Fighting Divinity

'It seems to me that the lot of you, rather than strive for perfection, are naturally drawn towards imperfection. For humanity as a whole is indeed imperfect. It is only when you are blind in the night do you find perfection. Ignorance is, after all, bliss.' Katina finishes reading the mysterious letter and gently places it on her desk, contemplating. Who is this stranger? Is it possible they're not human themselves? As Katina considers this possibility the floor beneath her feet is split in two and she instinctively jumps to one side chosen on nothing more than impulse. But it is a fateful choice none the less, impulse or not.

Katina runs out of her house before it can collapse on her. She looks back and notices the crack stretching across her now crowded street and beyond until it reaches the horizon. Maybe it is even reaching beyond the distant skyline. She looks up and down the great crevice, searching for friends, for family. For any familiar face at all. There are far too many people talking. Too many screaming, calling out names.

There are far too many people here on her normally quiet road. Someone shoves her out of their way. She glares at their retreating back as it disappears into the cacophonous fray. Yet again Katina scans the crowds and her gaze sweeps across the other side. To those equally stranded as the rest of these people are. Her eyes lock with someone she loves deeply and endlessly. Her little sister. Elvia.

Elvia opens her mouth to shout Katina's name but it's of no use. Katina then realizes that there is no sound reaching her ears from the other side at all as she watches Elvia's mouth open and close frantically, but only silence escapes her lips. Then it happened. Elvia must have realized that there is no sound from Katina's side either because she stops shouting, and Katina knows that look. That look that means Elvia has a terrible idea and she's about to execute it. Elvia jogs backwards from the edge in order to gain a running start, and leapt across the great crevice. There is an audible gasp on Katina's side as everyone caught their breath at once. Elvia is soaring across the chasm as though the wind is carrying her. As though she is floating on the breeze beneath her feet and Katina is holding out hope that her baby sister will make it. Elvia is nearly halfway into her sisters anxiously, awaiting arms when she smashes into an invisble barrier. Like a sparrow to a freshly, cleaned window Elvia smashes her face in. Her nose bends and shatters, and Katina's only selfish thought is that she is glad she can't hear anything because watching alone is torture enough. Katina continues to watch as the horror ensues. Elvia's jaw is forced out of place and her teeth crack and break. Her eyeballs are forced backwards into their sockets and her neck snaps when her head is forced backwards as though in whiplash. And Elvia falls down into the darkness the eerie way dead things do.

Katina's scream is so inhumanely loud it is as if no noise tears from her throat at all. It is a soul crushing noise, however soundless to the ears it may be. Despite the panicking, stampeding crowd around her she collapses and pulls her knees to her chest and weeps. Katina cries the fattest, saltiest tears she has ever cried in all her life. They are the tears of grief. The tears of a lamenting soul. Her grief is loud and meant to be heard and yet goes unheard by the uproaring crowd, and is not visible enough to be seen by frantic eyes. The frantic eyes are not searching nor focused. They are neither delicate nor careful. They are hazardous and clumsy.

A man is running through the crowd, calling for his pregnant wife. He doesn't pay any attention to the unmoving ball of human grief, too caught up in his own hysteria to see any thing outside of what is most important to him in the moment. Finding his pregnant wife is truly the only thing that matters in this moment. All else can go to hell for all he cares. It is far too late to change this course of thought when his foot digs into a girl's back. He stumbles but moves on, not glancing back once, eyes set on the course ahead. If he had looked back he would of seen the beginning of the end of one girl's world as she knows it.

Katina rolls and tumbles and offers no resistance as she nears the inevitable. She falls beyond the surface of the world. Beyond the help of humanity, to the world below she rapidly descends.

At the end of Katina's long descent into the dark fathoms beneath the earth's surface, she comes to consciousness on the ground in a deep and damp room carved out of obsidian crystal. As she sits up she sucks in a shaky breath and she feels no pain. Which she finds odd considering she just fell from the earths surface. She looks above and takes notice of all the sharply jutting rocks and thinks of how many she collided against. This only makes her believe she should have been shredded and her bones shattered at the very least. When she looks back down at herself she knows she isn't going to have so much as a scar to commemorate this bizzare experience. Slightly disappointing, but she's alive. A little dirty and bruised but otherwise very much alive and if she survived then maybe...

"Elvia! El-!"

Katina is cut off by a choked gasp of "Kat!" There's more choking, gasping, and what sounds to Katina much like gagging. She follows these ghastly noises of her injured or possibly dying sister and finds her sprawled in a heap with her limbs tangled and bent in awkward angles. Her sister, so full of light and love dying in the dark so far away from the sun in this underground prison. As she approaches and sees her sister's condition she nearly breaks down in sobs again. Elvia has survived, that much Katina is certain about. It's how much longer Elvia can hang on that she doesn't know. But she has to focus, there is no one else to help her down here.

Katina kneels down next to Elvia and cringes at the red, clotted fluid seeping out of Elvia's chest. She can't make out any wound and the only reason she can see blood is due to the luminescent gold flecks in the brackish liquid. Katina gently pulls back Elvia's shirt, immune to the oddity. She'd be a damn fool if she wasn't by now. She squints but she can't find a wound. None at all. Perhaps that's a good thing, but she can't help but wonder where the blood came from if not her sister. Maybe the wound mended, but thats ridiculous.

Nothing is so ridiculous anymore

. Katina reminds herself bitterly.

Elvia begins to spasm under Katina's fingers and she is at a total loss of how to help her baby sister again. Katina feels so useless and she offers no resistance when something comes up behind her and drags her away. She is bound and quickly gagged, with what she doesn't know, but it has a very earthy flavor. She is dragged farther and farther from her sister through the oppresive darkness, and once again passes out.

"Please. I don't know you who you are, but you have to let me go. My sister is bleeding out and I need to help her." Katina has woken from her spell of unconscious slumber for the second time in these deep bowels of the earth, and her head is pounding. Her captors don't seem to hear her, but they have removed the gag. They probably just don't care about her demands. They don't care that her baby sister could be dead, and she couldn't be there to hold her until the end. That thought alone makes her scream her frustration at how truly useless she feels. Now she really can't help her at all.

They left her bound to the wall and their silent silhouettes pace back and forth in front of her tauntingly. They are covered head to toe in shining armor, chainmail glowing black as the light of the torches refract off the metal. The armor seems to shed a kind of dark glow about the pacing guards. Not for the first time, Katina wonders what kind of creature her captors could be. Suddenly, one of guards stops and kneels in salute to a gorgeous, pale green humanoid with flowing black hair. She wears a helmet with a worn crest. Sort of like the type ancient Greek militia used to wear. She's wearing a glowing and shimmering dress of alternating gold and silver, with a curved silver and gold bow of a similar alternating pattern strapped to her back and arrows carved in the same style, a curving silver dagger strapped to her hip. She removes her helmet and hands it to the still kneeling guard, and when she does this she gives Katina a full view of her leather wings and scaled and spiked tail. With the helmet removed there is also a glimpse of pointed elf ears.

She appeared before Katina at a startling speed and on light feet. She began to untie Katina's wrist. "Forgive me sister of the Chosen. We have made a terrible mistake. Please keep our kind in your favor."

"Who-who are you?" Katina's voice wavers as she had been screaming herself hoarse only a moment ago.

"I have gone by many names, and I shall go by many more. They have changed, but I have not. You, human may call me Synbri."

"How old are you?" Katina asks, dazed by the sheer, cryptic answer. At least it was an answer though. It is more than she could ask for right now.

"My kind have been living under your kind's feet for millenia, and millenia to come. We were here long before the first surface dweller took their first steps. We are earth's first true rulers with no true ruler of our own. In short far older than you could possibly concieve in that slated mortal mind of yours."

This only causes Katina's headache to throb sharply. Yet, as though Synbri's words are an omen, Elvia is carried in on a stretcher still covered in the gold flecked blood. No matter how brightly glowing Elvia's blood is, the excessive amount of it is truly a horrendous sight to behold. Katina wants nothing more than to hold her in her arms one more time. Elvia is still spasming much to Katina's horror. She tries to sidestep Synbri but she holds an arm out in deterrence. "What's wrong with her!?"

"Not a thing. But you mustn't interfere while the healers save our queen."