"Power Insurmountable"
Written by Azusa Kuraino



The Lord giveth, they say, and the Lord also taketh away.

In my case, it seems to be a lot less of the giving and a lot more of the taking away.

And just taking away doesn't seem to be good enough, not as far as I go. Nothing ever slips away from me painlessly-- no, first I need to see everything I love burnt, mangled, torn to shreds, stripped of all glory and dignity, and those remains held aloft for me to see. Fate is a bitch with knife-edged nails.

Somewhere behind my eyes, fate smiles serenely, her face neatly framed by indigo hair. In my mind I reach out for her, shake her and shake her and shake her, tense my hands around her neck until I feel it snap.

Even in death, the harlot's smile is triumphant. Perhaps I am too late, after all.

I tighten my grip on the control stick in my hand. No drugs this time: the ungodly rage searing the back of my skull would burn just as brightly without them. Power calls out to me; I silence it with a memory.

"Are you sure about this?" Kelvena's voice over the intercom, an implacable soprano tone. Calm. Her powers are the inverse of mine: I need the rage, the fire of hate. Water is my polar contrast.

"He is your Commander too. If you wish to forsake his gifts to us and prove yourself unworthy of his blessing, so be it. I will go alone."

Rage beyond comprehension, liquid fire flowing through the blood: such is my gift to summon without the drug called Drive. Perhaps I am destroying myself, as is said in whispers behind my back, murmurs exchanged between soldiers when they think I cannot overhear. If I must burn, and burn I shall, I will take her down with me.

Merkava opens before me, a yawning maw of blackness. I step forth into its depths, held by the hand of God, a birth in reverse. He is here; I feel it; I sense it. Heat embraces my body.

I ignite my thrusters, begin my descent into hell. May God forgive me.


*******


It burned, it burned, and I raged along with it. It was the day when the flames consumed my soul.

It was the first time everything was taken away.

You would have loved my hair then, Commander; if you like her cold violet hair to pet and stroke and marvel over, you would have loved mine better. Such long, soft, pretty tumbles of silver-white. I was beautiful then. No one tries to spite me for my place in life now, Commander, but they were jealous, then, jealous of my face, my hair, the curves of my body. If my hair had not been matted crimson and dirty that day, perhaps you would have stroked it.

There are one and a thousand tiny points in my life I see now where fate could have been changed, and what might have been cries out with feeble voice, lamenting and mourning, "If only, if only." There were no if onlys then, save perhaps the favor of God. What can I say about it? What can I say that has not been said? It was brutal, yes, it was horror, yes, and perhaps I screamed back then, but my heart was numb and full of nothing already when the fire came.

I sat that day in a ripped summer dress, leaning against a wall spattered with the blood and brains of my family, each one pierced through the skull with leaden hail. I would have been next; I was to be next; I felt a tiny child hand reach for my ankle with a plaintive cry like that of a mewling kitten, then fall mute and still in death. It was the fire that saved me, the fire that condemned me, for God would not spare my life even when I cried out to him for surcease. The flames sprang up behind the executioners all at once, a searing wall of death, and with cries of stupefied shock they hoisted guns over their shoulders and ran.

Supine on the ground, I prayed.

I prayed for the fire to deliver me into the hands of God.

I was delivered into the hands of a soldier with a rough and burly grasp, grabbing me by one ankle and pulling, dragging me through spilt blood and the contents of reamed-open skulls. At least, that was what I found clinging to the pretty white dress later on, when you found me, when you took me away from that place where I was born. At the time, I felt nothing; I stared into the burning maw of hell and thought, for a moment, that I had seen God drenched in blood and floating on blue wings.


*******


Here inside the ark of God, there is nothing but stillness: there is no noise, no hum of machinery, no whisper of voice. Even the shudderings of my heart are swallowed up by this structure, devoured by the air itself around me. It is the silence that existed in the seconds before the universe was born.

Before God was born.

Faltering in the void, I stumble and fall against the near side of the corridor, cursing my weakness, cursing this legion of unwitting slaves which aspires in conceit to call itself the human race, cursing this shell of a world and the deceptions of history. The silence envelops me, devours me, and the absence of noise screams in my ears.

Commander, you're in here, aren't you? I know, I know you're here. She took you here, she took you away from the world, told you it would be better here and you would be at peace. How like her to say such a thing. I will never let her take your soul, I won't. I want to return the gifts you gave to me. I cannot go back now. I will never go back.

Where is she? Where did she take you? I won't let her have you. Please, let me help you in return. Please, just once. I've failed before; I know I've failed you. I saw shadows cloud your pretty eyes even when you told me that I served you well. I want to do something right.

I want to kill her.

I will take her down though I may walk through burning coals to do it. If God punishes me for shedding blood in his domain, I will laugh in his face, and spit upon him for what he took away from me.

*******


While the city burned and my soul burned, the executioners who feigned themselves chosen by God dragged me away.

There were others in that place where they took me, that little hovel redolent with the smell of smoke and blood: I recognized them in some way as women I had known once, relatives with some connection to me, but my mind refused to confess the truth of their identities-- perhaps because I did not want to remember them in such a manner. I remember what happened next, of course. I saw it; I watched it all. I stood helplessly bound somewhere far beyond my eyes, watched what God's chosen did to them, and when they came for the sad and feeble lump of flesh which no longer belonged to me, I could no longer feel the hands that struck and violated. My blood ran down into silken reams of silver hair and joined the blood of aunts, sisters, cousins there. While Elru burned, they huddled in a loathsome shack, the cowards, deserting their filthy comrades and slavering over their little prize. They took away everything which had not already been taken from me. Took and took and gave nothing back. Took away things which could not be given back.

When they left, I lay on an earthen floor with my soul hollowed out.

I thought the cool fluid trickling down the side of my face was water; I put my tongue out to catch it, and tasted my own blood. I drank it nonethless. My nostrils were so infused with the scent of blood that it tasted no different from a breath of air.

Outside, the demon god with angel wings rained fire down upon the city.


*******


The fire is still here; it has never left me. It kindles in my veins, blowing life into the ashen coals that remain of my dignity. It was you, Commander, who taught me how to use the rage to fight. How to shape and refine it like the clay of a potter's wheel, to create in fury masterpieces of power. How to keep it from destroying me from the inside out.

As you taught me to warp this to my whims, so also does that whore warp your mind, your desires. I see her, like a demented puppeteer, animating you against your will, twisting and jerking with such insurmountable power that you forget what it feels like to move of your own will. Can't you see this? Why do you listen? That veil over your eyes which prevents you from seeing the world as it is-- it was she who put it there, wasn't it?

You took me, broken, ugly me, under your wings like an angel of protection; you gave me a new birth in Solaris, made me new again. You made it so that every injustice heaped upon my head fueled my power; you made me a warrior. We both died in so many ways on that day of blood and fire long ago. Why have you forgotten?

I plunge like a broken bird down the chasm of steel leading deep into the pits of her hell, and pause, in awe.

The sensation tugs something in my memory, then digs in with viciously nagging claws and refuses to let go. Hanging suspended in this pit of torment are two angels, their unpaired wings soft and blue and radiant as those of the demon god who laid siege to my homeland on that day. Imprisoned in midair, they reach to each other, hands unfurled to reach each other's clasp, and never quite touching.

Bladegash alights upon the floor of the chamber, and I disembark, falling to my knees on the floor and staring at the suspended seraphim like some feeble child.

Commander. Why won't you take my hand? Why don't you even see that I am reaching for you?

A stirring, and ripples in the silence, and a voice speaks.

"This is not for you to see, Dominia."

Her.

I am on my feet in an instant, rage bending within my mind like heated steel, sharpened and and poised to strike.

"There is nothing you can do here." Her eyes are void of emotion. Nothing. Empty. "Do you seek Commander Ramsus? You will not find him here. He is no longer your Commander; he is not the man you thought you knew."

I will not listen; oh, no, I will not listen to the harlot's lies. The rage twists and curls; my hands rise, almost without the blessing of my will, and latch to her neck.

"Is it he whom you seek? He will not listen to you, even if you go. He will not know who you are."

"Liar!" The word erupts from my lips in a contorted growl of rage, and my hands clench tighter. Those pretty, slender arms of hers wreathe between mine, grasp my chin with frightening strength.

"You will get nowhere attacking me." The voice is air frozen solid. "Rail against me though you may, you will never be able to surmount the power which holds his mind in thrall."

"Where is he? Where is he?" Her head bobs back and forth like a broken doll's as I shake her shoulders; I expect satisfaction, or at least a cessation of her anger, but her face is stolid. I feel nothing; I am numb. "You have no power which I cannot take down!"

"Perhaps you should not trouble yourself with this, Dominia. This is not a place human eyes were meant to look upon. Now..." The delicate white fingers grip like steel vices, and almost involuntarily, I wince in pain. "Here... look..."

I look.

At first, there is nothing; a calm and endless and ceaseless violet sea; and then, a calling, a compulsion to lose myself in its depths, immerse myself in a beauty I can never hope to match, become one with the beauty and in doing so erase my own existence.

Erase the wretched inferiority of my own self.

The sea beckons me, gently, and my soul aches and shudders with pain, and a gentle dulcet voice calls out to me in siren songs, inviting me to soothe my fury, never again suffer the knowledge of the lowness of my existence, to join with it forever and ever and drift in eternal beauty in a place where there is no pain, no sorrow, nothing to remember and nothing to forget, neither tomorrow nor today: only the endless, ceaseless, beautiful Now.

I reach out to it, weeping.

The sea parts for me, calls gently for me to come erase my misery in its depths...

...And the fire returns, then, lancing my heart with a sharpness that makes me cry out; and I feel no beckoning, no beauty, no longing. I feel her in my head, clenching me with a power that holds me fast, my body still, immobile, and her inside me, getting into my mind, gripping and hooking and ever probing for new weaknesses.

I stare at her eyes, impaled on a lance of power.

I feel nothing, and then I feel rage.

Inside me, hands of shadow rise, wrestling and grappling with her firm hold, feeling her tendrils of power flail in surprise and helplessness as I grab hold of them like coiled serpents, feel their furious attack against me with a power that makes my head shudder with pain. I hold tight, fast, still bound by her eyes, and I push, push against her struggles, channeling every ounce of my rage and hate into the battle, and at long last with a final shove I extricate the last of her hold on me.

I throw her amassed power back against her, back down along the bond between our eyes, and inside my head echoes a shriek like a dying animal as the invisible binds loose from my body all at once. A trembling, a flash of light, and she howls with pain and falls into a heap on the ground, hands clutching at her eyes, writhing and twitching with a vigor that holds her helpless.

Slowly, I back off, half-nauseated from the cold residue of thought and memory left accrued to my mind by her touch. That echo which I feel is inhuman: utterly devoid of pain or pleasure, imprinted with a thousand remembered trappings of behavior and humanity, bits and pieces to be worn and discarded when occasions necessitate.

Did she begin with this coldness, this utter void where emotion ought to be? Or did she merely forget how to feel it, or make herself forget?

The question vexes me for but a few seconds, and then, in my mind, I see the Commander reach for me like the hapless angel, bound to his stance and unable to reach the hand which beckons him.

I run.

*******


I do not know, in retrospect, what possessed me with the sudden urge to get up at that very moment. I knew merely that I would not die, that I could not die, and that certainty burned as strong in my heart as a heated brand, illuminating my path in the absence of any other light.

From outside, I heard the thunder of gunfire, and rolled over, half my face painted in blood from the soaked earth where I had lain. My dress was a rag of shredded cloth and bloodstains; it was partly split up the front, torn open so that prying eyes might have a better look at their prize, at what they wanted to see.

My feet, when I went to stand up, did not want to respond; I did not want to acknowledge that this hapless form of flesh soaked in blood was my own body. I left the pithy little room, dripping a slender line of red from my hair as I walked. The heat of fire was everywhere, suffocating, enveloping, and yet somehow the burning of wounds and the hot rage of fire became one and the same against my body. I felt like a helpless doll, arms and legs set into motion only through a force outside myself. I was no longer attempting to command my motions; I knew only that I moved.

I stepped out of the door of the filthy hovel and into the garden of fire and destruction, and a legion of men turned to confront me, guns trained upon the bleeding waif who had come limping out of a shack.

I do not know what would have become of me if at that moment three men had not stepped from their ranks and motioned towards me; I staggered backwards, and looked upon their faces.

Cowards.

Wounds unhealed flared at the sight of them.

I saw their faces behind my eyes. Hurting, taking, smiling.

No, no, they would never take my life now; no, they would not take it after they had taken so much else they might have left alone, if indeed it had been my life alone they wanted. Behind me, flames snared the roof of the hovel, and I had no place to run. The fire seared, seared against my skin, and I burned to look upon the grinning faces.

Rage beyond physical containment. I felt it then, as I feel it now.

I felt it, I felt it all, the pain, each blow inflicted by their hand flaring into life, and hate, hate churned like a murderous cauldron in my body, and power that sent me staggering with its magnitude flared in my head. The first among them, the one with the burly hands, stepped forth, and I screamed and howled incoherently, gathering my hands before me. Heat spun in my head and I lurched dizzily to one side, and I screamed, screamed, and with unwounded shadow hands I grasped that power like a starving man clutching at a bit of food, and threw it at them.

I know you were there, Commander. I know you saw it. Perhaps you had seen it before, for you were the only one among them who did not turn to me in vengeful fury. As for I, I had never before seen a man burn to death; I shall not soon forget the sight. The screams that go on and on, the smell of seared flesh and the lunatic flailing of burning limbs, writhing in mad lust to put out the fire. The black silhouette of the tortured body within the flames.

The agony of the three burning men was ended soon enough, for it was Ether flame which devoured their bodies, I know now, searing deeper and fiercer than the orange flames consuming the hovel at my back. I did not know then, but I could not walk away. I staggered backwards, muttering and screeching like an animal-child, clad in shrouds and bedecked with blood, fearing the wrath of the amassed soldiers no less than I feared the thing I had become in that second of pure power.

When I saw at last the array of soldiers encircling me, eyes welling with bloodlust and vengeance, I began to shriek, flailing my bloody hands in terror and babbling and choking under the duress of my screams.

There was not a scrap of humanity left in me; that had been kindled in the licking tongues of Ether flame. I was an animal now fearing for survival, terrified, wounded, my mind void of anything which might have been considered language or reason. So when I saw the gun of the one soldier lifted, I reached again for that burning heart of power and flung its rage at him. It was the man's ammunition case that exploded, this time; I heard the screaming, the thunder roar that left me deaf for seconds afterwards, but it was to the ground where my eyes remained slavishly focused. I wrung my hands; I screamed; I screamed.

"Kill her! Fire!" The howl went up from somewhere in the troops, and I lifted my face to the burning starless night and wailed, begging God's intervention.

When I heard that voice for the first time, ringing clear and sharp above the noise of panic and delirium, I was quite certain, in that instant, that it was the voice of God calling out to spare my life.

"No! Hold your fire!"

And as one, they obeyed, that smooth and unshaken voice slicing through the madness with the efficiency of a knife.

I ceased my screaming in that moment, for it seemed that this could be nothing other than the presence of God on earth which had delivered me from death, for the figure which emerged from the line of supplicating troops seemed no less than divine to the ragged, shaken thing which was me so long ago. Among the soldiers, his voice alone held the trappings of courage, and somehow I knew, I knew in that moment that he was to be my savior. It was that voice which spoke to me again, this time in a low and assuaging tone, as I whimpered like a child, telling me not to be afraid, that he would not harm me.

He wore a long robe of black and purple and white, trimmed along the edges with thin lines of gold which illuminated the outlines of his form against the flames. In his right hand he carried a double-edged blade which shone like the sun; his face was pale, proud, and unyielding, as precise and perfect in its sculptured beauty as the contours of a statue. A whirl of soft white hair framed his head like a circlet; his eyes were equal in color and shine to burnished gold, and within them burned the power and the fury of nascent stars.

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.


*******


I was not afraid then. I'm afraid now. I'm running, running, and my body burns now as it did on that day so long ago. I'm crying. I don't cry.

I know you're here. I know in that she spoke the truth. Don't let her take your soul, Commander. Don't let her. There was a time when I thought you were invincible. I thought nothing could destroy you. I will squeeze her life out with these hands if she has your soul in her grasp too.

...Commander...

...why?

You're here. I can see you now.

He's here too. Why are you fighting him again?

A current, a breath of cold air, grasps at my hair with little frost hands, and I shiver, recognizing the touch of Ether. I can feel it, the power radiating outwards from his body, stirring the air and the silence and the solitude of God.

That Gear he's in-- it's alien on first inspection, the shape distorted beyond anything my mind would willingly put the label "human" to-- pounds together fists of steel, the motion tense and rote as a child's wind-up toy. The shriek of metal against impounded metal-- he's screaming now, and something cold as the icy Ether wind has been loosed within my heart.

"Fei!" It's his voice... and yet not. It is the wail of a dying child I heard on that day when the sun turned to blood and the earth turned to fire. It is the scream of an animal downed by a wanton bullet.

"Because of your existence... I... I... was discarded! I was destined to be the representative of God... having the might of an Emperor... " The cry trails off, punctuated by rasps of breath, and the voice resumes again, a high keen this time. "I was destined to be the ultimate existence... the hand of God, having power above all other humans... but I lost it. I lost it all... lost it all... because of you!"

The chill wind in my chest slows, and condenses, and slivers of ice shear my heart. Silently, I bleed.

Commander, please, why won't you listen to me? Can you hear my voice? Do you recognize me? Can't you hear me crying? Can't you hear me calling out for you?

You were everything to me. God died in my heart on the day when everything else was taken away. You were the beginning and the end, the first and the last. You picked me up and took my broken life and put the pieces back together again, made me whole when I had nothing but shards left rent and shattered everywhere I turned. If the world itself had turned upon me, I wouldn't have cared if you had stayed by my side.

You were always the best to me. Didn't you know? Couldn't you tell?

"Commander..." My own voice is feeble, supplicating, a slave's cry for mercy to her master, and I loathe myself all the more for it. "Commander, please stop this! If what you say is true, you must not fight!" My words are the words of a fool, an idiot blinded by the notion that perhaps God would spare her just this once, that some divine favor will reward suffering in the end.

Please, don't leave me. Look at me, Commander! Look at my face! Talk to me! Listen to me! I care about you! The ones you put your trust in are liars, Commander. Can't you see that with my own eyes? I love you! It was you who picked up my body so covered with blood as I sobbed and cried on that day. It was you who took me back to Solaris, and it was you who forced the scientists to set me free when they imprisoned me in the torture chamber they called a laboratory. It was you who made me a fighter. Does my gratitude mean nothing to you? How is my love lesser than the love of that false messiah who destroyed your world as Solaris destroyed mine?

"Silence! You... even you... dare to spite me..." The voice chokes on its own amassed rage and pain, and something inside me curls and withers like a dying flower. "I saved you from a life in the labs and this is how you repay me!"

"No! You are mistaken! I..." And my voice reaches a pitch like that of a sniveling child, and nausea clutches at my stomach: disgust and hatred for myself, my weakness, my foolish pride, my inability to destroy those feelings which make me feeble. I can no longer speak: not because I have nothing to say, but because a searing shame holds back my words.

Has she driven you this far, then? Has she driven her claws so deep into your mind the damage can never be undone? I will make her shed blood for every tear you wept on account of her machinations, make her pay in flesh for her crimes. Try and stop me if you will, for I would face down the wrath of God himself to drive my sword into her heart, twisting and slicing and making her feel such pain as she deemed a proper reward for the man who pledged his soul to her.

If I believed in hell, I would gladly have promised it my own soul to be certain hers would be thrown down into the pit of fire and torment along with me.

"I... I am the only one who can help myself! I am the only one who can set this right!"

When did she tell you that? Did she tell you that? Is it her... or is it you?

I want to stop him. I want to spring from my cowardly perch, here, to hold him back from fighting, restrain him with the force of my will, ill-equipped though I am to stand against the double-headed monstrosity he wields against a false enemy. And yet there is nothing I can do-- nothing; I am as helplessly bound as I was on the day when I first fell at his feet crying out for mercy. I cannot so much as lift a finger against the man to whom I owe my life and the remains of my soul, even in this hour of desperate need.

I can do nothing but cry like a frightened child-- cry over the man I had once worshipped as a god on earth, a man who is altogether too human and too mortal and torn by dark needs I had never before wished to acknowledge the existence of-- nurtured and tended by the vile woman who sucked the life from his veins for so many years, but lurking inside him, unformed, since before she deigned to defile him with her touch.

Why, Commander, why? Why did it have to be this way?

Why must you close your eyes to me even now?

Sparks fly through the air as metal collides against metal, his Gear locked in a contest of wills with Fei's; the fire and chill of Ether resonates through the air, and I shiver, wrapping my arms around myself in a clumsy bind and huddling deeper into my chair. Seconds later, I close my eyes as well, for sight is more a curse than a blessing when it reveals to you nothing but horror and rage and destruction.

*******


...Where do I begin...? Words such as these have not crossed my lips for five years. What shall I say?

For a moment I pause, my hand hesitating above the Commander's-- cold and marble-white, clenched into a fist as he lies as dead beneath thick woolen blankets-- and then, swiftly, I draw away. As if I am not fit to touch him. No, Commander... they lie to you; all liars; all wrong. It is I who am worthless...

I know behind my back they talk about me, whisper when they think I am not around to hear-- crazy, they say; insane; bloodthirsty; ought to be sent back to the labs. This is the best of it; the worst of it hardly bears repeating.

What would they say if they could see things through my eyes-- see the world as I see it, as I have seen it in the past?

I prod at memories I once wished to bury, stirring and rippling the waters, waiting to see if something of use will rise to the surface. There are whispers, fragments of songs, memories of silence and light. There was a time, a time long ago, when I felt protected-- a child cradled in the embrace of God. I cannot say for sure whether that God is dead now, or merely revealed to be the shade it was-- a childish dream borne of innocence and ignorance.

And yet, how much easier to place one's trust in a shade than in the foolishness and weakness of humankind. Even the man I had once believed to be divinity made flesh...

Tears rain from my cheeks, falling over the Commander's rough shrouds of blankets, and I bite my lip until the raw taste of blood sours my dry mouth.

No words rise to the occasion; no memories will give me quarter. If no words come to me, then, I shall make my own...

My knees ache from kneeling beside his bed, on the cold floor of Shevat's palace. The pain is dismissible, of course: it is merely physical pain, a trifle. I fold my hands together, fingers interlacing and skin pulled white and taut against bones.

"Forgive me... forgive me..." No sooner do I speak the words than my voice crumbles; it leaps from pitch to pitch, breaking and cracking, degenerating into a shaking whisper. "Forgive me, God..."

The Commander is silent, as still as ever, eternally young and beautiful in sleep.

"Forgive me. Forgive me... for not being able... to save you..."

My eyes burn and sting as they purge themselves of tears, as if they too are loathe to admit that anything at all could bring me to weeping, to kneeling and supplicating the universe like a foolish deluded child. I have never been anything else, have I? Seeing God in a man because in nothing else could I find salvation; calling myself "God's chosen" because I saw in "God's forsaken" all that I hated and loathed and wished to destroy in my own self.

Forgive me for being so ignorant, so naive. Forgive me for turning my eyes from your sorrow because I was so blinded by the light of your glory. Forgive me for not serving you better, for not loving you more. For not doing enough... for not being enough.

"I'm sorry... I'm so, so sorry..."

I stagger to my feet, struck blind by a sudden hot rush of tears; I dispel them with a quick wipe of my hand. No divine favor returns my plea; no ray of light breaks open the heavens to shine upon the man whom I love-- yes, love, as bound and tangled and knotted with so many other things as it is-- to return his soul to him.

Perhaps it is just as well. It is that power she spoke of, the power holding his mind in thrall, the power I cannot surmount-- it is his own will which binds him, and always has. And so long as he is enslaved to that notion of his worthlessness, there shall be no end to his torment, rail against it and weep though I may, cursing whatever God may exist to hear my prayers.

You bastard-- you damned bastard. You might have let me keep this, at least, keep this among all things-- and yet you took it away again, took it away and rent it to shreds before my eyes just like everything else. Do you draw such pleasure from my pain? Condemn me to burn in hell if you wish; certainly no torment you contrive shall ever be greater.

I run from the room in staggered motions, blessing the silence and the emptiness and loneliness for the time being.

And when I am alone at last-- truly, completely alone-- I weep.

~Fin.~