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CONTENT WARNING: this solo contains discussion of child death
Dagon had lost track of time.
She supposed that was only natural; weeks stretched to months to years to ages, and a mind could not be expected to keep and comprehend dates at that scale. All she knew was that her world was dark, the ocean was vast, and she had been the last of her people for perhaps two centuries, if not longer. She remembered the last death she witnessed; she’d held the hand of a young woman, her breath stolen by plague, and watched the light go from her eyes. She couldn’t be certain that was the last other than her; Dagon had many isolated islands; but that was two centuries ago, and in the time since then, things had only gotten worse.
The oceans no longer churned with monsters, and even the scent of rot that she had become used to as carcasses floated to the top and washed ashore was long gone.
Because there were no more carcasses. No more great leviathans rotting on beaches, no more dead birds or starved lizards. Not even a wind to stir the placid seas, left mirror-bright and still, a reflection of the eternal night sky above. Just bones, and dust, and silence.
And her.
It was hard for Dagon to understand how she was still alive. Surely something should have gotten her—being a Senshi did not make her invulnerable to the vagaries of time, or to the claws of the strange, Chaotic monsters that were the only other things that seemed to roam her world. She hesitated to call them “alive,” since they seemed to lack the essential essence of life, but they certainly prowled, stalking shadows and dark places, hungry to kill her. She spent a lot of time hiding from them, fighting when she could.
Of course, she’d had better luck in years back, when wings rested on her hips and the sky darkened at her command. But her power had decayed over time, and she found herself unable to access her higher forms or her higher magic. Worse, even the standard stuff she was left with fizzled and fluttered as if behind a dam, or burst from her like a surging tide, more often than it worked like it was supposed to. The decay of her world had, it was clear, decayed her power, and that was a frightening thought.
She knew, in truth, that she would not be able to keep running and fighting forever. She had been spared the vagaries of time, but someday, accident or injury might get her. One of the beasts could land a lucky hit. She might fall through crumbling ground, or stumble over the bones of some long-dead creature.
Perhaps, then, Dagon might finally rest.
Perhaps, rest was what she longed for most.
Rest, and the chance to once again lie in Kalari’s arms, and hear their daughter laughing outside.
But those things had been stolen from her, and now she was alone, the last breath of life on her world.
Once, she had duties as a Senshi. Once, she had worked hard to drag Dagon into the wider universe, making connections and pushing her people forward. It had been a calling, of sorts. Something she desired more than anything. Her people had spent centuries isolated, working to keep outsiders out, retreating into the fog that covered their islands and rejecting anyone that found themselves there. It had been clear to her, once, that they simply could not survive that way. So when she was old enough to fly her own ship, she set out on a mission of outreach. She would make the wider universe acknowledge them, and make Dagon acknowledge the wider universe.
It had been in that wider universe that she fell into Kalari’s arms. That she had met the woman that moved her soul, that she knew she would want to be with for the rest of her life. Their time together had lasted nearly a century, and yet it felt like nothing—and even with so many years between them, so much more time without her than with her, the wound of her loss still tore at Dagon’s soul.
Dagon wondered if she had been reincarnated somewhere, in the wider universe. If other planets were still thriving. There had been so many, once—so many stars bright with life—that surely something must have survived the great calamity that tore the universe to pieces.
She hoped so. She hoped that wherever Kalari had been reborn, she was happy. It was what she deserved, after her last life ended in pain and horror.
Dagon visited her grave often. Hers, and their daughter Aralinn’s. Both of them should have had centuries more to live. Both of them deserved better than what had been done to them.
(What had been done to Dagon, too, but she rose out of the healing spring with rage and revenge in her heart.)
Her lonely wanderings had carried her back there, and she sat between the graves that she had dug with her bare hands, refusing the help even of the remaining allies she had at the time. The stones that marked them, she had accepted help with—because Kalari and Aralinn deserved their names on their graves, and she could not make them alone, not to the quality her beloved and their child deserved.
Kalari had been perfectly ordinary, but Aralinn had longed to visit Earth’s Knight Academy, to advance Ophelia’s vision of connecting Dagon to the wider universe. She’d hoped to find a placement on another world, to create a link that would last for centuries.
When she was murdered in cold blood by invaders, empowered by Chaos, who sought Dagon’s treasured healing springs, she was two years too young to attend.
They had fought. Tooth, nail, and claw, they had fought to stop it. But not even Dagon’s magic had been enough, then, and knives had found her throat, found Kalari’s, found Aralinn’s. Their bodies were left abandoned in the little house they’d retreated to, when they fled the invasion of the capitol.
Dagon had meant to bring them there and leave them safe on the far island where she had been born, but they were followed. Hunted down and killed like animals.
The invaders had thought to intimidate the rest of the people into submission, by casting her body into the spring. They had thought to taint it with death and blood.
Instead, it had given one last burst of power, and restored breath to her lungs.
And she had hunted them, as they hunted her.
Her vengeance, and the vengeance of the Dagonite people, was terrible. The invaders had success initially, with their Chaos-fueled powers and the element of surprise, but when the infection spread, when the world closed off, when their support could no longer arrive and they were left alone on a world they barely knew….
Some fell to the environment. Ate the wrong plant, challenged the wrong predator, fell into the seas and were consumed by the enraged beasts that rose from the depths.
Others fell to knife and spear and bow, wielded by the local populace who disappeared into the fog and reappeared only to strike with the same brutality the invaders had used on them.
And slowly, their numbers were reduced, and not replenished, because they were not there to settle and make families. They were there to make war.
That was their downfall, Dagon thought. They could have been welcomed on the world she was trying to create. Could have sought what they wanted from Dagon’s healing springs, and even become part of the planet, if their own world was no longer good enough. But they had come conquering and to conquer, and they intended to slay the Dagonites and take their world for themselves.
And that could not be allowed.
They took their world back. Slew the invaders that fought, welcomed the ones that surrendered. But it was too late. Even once the external threat was gone, the Chaos that had rooted itself in the world was not.
Dagon had seen its poison growing every day, felt it in her bones, seen the monsters grow and multiply, and known in her heart that the invasion was not the end. But she still fought, because they deserved to pay for what they had done.
For Kalari. For Aralinn. For every other Dagonite whose life they ended, callously and cruelly.
They fought, and won.
But they could not fight the darkness.
They could not fight the monsters—the ones the Chaos created, and the ones it enraged. They could not fight the dwindling of their food supply, as plants died and no new ones replaced them. They could not fight the plagues brought by rotting leviathan corpses on the shores.
In the end, they dwindled. And all that was left for Dagon was a world that could barely support her.
Once, it had been her duty to guide her people to the stars.
Now, it was her duty to guard their final resting places.
And yet, as she placed the carved leviathan-bone trinkets she had made on Kalari and Arainn’s graves, she felt a tug in her chest.
She looked up, and her eyes went wide.
There was a light. Breaking through the fog.
A light, and a pull.
And Dagon knew: she needed to follow this pull. She knew it in her bones, in her core.
“I’ll be back,” she told Kalari’s headstone, and she bent, and kissed it.
And then she let the pull in her starseed carry her away.
When she opened her eyes again, she was shocked by the assault of sound. She had become used to silence, in the lonely years that stretched out behind her. But here—wherever she was—there was so much sound, it made her flinch. Truly it wasn’t that much—as she oriented herself, she recognized the soft sounds of insects, the distant whoosh of vehicles, the sounds of a city—muffled, but alive.
It reminded her of planets she’d visited in the past; Saturn, certainly, but others, with their cities much larger than even Dagon’s capitol.
She could have wept from the shock of it, the joy, the relief. Wherever she was, it had life. She was not consigned to the last breaths of another dying planet, not lost in the vast universe.
That did not answer, for her, where she was, but she knew that wherever it was, there were people here.
The second thing she noticed, slowly and a bit belatedly, was that her aura sense was much clearer than it had been in centuries. On her homeworld, the fog of Chaos blotted out nearly everything—but here, she could feel….pinpricks. Light, and shadow, and the shadow wasn’t like what she was used to, but it was darkness all the same.
Her heart dropped. This world, too, had a Chaos menace, then—and perhaps that was why it called to her. So that she could solve it. Perhaps not alone—not when she could feel Knights and Senshi, and her heart flipped at the knowledge that they were out there. Perhaps she would be able to find familiar faces.
Perhaps, somehow, improbably, she was not the only one who had survived.
It had seemed like an impossible dream, not too long ago. She had been certain for decades that she was living on a ticking clock, that eventually her luck would run out and she would die alone, unremembered, the last of her people, the dying gasp of a dying world. She had assumed that she would only get another chance when she was reborn. That the only thing left for her was to slowly waste away, alone.
But she had hoped, in the secret places of her heart, the ones that she let few people see.
(That no one had seen since she stumbled back into that empty little house, and collapsed to her knees, and cradled Kalari and Adalinn’s cold bodies in her arms, and wished that they, like she, had been saved.)
This was what she had hoped for. A planet that was still alive, still breathing. But it had a problem. A festering infection—one that, Dagon knew, could not be allowed to get worse. Chaos had destroyed her world.
She could not allow it to destroy this one, too.
[wc: 2,066 words]
