Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 51: Here Upon These Stones

Chapter 51: Here Upon These Stones

-VERTEX ONE: 15.556984-

Ananke, in Orbit of Jupiter

Approximately 722 Million Kilometers from Earth

Pain. Her entire world, her entire being, was pain... but she couldn't stop yet. Not when she was so close. She would rest for now, but she refused to stop.

She lay on her side in the blueish methane snow blanketing the frigid, dead rock, staring at the palm of her hand with her one working eye. Once pristine, her flesh was now carpeted by gnarled scar tissue, hardened and shiny and crisscrossed with raised ropes of collagen. Much of her body looked the same; it would be a long time—if ever—before all of her scars healed, even with the full range of her powers returned. Even if they did, she wondered if she should keep the scars, wear them as a monument to the ordeal that she survived.

The ones who gave her those scars made a grave mistake. They should have killed her when they had the chance, because when she managed to tear her way out of their infernal torture device, she snapped the spine of the first fool she saw before escaping into the nearest thing that looked like a warp portal. For almost every waking second since then, she thought about how she would pay them back. Each and every one of them responsible, their very souls would writhe for the rest of time for what they did to her... but not right now. Not yet.

It took time, too much time, for her body to heal as much as it had. It took more time still to make it this far, to the twelfth of the nearly eighty moons in orbit of this planet... but now she was almost there. She was almost to Earth.

The methane snow squeaked as she rolled onto her back. Whenever she moved, the snow evaporated into vapor, then immediately froze and snowed down again, on and around her. Its smell was noxious, but bracing... she used the sour odor as an anchor, a way to stay alive and awake to do what she had to do.

Millions and millions of lights shone down from above her, standing out from the darkness of space. Countless other stars and planets across the cosmos, countless other worlds... many of them she had visited long before, in different circumstances. On her way here, she returned to many of those worlds, during the other times when her aching body could move no more without rest. There, she told the people she met that they would follow her lead if they wished to seek revenge as she sought. She left no doubts about her intentions, and she let no one aid her. Always fighting and clawing to survive and emerge victorious, that was her way. From those foreign stars, others might follow or they might not. Though she might fight alongside them, might perhaps even lead them if the need arose, she would never truly consider them comrades. She would stand alone, apart from them, as she had always done before. Alone, now and forever, until universe's end.

One light in particular stood out from the others, a banded red-yellow disc that she could encircle with her thumb and forefinger: Jupiter, this moon's parent. The stellar bodies of the Sol System guarded the Earth and its moon much as their Sailor Senshi guarded the Moon Princess, and the energy of each planet was normally like feeling sunshine on her skin. At the moment, Jupiter's ambient power was dim, its light was weak and cold. Something had gone terribly wrong.

It's all gone wrong.

That was another voice, a stranger's voice in the back of her mind. It had been there often since she awakened, always speaking the same words. She had grown quite tired of hearing that voice, and she intended to find answers as to who it belonged to... but that was secondary to making Dead End pay for her scars, for her torture and humiliation.