xp_logs | Behold A Pale Horse

As Death deploys his avatar powers, ready to claim not just District X but the heart of New York, Kane has time for one last desperate gamble.

It wasn't going to be enough. They had beaten Marius from one side of District-X to the other without being able to put him down. And now, tucked in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, he was hunkered in the middle of a globe of energy which slowly began to grow. Bullets disintegrated against the edges, energy dissipated, and even the most powerful psionics simply evaporated as soon as they reached the edge.

Garrison made a quick calculation and swallowed hard. If his attack had the same radius as the others in Spain, Kenya and Alabama, it would swallow all of Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and better than half of Brooklyn. In the middle of the day, millions would die to fuel this creature that had taken control of Marius. He fished out the neural interrupter he'd grabbed from the mansion, naively having hoped he could have gotten close enough to maybe incapacitate whoever Death was even without his powers.

Except.

Kane did have powers. Not ones he could control or even really understand, but-

"Kurt, I need you at the corner of 10th and Avenue B, ASAP!"

Kurt was there almost before Kane had finished speaking, thankfully familiar enough with the area for the teleport. "What do you need?"

"I-uh-" He stopped and swallowed heavily. "I need you to get me directly above that." He pointed to the growing sphere of energy.

Kurt turned to stare at it, then back at his teammate. "...Why?"

"I have a plan. I think. I- fuck, unless you have a way of evacuating millions of people in the next few minutes, I gotta try something." Kane said, looking between the energy globe and Kurt several times. "Trust me. I... I think there's a better chance this will work than any other option."

"Tell me what..." He looked again at the globe, and decided there was no time to ask for detailed explanations. "Do you think you will survive?"

"That's the plan. Drop me and have whoever we've got standing by. If I'm right, you'll have a chance to put him out." Kane said, transferring the interrupter to his other hand. "And if not, tell the others... there wasn't another option."

"All right." He reached for Kane's arm. "Ready?"

"Fuck no. But let's get this done."

A moment later, they were above the sphere of energy, and then Kurt released Kane's arm and returned to where he had been to watch, already pulling out his communicator.

Kurt let go and Garrison started to fall. He wished he had a better plan. Some knowledge from the experts that said he wasn't gambling everything on a gut feel and a chance. But, well, it's not like that was on the cards. There was a former friend out to kill millions for no reason other than to bring back a creature so ridiculous that he was a myth. And he might do it.

Kane pulled the neural emitter from his pocket as he fell. "OK, so the universe wants to keep me alive. Let’s see how much." He muttered to himself as he hit the edges of Death's radial projection.

There was something viscous about the energy. It resisted his passage as if he were trying to penetrate the membrane of some vast cell, the very air dragging against him as if he were fighting against a current. The outer cusp of the sphere finally gave and cold enveloped him, cold so profound it stole even the memory of warmth, and he was through.

He exhaled, and instead of mist his breath turned to shards of glass.

Kane had a moment of understanding what being shredded to a million pieces felt like. His gasp of pain changed as he was suddenly back together and whole.

The fibers of his uniform began to squirm against him, shrieking like a chorus of cicadas. Patches of fabric began to unravel and reknit, here as chitin, there as glass. The communicator embedded in his collar began to keen like a dying animal before it tore free and, writhing with agony, tried to plunge itself into the side of his neck.

"Fucking-" Kane grabbed for it but without his powers, it stabbed deep into his neck.

"I eat your reality sandwich!" The beast twittered at him.

Above him a flock of pigeons, swallowed by the sphere, began to rain around him. Their breastbones split with peals of laughter, spraying loops of intestines like canned snakes. The tiny bodies shed feathers in flakes of gold leaf and gristle that hung in the air to bloom like arboreals.

Kane twisted, tearing the creature from his neck and throwing him away in a shower of purple glitter. Now facing the sky, he pivoted, trying to get back into control. But the world around him suddenly froze for a moment. The cold crept up his arms and legs, frost covering his body. As the last of the ice encased his face, he had time for one last breath.

And then exploded into a million shards of music.

The choir of his body spiraled down in a gust of fresh-baked bread and fur in winter. A handful of notes crashed into the side of a building with a sound like a car alarm and enough force to knock loose bricks that softened into a shower of tropical fish. The color blue turned to gelatin, stop signs suspended within it like sliced fruit. The street lamps began to conspire.

In the moment, Kane flickered back into view, suspended in the ether as it changed, luminousing as it turned clear and hard; the first few cracks halting and spread out. Quickly, they turned into a rush, running together and expanding in every direction, delineating the sky into a billion tiny pieces and then, with a thunderous crash, exploding, inflicting a thousand cuts as he fell through the sharp and terrible cloud.

A strata of bitter recriminations and dead rats battered him like a human speedbag. Snatches of profanity peeled away to ignite against his skin only to twist into a string of Christmas lights that constricted like a snake, burning all the while. Broken umbrellas crawled from the gutters and rose like a swarm, buffeting him with their broken ribs and the taste of Neil Diamond. Reality bled.

The scatterscope of broken worlds pinwheeled around him as the world spasmed and cracked trying to thread through the impossible worlds in when Kane wasn't immediately torn apart by the death field. He groaned, groping at consciousness in the madness, holding to the flicker edge of sanity as each world was more improbable as the last. Death was just below him, dripping Marmite and ancient speeches, stretched out to greet the coming morn. He reached out with an arm both flesh and steel and marshmallow and tentacle porn and Ruth Zuchter from the third grade who once spit in his hair. He reached out and slapped the neural emitter on Death's head as a billion possibilities of him smashed into the ground next.

Some current in the air warned Death something was coming. At Garrison’s approach his head began to tilt upward, and an instant before the inhibitor hit him his left eye flared like the sun.

Then roiling chaos slammed into anti-life, and Death unravelled.

The Horseman's body exploded into ropes of meat and blood only to reknit with near instantaneous speed, like video footage played in reverse. Worms of muscle twisted and reformed within the shattered armour in a spray of blood and sputtering plasma. remaking, unmaking, remaking again. Chaos churned against probability, battling for some sort of equilibrium. A coin spinning in the air.

Both the sphere of death and storm of chaos vanished. All that remained behind was a figure that was somehow diminished, the grey pallor of armoured skin now softened to olive.

Kane was flung off to one side, tumbling over and over on the concrete until he hit the grass and stopped. Smoke rose from his body, and blood seeped from a thousand cuts. He tried to get his hands under him and then collapsed, spent. Meanwhile, the neural interrupter was scything energy up and down Marius' nervous system.

The Horseman was still for a few heartbeats, stunned or unconscious. And then, suddenly, he started to thrash.

He began to tear at himself, but not at the inhibitor. Instead it was his own chest he clawed for, opening bloody tracks across the brand of Akkaba that had been cut there. He screamed, and in his screams were anguish, and despair, and what might have been a word.

It might have been "no".

Bands of energy immediately sprang to life around him, trying to restrain him, but even then Topaz stayed out of sight, concentrating on keeping Marius down and rooting through his mind. And it was definitely Marius Laverne this time - the muted, flat affect she had felt before was gone, replaced with a pure terror only a human on the verge of breaking could feel. There were other things still crawling along on the edge of his mind, but she was working on those.

If anything, the restraints seemed to make it worse. He was bleeding blind desperation now, sparked by some association with the restriction of movement and pressure on his body, thrashing against them like a wild animal.

But warring with that emotion was something that pressed forward with the inexorability of a glacier, vast and unrelenting. It was a presence, an intent, beginning to build. Seeking to regain purchase.

Topaz immediately pushed back on that intent, but she could already tell she was going to need a much more permanent approach. She tapped her earpiece to quickly say, "Kane is unconscious, I think, Marius is himself with the powers inhibitor on him, there's still something trying to latch onto him, I have an idea for taking it out and it's going to suck for everyone involved."

She closed the comm link again before anyone could question her, refocused fully on Marius, and dug deep into his mind. She found the root of the panic, and pulled, unraveling the emotions like a cat with yarn, and winding it for herself.

Jumbled impressions poured into her mind.

Strapped down beneath bright lights as the needle went into his arm. Vulnerable. Helpless.

Darkness and pain now. Conscious but paralysed. Desperation. Fighting. Fighting. Hopelessness closing around him like a fist at the realisation he could only lose.

Despair, knowing no one would come for him.

No one had come.

The unbidden memories and emotions nearly brought Topaz to her knees. She struggled to stay afloat in the drowning hopelessness and despair and fear and helplessness. It wasn't hers, the memories weren't hers, and she certainly wasn't keeping them. She wound them up, infusing the strands with magic as she went, until she was satisfied...

And then, with an enormous effort, she pushed the entire magical emotional bomb right back into Marius's head, shoving it down the link to whatever was trying to take over.

Unstoppable force met immovable object, and the link between the two shattered.

Feedback screamed through head and heart as the channel exploded. There was an endless moment of unendurable agony, and then . . . nothing.

He lay on his back, staring into the empty sky. Topaz had taken all he had. Thinking nothing, feeling nothing, he watched his own breath stream into the cold.

Yet in the emptiness that remained he became aware of a different absence. A thought occurred to him:

Je suis libre.

He realised his face was wet. He didn't understand.

Free again, Marius lost consciousness.