It wouldn’t work. Love Lost and Cradle seemed to think so, and he’d researched powers involved.

This was an egg we couldn’t easily crack.

Heavens 12.all

Victoria Dallon, Glory Girl, Scholar, Wretch, Warrior Monk, Antares.

Labels.

In every incarnation or with any label worn, she’s a girl who cannot be swayed from her path. For a long time this girl has been this way. Delayed at times, but not swayed. This from when she learns to walk early, persevering past sore palms and knees. There is no label for this, not exactly.

In every incarnation, with every label worn, she is a woman with more appreciation for gathering information than there is from the usual person. Right now, she stares through a window that is made faintly cloudy with frost, her eyes tracking distant details. She is in a kind of shock, but her thoughts fly through and among one another as she struggles to make connections. Every face she knows is a potential answer. She studies the gaps and sees light glowing red from within, so that the points where one body part ends and another begins are illuminated.

She thinks of the man who raised her, holding a glowing orb in his hands, the light shining through. Of her mother, gripping a blade made of energy in her hand, the light shining between fingers that are clenched hard around the weapon.

She looks away from the gaps and the light and at the flesh, some raw, some pale. She thinks of the girl she grew up alongside.

There is one final defining point. An extension of the last. This person who hovers by a window, looking away from damaged flesh as noxious emotions boil up inside her, she takes what she is given and she puts it to effective work. Information. Allies. Powers.

Those powers are a ‘we’, an ‘I’, an ‘us’, inextricably connected and woven in. Until a quarter-hour ago, the I, us, and we were dampened. As is the case in any broadcast. When a host connects, the broadcast is made, and every host briefly shuts down, blacks out, capabilities and connection disabled or dampened until the new factors can be sorted. Now the multifaceted girl processes and plans. She flies and she calculates her route. She thinks, signals, frames.

The information and manner of processing is something that can be borrowed.

I am everything she is, viewed from another angle, another facet. I am a part of her that is entirely in shadow, inside skin, blood, skull, and cerebral fluid.

She embraces facets, and I struggle to conceptualize my own shape and label. The combined ‘us’ find some equilibrium, but that is her and not I.