Yelena

Berserk: Activated

HP: +25

STR: +15

SPD: +10

The whole world of the cave moved like a slow, lumbering giant, directionless and absent.

Into this absence, she flew.

Her sword snapped out like the teeth of a dragon.

All rage.

Vengeance!

The blade, wreathed in creeping onyx, sliced through the arm of the first assassin with the ease of a knife carving through soft sponge. As the other one charged she flew back, elbowing him in the stomach and grabbing him by his throat. She held him above the ground, watching his ankles flail about, seeing the dark eyes behind his veil bulge like two little jam-filled eggs set into a pallid face.

"Help!" he screamed.

"By the Don!" came the cry of another.

And out there, in the dim dark beyond, her conscience registered yet another voice laugh in delight.

"Ho, ho! Now it gets interesting, boys!"

Uncanny Danger Sense: Activated

A bolt flew to strike at her shoulder. She knew it was coming. She could feel it float through the air with the meandering slowness of everything else around her. She turned and fixed the projectile with her glazed-over eyes, seeing it trail through the air towards her even as the boy in her hand kicked against her to be free.

She brought up her sword and cut through the arrow before it even came within an inch of her face.

And then she felt it: pain. She felt warmth cascade up the side of her neck, where the boy she was holding had managed to thrust his blade and was now attempting to twist it and bring her down.

She felt herself smile at him. The feeling was sharp, but clouded. She felt the kiss of the dagger as she would feel the soft but sudden caress of a kitten's fur against her cheek.

A smile broke out on her lips as he returned to the boy.

"Fucking...Voidspawn!"

That word - there. That-that word was-that was something-

Another strike across her back broke her concentration and she threw the choking boy away, turning to bring her sword up to deflect the other one's blow. The one next to him - he'd been without a foot a moment ago, had he not? What was he doing with it attached back to his leg?

How?

Stop! Something said outside her pounding head. You're slowing me down.

She watched within the prison of her body as her sword arm met the knives of two assassins at once - both of them parrying her strikes with increasing difficulty and attempting some quick ripostes under her armpits.

But their efforts were in vain. She could feel the thing that had wrapped itself around her do nothing more than giggle in glee as the strange, warm sensation of pain poured through her.

Bloodlust: Activated

HP Absorption: 10pts for 30 secs

Then the world became a haze of sword slashes striking both men down with impossible speed. With each hit, she saw them weaken - she saw herself become faster. She saw herself draw blood from their shoulders, their torsos, their kneecaps, and saw that same blood collect and travel up her limbs to cleanse her own wounds.

"What the fuck is this thing!"

A Monster, she thought in despair.

She could barely hear their cries of torment as her sword sliced through their every attack. She never let up. She pushed them back to the very walls of the cavern and laughed in the face of their growing fear. They stumbled out of her reach, tried to counter, and were always met with three new gashes across their bodies.

They were fast. But now, she was faster.

Now she was something greater.

Now, she heard a voice outside herself exclaim with glee. You are what you should be. What you always have been.

She heard another voice off in the distance of the reality she was locked away from - a prisoner in her own skin:

"Keep it up!" it yelled. "Let's see what she can really do!"

The rage of an animal burned through the muscles bulging all through her limbs.

You would challenge me, mortal?

Two more bolts sang through the air and she saw her sword split them both apart. She surged forwards, ingoring the sprinting thieves in their futile attempts to reach her.

"Come on, honey!" the voice she charged towards yelled, spitting more bolts out of the shadowed cavern ceiling. "Come get meeeeee!"

You think the dark protects you, weakling? I live and breathe the cloak you wear.

Within her clouded mind, the thought rang out between the cries of her Voidspawn-self and the invisible antaognist that she could fight against the thing right now. In its rising fury, it was growing careless. At least a portion of its strength was required to keep her constrained.

But her half-closed eyes weren't looking at the battle raging in front of them. Instead, they were back in the burning village, watching her world being eaten by cinders.

Daddy was out there, fighting, killing. Like an engine spurned to life by her agony and frustration. She was to wait here for him, like a good girl.

"And when the hell've you ever obeyed an order?"

The voice came from someone familiar - a man with a wolf's head and a gargatnuam slab of iron moulded into a mishapen sword. He was burning, too, just like everything else around her.

And yet he was here, standing.

How?

"Because I ain't no pup", he answered. "I'm the guy that didn't let you burn away. I took you in and trained you to hold that sword at your feet."

No. It was broken. She'd seen it. That sword wasn't for her hands.

"You think I'm lying, buttercup?"

Outside the walls of the bunring village, she could feel chains wrap around her corporeal body. Daddy raged against the bounds as the assassins tried to catch him like some animal.

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GLANCE: 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

---5f803-393209--393392e7--

GLANCE: 50/10

GLANCE Channel: Implosion (LVL III)

Type: PYRO

Cost: 30

She felt the heat of the flame on her limbs as an inferno burst from Daddy's body, instantly breaking the chains and knocking back all the assassins.

Somewhere above, someone laughed again.

Now, he was going to kill that prattling clown.

"Hey - hey!" the dog-man shouted, snapping her back to the world of her broken mind. "Lena?"

Yes...that was her name.

Yelena

Her lips moved, mouthing the label that meant nothing, really.

"Nothing beyond it being something that belongs to you, and only you, buttercup."

Yes. That dumb name was the word he always called her.

That and...swordmistress.

She looked up through her tears and saw him wink at her, even as the fire coursed through his body and licked at his fur. Somehow, it never singed a single hair on him.

"It's not the only thing that's yours," he said. "Look down."

She did, despite what her head was telling her. She looked down, and her shaking hands reached towards the hilt of the sword at her feet.

The sword that had put itself together. It was still fragmented, true - she could see the marks where it had been cut into pieces. But it was still there, and as she gripped it in her hand, it felt rigid, certain, and sure.

It felt right.

"You want me to fight," she said.

The wolf huffed. "Don't you?"

She felt herself shake. The flowers in the dirt around her held the faces of her brothers and sisters who had met their end because of her fighting: there was Virtir's slashed face, oozing lambent green, and Cynthia's with its broken jaw, barely even recognizable.

They were burning, too.

Outside her head, her body was slashing through dead air, followed eternally by the cackling of the being Daddy was seeking.

She could feel his anger. His rage was pouring out his throat like vomit with every cry that sang from her lips:

You can't run forever.

Then she felt his satisfaction as her sword made contact with something heavy, fat, and bulging - a sapphire-blue scaled arm that threw viscous purple blood across her blade.

"Damn! Little blonde chick's got teeth, eh?"

The leader of the assassins - a Yok'ra clothed in the same desert cloth that clung to the team's skin - fell to the ground and retreated back, letting his wounded arm hang limp and licking his cracked lips with his forked tongue.

He was smiling.

And as she plummeted to the ground and stalked towards him, sword raised, she knew Daddy felt pride in his catch.

And she felt how, in this moment of emotional focus, he was at his weakest.

"What else do you need, Lena?" the wolf-man asked her dream-consciousness. "What's worth fighting for if not your self?"

But another voice was whispering to her too, now. Something she could dimly recollect. It was something that she knew, as her grip loosened on the sword in front of her, that she had to hear:

"Would you listen to me if I told you that's exactly the type of attitude that'll get you killed quickly down here?"

It was a voice that was as obnoxious as, she admitted, it was right.

She could strike out at Daddy just as he could strike down the snake-being in front of her. Then she could let him go on killing, raging through the Everloft with impunity, till he found a way to bring her back to the surface and use her body to enact vengeance upon the world he hated.

For she knew that now. Daddy - no - the thing inside her. It hated Averix. It hated the land, it hated the people, and it hated her most of all.

She could feel hate burning from her every orifice when the creature looked through her eyes.

Why did he hate them all? It didn't matter. It was the truth of his existence.

But it was not her truth.

She looked passed the faces of pain that stretched before her in the burning field. She recalled the ghosts of these same faces who had smiled to see her - Cynthia...Dimedrious, the wolf. Azran, the Proctor. Her family. Her true family. They had stood with her, to the end.

So what was she doing sitting down?

As the thought began to fan away the flames of her doubt, another face then appeared before her physical body. She forced herself to see it. Her eyes were open now, and the thing that had commandeered her knew she was there.

"Lads, this fight's over."

Her vision shifted to Yok'ra's left hand, and the length of chain that was affixed to it like a natural extension of his limbs. He yanked it towards him and, from our of the shadows, the thief came tumbling into the chain-bearer's arms.

Marius.

That was his name.

He didn't struggle in the slightest, nor did he look upon her with horror to see what she had just become.

Instead, he flashed his sad little smirk in her direction.

"I won't tell you I put up a fight," she heard him say.

Her possessed form gripped the sword handle harder, so that she feared the raw power running through her every muscle might now tear the thing in two.

"Hey!" The Yok'ra was shouting. "You in there, girl? Here's the deal, though unless yer dumber than you look you probably know it already: you keep this shit up, and yer pretty little thief friend says goodbye to his pretty little neck. Calm the fuck down and we might just consider letting 'im go."

He produced a dagger from his waist and held it dangling just above Marius' exposed jugular.

"You know, I wonder how many times I've been threatened in the last twenty four hours?"

"Can it, funny man," the Yok'ra spat, his dagger edging closer, but the sly smile never leaving his face.

Time was slipping away from as she lay locked away in here, watching the world like it was some turbulent dream she just had to wake up from. The wolf man bent down beside her in the dream-world, whistling at the whole predicament, and chuckling when Daddy began to take another step forward.

You will address me, serpent-filth!

Again, the Yok'ra only smiled wider.

You think to use that abominable mortal to save you? I will kill you both, and leave what remains to fester in the spume of this damned cave.

"You really do hate us, don't you?"

She felt her body stop as she said it - a question that she sent through every synapse of her mind. An impulse that 'Daddy' couldn't ignore.

"I can feel it, you know. You've been alone for a long time."

Beside her, the wolf-man chuckled and turned to her, even as she felt the being puppeteering her body howl with rage at her statements.

"You aren't gonna fight?" the wolf asked.

She shook her head and smiled. The thief out there wasn't looking at the darkness draped over her body. He was looking at her, right now. She knew it. And it was his words, again, that touched her mind through her father's fury:

"There's a time for action and there's a time for listening."

Maybe that was the piece of the puzzle she'd been looking for all this time.

"No," she told her wolf-friend, burning bright beside her.

"It's your call this time, buttercup. What're you doing?"

She smiled at him, without really knowing why.

"I'm listening."

For some reason he laughed at that, before turning away and melting into the fading twilight of the dying day.

"Makes a change," he murmured.

And yet even as she watched him go with a smile and then realized she knew his name - Dimedrious - it was now her father's anger that cut through the illusion of her dream:

You know nothing, girl.

"You're wrong", she replied, standing on legs no longer staggering under the weight of her self. "I know what hatred is, and your full of it. All I have to do is feel the rage that bubbles over in me when I let my guard down. That's you, telling me to let you out."

He roared again - and a flash of lightning broke through the burning field before her, signalling the onset of thunder and rain.

"You come to me through my sadness and pain alone," she yelled into the torrential rainfall. "And I've listened to you enough times to know that, when you rise up in me, its because you're in pain, too."

Another crack of thunder. Now, she didn't know what was happening in the outside world. Now, she had brought him here, with her.

The assassins and the thief outside could do nothing but watch her claw at her skull and wave her sword around at nothing. They watched, and waited.

You are nothing but an animal! The creature's voice came again, contained in another spear of lightning that pierced the ground just beneath her feet. An aberration! A mistake of nature!

"It's easy to think of us like that, isn't it?"

She weathered the storm of her mind without the need for her blade. Each bolt of lightning struck at her shoulders and scorched her skin. But she still stood, watching the rain beat down upon the earth, dousing the fires that had raged in the darkest depths of her dreams.

"That's what they all say about the hybrids," she told the lightning-streaked sky. "And that's what they said about me. That's why they cast me out. Its easier for the hateful to think of us as lesser than them."

This time the lightning struck at her heart, delivering a charge intending to silence. To cull.

But she stood.

"Because deep down you and your kind - you Voidspawn - you're afraid that you're more like us than you think aren't you? You were just like us, once. And you hate remembering that, don't you?"

Now the rainfall stopped. The cloud-filled sky twisted in on itself and a torrent of black bile poured through its cracks. She gasped once before she felt her breath leave her, and she looked into the eyes of the thing for what it was - the outer her - the self that had its undulating, smokey claws around her throat.

Call me Voidspawn, girl? it said through faceless, formless shadow. ME? Your ignorance is as pathetic as your future. Those that came before you taught you nothing.

She did not grab at its ethereal hands, nor did she attempt to cry out. Instead, she fixed it with the same smile the thief wore. There was something about it that irritated her more than anything she'd ever seen. She'd wear that same smile proudly for this pest.

"True, I don't know what you are", she gargled through its tightening hold. "But I know what you feel. I felt the same thing, up there, and that's why you attached yourself to me. All this, down here, this was your real prison. And you know, deep down, that I'm going to send you right back in here, even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming to do it."

She let her smile grow as she felt its rage boil her blood.

"Because this is where you belong."

It brought its formless face close to her and bared a set of bloodstained fangs - her teeth, grown and elongated beyond recognition. She could smell the scent of death on its breath. But she did not flinch even as it smeared its spittle across her stalwart face. She looked into its tunnel-like eyes, and then she heard it:

You know nothing, it said again. Nothing!

And this time is declaration was punctuated by something that might have been laughter spilling out from its black throat.

They really taught you nothing! You are as forsaken as I, child.

More laughter - desperate - like a traumatized soldier barely clinging to the last vestiges of their sanity. It was so loud that it broke through the unreality of the dreamscape. She could see the cracks lengthening in the sky.

All this, it said, gesturing around them as the world of The Everloft broke through the dream. IT BELONGS TO ME.

Then: a spark. A light that switched on, somewhere. A key that turned and opened a door. A feeling of weightless abandonment, accompanied by a sharp sensation of pain across the back of her head.

And the dream of the tree, and the burning village, faded away into nothing.