kindling

It had been a long, hard road.

She lost her parents to the ship they had been put on. She was nearly executed for the strange powers she manifested after that. Another woman became her mother, and sacrificed herself for her and the other children aboard the ship. She was forced to fight in the Old War, and then she was put to sleep by a Sentient who had changed hands from a sense of sympathy and longing.

She was reawakened by force, not knowing her true form. She was nearly assassinated in her sleep, and awoken once more in her real body. She was nearly taken possession of, and had to learn to fight again with her own hands. She had dealt with another who was on that ship, and she’d seen her third mother robbed from her before her eyes.

The girl named Chandra was so, so tired.

She couldn’t even articulate how much she wanted to burn it all to the ground. Burn it, burn it all away so the world can regrow like a plant. Sometimes she thought about it and laughed. She always liked fire, that’s why she had been drawn toward the frame of immolation and destruction. There was a tranquility in the chaos of the flames. A purifying fire, perhaps. It was the only way she knew to react to the way the Origin System had fallen. Fragmented colonies under constant siege by ground beef looking clones. Entire peoples enslaved to money, and the only thing standing between innocent and evil was her.

She was a figure of legend to these people. Children wore the masks of warframes to play pretend. She had been led on countless chases by tales of others like her. She was a hero to them, and she had to act like it. Especially now. She had to be the figure that Margulis was. The protecting force, the one who would die for them.

Except she wouldn’t die. The legions would.

That night, under the light of a fragmented moon, Chandra stalked through the grass of the Cetus plains. Out of her frame, in a certain state of zen, seeking the floating Eidolon fragments called vomvalysts to rip out their cores. One blast of energy from her palm faded them into a twilight state between worlds, and another wiped them out completely. Without any command, she had found herself baselessly hunting like this more and more often. Those Quills guys seemed to like these cores, she was hoping that bringing more to them would help them develop an amplifying device that just let her set things on fire instead of firing beams. Yeah, that would be sick.

Ethereal roaring from behind her, not unlike an engine being played through a series of nesting tin cans,  snapped her out of her trance and she jolted up to face the threat. Through snow-white bangs, she saw a being at least thirty times her size stomping in her direction, clutching an uprooted tree in what might have been a fist if the creature were anything other than eldritch.

Oh, fuck.

She had been lucky enough not to see it up close, even in the Old War. Others like her had fought here, but she was occupied elsewhere. Back then it was bigger, at least ten times the size it was even now. Its bones crossed the Plains as landmarks and formations, but one piece of it still lived, still walked. The Ostrons whispered about it and warned each other to stay away at night, lest they attract its ire.

She stared up at the Eidolon with a mix of wonder and abject terror. She had been good at avoiding it when she’d been hunting. How had she missed it? Was she going to die here, after being stupid, instead of mired tits deep in any of the other bullshit that she’d been caught up in?

A sweeping blast of laser energy knocked her immediately off her feet. As she lay prone, she thought about all her regrets. She regretted never having noticed Rell on the ship. She regretted never telling any mother figure how much she appreciated them. She regretted being such an idiot that she was about to get summarily crushed by an angry dead Sentient.

The beast’s ‘foot’ came down upon her, and those few seconds felt like hours.

And then… she was falling.

She was falling through a swirling, dark portal. It wasn’t like the Void portals she had blown up in the past. It wasn’t like anything she had ever experienced before. All around her, bright colors and chaos, until she hit cold stone with a dull ‘thump’.

Nothing in the Origin System looked quite like the place she had landed.

The room was round, made up in equal parts of light gray stone and vines she’d never seen before. From two walls, slabs of rock jutted from the wall, bolted in and not attached to the floor. The scrape marks underneath seemed to indicate that you could push the slabs, if you were strong enough. The ceiling seemed held together by plant matter, and a square platform about the size of a person stood in the center of the room. To the north was a long hallway, lined with old, musty carpet and paintings, ending in a door that looked like solid steel. She didn’t recognize anything in the paintings at all, except from what little she’d seen of Ancient Earth art.

All around this room were chairs and tables and other odds and ends that looked long-untouched, though they didn’t look like they came from any society she was familiar with. On one of those tables, a device she had never seen before, consisting of a screen, a few buttons and a wire ending in two pods.  In one small entryway in the walls, there was a bed and some lights, and a number more odds and ends. A writing device, and a small red and white orb with a button on it.

Most curious was the object sitting on the bed in the hole.

As far as she knew, everything in her world was ruled by technology. Circuit boards and screens and tangible light. Paper and pen were the territory of childrens’ drawings and the poorest of colonies. And even in the poorest of colonies, she had never seen this. She had only dug up their remains from Ancient Earth.

A book.

Bound in leather and embossed with dusty gold, it would be unassuming to anyone from the Ancient Earth era, but to her it was a marvel of an age that had passed millenia ago. She felt drawn toward it, even though she knew that it was unlikely that she would ever be able to read it. But before she could ever feel safe here, she knew she had to make sure this wasn’t a trap. Danger could lurk anywhere. Nothing was truly safe.

But it was so… quiet. Not even ‘too’ quiet, because above her through a hole in the ceiling, she heard the rushing sound of the wind through trees, and the chirps of birds. Those chirps were rare in the System, but here they were frequent and prominent. The air in here felt fresh. Pure.

Chandra decided that she had already almost died once. What was a second time?

As she approached, the book cover’s lettering shifted and twisted until it was in the familiar, flowing script she was so used to. It was as if it had changed just for her, like magic.

Magic, now there was something she wasn’t used to hearing. Mysticism, the unexplainable. How interesting. Some would say that her powers were magic, but there was a big difference between Void energy and… the…….

… no. No, no one really could explain Void energy. It just happened. Maybe it really was magic.

She approached the book, and held it in her hands. Immediately, her judgement brows ascended to somewhere in the middle of her forehead, and showed no sign of coming back down.

“The… Blahblahland Dance. What the hell kind of name is that.” She mumbled, flipping open the book. Inside, was indeed the instructions to a dance, outlined in brief under each step. You put your hands in the air, and you jump off the ground, then you take that funky butt and you shake it all around…

Somewhere in the beginning steps, Chandra got lost in the motions. She didn’t seem to question the steps, even though some were impossibilities to her. She didn’t know what peanut butter was, or lunchmeat. She didn’t know what a camel was or why she had to slap one. But she didn’t question, it was like it was ingrained into her mind.

There was a pause when she was finished, as she felt something build inside of her. Before long, she noticed the creeping feeling up her skin, like she was being coated in metal. She felt every bone in her body stretch out to an adult height, and felt something digging deep into her body. Even her organs felt reinforced by steel fiber. As she saw the dark steel and gold cover her body, she wondered if this was what the Infestation felt like, but painless.

In a few moments, she stood in the form of her favored warframe, watching lambent flame dance across her newly gilded hands. Not just the warframe, but the original. The Prime of the crop. She wondered if she had summoned it, but she couldn’t use Transference to step out. She had, in fact, become it. A strange sense of calm washed over her. She didn’t feel defenseless now. This was normal to her.

But on another level, she wished she could have her old form.

As she thought more about herself as she was, she felt that creeping in reverse, and again was Chandra, and not Ember.

She wondered what to do, now that she could shapeshift. She wondered where she was.

She wondered where to go now.