Tower of Light (Under The Cowl Book #2)

CHAPTER 23

     Jessica never felt so weightless whenever she'd taken flight.

Was this the result of drifting across space and time? Outside portal breeches, she could see the faces of people she never met before with those she's closest to. Many leading very different lives side by side with the most unexpected of people, she being one of them. In one world she's a mother and a happy wife. In another she's ruthless entrepreneur, a hardcore drug addict living on the streets of Gotham, and powerful Green Lantern even in her twilight years.

"Who am I then?" she asked herself, gazing into the eye of a dozen more worlds and a dozen more after that. "Can I become like them?" 

"Yes. A true hero with the willpower to do what's right." 

"Inspire by giving hope to the downtrodden." 

"Make them remember the horror." 

"Feel pain." 

"Take what's yours  and become stronger." 

"Help those unfortunate." 

"Embrace the love in your heart." 

It was the voices of the emotional spectrum, once again guiding Jessica. 

"The willpower, the hope, the fear, the rage, the greed, the compassion, and the love, revive what I don't want lost forever from my world or any other."

Thrusts across her body, a wave of energy pulled from the walls of the tunneled breech. Powerful, Jessica had never felt anything like it. She could stand here forever and never grow weary. But something suddenly caught her eye, a dark spot in the distance. She could feel that it doesn't belong. And if left uncontested, a fate worst then death likely awaits across the multiverse.

Jessica started to fly toward the dark spot when a tug on her ankle forced her to stop. She looked back and down. And there she found a hand wrapped around her. The hand broke through a breech. Cracks begun to emerge around the broken wall as an emerald glow ignites from the other side.

Pulled through a forced breech like a fish out of water, Jessica spun widely across the open air. 

Gravity quickly took hold.

She began to descend from a height thousands of feet in the air. The power of her Phantom Ring fading, leaving her unprotected. City lights below close in and fast. Jessica flipped around and around with nothing to grab onto, nothing to keep her from falling or allow her to gather her bearings. I can't die here, her will to survive expelled, calling forth and igniting the power of the Green Lantern from the Phantom Ring.

Jessica took flight, caught under a wisp of green fired from her ring.

She steadied herself on one knee while in mid air. And it's over her head where she watched a breech widen behind what pulled her into this world.

"Batman?" she said with wide eye doubt.

No, this was not the Batman she knew. 

Dressed in the uniform of the Green Lantern, although still with the cowl of the Dark Knight, Jessica couldn't shake this ominous feeling she was getting from him. "I underestimated you." he said. This was another version of Batman like the other two.

"Who are you?"

"You threw me into the green realm. It was quite difficult finding my way out. And just as I was on my way to you, here you are."

"...Dawnbreaker" her fleeting breath exhaled.

Monsters, creatures of the night, the living dead, a storm of the dreadfully frightening erupt from Dawnbreaker's ring. Jessica had seen monsters like this in her dreams. They'd normally take the shape of her hunting party. Lifeless bodies, flesh covered in moss and dirt rotting from the inside out. "You don't seem all that surprised to see what stands behind me."

"I guess those are your demons."

"My demons?" he scoffed. "That would imply that I cared about the lives I've taken, recreating them with the hands of a guilty conscious. I am the monster."

The monsters race in unison seeking to swallow Jessica whole.

Jessica ignites her ring to forge a fence, shielding herself from the horde. But not entirely strong enough to hold back the creatures, Jessica descended with the ground closing in on her. 

Less than half of her body began to take up the protective uniform of the Green Lantern. From her ring finger to half her chest, the rest of her was exposed. And at the speed she was moving down, the unprotected side will hit the earth splat.

"He is too strong!" her cry pleading for help.

"Yes, he is!" Jessica listened to her voice reply. "And I want it!"

"What's mine, is mine, and mine, and mine, and mine, and mine, and mine. Not yours!"

The green from the lanterns vanish, swallowed in an instant by an avarice beast not of this world. But as the monsters reappeared, once poured from Dawnbreaker's ring, they turned to set their sights on betrayal.

No longer do they move at his beck and call, taken over by the Orange Light of Avarice, Jessica charged forward with features across her face far from human. Her eyes bright orange and satanic, her skin oily and scale-like, in a way she was starting to become the parasitic demon of greed, Ophidian reincarnate.

Jessica's new look forced Dawnbreaker's unlit cigarette to slip from the corner of his mouth. But quick on the draw he ignites his ring to fight the monsters coming his way.

They break through the nearly closed breach.

Monsters, swords, guns, forged from their rings they race to combat the other across the tunneled breech.

They pass throughout the multiverse without slowing down, until a twisting tide of light pulled them inside.

Jessica and Dawnbreaker found themselves transported yet again in the blink of an eye, but this time into the stratosphere.

The sky is dark and stormy. Broken pieces of the earth drift from the sunken holes where continents use to sit. The desire to take away Dawnbreaker's power and make it hers is replaced the second Jessica noticed her return home.

Without the power of her Phantom Ring at sufficient strength to guide her on her way down.