TW: graphic descriptions of death and violence in spoiler
The trek across the land bridge was… certainly not the most joyous one.
The land didn't exist in the majority of the maps she'd found--any of the maps she'd found, actually. It concerned her, fit into the reports she'd read of costal cities and towns noticing the sea levels dropping.
But enough for a whole new strip of land to form?
It was… disturbing.
Rocky, dusty dirt sifted beneath her feet and swirled by the winds that were ever constant out there. She'd pin the width at around… three… three and a half kilometers wide? The length was harder to guess, but she was figuring maybe around thirty-two or so kilometers. Depending on how often she needed to break… six, eight hours of walking? Kyrie remained as Solaris, knowing at least the boost in even her walking speed and stamina from the magic would aid her in the trip.
Blue and orange skirts tugged and tangled in the winds, the sparkling material mixing with the ever present haze of mist and floating droplets condensing together bit by bit. The wisp hummed along as it floated and zoomed about her, sometimes heading forward a bit as if it were scouting ahead, other times lingering at her shoulder like it was hitching a ride.
Her eyes scanned the land--wasteland, like nearly all others, with the occasional desiccated piece of driftwood tossed about and snagged between rocks, or scraggly looking shrub that had tried to thrive on the nutrient-void soil… only to linger now as a skeleton. The branches clicked and crackled in the winds as she passed, only making her mind wander to the sound of bones striking against one another, though they'd have to be pretty dry to have that sound, usually there'd be a bit more flesh and wet stuff around--
Solaris winced, physically jerking herself out of the tangle her mind was falling into. Memories flickered and lurked at the edge of her awareness, waiting for her to slip up again. The wisp hummed, and she reached up to lightly pat the ball of energy. Or well, much as she could.
"...I'm probably going to have a lot of those. I'm sorry." For a while she didn't elaborate, scanning the waves that rolled lazily to and from the beaches of grey-red sands. So much iron in Solarian rocks…
Again, the wisp hummed, and she softly hummed in return, chuckling a little before sighing. "It's just… I left the Kyrvel for a reason. The Kyrnsūl'vel. It was one of our best ships, and it wasn't meant for me. It belonged to--" Her throat tightened, and she could only let out a breath in a sigh, closing her eyes briefly. Didn't need to trip over a rock or skeletal shrub. "...it belonged to someone else, someone who deserved it. But they made it clear I was to get it after them, and…" She waved her hand absently in the air in the direction of their island goal.
"I used it. The ship was beautiful--is, I hope," she added with a cringe, unsure of how kind time would be to the delicate machineries and systems. "I went through a lot to help its real pilot get the parts and fuel necessary to maintain it, as did other people in the military, then the separationists they went with…" So many sides to wars.
"It wasn't as complicated back around when the communications failed. All the groups fighting each other, I mean," she sighed, waving her hand absently again. Old memories groaned and creaked in her mind as she tried to wave away the dust and cobwebs around the boxes she'd tucked away the worst of her past. There were things in those boxes, though, she wasn't sure she'd ever fully be able to reopen again.
"You had the countries mostly working together, and the independent forces of the Paxaris and the Golden Consortium--those were the biggest < Guilds >, really, the others had decent numbers across the world but not the same level of influence and stocked up supplies and weaponry to really be considered independent. The rest mostly relied on patronage of specific countries or--hm.
Well. I think the closest English word--I'm pretty sure you can't understand Solarian, anyway, if you even understand what I'm saying in English--would be something like…" Her brows furrowed as she considered, unsure of the different phrases and their full contextual meaning of Earthling religious beliefs. "Alaspirium was a wide-ranging faith, but its core was a unifying aid for most Solarian countries. Fully forsaking the creeds was viewed world-wide as the people turning away from what made us Solarians in the first place. Publicly, anyway."
She laughed, the sound dry and brittle as the skeleton shrubs. "Privately… it was always another story, privately, for the people with enough money and influence to skirt around the legal and social punishments that everyone else was subject to."
Though her mouth opened to keep speaking on the topic, her eyes widened and teeth clicked shut before she groaned out loud, rubbing at her forehead. "I really tangented on that, didn't I? I was talking about the Kyrvel… I mean, yeah it's all connected somewhere but…"
She glanced at the wisp that more or less road along her shoulder and smiled somewhat. "Something tells me you don't care much for a full history of my people. We'd be here for months if I tried, anyway," she huffed as she hopped up onto a large boulder, then slid down the other side with ease back to the sand and soil mixture of land.
"You likely care about that as much as you care about the Kyrvel, but you might just hear me talk about it anyway. I'm rather sick of just keeping everything in my head." And no, she didn't mean to suggest she was open to speaking with others about it all, either. There was too much, in her mind. Too many pieces that needed to be shared to understand the extent of the damages she'd caused at times, or the losses she'd witnessed. There was a sort of… peace, in a way, at least, in meeting other senshi who bore a similar burden as she. Who watched their worlds wither and die, their people lost to time and isolation. She felt she didn't need to say much to others like her, that they might understand by the simple phrases.
I was a soldier.
At least in her mind, it spoke untold volumes that she'd little interest in laying open and bare before others. They didn't need to know the bloody details, or how many lives she'd taken in conflict.
TW
- The knife was scarcely a weight in her hand. Heavy enough to be assured of its presence, but the only force holding her back, making her arm tremble and quake as it did, was the weight of her own terror. Over and over, she used it as a shield, trying to push away their advances, keeping their own blades from her vital organs or arteries. When the blade at last sliced through flesh, and the wet, garbled gasps reached her ears, she had a long moment of wondering how it'd happened. Hot blood sat heavy on her hand, coated the blade of her light-weight knife. Their hands grappled at the torn flesh as if they could stitch it back together by sheer will, lips turning blue under the sputtering foam of dark blood. The violet irises nearly drowned out the pin-p***k irises, the eyeballs nearly popping out with how wide their lids were spread. Alarm. Disbelief. Grey-green wings thrashed at their back, disjointed in their panic. The gargle and wheezing of a severed windpipe echoed in her ears, along with the pitiful sort of whine they made as they crashed to the ground. The body twitched and spasmed, the last fragments of a nervous system trying to maintain control. Somewhere, people were shouting. Fists were banging on the door, and she couldn't figure out how to turn the lock to open it. She could only stare at the still warm body and the blood pooling beneath the gaping throat. How had that happened? She was doubled over, puking up what remained of her rations from the night before, water, and bile, so much bile, till she felt like she was scraping the very bottom of her stomach in an attempt to purge everything she had in her. Every scrap. Every drop. Every figment of memory. She wanted none of it.
Firing a gun at a practice range wasn't nearly the same as holding one in the field. She kept the weapon pressed close to her as she navigated the halls, trying to control her breathing into something that wasn't a hyperventilating mess. Made sure the safety was engaged, her finger far from the trigger. Her pulse was thunder in her veins and ears, but there was a small triumph in keeping her breathing sort of vaguely calm. She'd nearly rounded another corner when the first shots rang out, and a few lasers burned through the surface layers of the wall mere centimeters from her head and opposite her. She ducked back immediately, pulse erratic, fingers moving on autopilot over the safety mechanism and into place over the trigger. Just as she'd practiced countless times with the others at the range. But firing in the field was so, so different. Even the practice weaponry they needed to defend against, try to not get hit by, didn't prepare her for the knowledge she was trying to aim for a target while trying not to get shot by lasers capable of piercing her skull. A living, breathing target, with goals of their own, dreams of their own, fears of their own. She could hear the hollow clink clink clink of an empty cartridge, and the fumbling of an ammo belt to get a replacement. There was the tink and clatter of the empty cartridge being expelled and hitting the ground. She moved around the protection of the wall, enough to spot the soldier. They were young. Younger than she would have expected anyone to allow to pick up a gun. Were they even old enough to remember Solaris before the world began to spiral and fall apart? Did they ever know the freedom of gliding through the misty mornings and feeling the golden rays caress their wings and skin? Their hand was going for the next cartridge, about to slide it back into place. She lined up her weapon, and fired. The repeated shots hit in rapid, near instantaneous succession. One in the chest, somewhat deflected by the armor there. One in the neck, far less secured. One in the eye, open forever now and a hole blasted through the back of their skull. The body dropped almost instantly, twitched and gasped, and the remaining eye rotated wildly as if trying to comprehend what had happened. She didn't know if the cranial damage was enough to be instantly fatal, though the presence of so much blood and goopy, semi-solid material along the wall beside them said it would certainly be so shortly. The mouth was moving, a voice croaking out. Higher pitched. Young. She raised her gun again and fired cleanly, and knew the extensive damage at that point meant nothing could remain. She couldn't cry now. She knew that. So she pushed it back in her mind, into a box there, where she could lock it away until later. And she did. She completed her mission. She secured the base along with the others in the unit. The bodies burned outside, a putrid stench that couldn't be carried far enough or fast enough on the winds. It was in that corpse light she cried, hands curled tight over her mouth to muffle it as much as she could, crouched behind containers of ammunitions, rations, water, medicines… things people needed, and they'd gotten for them. But she cried, each face and gasp and gargle stained and imprinted in her brain. She let herself hyperventilate, let herself panic, let herself gouge at her own hands with her nails in an attempt to scrape off every trace of the blood and bits of people.
The first time she'd smelt burning flesh though, as a result of her magic, had been long before even any of that. Her people flourished. Her people thrived. They cheered her as a symbol of change, as the Guardian of Solaris. The agent of catalysts. But there was no cheering in that room. She'd stood in mute horror at the scene. The explosion had gone off perfectly, as it always had when she'd trained or used it against hostile creatures. She'd just not realized how… how much damage a Solarian body could take and be torn apart, and you could still recognize the pieces for what they'd once been. What burnt feathers smelt like. Burnt blood. Burnt flesh. Burnt hair. Yet how easy it was to pretend she couldn't recognize anything--that was safer. She wanted to scream, she wanted to wail. This wasn't what a catalyst was supposed to be, was it? It was supposed to be good. It was supposed to be helpful. She was supposed to be good, and helpful, and a good person. But good people didn't cause this, did they? What sort of change was she bringing about, at the behest of her betters, of those wiser and more experienced than she, when this was the cost? She didn't understand it. Couldn't understand it. Which was why, they later told her, they were the ones helping to direct her, instead of her making the choices herself. She didn't know. She was too young to know. They knew. Yet she wondered why she wasn't old enough to know how to help and direct her people, and yet old enough to know what the burned corpse of a Solarian looked and smelt like.
No. She didn't need to burden anyone else with that.
The trek stretched onward. As she'd thought, staying powered up as Solaris did help her maintain a good pace for a much longer period than she would have without the magical boost, though the bonus of now being a Super Senshi again certainly helped an additional volume. Talking also helped pass the time. She spoke on and off to the wisp--more on than anything--recounting bits of her history, though keeping the worst of the memories safely tucked away in her own mind. She spoke of what it was like to fly the Kyrvel. The freedom she'd felt, above the clouds, beyond the islands and lower lands, untouched by anything save the atmosphere and glimmers of stars that stretched out to infinity ahead, above, and behind her. She didn't speak much of what it felt like to use the aerial craft for its intended purpose, as a weapon, but knew its systems were some of the top of the line. It's why she and so many others took such great risks, and many paid great costs, to keep it working. Keep it fueled. Keep it stocked. When its pilot passed, though…
There'd only been so many missions she'd taken before she refused to operate it in battle. She could. She knew how. She'd done countless aerial battles in other ships. Enoch helped her substantially with the systems. But how many times had it warned her of elevated heart rates and of extreme stress indicators? How many times had it commented that restless sleep, night terrors, waking up in cold sweats from nightmares that were only slightly twisted from the true horrors she'd seen… all of it were clinical signs of trauma?
No. She spoke of the freedom the Kyrvel gave her.
On the second day, she came to the island. It rose high above the sea that shimmered and glimmered in golden rays. Solaris was at least grateful her jumping height had also increased… though jumping around buildings was probably a tad easier than leaping from jutting rock to jutting rock, hoping her fingers and toes were strong enough to catch the holds she forced herself to each time.
Scrambling over the edge of the cliff earned her a range of cuts and scrapes, though the damages to her uniform weren't much of a concern. They'd be repaired next time she powered up, which was very useful and efficient.
The winds tossed about her skirts here, the flat of the plateau of the island stretching before her. The hanger, wide and low, built of sturdy blue-silver metal and white stone, was the first thing she noticed. Solaris shed the garb and guise, and Kyrie walked forward across dead soil that once likely held a wide field of dark, glistening grasses and plants. She could see the vast expanse of the aetherport of sorts beside the hanger, necessary for most Solarian ships to help ensure they had the power built up behind them to help with lift safely. It brought a small smile to her face. It'd not been constructed specifically for the Kyrvel, then, if they'd designed it like that.
The small house beside the hanger, though, drew her attention, realizing the single-story building would be a more than suitable base for the time being.
…when was the last time she'd lived in an actual house..?
Probably about the same time when she was anything close to being a mechanic, if she were to be honest with herself. Finding the Kyrvel was a triumph, and when she built up the courage to finally open the hangar doors, she'd be proud of it…
But fixing this Solarian relic..? Finding a way to access Enoch, if that was even possible..?
Well. Still better to focus on than the horrific memories she shoved back into those dark boxes locked up in the back of her mind.
