Fall From Grace

There was a small room, almost completely darkened, on the ship. A small light burst forth from the center of it, a small, pulsating beam of golden color that ricocheted off the ceilings and walls wonderfully playfully, like the flame shadows of an earthling campfire. The changeling Tehran’he was the source of the mysterious image, and it was she alone who was meditating, tempering herself, and trying to control her fiery emotions. Which in her case could be used both literally and figuratively.

She was a master of fire, a pyrotechnic, in the worst way. An anomaly, really, seeing as she was the only changeling she was aware of not only to have an aptitude and interest in fire, but to have true prodigious skill in the art that outstripped most in the universe. She enjoyed this standing and held it well, not understanding how other changelings, built with rock hard scales, could not withstand the flames as she does.

And now her aura, usually a dark black color that was tinged with a hint of pure gold, was almost entirely the shade of sunlight, blindingly so. She’d had to rein it in from exploding outward, and it was taking tremendous force to keep it so. For some unexplainable reason, the fires within her wished to burst forth, flooding the ship with its power and brilliance for all to see. But the changeling had preferred solitude since her trip to Earth, and, some would say, for obvious reasons.

She had been off-balance ever since the Wheel of Misfortune television show. What she had witnessed there was true, raw power being unleashed, and it wasn’t by her. It was by beings who were of the ignorant and the arrogant: the heroes of the world. But what bothered her more was Atlas himself, taking over the power of Tapion, the ashen alien. She herself by no means called herself a saint, but to take over the body of another went so far against nature… it disturbed her.

She could say that was why she was unsettled and move on, couldn’t she? That it was simply that someone else was stronger, that her pride didn’t like being second-best? But even so. Tehran’he was not one to kid or lie, so she would not start now, and certainly not to herself. What was really bothering her about that was the fact that they even existed. She knew virtually nothing about the universe and it’s inhabitants.

But that was what she was doing there now. Tehran’he was off to the Kelioux Empire, to the planet of Cauldron. There, she would buy the largest ship she could afford from the master ship builders, hopefully work odd jobs for a bit until she had scraped back some money, and then go off. It was time the changeling female saw what this galaxy had to offer.

Tehran’he took a deep breath, and a bead of sweat trickled down her forehead, hitting her left eye. Immediately, the salt from it made her eyelid water, and she blinked at an increased rate. Slowly, she began to hover into the air, and a foreign command sprung forth from her mouth unbidden: “Aifnidiastiki!” Her voice was deep and scratchy; hard. It sounded as though something from ages long past came and gripped her being, forcing her to shout out in the old language.

As she called the undefined word, her right hand shot out a blast of energy. Only it wasn’t quite Ki. It was superheated plasma, in the shape of a crooked bolt. She had fired lightning from her palm. The changeling stared at her hand interestedly for a long moment. She had recently learned how to conjure lightning at great personal risk, and already, through certain meditative conditions, she learned enough control to effectively channel it.

Naturally, though, fatigue set in. Lightning was an extremely advanced form of energy, which was why when she originally used the technique, she mostly used her aura, which was already well contracted and heated. Taking it directly from her body was like firing two or three Electro Eclipse Bombs. After a moment, she realized that her cheek was on the floor; somehow she had stopped hovered, presumably by falling.

After that, things got a little dizzy, and she couldn’t be perfectly sure if anything that happened thereafter was real or not. Not that anything happened. She had given deliberate orders not to be bothered until twenty five hours had passed. She’d only been in for an afternoon when the lightning blasted out of her.

Eventually, all passed into darkness, and the sweet arms of the unconscious embraced the ravaged changeling wholeheartedly. The next thing she remembered was being gently shaken by the shoulder. Her vision swam in and out of focus for a bit, until eventually she made out a single face. It was that of the second in command of her temporary ride to Cauldron, Eronia. The first thing she heard was a groan, and immediately tried to look around, to see who had made the pitiful noise.

Eronia gave a slight chuckle. “Are you feeling alright, captain?” he asked in concern. The changeling tried to speak but found her tongue seemed too big in her mouth, which was an odd sensation, as she had never before experienced it. Shutting her jaw closed, she gave a stiff nod, and attempted to get up. Red tinged her vision, and she immediately fell back onto the bed, hyperventilating slightly.

Eronia gave her vitals and quick glance and said, “You sure lost a lot in there. What were you doing?” there was curiosity and more than a little exasperation. The changeling gave a real and true smile at that, weak though it was. Eronia was strong in his own right, she had to admit. But he hadn’t reached anywhere near levels she had. An attack like the one she had fired off would have consumed him, easily. But she could not say that.

Against her better judgment, she had immediately grown fond of the overly talkative alien. So all she said was, “More than I ought to be.”

He scrutinized her for a moment, but eventually let the comment slide. “Well, you took a pretty serious beating. I don’t think you’ll be back up to par yet in a few weeks.

…odd. The damage from the muscles shows this began days ago, possibly even a week previously. Did you overwork yourself or something while on Earth?”

Tehran’he could find no answer to that. She had not properly rested up from after the battle with Atlas, but rather immediately prepared to leave. It seemed that was the recipe for disaster. Avoiding the question, she diverted it with another: “How long is a few weeks? Soon, right? I need to be back up to speed as soon as po-”

“It’s alright, you’ll be fine. I’d give this thing two, three weeks tops. And you can be out of this bed in a couple day, if you can guarantee you don’t do anything too strenuous until you’re back up to par.”

A nod.

“Well, in that case, I’ll go then.”

SEVERAL HOURS LATER


After a while, she was deemed able to walk on her own by the nurses, and was allowed to roam the corridors. The first thing she did was order food. Since the changeling lived basically on the riches of other worlds, she had no real care one way or another for what she ate as long as it was meat. Soon enough, a steaming platter was sent to her hospital room. In it were roasted vegetables, and a tender steak of… some sort of animal.

Picking it up, she took a large bite, chewing thoughtfully. Cooked to perfection. She suppressed a burp as she swallowed the bit of meat, and continued on, plowing through her plate to renew lost energies as fast as she could. Within minutes, she was done, licking her lips contentedly and lying back, ready for a good nap.

But she would not fall asleep. Forcing herself into a sitting position, she picked up a small disc from the counter across from her and sent out a quick transmission. There was a moment of static, and then finally it patched through to the Avalon Protectorate, where she had stationed two of her most trusted colleagues.

“Yes, Master T?” the fallen angel Fonos answered. She rolled her eyes. There was nothing difficult about the pronunciation of her name, but he insisted on the little pet name. Not that she’d scold him. It stuck, after a while, annoying, though it was.

“Report?”

“Boring. Come get us off this rat hole of a planet. Give us something interesting, challenging to do. Please.”

The changeling couldn’t say she hadn’t seen that coming. Weeks upon weeks on a planet with no orders or plans, when all the real traffic is over on Earth must have been terribly dull. But she had needed them to work to get certain items that could only be bought on Avalon. Now, their work was done, and they needed a ride.

And Tehran’he was about to give it to them. “I’ve bought a ship just for the pair of you, and I’ll have it sent over immediately after I’m done with it.” Fonos was stunned into silence; clearly, he hadn’t expected relief from his burden.

“Th- Thank you! Thank you, Master T!” A great big smile broke out on his face and he shouted, “Cado! Do you hear? We’re leaving! We’re finally leav-” She let the transmission cut. They could celebrate in peace. She merely wanted them to be ready for when the ship arrived.

“And now… sleep.” And with that, she once more drifted into the land of the darkness, only this time to heal her body, rather than to escape from it.

THE NEXT DAY


Tehran’he woke up early that morning, refreshed and ready, everything in sharper clarity. She could distinctly smell the chemical scent of the room she had been staying in, and the faint small of body odor that was coming off her in waves. Stumbling to her feet, she groggily walked out of the room, rubbing her eyes desperately to wake them up.

She sluggishly made her was down the narrow hallways, bumping into others going the wrong way in decidedly tense stances. But not knowing exactly why, she didn’t bother with it. She wanted to talk to Eronia about what to do, since she had really only planned on training on this ship. Without that, she was fairly lay about.

But he wasn’t in the cockpit, or in his private room, or the bathroom, or the kitchens, or even in the infirmary looking for the changeling. Pulling aside the next person that hurried by, she got up in their face and said, “Where’s Eronia?”

The woman, humanoid in appearance and look, visibly flinched and looked away, her dark hair obscuring a face suddenly full of hurt. “Piss off,” the women whispered dangerously. Shocked, Tehran’he let go, having never before been spoken to with such undeserved venom. She hauled off and slapped the woman when finally her wits returned.

“Where is he?!” she bellowed.

She looked up in fear and resolute defiance. “You honestly don’t know? He is dead. Murdered, by the looks of it. And they skedaddled off the ship once the deed was done. But of course, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” she suddenly hissed.

“Nobody had wanted to kill him before you hired us! Why now? It must be you! You killed Eronia!” Bursting into pitiful wails and sobs, the frail lady pushed past Tehran’he and raced down the hall. The changeling stood where she was, staring at the floor where the woman had previously been standing, a hollow feeling in her gut.

The woman’s words had sent her spinning into confusion. How long had she been out for that someone could waltz in, kill the second in command, and leave without her even knowing it? And how had that even happened? There were dozens of people on this ship. There was no way that nobody saw this. Not to mention Eronia himself, who, as she herself acknowledged, could hold his own in a fight.

The world started spinning. Or perhaps it was herself; maybe standing up for too long had caused her to be lightheaded. Either way, she fell to her knees to keep her balance, still staring at that one pinpoint in time, replaying what the woman said over and over, each word like a sharp, poisoned pin that pricked her side repeatedly until an infection grew.

“You honestly don’t know? He is dead. Murdered, by the looks of it. …. must be you! You killed Eronia!" And she could find no argument to the contrary. Quite obviously, someone was out to get her. And the only thing she could focus on at the moment, because if she tried to think of anything else, she might snap, was that they needed to get out of this area and lose whoever was tracking them.

After that, they would hold Eronia’s funeral procession.

Deciding on this, she ran off to the cockpit, throwing people left and right as she did. Her bare feet thudded incessantly against the floor, oddly in tune with the chaotic beat of her heart and the sharp intakes of breath. Busting into the cockpit, she looked around the faces of the stricken men and women standing around her. She went without a word straight to the first seat and pulled up the star charts, before recalibrating the information, slightly altering their course. The final destination was the same planet, Cauldron, but they would be arriving on a less direct route.

Finished, she locked it in with the password Eronia had given her, and walked away. Nobody questioned it or wondered on it. They barely even acknowledged she did it. But the changeling herself was not yet done. She then tore off towards the space/air lock, where people were casually milling about. “Back off,” she viciously barked. Leaping, they immediately did as she ‘requested,’ as the changeling stepped inside, closing the door shut behind her. She then opened the door leading into the icy cold vastness of space.

The doors opened, and she walked out into the vacuum, stunned by its deathly quiet. She had never met a silence so omnipresently loud. But that was exactly what she needed: nobody to hear her scream. Literally.

And scream she did, of the blood curdling sorts. It was a release of the energies that had been building up in her in the form of stress, and she let it out in that scream. In fact, it was such a powerful scream that the lightning trick that had nearly killed her before was let loose from her mouth in a devastating blast of beatific, arcing, purplish plasma. It flew across the cosmos, soon disappearing from view as it searched for a planet to land on.

And the changeling sat in space, covered in cold sweat, breathing heavily. It hadn’t been nearly enough, but it had been enough to sate the dragon within her. For that was what she was finally recognizing herself as. The daemon Dragon of Frieza. And lightning seemed to be her daemon fyre. It gave her a sick pleasure to know this, that her power was so raw and uncontrollable.

But at the same time, it repulsed her, and she wished to rein in the power, show it off only as necessary, and to keep her emotions in check as she had been taught by not one or even two or her masters, but yet all of them. Including Lords Frost and Vegeta, men well known across the cosmos for their towering tempers.

The changeling eventually felt her breathing lesson in force and her pulse fell. She slowly calmed down, but still she stayed out there, for long minutes, with nothing to do but relax and let herself calm down. About a half hour later, she had finally been self-deemed ready to deal with living beings, and flew towards the air lock, letting herself in.

She then went off the cockpit, this time at a much more leisurely pace, looking up at the blank stretches of white canvas paper, and even giving an occasional false smile to one of the members of the ship, not that she thought it looked realistic in her head. Upon reaching it, she quickly grabbed the intercom and made one quiet announcement.

“There is a change of plans now. First, I will be going to my private quarters. That is where I will be for the next twenty four hours. We will then all exit the ship on the ship it has docked itself at. It is not Cauldron. It is a small planet with no inhabitants where we will hold Eronia’s… funeral… services. We will then cremate his body and scatter his ashes over the ship, so symbolically, he will be watching over each and every one of you after my leadership of this ship has ended."

She then hesitated a long moment, before thickly saying, “I am sorry.” And cutting off the intercom. Carefully avoiding the gaze of any who would try to comfort her, she stuck her head high in the air and walked out the door, headed for her private room. There, she would eat, sleep, and rest her mind in peace, readying herself for the attendance of her first-ever funeral services.

Not that being a changeling meant you wanted to go to funerals. No, in most cases, the only beings who died, deserved to; they failed in being the strongest. But in this case, that had been her fight, and someone much weaker than her had taken the blows. It made her feel cowardly, despite there was no way she could have changed any aspect of what happened.

And it was in these thoughts she dwelled, and took refuge in, from that moment on until the landing of Cauldron. She went through the motions of everything. The funeral, the grief, the ‘attempting’ to stay strong… but she wasn’t in it. Like before, she had long since created a hardened shell around that portion of herself. Eronia was dead, and he wasn’t coming back.

And that is the sad truth of it.

Word Count: 3063

121,300 pl and ki and zeni