castor. Yet all she had was Metallia's fleeting knowledge that Chaos had never done her this injustice.

Yet, even as broken as she was, she understood it.

"Oh, vengeful Prince," her voice was soft, but lacking a certain tenderness that it once held. She kept his eyes as he brushed her hair back, let him look in vain for whatever soft heart had once caused him to be her friend. As he turned away and stared back at the castle in the distance, she knew that his promise was a good one. The Negaverse had rekindled something in him that would not stop.

"If revenge is what you want, then I can give you one thing." Her hand pressed lightly against the gaping hole, where the remnants of her starseed gleamed dully. If was hard to tell if it was one of her habit mimics, or a true pledge. Her face was too stony to tell the truth. "War, my dear. You can fight for revenge, and I will fight for Earth."

She dropped her hand then and took a good, long look at the destruction across Castor. If he had been conquering other worlds, had Chaos really been so wrong to strike him down? Was it any different than their fight now?

"All I want is for every last Senshi to go home to their rotting little worlds and leave the Earth. They kept their planet safe, but the Senshi did not." The hands at her side curled into fists, squeezing until her fingers groaned and cracked under the pressure. It was her first sign of passion in this long talk and when her eyes swept back up to the tall man at her side, there was a fire there.

"We have no right to make Earth our battlefield, but if we must, it will be a great one. I promise."

This talk was a dance she had repeated, over and over again with countless members of the Order. They claimed Metallia was wrong, that she was lost. They all promised, one day, they would save her from this path.

They never asked if she wanted to be saved.

"We all fight for a conqueror and we all have our chains." Her bright eyes stared up into those of the prince she had once known, back when she was young and naive, before she knew what a proclamation of war truly was.

"But so too do we all die. If it is at your hands, so be it." Her emphasis was placed with a narrowing of the eyes and a raising of her chin. Alkaid was as proud as she had ever been, dignified in her belief that she was fighting for what mattered. Some parts of her were there, somewhere, in that hollowed shell.

Her hands reached for his then, the ones that one day might claim her life. They grasped tightly with no fear of him or the death he promised.

"To War."