Ganymede always assumed her life would end in blood and gore.
She'd seen enough of it, of course. As the world was torn asunder, her life became an endless battlefield, a broken city full of equally broken people, all struggling to find a peace that proved itself increasingly out of reach. They should have realized it long ago, back when the war began and their failures came in a steady succession, one after the other in a futile show of resistance. It was no use to hope. Hope blinded them, taught them mercy and failure when they should have known justice.
If her life was a color, Ganymede knew that it would be painted some shade of red—bright like the collar and train of her fuku, or dark like the life draining from another inert form. The world was no different. The longer life stretched on, the more the Earth became soaked with blood, for the years had passed with too much pain, and too much heartache, and too much death.
The Order headquarters was no more. In the depths of the forest, flames rose in an inferno like that found in the deepest pits of hell, stretching toward a dark sky to smother the stars with smoke and ash, rising higher and higher, hotter and hotter, until it seemed it might stretch all the way to the moon.
This was hell. She'd known it long ago.
Valhalla ushered her through the trees, as bruised and bloodied as she was, not running from battle and submitting to defeat so much as grasping onto the last stubborn threads of hope—that their survival could somehow make a difference. He'd lost his helmet. Blood oozed from a wound at his temple, another from another cut below his eye, streaming down his face in thick, sticky rivulets that looked like ghoulish tears. He threw off the torn remnants of his long cape when it was snagged along the trees and underbrush, covered from head to toe in dirt and soot, bruised and bloodied and burned.
Ganymede stumbled over exposed roots and fallen branches, unsteady on wobbling heels. One broke with a snap. It sent her careening into the unforgiving trunk of a tree before Valhalla took her by the shoulders and helped her upright. Ganymede lened over to tug off both boots, throwing them to the side with a frustrated cry. Most of her train was missing; what remained hung in tattered shreds of singed fabric. Her collar swayed from her bustier in a similar fashion, so torn it no longer hung about her shoulders, and her hose were so ripped to shreds she may as well have not been wearing any. She had not seen her top-hat since transforming at the start of the ambush.
This was the end, intuition told her. There was no moving forward, no more pieces to retrieve and put back together. They had lost—completely and decisively. They could not save one another when they couldn't even save themselves.
Valhalla came to a halt. Ganymede stopped with him, out of breath and choking off sobs; her tears weren't red, but they fell as steadily. Figures slid out from among the trees, all darkly clothed and menacing, their eyes gleaming in the firelight.
In the very center of the group was a face so startlingly similar to Ganymede's it tended to cause some mild confusion, but the fuku was different—flowing instead of constricting, lined with fur instead of lace, and a dark black to Ganymede's pure white. Her eyes were a deep plum, her fair hair so long the decorative braid curled along the ground, catching twigs and leaves in platinum strands.
Ganymede had known her name once—long ago, it seemed to her now, when there was no war and they were but children.
The corrupted Senshi looked pristine but for the black holes that marred her chest and forehead. Her fuku was untouched by blood or fire, her pale skin unmarred, glowing orange from the light of the not-so-distant flames.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice an uncharacteristic trill.
She smiled a grim little smile, like a reaper come to collect a wandering soul.
A shiver traveled up Ganymede's spine at the same time she felt the shift of teleportation in the air at her back. Her senses were clouded by chaotic auras, numb to all pain but the ice cold chill of defeat. Her vision tunneled until all she could see was the corrupted Senshi before her, her hearing closed to the distant screams of her fleeing allies.
There was a gasp to her right, a strangled sound like a choked off warning. She felt Valhalla go still at her side.
“No,” she said, weak and strained.
She breathed, and she turned, and she saw how her life was really meant to end.
A man stood behind them with an arm stretched out toward them. He was familiar only by the contours of his face, the color of his hair and eyes, and the leer with which he greeted her. His military coat was long, his wide shoulders topped with epaulettes. In his eyes she saw herself with a hand upon her chest, reaching in to snuff her out while a volcano shuddered and roared in the background.
Eight years since Elysion, and she still did not know his name.
His arm drew back and his hand slid from the chest into which it had been buried. Nestled in his palm, beneath the long fingers that curled over it possessively, glittered Valhalla's starseed.
Time slowed.
Valhalla dropped to the ground. The corrupted Senshi cackled with pleasure at Ganymede's back. The man from Elysion tightened his finger's around Valhalla's starseed. Ganymede heard the crack of split crystal and watched, helpless and horrified, as shimmering dust and glittering shards slipped through the man's fingers. A few pieces scattered into the leaves at her feet. The rest were carried away on the breeze.
Then the air shifted again and the man from Elysion was gone. Behind her, Ganymede heard the others slip out of sight. The last to go was the corrupted Senshi. She approached Ganymede's back and slipped long, thin arms around her in a mockery of a loving embrace.
“You're nearly ready,” her cousin crooned.
Moments later, she too was gone.
Ganymede crumpled to her knees. Her hands sought out Valhalla's motionless form. Her fingers went to his neck but there was no pulse; her mouth went to his lips, but there was nothing that remained to accept the life she attempted to breathe into him. He was pale and cold. His eyes were still open, but they stared up at her without a trace of emotion. He was empty—devoid of life, and feeling, and memory.
And Ganymede was alone.
She slumped over Valhalla, pressed her face to his chest where she heard no heartbeat, and screamed her grief into the night while the forest burned.
Guine's characters were used with permission.
