ALFG Chapter 149

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX: YOU SAID YOU’D LOVE ME FOREVER

FEBRUARY 1, 2014

NIGHT VALE

Between Karkat, Meenah, a strange adult’s arrival from a completely other planet and Dualscar’s awakening, it had been shaping up to be quite an eventful day. The surprises kept piling up, it seemed, as in the early hours of February 1, 2014, Hal Strider finally awoke, and stumbled downstairs right in the middle of everyone trying to catch everybody up with new information.

Terezi listened to the sound of the commotion that erupted upon the young android’s friends seeing him finally, after days, being up and about. Eugene later described his arrival to her as one of a man who’d just crawled out of some hell – he had been clutching his throat, as if in pain, and his eyes were wide eye in some far-off gaze even while he descended the stairs. He swayed here and there, his gait unsteady, and his hands were shaking, sparking with the signature pink electricity of his magic every now and then. That explained the smell of ozone.

Strangely, there was a certain absence to his scent, one that she hadn’t even noticed wasn’t supposed to be a part of it until it was now missing. The scent of mint, which though faint, was always ever present around the smell of cold steel he carried. Now, it was gone.

Pity curled in her gut. Angeles was gone, then, the last of them burned up, their goal to protect him – though clumsy and almost desperate – complete.

Surprisingly, the boy didn’t seem interested in grieving. Instead he sat right with everyone else in the living room, waving off his friends’ concern and asked, “What did I miss?”

Quite a lot, and with slight hesitation and obvious worry, everyone started from the top and tried to brief him on what had been happening, from the deterioration of the world around them, the weirdness of the city wearing off in the face of everything devolving into chaos, to Dualscar’s fight with Eridan and Karkat’s sudden arrival.

Karkat who smelled like he’d just been dipped in a vat of blood and hadn’t washed the whole thing off, despite his assurances that he had in fact been forced into a bath by the fucking Handmaid, of all people. It was a whole thing, apparently. Even Dualscar confirmed her presence with a snort and a growl, and a muttered, “Nagging hag.”before Nightwalker hit him upside the head for it. What was up with people’s legendary ancestors just showing up out of the blue?

Hal seemed to take it better than her, at least, though it might just be due to his distance from it. He didn’t exactly have the right context for just how utterly baffling it was to just be sitting in the same room as Orphaner Dualscar, who confirmed the existence of the Handmaid, who apparently telekinetically threw Karkat around so he would cam down. Even weirder was the little-Empress sitting with them, Feferi’s dancestor, Meenah Peixes, who kept muttering to Karkat: “Yo, THAT’S your universe’s Cronus? Why is he so cool?”

Once everyone finished talking over each other trying to get everything out of the way, Hal merely grunted in response before asking what the plan was now.

“Simple,” Vriska said, leading the conversation before Cronus Ampora of Beforus could get there first. Terezi heard him make a displeased noise across the opposite couch. “We go back to New York and kill the Sylph of Hope.”

“Against a Prince of Hope as fucking overpowered as Eridan. Sure.” Cronus snorted.

“Yeah, but we’re not fighting with a non-godtier Bard as a handicap.” The sneer was practically in Vriska’s voice. Her nails tapped against the coffee table. “We’ve got a lot more people who can use magic. Strider is a fellow Prince.”

“Eridan’s a ranged fighter,” Hal said, quietly. “Even if I’m a Prince, it’s not a good comparison.”

“I know, that’s where I come in. My ability is to take away luck, and it sounds to me like he’s just been lucky to have a healing factor on his side. Orphaner Dualscar had the right idea to keep him and the Sylph separated, it was just that someone – ”

“Oh, fuck off!” Cronus snarled.

“ – couldn’t do his damn job right.”

Vriska ignored him. “Once we successfully separate him and the Sylph, you, Dualscar, Karkat and Nightwalker will keep him busy.” Terezi felt a hand on her shoulder. “While me and Terezi will kill the Sylph.”

“Hey, where do I come into this?” Meenah asked.

“You said you didn’t have any magic.”

“Shell, I mean. Yeah.” There was shuffling. “But I’m here for the fight, man, I’m not gonna just sit this one out. You know how much Shouty scratched me try’na push me away while we teleported?”

“Don’t make it sound like that’s my fault, you piece of shit!” Karkat yelled. “You’re the one who fucking grabbed me.”

“See?”

“Fuck you!”

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Eugene muttered beside Terezi, and she heard his hand smack against his face. Snickering quietly, she patted his back.

“With…all due respect,” Vriska said, sounding not very respectful at all, and more like someone humoring a child. “You just listened to several hours of people talking about how Ampora sunk a chunk of the city into the ground. You’re just going to get in the way.”

“Yeah, but the Sylph of Hope doesn’t have a lot of magic on her own, right?” Meenah reasoned. “Cronus was fighting her hand-to-hand.”

“She had magic,” Cronus corrected. “I think there was just some caveat to how she could use it. Nereus wrote about…” He paused here, and Terezi imagined him closing his eyes in concentration. For a boy whom Meenah seemed to view as the worst person alive, he was amiable in the last few days they’d hosted him. Incredibly knowledgeable about classpects too, and a self-proclaimed lover of all things magic, though he admitted having lost faith in it a while back – a stark contrast to how Eridan was. “Sylph magic is mostly healing in the literal sense, so when it comes to other uses of it, it’s largely derivative.”

“…no fucking way you knew Nereus Ampora,” Dualscar said.

“I didn’t. I was sent his journal.”

“By who?”

“The Heir of Doom?”

“What?!”

“Hey, don’t look at me like I did anything wrong, you got his manica!” Cronus said. “You’re obviously the favorite one, why the hell are you mad at me?”

“Yeah, you’re right, this is getting nowhere,” Terezi whispered back to Eugene, before taking her cane out of her sylladex, tapping it forward until she hit the leg of the coffee table, and repeatedly smacking it against it to get everyone’s attention. The rapidly-devolving conversation silenced. God, this meeting was going terrible compared to the one they’d had on the island. Having so many people with so many ideas at once had gone somewhat well that other time, what the hell was so different now?

“Can we focus?” Terezi called out. “Obviously, Cronus…Beforan Cronus here knows a lot about magic. What I learned on the island was mostly about how to be a Seer, so I don’t know anything about how Sylphs work.”

“I had to read about a lot of things, magic especially.” She could hear the way Cronus moved forward in his seat as he talked. “Sylph magic stands opposite Maid magic. Sylphs are derivative, Maids are generative.”

“Talk coherently, asshole,” Karkat sniped.

“Sylphs need something to work with, something that already exists. If there’s a hole in your shirt, they can’t fix it if the shirt doesn’t exist in the first place. Maids can just make you a new one and fix the problem that way,” he said.

Terezi frowned. “That’s why Kanaya needed the Roxy girl for the Mothergrub.”

“A Sylph of Hope is supposed to be wish-granter. But she can’t make her own wishes, someone else has to do it for her,” Cronus continued. “Which I think is how she was able to tank my command to sleep, because Eridan didn’t want her to.”

“She’s useless on her own,” Vriska said.

“Essentially.”

“Something’s wrong with her. Don’t underestimate her.” Dualscar’s deep rumble interrupted them, his tone slightly distracted, but no less serious. After a moment’s pause, he said: “She can completely break her bones to fight and have everything reset like nothing’s happened. I’m not sure if she feels pain.”

Now that…was interesting.

“Huh,” Vriska said. “Was she godtier?”

“She is, she flew,” Cronus said.

“Oh, that’s probably how then.”

“No, it’s not,” Karkat was the one to interrupt this time. Beside Terezi, his seat dipped as he leaned forward. “Even godtiers can feel pain, shit doesn’t heal right away like that.”

“She’s a healing class, it’s probably a whole thing for her,” Vriska said.

“Even the healing classes we know don’t react to pain like that,” Karkat insisted. “You saw how everyone was on the island, even Feferi couldn’t automatically heal herself like that. She never went as far as breaking her own bones either.”

“Yeah, but what’d this Sylph do? She probably just broke a hand.” Terezi could hear her turn in her seat, likely to search for approval from Dualscar.

But the man’s answer came in a grave correction. “She broke her spine.”

The room fell into silence once more.

“She what?” Hal asked, the first to speak.

“She twisted her whole body in a way that would have broken her spine,” the man enunciated carefully. “Just so she could land a hit. And when she did, she twisted everything back into place like it never happened, and was able to function normally.”

“Like she couldn’t feel pain.”

“Yes.”

“Which means fighting her would be even harder,” the boy said. “Because if she can inflict something as fatal as that on herself, how on earth are you going to kill her?”

That…was a point. If even breaking her own spine wouldn’t kill the girl, what was a stab or some blood loss going to do to her? She’d just patch everything back up, probably.

“Is it possible it’s part of wish-granter powers?” Jeremiah piped in, having stayed silent along with the other non-magic users considering the topic.

“Possibly, but Eridan was nowhere to be seen when that happened. We actually assumed he’d passed out then,” Dualscar said. “But, no, I don’t think it’s part of her wish-granting abilities.”

“What about you, magic boy?” Vriska asked, directing the question to Cronus. “Anything you know about automatically healing godtiers?”

“Maids and Heirs of Life automatically heal themselves, but not like that. From what I’ve read, they certainly also feel pain; even if they could twist themselves up, I think that factor would stop them,” Cronus said. “Give me a moment. I’m trying to think.”

“So say we can stop uh, fishdick’s descendant here,” Meenah started, to which Vriska interrupted:

“You’re not coming with us.”

“Yes, I am. Anyway. Even if we knock out Ampora Jr., killing the Sylph girl still going to be frond-lem,” she said. “You guys got anything that can like, stop magic?”

“Doom magic can nullify,” Cronus said.

The room quieted again, the weight of the house master’s recent passing pressing down on them. Doom magic could have nullified.

“We don’t have that anymore,” Hal said.

“I can take away magic,” Vriska said.

“No, spider-girl, you take away luck. S’a very different fish. That’s light,” Meenah said. “I’m talking magic. Whatever that chick’s got going on with her freaky pretzel thing has got to do with magic, we just don’t know what it is. But if we have some-fin that can just sink out magic as a whole, we don’t have to know what kind of iceberg we’re dealing with. That whole thing just goes down.”

Angeles’ abilities would have been very useful now. Benzedrine had potential considering the weirdness of his and Hal’s fight, at least according to Kevin Palmer’s recall, but the boy hadn’t done it since and was far too inexperienced with whatever possible abilities he had.

Cronus suddenly let out a sigh, muttering curses under his breath as he ran his hands over his face. Terezi could hear everyone turning to him.

“What?” Meenah asked. “What is it?”

“I know what can destroy magic. It’s practically made to destroy magic,” he said.

That got Vriska’s attention. “Well?” she asked. “Spit it out.”

“A Prince of Hope,” Cronus said, with a heavy, incredibly tired drawl. “A Prince of Hope is Skaia’s answer to an overflow of magic. They’re destroyers.”

Fuck.

Of fucking course.

Except their freak of nature wish-granter was working together with the destroyer of magic.

“So,” Kevin cut in with a clear of his throat when the awkward pause had dragged on. “What do we do?”

The girl seemed to be unkillable. Their best chance of killing her was protecting her. If Terezi knew Eridan, she knew he was borderline immovable when he set his mind on something. For the love of god, he was obsessed with getting back with Feferi even after she’d broken off their moirail-ship.

“…Kankri said something about her being two things stitched together,” Nightwalker said, suddenly. Terezi snapped her head towards him, slightly wary since he was a stranger, but Dualscar and Cronus seemed comfortable enough with him. “If her invincibility isn’t a part of her Sylph abilities, then, it must be her other half. If we could sever that – ”

“We have a better chance of killing her,” Hal finished.

Prince of Heart. Terezi sat up straighter.

“I don’t think we even need to cut her soul in half if you’re saying what I think you’re saying,” Cronus said. “Most things can’t live with fatally-injured souls – ”

Terezi could practically taste the panic suddenly coming off of Strider at that.

“ – so if you could just wound her enough – ”

“She’s done for,” Hal said. “And can she…heal herself from that?”

“Given that Hope’s above any and all aspects, theoretically, she should be able to,” Cronus said. “But only if someone else wishes it.”

“So she can heal injuries on a soul?”

“Yeah.”

This boy was planning something. Whatever it was, Terezi only hoped he stayed objective enough to worry about the end of the world first and have the weight of an entire universe’s survival stand more important than his own wishes.

“Well, there you go, that’s our plan,” Vriska said. “I steal Eridan’s luck and we separate him and the Sylph, the rest of you engage him while Terezi, Strider and I kill her.”

“I already told you not to underestimate her,” Dualscar grunted. “Nightwalker.”

“You are not my boss,” Nightwalker immediately replied.

“You know as well as I do how shit this plan is,” the man said. Vriska made a noise of offense, but he ignored her. “The Sylph is our target, so we need someone who can use Territory magic in order to restrain her. You’re going on the strike team for her.”

“For the record, I hate every opinion you have,” Nightwalker said. “But, you make sense right now.”

“I always make sense,” the man said. “Palmer.”

“Me or Cecil?” Kevin asked.

“Which one of you was telekinetic again?”

“You’re not throwing my brother into an active warzone,” Kevin said, immediately.

“We need someone who can help restrain Eridan.”

“Then use Cronus,” he said, his sleeve flapping as he pointed to the younger troll. “He’s Silvertongue too, isn’t he?”

“Psychic powers are gonna be a lot more effective against him than magic. It’s something else completely so he can’t destroy it. That’s why he asked for your brother,” Karkat said, and then paused. It was so weird, to hear the boy speak in so few sentences, but then again, if he spent so long in a world by himself… “I’ve got an idea. Hey, uh, Cecil, right? Give me your arm.”

“Oh, god,” Nightwalker murmured.

“Why?” Kevin asked. Terezi could hear him stand and push his brother behind him.

“He’s gonna copy his powers, or try to,” Nightwalker said, just as Karkat got to his feet. “Though he’s gonna need his blood for that.”

“Absolutely not,” Kevin said, and the force of his anger rippled out in slight pressure that pushed the couch Terezi was on backwards. Judging by the scraping sounds across the room, everything else had been displaced too.

“…that hasn’t happened in a while,” Eugene murmured.

“I thought you weren’t telekinetic,” Dualscar said. His boots thudded on the floor, and then there was another scrape as he pushed the couch he’d been sitting on back into place.

“Not at the same level as Cecil, but I can move some things with a bit of effort,” he said.

“Enough to hold someone into place?”

Kevin sounded doubtful. “I’m…I don’t know.”

“In order to kill the Sylph, we need to make sure the Prince is distracted or immobilized, and we need every contingency we can get. We can’t afford to leave this up to luck,” Dualscar said. “If you’re not going to let the Vantas boy copy your brother’s powers, you might as well give up yours.”

Kevin stayed silent for a few seconds, and when he spoke again, fear tinged his voice. “What do you need me to do – why the fuck are you opening your mouth?”

“I need blood,” Karkat said. “I don’t normally look like this, you know. Even my nails are going back to normal.” His claws clicked together, as if he were clacking them in demonstration.

“Do you need to like, drink blood?” Eugene asked.

“The more the better,” Karkat said. “If it’s gonna be a long fight, I have to get as powerful as I can and use this shit as long as possible. If he’s not as good as his brother with throwing people around, I’m gonna need a lot.”

“We could go back and ask the Handmaid,” Nightwalker cut in.

“Fuck no,” Karkat said. “That woman’s gonna knock my fucking teeth out. You try asking her and see how it goes. She’ll blast you halfway across the universe.”

“She’s the most powerful living psychic this side of the universe,” Dualscar tried this time.

“Okay, you try then, fishbreath, see if she doesn’t rip you to shreds. I don’t see you volunteering to go asking her, Hey! We need maybe a pint of your blood to stuff down some rainbow-drinker wannabe loser’s snack-hole!”

“…” both adults wisely said.

“You know what.” Nightwalker stood. “I’ll take this one. Where’s the kitchen?”

“Um. Hallway to your left?” Benzedrine answered nervously. “Why?”

“I need to bleed into a glass. You mentioned one of you was skilled in first aid?” the man asked. One of the humans, William, stood and volunteered, though the older woman named Elizabeth, as well as both Palmer brothers followed them into the kitchen to assist with Nightwalker draining himself.

Dualscar cleared his throat. “Now that’s out of the way, let’s continue. Strider will be the one to primarily engage with the Sylph, Space-shithead back there’s going to be backup and corral her in, in case she tries to escape.”

“And us?” Vriska huffed.

“To my understanding, your moirail isn’t godtier. In such a dangerous situation, I would not advise endangering her life by dragging her into a fight with two Hope players.”

Huh.

For a guy with such a reputation of violence, Dualscar was…strangely nice?

Or just realistic. Given the man’s military prowess, it was most likely that.

“But I’m godtier,” Vriska said. “You can’t just bench me.”

“We won’t. We need every advantage we can get against my descendant. We’ll need you to cull his luck,” he said.

Vriska’s hostility immediately dropped, clearing the air around her and flooding it with excitement. She must be pretty stoked, given that she’d just gotten acknowledged by the Orphaner Dualscar.

“But I would have to reiterate that it might not be wise to bring along Miss Pyrope,” he said. “No offense meant. But Eridan’s attacks are very indiscriminate.”

“None taken.” Terezi waved her hand. “I know my capabilities and I’ve heard your accounts. I can take on someone hand-to-hand, but I doubt I could do much to block something powerful enough to sink a city.”

“Thank you,” the man said. Continuing, “I’ll primarily engage with Eridan…Cronus, you’ll be back-up; Vantas, you corral him in.”

“What about me?” Meenah asked. “I swam all the way here.”

“Be that as it may, you are also not godtier,” Dualscar said. “You would just get in the way.”

“Bullshit!” Meenah cried. “Look – I’m like, I’m a fuchsiablood! You’re supposed to listen to me and everyfin or whatever. Why the shell can’t I go?”

“For the same reason I can’t,” Terezi said, “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Hey, us highbloods are tougher than we look, you know!” Meenah said.

Nightwalker’s footsteps slowly came back into the room, followed by a pattering of everyone else who’d followed him.

“Dualscar’s entire forearm was gone after his fight with Eridan,” he said, stinking of…pink cherries and fruity strawberries. Oh, his blood smelled delightful. “This isn’t something to be taken easily. We mean no offense, only worry for your safety. Now.”

He approached Karkat and thrust the glass in his hands. The boy’s nails clinked against it.

“Get ready,” he said. “We leave in an hour.”

#

???

It was not a mistake to use this girl as a puppet but perhaps there could have been a way to render her brain dead while still having access to her powers.

Any attempts to kill the Prince of Hope over the last few days had ended in catastrophic failure, due to her awakening and seizing control of the body through sheer force and rage; she was willing to take any inch she could grab onto, whether it was a pinky she would shove into her own eye to blind herself with pain, or a whole hand just so she could shove herself back. The Prince was weakened, unconscious for so long from overuse of magic, and was prime for the killing, but for hours and hours until both of them tired, Anshu Jaeger was fighting the Heir of Blood off for control over her own body.

Her blood was all over the dingy house she’d forced them all into, laying her Prince down on a bed before shutting the door closed and not letting herself take one step inside. It was splattered all over the floorboards, the walls, the ceiling, all from her efforts of trying to incapacitate her physical body enough so it couldn’t get closer to her unconscious friend. She regenerated, every time, as this body was supposed to do since it was mostly made of Blood, but she always made sure to be inconvenient with her injuries.

A blow to the head to for dizziness, a strike through her ears for imbalance, blinding to take out her sight; how and where she got her resolve from, the Heir did not know, but she was almost as annoying as William, whenever he saw his beloved little sibling.

Today was no different, however long it had been since their war of attrition started. Time moved differently now, with the universe broken. Where it once adhered to the tight rules of a constricted hourglass, the whole thing poured in free-fall, and so there were moments which should be seconds that felt like eternity, and there were moments that should have taken longer that suddenly cut like seconds.

Today, Anshu Jaeger had decided to lock herself and her parasite in the bathroom, a shard of glass from the broken mirror in hand. Her palms were bleeding and continuously healing, her feet were cut up and still stitching themselves together when they should have healed a while ago, and she was sat stock still, into the corner of the bathroom, silent, eyes wide in concentration. One of her irises was red, the other blue.

As she sat there, with nothing and no one else for miles stirring, the sudden flare of magic and the beam of moonlight that cut through the darkness was like a siren that had her turning to the small, bathroom mirror. The sliver of light from the Full Moon of Derse was visible from the empty sky, an impossibility, made only real by the fact that her magic did not adhere to the rules of physics. With her arrival came the feeling of other magics, two of which were familiar.

The Amporas were back for their youngest, it seemed. One of them felt wary, the other angry. They several other people with them, which Anshu’s capacity for identifying emotions could pinpoint. One of them immediately struck a memory with the half of her connected to the Heir of Blood, he’d met this young man before – a Knight of Space from another universe that had escaped his clutches thanks to William’s friends. The others Anshu had only been acquainted with for a several days – a grieving young man whose magic was electric, another boy whose emotions were running several miles a minute, and a proud young woman who was eager to show her skills.

Now that was curious. Jaeger tapped into her senses, feeling out the young woman’s emotions…yes, there was a lot of pride there. A lot of discontent too, disappointment at being underestimated and a willingness to prove people wrong. She felt left out, as if she was not being allowed to act in her full potential, and in that regards there were faint stirrings of mutiny.

Interesting. This party was falling apart at the seams already.

Jaeger flew up to the small bathroom window, cut-up feet and all, and squeezed her way through. Anshu was quiet now, taking the moment to rest while the Heir’s attention was elsewhere. Annoying girl. When the Heir made to turn back towards the bathroom, intent on getting back to Eridan, the body’s neck violently and audibly cracked as Anshu forced it to face back towards the direction of their visitors.

“I’ll get rid of him some day,” Jaeger muttered.

Anshu opened the body’s mouth and bit its tongue – not hard enough to sever, but hard enough for blood to spurt out. Hissing in pain, the Heir unclenched it, waiting as it healed itself up.

Whatever. Fine then. The intruders would be dealt with first.

Though the Full Moon’s light had died out, it had practically pointed to where they were; Jaeger could surmise their location. And so, high above the crumbling form of what was once New York City, she flew, spreading her senses to where she could feel their emotions – the proud young woman’s most obvious of all – in order to pinpoint them more accurately.

She found them clustered in a group warily looking around the darkness, with only a ball of light summoned by the Orphaner Dualscar in hand to light their way. High above them, cloaked in shadow, they didn’t notice her.

Jaeger grinned. With how destroyed the walls of reality were, it would only take a simple nudge using the wishes of the Heir of Blood to get rid of them. He wanted them gone, and his wish was her command.

“Manifest,” she whispered, summoning rips into reality that would devour these people whole.

The flare of her magic sent several heads snapping up. The slowest to react was the blueblood girl, who was clearly the most inexperienced when it came to proper magical combat. Their weakest link, then, adding to her pride and unwillingness to work together.

Her late reaction cost her. When the tear opened by her side, it dragged her in before she realized what was happening, while the rest immediately braced themselves, Karkat Vantas, Hal Strider, and Aeon Nightwalker dragging onto the others as they recognized what Jaeger had just brought forth.

“Vriska!” Karkat yelled as he watched her disappear, lunging towards her, only to be pulled back by Dualscar, whose arm was latched onto by Nightwalker, even though they were all slowly being pulled in different directions.

With a flash of green and silver, all of them disappeared from the range of the reality tears. Ugh. Teleportation. Oh, well, at least she got one. Stubborn, prideful lone wolves were always the easiest to pick off from group work. Devil take the hindmost and all that.

Jaeger turned back towards the way she came from. They would be looking for Eridan, so she might as well go back. Maybe, perhaps, with someone else to focus on rather than the sheer focus Anshu had with protecting her friend, she could manage to finally end the Prince of Hope’s life.

He wouldn’t fight. Of course, he wouldn’t. Not her. Not while the Heir of Blood was currently wearing this young girl’s face. Jaeger could feel emotions, after all, use them to invoke a Manifestation, or amplify them to get powerful enough for that. And Eridan Ampora’s grief and adoration ran deep.

She could just make it run deeper. So much it would drive him insane. Just like how William’s fondness for his sibling drove him to sacrifice.

Oh, wasn’t love such a wonderful thing?