WC: 1049

The scar on her back, still red and all too tender, was another reminder of just how much she needed protection.

Not a layer of magic over her starseed would do all that much for deflecting knife wounds. That was its own problem, but she had little doubt that Sylvite would have gone for her soul in one way or another if help had not arrived when it had.

It had happened before.

On her first night out again after the incident when she found herself well and truly alone, Cybele’s eyes flicked skyward, up through the trees in the park that she was wandering, and her gaze stayed there. Not that there was any way she could see her asteroid from where she stood. She’d done a bit of research, enough to know that while Cybele was one of the largest asteroids, it was so darkly colored that it had escaped the eyes of astronomers until much later on.

She settled into a park bench, still looking up. Instead of focusing on the stars, her gaze combed through the darkness in between them, wondering where her own world might be hiding. She supposed there was no need to wonder when there was a much easier way to see this place, a way that was required if she was ever going to keep her world from missing her, if she was ever going to unlock this magic protection that she so badly needed.

There was still something, barely remembered, that made her hesitate for a long while. It still seemed like a difficult thing to just press the button on her phone and see where she ended up. She tried to nudge into that feeling, too see where it came from, but as usual anything all that specific evaded her.

Then again, she was used to doing difficult things.

She pulled out her phone after about five minutes of looking up at the stars. She held it in one hand and then the other. She sucked in her cheeks. She closed her eyes. More time passed. It was nearly half an hour before she pressed the button.

The humidity hit first, as did the warmth. It might have been summer back in the city, but it had been the cool of the evening. Here it seemed to be right in the middle of the afternoon. In any case, she could tell that she had arrived somewhere else. “I’m here,” she whispered, and she opened her eyes.

It turned out that her asteroid was beautiful. The skies were violet, just as Ganymede had told her they would be. Some sunlight flickered through, although it was not quite as strong as what she was used to, on Earth. It was difficult to completely gage, though, because she was in the shade.

She’d found herself in the middle of a forest. The trees here were massive, larger than anything she’d ever seen on the trails in Virginia. Perhaps they were more like the seqoias that she’d glimpsed in pictures. In any case, she felt small when she walked up to one and placed her hand on the bark.

It was dry. Leafless, she realized as she glanced up. All of them were, by the looks of it. It was dead, as she’d been warned. Some of the smaller plants seemed to have made it. There were familiar purple flowers tangled up in the roots nearby, and some grasses, too, but that was about all that she could see.

Other than that it was just dead trees all the way to the shadowy horizon.

A nice sight, yes, but she wasn’t sure if she felt any more peaceful or more protected than she had a few minutes ago. She checked and found that her skin hadn’t started sporting any markings that she could see.

“Now what?” she asked the dead tree in front of her. “I purified back out of the Negaverse, you know. I lost my memories, again. I broke my starseed, again, and it was partially for you. I heard that you’d be waiting for me.”

The tree, being dead, was silent. Whatever it was at the core of her world that she was actually talking to seemed silent, too.

“I want to bond with you,” she said. “I want to have you on my side.” She pushed away from the first tree and walked in a direction that looked like it led deeper into the woods. “I can prove myself first, if you’d like,” she said, picking up the pace a bit. “I can hunt something.”

Not that she was sure if any animal life had made it this long on the empty asteroid. Even the plants seemed to be struggling, and they had photosynthesis on their side. She found a larger one of the flowers, plucked it, and held it skyward, in the off chance that it might be a good enough offering, but no.

“Here,” she said. “If you want more than this, or something else more than me just being here, you’re going to need to give me some sort of hint, all right?”

Nothing answered, still, and it began to sink in that Cybele was talking to flowers and rocks and dry bark. If there was something deeper here, she was missing it. She gave a deep sigh.

It was starting to become more obvious why she hadn’t spent so much time up here before.

She stayed for an hour, just to say that she had. It was soothing here, in the way that all nature was, and eventually she settled down at the base of one of the trees just to let herself breathe. Nobody came out of the woods to stab her, and that was also something.

It just wasn’t enough.

The others had made it sound easy, as if there would be some way to tell that her world was warm and welcoming, that it had been missing its senshi. They’d sounded so sure of it. Of course Cybele had been aware that full Transcendence might not come right away, but she’d been hoping there might be something to suggest that she might be on the right track.

Mostly what she ended up with, as she headed back to Earth, was more questions.