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Description
Alice reasoned that she was still grieving for Mars when she began to hate the nothingness around them. She hated its starry impossibility, she hated the little green ripples across the floor. She hated the empty-smelling air, dead and cold and acrid. Something about it was uncomfortably familiar, like a place she'd been once before. A creeping sensation of unease had been inching up her spine since the battle began, and it only got worse the longer she ignored it.

She was no match for Christine, in pure physical terms. Alice had not fought in years, and to be honest, she hadn't eaten in at least a day, maybe more. Christine, by contrast, was stocky and muscular, her serious expression one of a mind in top shape, concentrating on strategy and careful planning. Where Alice did her best fighting at range, Christine was monstrously clever in melee, and not half-bad at range if it came to that. While Alice had been distracted summoning her staff to hand, Christine had been throwing daggers to keep Alice off-balance and running; while Alice was dodging and running in circles, Christine was marking the patterns Alice fell into unconsciously and preparing to catch her in one of them, tripping her with the flat of that huge sword. Christine was bleeding from a shoulder wound Alice had left her with thanks to an extremely lucky shot. Alice was bleeding from a cut slashed across her thigh, and rapidly getting dizzier. She was outclassed, and she knew it, but she stubbornly kept running anyway.

When she swung around to take a defensive stand, planning to make it her last, Alice was momentarily blindsided by the huge red glow of a nebula overhead and seemingly close enough to touch. Instead of stars crowded in all around and an invisible, translucent floor below, Alice saw in that instant Mars's red-orange sky and stumbled back. Confused, she broke her own guard with a hiss of surprise and shook her head until the mirage cleared.

She didn't dare let herself worry that the fight was all a hallucination. She tried to focus on the pain; on the fact that she could feel the impact all the way up to her shoulders every time Christine's big damn sword came crashing down on her staff; on the sweat gathering on her brow. It had to be real. And as long as the fight continued, Alice didn't have to worry that she'd get sent back to Mars to die when she lost, so she wasn't willing to give up. Christine came after her, and Alice ran again.

That was how it went, over and over and over, until she heard a weak croak behind her, and the sound of Christine dropping her sword. "I yield."

Cautious, Alice glanced over her shoulder, running sideways, skirting around the angle of attack in case Christine was pulling her around for a frontal assault. Instead of a ready weapon, Alice found that she'd left Christine several steps behind, doubled over and gasping for breath. Alice was just beginning to feel sweaty, but Christine's face was pink with exertion, stray locks of her hair hanging damply in her face. She waved for Alice to come closer, too out of breath to speak, and Alice clutched her staff tighter, paradoxically frightened that it was some kind of trick to make her lower her guard.

"What?"

Christine, still catching her breath, rolled her eyes at Alice's reaction. Gripping her knees while she gulped air, she didn't respond until she was finally able to straighten up again, wobbling for a moment once she reached her feet and rubbing at the back of her neck with a tired groan. "I said I yield, Alice. Come on, you're bleeding pretty badly. Let me bandage that."

It didn't quite make sense, but Alice trusted Christine as much as she'd have trusted any Starlight Ranger, so she risked closing the distance between them, using her staff to limp along. As the adrenaline that had been fueling her through the fight began to fade, her head started to feel cloudy, the pain in her leg slipping from 'annoyance' to 'agony'. Attention wandering, Alice stared at Christine's wounded shoulder. That bloody mess was her fault. She wasn't sure if she was entirely comfortable with that. "Okay-- I mean," Alice frowned down at her thigh, trying to tell how much she'd been bleeding from the cut. The pale orange of her uniform was stained darker in a solid streak down to her knee. From there, the blood seemed to have pooled in her boot. Her foot felt suspiciously sticky. "Thanks, actually, but are you sure? I mean, we don't have bandages out here--"

Christine reached down to the hem of her green tunic without a word, and ripped off a long strip from the bottom. "Yes, we do."

"Oh."

"Get over here and lean on me while I fix you up." Christine smiled wryly, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She was older than Alice remembered, but that made sense. It'd been at least five years, maybe longer, since she'd had contact with any of the Rangers other than Elizabeth and Sunny. "I yielded already, I'm not gonna fight anymore. Thought my heart would explode at the end there, ha! It's not like I really stood a chance."

Surprised, Alice did as she was told, putting one hand out to balance on Christine's uninjured shoulder. Christine grunted under the weight, and fastened the makeshift bandage snugly around Alice's thigh, tying it off just enough to catch any further blood that might seep out of the half-scabbed wound. Alice thanked her again as she stepped back, offering a hand to help Christine up. "I was expecting to lose, honestly. You were always one of the best in combat." Wincing, she tested her weight on her injured leg, trying not to stare at Christine's shoulder again. "I'd offer to return the favor but I don't have any spare fabric. Not sure if it would help, either."

"No big deal. Don't tighten that, by the way. If it gets loose or soaked, get a new one. You don't wanna lose your leg."

"Right." They clasped hands. When Christine grinned, Alice found herself grinning back, oddly confident in her ability to continue with whatever it was Hans had planned from here on out. "Good fight. Sorry I spent most of it running away, but--"

Laughing, Christine broke their grip and knelt to retrieve her sword. "Hey, you do what you're good at, not what's convenient for your enemies. That's just common sense."

Alice glanced around, trying to spot Hans or another of his projected images, but the nothingness around them remained as deserted as it had during their fight. There was no sign of the countless other combatants Alice had glimpsed earlier, either, which seemed to suggest he'd separated each layer of reality to create an infinite battleground to accommodate the impromptu tournament. "Wonder where we're supposed to go now that we're finished. Do you see an exit, or anything?"

A shrug was the only answer Christine offered, as she prodded her wounded shoulder with two star-gloved fingers and bit her lip, nose wrinkling. "As long as I don't go swinging around my sword for a couple of hours, I'm hoping this'll scab over and stop hurting so much. Anyway, maybe we just have to wait."

"Maybe." Alice picked an arbitrary direction, and began walking. "Hey, Hans? You listening?"

Nothing responded, not even Christine, but Alice could hear her breathing and kept walking, reassured by the sound. At least she had Christine for company if Hans' plan was to make the two of them wait for the next stage of his tournament. Christine was far better company than Vicky, for example, or El Sol. At least Alice could talk to her. Still nervous, Alice glanced back regularly, making sure Christine was still there, and that she didn't look like she was on the verge of passing out from bloodloss. After the first few steps Christine had begun to follow along, walking at a very reserved pace and keeping quiet. She had a bit of a glassy look in her eyes, but when Alice asked "hey, can you still hear me?" she was quick enough to answer "yeah; something the matter?"

"Nothing." Alice willed herself not to think of the last time she'd had to watch a Ranger die. This was different. Christine was going to be okay. "Just worrying over nothing, never mind."

They walked together for several minutes, occasionally calling out to Hans, before Alice realized something had changed about their surroundings, something that made her skin crawl. Christine didn't comment on it, either not noticing or not caring. She looked about at the starry expanse around them blankly, ashen but stubbornly keeping pace. Worrying for Christine's health and trying to figure out what it was to felt off, Alice slowed her pace until the sounds of their footfalls synched up in matching rhythm. She had noticed that there were fewer stars this way when she first started walking. It hadn't struck her as particularly odd, though. There had been a surplus of them in the main area of the battlefield, as if several universes were crammed into one small room, gleaming impossibly bright and nearly dazzling the eye with their magnificence. Here, Alice could almost pretend that she and Christine were walking together under a cloudless sky on Earth, somewhere.

It was the horizon that finally made it click: the path they were walking on had begun to slope gently downhill, growing slightly steeper as they went on. Before, it had seemed that she was surrounded by space on all sides, only the faintest green glimmers defining the bounds of what passed for a floor in here. Now the horizon dipped, emphasizing the slight declination she was noticing. The change was so gradual that she hadn't really felt the difference, attributing any difficulty she had keeping her balance to the fact that she was limping.

"Do you think he's pulling us somewhere?" She asked, keeping the same pace as before but daring to glance back and see if Christine had gotten paler, again. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe they should stop walking before the incline got too steep and sent them tumbling down the floor. Christine might appreciate the break, too. "We-"

Behind her, there was simply nothing. No sign of sword or companion, no sign of a body in the distance or a door Christine had walked through. The brightly shining stars left no shadows that Christine might be hidden in, no question to the reality of her disappearance. Alice caught her breath in fear, trying to figure out how long ago Christine had disappeared. She hadn't the faintest idea. She hadn't heard anything change, hadn't seen anything that explained the sudden absence.

"Christine?" She called, voice wavering.

No movement, no sound, disturbed the silent coldness of the nothing to answer her. Alice straightened up and turned back to continue walking down the slope she'd found, her steps coming faster and faster as weariness gave way to gradual, total panic.

She had always hated being alone.

Gradually, the slope she'd been running down began to level out, leaving her running along a carved-out hollow while great, dark waves of the nothing seemed to rise up on either side of her, rippling with little green aftershocks from her passing. Fewer and fewer stars glimmered in the depths of the nothing, here, until finally Alice was running in a sable darkness, her path lit only by the soft green glow of her own footsteps striking the ground before her and the fire that flickered along her staff.

She was becoming hyperaware of the soft tapping sound of her booted feet chittering rapidly over the glassy floor, and worried that her vision might be tunneling and she'd never be able to tell. Hoping to keep herself centered, Alice focused intensely on the ground as she passed over it and the light cast by her staff. The path had leveled out some time before, and now began to rise again, the change accentuated by a faint green glow, far ahead in the distance and above her. It seemed unlikely that this could be what Hans had intended, even less so that Christine might be hidden up there, but Alice ran for the hill anyway, watching as the walls to either side of her began to glimmer greenly. At first, she thought the light was coming from the stars, returned now that she'd passed the point of dead space where they did not shine. It was hard to tell at her speed of travel, but the light didn't seem to be coming from clusters of stars. Instead, the nothing looked like it had been scoured and broken open, leaving behing sparking green patches of raw energy, hissing and buzzing as it slowly reformed. First it was just the tops of the walls that glittered like shattered glass. Then it was the full measure of the walls. And then, as she crested the incline, even the floor on which she ran, its hard and broken surface forcing her to slow her steps and pick her footing carefully for fear of a twisted ankle.

The same unease that had been infecting Alice this whole time was an overwhelming sense of dread by the time she crested the hill. Seeing what lay below, Alice stopped dead, digging her staff into the ground to keep her balance.

It was a city. The city. Even this far away she could hear the faint cries of the Fallen, jabbering and laughing and screaming down in their moving home. She remembered this place all too well: the sinister towers rising up like obsidian daggers; the city walls, low and hung with barbed wire and corpses; the rancid smell of decaying flesh on the air. It coasted through the nothing like a ship scudding over the sea, belching putrid black smoke as it passed.

Her mouth felt dry, her hands were shaking. She rasped, "Hans," and snapped her mouth shut, trying to force herself to keep breathing, to swallow until she could actually make enough noise to have a shot in hell at being heard. She tried again: "Hans!"

Nothing.

Desperate, she tried to bargain with the empty air around her, afraid to go forward, afraid to go back lest the Fallen Stars notice her scent and follow her out of this dark, distant place. "I can't go back there, please, you've got to listen. Hans?" A wild howl rose up from the city, and the laughter of thousands; the bodies dangling from the city walls suddenly caught fire, and Alice had to turn away a moment, retching. An old, deep anger started burning in her gut while she waited for it to untwist enough that she could bring herself to look again. "I'll go back to Mars and die, if that's what you want. If I deserve that. I understand, but. Not this. Anything-- anything but this."

An answer came from not far off in the darkness, some shadowed figure crouched in the most brilliant patch of the broken green. "Well," it said laughingly, "There's not anything else here, now is there?"

The burning in her gut turned hot and white, and she could feel herself shaking with it. The words fell out of her lips before she knew what she was saying, and the flames of her staff began to roil from their usual orange to a white-blue heat, hands gripping the staff so hard her fingers hurt. "I'm going to kill you."

When it rose, the figure resolved into the shape of a dark, heavyset woman, her face covered-- as was typical of the Fallen Stars-- by a grinning helmet. Hers was horned and set with six eyes, and she swung her head to a disconcerting angle, reminding Alice forcibly that the simple physical constrictions of a human body didn't apply when it came to the Fallen Stars, if only because they were no longer truly human. "Go on and try, little Ranger. Make me laugh! I like a show with my dinner."

Everything started to go curiously silent, except the roaring sound of blood in her ears. Alice didn't notice, didn't care. She shot forward at top speed, staff out like a spear, and rammed it clean through the Fallen Star's stomach, rending from navel to neck as she pulled the pronged head of her staff free with a tiny, hissing sound of triumph. "I'm going to kill all of you," she said, very matter of factly, to the thing she had disembowled, watching as it twitched and struggled, waiting until it stilled to shake the blood off of her staff. She felt calm, much calmer than she probably should, and underneath it there was a fine tremor of mind-blanking terror that she knew would eventually overcome her. Looking down upon the city, Alice grit her teeth and fought as hard as she could to bury the memories that this place brought back up, flinching at the sound of another jubilant scream down in the city streets. "That's what I should have done before."

She felt driven as she stepped away from the body of her victim and started to run, streaking down the vast, green trench of the city's wake for its front gates. Alice supposed she should have realized sooner that this was why she felt uncomfortable. After spending weeks- maybe months- chained up in one of those glittering black buildings, she recognized the particular smell of the city's exhaust, a sort of powdery, dull, metal stink that had pervaded the air since she'd arrived in the nothing, growing stronger the closer she got to the city limits.

The city of the Fallen Stars was one of the most dangerous places she'd ever been on Ranger business, and not by choice. It was small for a city, and overcrowded with its inhuman citizens, practically bursting out of the sturdy outer walls. What it lacked in size, it made up for in versatility. It could slip in and out of dimensions like a shadow, connecting with a reality just long enough to steal a few victims to feed on, and then disappear again to sail through empty space while the Fallen Stars feasted on their catch. Not all Fallen Stars stayed in the city, but those that didn't worked alone or, at best, in very small groups, making them easy targets for Starlight Rangers to find and defeat. It might be a place of residence but the city was a fortress, too, replete with dungeons for the captives. Alice was completely unfamiliar with its streets or its buildings, with the exception of one room she'd learned to hate, in the time she spent there, so her plan was wildly simple:

Get through front gates. Kill as many of the Fallen as necessary until the city docked somewhere in spacetime. Get out.

The ground became increasingly dangerous as she drew closer to the city, forcing her to keep most of her attention on her feet and where she put them. Even without looking up she could hear the howl of the lookouts posted on the guard towers over the front gates, sounding the alarm as soon as she was spotted. The answering, exultant cry of the masses within nearly broke her resolve and she considered turning back, feeling small and mad and violent, as trapped as she had been the first time they'd found her. She pressed on, ignoring the wave of befouled air that rushed out of the city as the Fallen charged forth to meet her, spilling through their gates in a frenzy.

They shrieked and giggled, they scampered on all fours or skittered sideways on extra legs they'd attached to themselves from the bodies of their victims, and they grinned, every last one of them, their masks etched with nightmare teeth, their beady eyes glittering through the darkness with some internal light. There were too many of them to take alone. Logically, she knew that: but the hate burning through her wouldn't let her stop, not when she was still shaking with the satisfaction of killing just the one, of taking some small measure of revenge for all the suffering they'd caused. They laughed mockingly at her, advancing like a plague of insects, and she screamed back, raw and wild. She'd been willing to sacrifice herself on Mars, wrought with guilt over the things they'd done, had made her do, the last time she had seen them. This time, she was going to get it right.

She was going to raze their city with her bare hands.

Description
Alice reasoned that she was still grieving for Mars when she began to hate the nothingness around them. She hated its starry impossibility, she hated the little green ripples across the floor. She hated the empty-smelling air, dead and cold and acrid. Something about it was uncomfortably familiar, like a place she'd been once before. A creeping sensation of unease had been inching up her spine since the battle began, and it only got worse the longer she ignored it.

She was no match for Christine, in pure physical terms. Alice had not fought in years, and to be honest, she hadn't eaten in at least a day, maybe more. Christine, by contrast, was stocky and muscular, her serious expression one of a mind in top shape, concentrating on strategy and careful planning. Where Alice did her best fighting at range, Christine was monstrously clever in melee, and not half-bad at range if it came to that. While Alice had been distracted summoning her staff to hand, Christine had been throwing daggers to keep Alice off-balance and running; while Alice was dodging and running in circles, Christine was marking the patterns Alice fell into unconsciously and preparing to catch her in one of them, tripping her with the flat of that huge sword. Christine was bleeding from a shoulder wound Alice had left her with thanks to an extremely lucky shot. Alice was bleeding from a cut slashed across her thigh, and rapidly getting dizzier. She was outclassed, and she knew it, but she stubbornly kept running anyway.

When she swung around to take a defensive stand, planning to make it her last, Alice was momentarily blindsided by the huge red glow of a nebula overhead and seemingly close enough to touch. Instead of stars crowded in all around and an invisible, translucent floor below, Alice saw in that instant Mars's red-orange sky and stumbled back. Confused, she broke her own guard with a hiss of surprise and shook her head until the mirage cleared.

She didn't dare let herself worry that the fight was all a hallucination. She tried to focus on the pain; on the fact that she could feel the impact all the way up to her shoulders every time Christine's big damn sword came crashing down on her staff; on the sweat gathering on her brow. It had to be real. And as long as the fight continued, Alice didn't have to worry that she'd get sent back to Mars to die when she lost, so she wasn't willing to give up. Christine came after her, and Alice ran again.

That was how it went, over and over and over, until she heard a weak croak behind her, and the sound of Christine dropping her sword. "I yield."

Cautious, Alice glanced over her shoulder, running sideways, skirting around the angle of attack in case Christine was pulling her around for a frontal assault. Instead of a ready weapon, Alice found that she'd left Christine several steps behind, doubled over and gasping for breath. Alice was just beginning to feel sweaty, but Christine's face was pink with exertion, stray locks of her hair hanging damply in her face. She waved for Alice to come closer, too out of breath to speak, and Alice clutched her staff tighter, paradoxically frightened that it was some kind of trick to make her lower her guard.

"What?"

Christine, still catching her breath, rolled her eyes at Alice's reaction. Gripping her knees while she gulped air, she didn't respond until she was finally able to straighten up again, wobbling for a moment once she reached her feet and rubbing at the back of her neck with a tired groan. "I said I yield, Alice. Come on, you're bleeding pretty badly. Let me bandage that."

It didn't quite make sense, but Alice trusted Christine as much as she'd have trusted any Starlight Ranger, so she risked closing the distance between them, using her staff to limp along. As the adrenaline that had been fueling her through the fight began to fade, her head started to feel cloudy, the pain in her leg slipping from 'annoyance' to 'agony'. Attention wandering, Alice stared at Christine's wounded shoulder. That bloody mess was her fault. She wasn't sure if she was entirely comfortable with that. "Okay-- I mean," Alice frowned down at her thigh, trying to tell how much she'd been bleeding from the cut. The pale orange of her uniform was stained darker in a solid streak down to her knee. From there, the blood seemed to have pooled in her boot. Her foot felt suspiciously sticky. "Thanks, actually, but are you sure? I mean, we don't have bandages out here--"

Christine reached down to the hem of her green tunic without a word, and ripped off a long strip from the bottom. "Yes, we do."

"Oh."

"Get over here and lean on me while I fix you up." Christine smiled wryly, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She was older than Alice remembered, but that made sense. It'd been at least five years, maybe longer, since she'd had contact with any of the Rangers other than Elizabeth and Sunny. "I yielded already, I'm not gonna fight anymore. Thought my heart would explode at the end there, ha! It's not like I really stood a chance."

Surprised, Alice did as she was told, putting one hand out to balance on Christine's uninjured shoulder. Christine grunted under the weight, and fastened the makeshift bandage snugly around Alice's thigh, tying it off just enough to catch any further blood that might seep out of the half-scabbed wound. Alice thanked her again as she stepped back, offering a hand to help Christine up. "I was expecting to lose, honestly. You were always one of the best in combat." Wincing, she tested her weight on her injured leg, trying not to stare at Christine's shoulder again. "I'd offer to return the favor but I don't have any spare fabric. Not sure if it would help, either."

"No big deal. Don't tighten that, by the way. If it gets loose or soaked, get a new one. You don't wanna lose your leg."

"Right." They clasped hands. When Christine grinned, Alice found herself grinning back, oddly confident in her ability to continue with whatever it was Hans had planned from here on out. "Good fight. Sorry I spent most of it running away, but--"

Laughing, Christine broke their grip and knelt to retrieve her sword. "Hey, you do what you're good at, not what's convenient for your enemies. That's just common sense."

Alice glanced around, trying to spot Hans or another of his projected images, but the nothingness around them remained as deserted as it had during their fight. There was no sign of the countless other combatants Alice had glimpsed earlier, either, which seemed to suggest he'd separated each layer of reality to create an infinite battleground to accommodate the impromptu tournament. "Wonder where we're supposed to go now that we're finished. Do you see an exit, or anything?"

A shrug was the only answer Christine offered, as she prodded her wounded shoulder with two star-gloved fingers and bit her lip, nose wrinkling. "As long as I don't go swinging around my sword for a couple of hours, I'm hoping this'll scab over and stop hurting so much. Anyway, maybe we just have to wait."

"Maybe." Alice picked an arbitrary direction, and began walking. "Hey, Hans? You listening?"

Nothing responded, not even Christine, but Alice could hear her breathing and kept walking, reassured by the sound. At least she had Christine for company if Hans' plan was to make the two of them wait for the next stage of his tournament. Christine was far better company than Vicky, for example, or El Sol. At least Alice could talk to her. Still nervous, Alice glanced back regularly, making sure Christine was still there, and that she didn't look like she was on the verge of passing out from bloodloss. After the first few steps Christine had begun to follow along, walking at a very reserved pace and keeping quiet. She had a bit of a glassy look in her eyes, but when Alice asked "hey, can you still hear me?" she was quick enough to answer "yeah; something the matter?"

"Nothing." Alice willed herself not to think of the last time she'd had to watch a Ranger die. This was different. Christine was going to be okay. "Just worrying over nothing, never mind."

They walked together for several minutes, occasionally calling out to Hans, before Alice realized something had changed about their surroundings, something that made her skin crawl. Christine didn't comment on it, either not noticing or not caring. She looked about at the starry expanse around them blankly, ashen but stubbornly keeping pace. Worrying for Christine's health and trying to figure out what it was to felt off, Alice slowed her pace until the sounds of their footfalls synched up in matching rhythm. She had noticed that there were fewer stars this way when she first started walking. It hadn't struck her as particularly odd, though. There had been a surplus of them in the main area of the battlefield, as if several universes were crammed into one small room, gleaming impossibly bright and nearly dazzling the eye with their magnificence. Here, Alice could almost pretend that she and Christine were walking together under a cloudless sky on Earth, somewhere.

It was the horizon that finally made it click: the path they were walking on had begun to slope gently downhill, growing slightly steeper as they went on. Before, it had seemed that she was surrounded by space on all sides, only the faintest green glimmers defining the bounds of what passed for a floor in here. Now the horizon dipped, emphasizing the slight declination she was noticing. The change was so gradual that she hadn't really felt the difference, attributing any difficulty she had keeping her balance to the fact that she was limping.

"Do you think he's pulling us somewhere?" She asked, keeping the same pace as before but daring to glance back and see if Christine had gotten paler, again. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe they should stop walking before the incline got too steep and sent them tumbling down the floor. Christine might appreciate the break, too. "We-"

Behind her, there was simply nothing. No sign of sword or companion, no sign of a body in the distance or a door Christine had walked through. The brightly shining stars left no shadows that Christine might be hidden in, no question to the reality of her disappearance. Alice caught her breath in fear, trying to figure out how long ago Christine had disappeared. She hadn't the faintest idea. She hadn't heard anything change, hadn't seen anything that explained the sudden absence.

"Christine?" She called, voice wavering.

No movement, no sound, disturbed the silent coldness of the nothing to answer her. Alice straightened up and turned back to continue walking down the slope she'd found, her steps coming faster and faster as weariness gave way to gradual, total panic.

She had always hated being alone.

Gradually, the slope she'd been running down began to level out, leaving her running along a carved-out hollow while great, dark waves of the nothing seemed to rise up on either side of her, rippling with little green aftershocks from her passing. Fewer and fewer stars glimmered in the depths of the nothing, here, until finally Alice was running in a sable darkness, her path lit only by the soft green glow of her own footsteps striking the ground before her and the fire that flickered along her staff.

She was becoming hyperaware of the soft tapping sound of her booted feet chittering rapidly over the glassy floor, and worried that her vision might be tunneling and she'd never be able to tell. Hoping to keep herself centered, Alice focused intensely on the ground as she passed over it and the light cast by her staff. The path had leveled out some time before, and now began to rise again, the change accentuated by a faint green glow, far ahead in the distance and above her. It seemed unlikely that this could be what Hans had intended, even less so that Christine might be hidden up there, but Alice ran for the hill anyway, watching as the walls to either side of her began to glimmer greenly. At first, she thought the light was coming from the stars, returned now that she'd passed the point of dead space where they did not shine. It was hard to tell at her speed of travel, but the light didn't seem to be coming from clusters of stars. Instead, the nothing looked like it had been scoured and broken open, leaving behing sparking green patches of raw energy, hissing and buzzing as it slowly reformed. First it was just the tops of the walls that glittered like shattered glass. Then it was the full measure of the walls. And then, as she crested the incline, even the floor on which she ran, its hard and broken surface forcing her to slow her steps and pick her footing carefully for fear of a twisted ankle.

The same unease that had been infecting Alice this whole time was an overwhelming sense of dread by the time she crested the hill. Seeing what lay below, Alice stopped dead, digging her staff into the ground to keep her balance.

It was a city. The city. Even this far away she could hear the faint cries of the Fallen, jabbering and laughing and screaming down in their moving home. She remembered this place all too well: the sinister towers rising up like obsidian daggers; the city walls, low and hung with barbed wire and corpses; the rancid smell of decaying flesh on the air. It coasted through the nothing like a ship scudding over the sea, belching putrid black smoke as it passed.

Her mouth felt dry, her hands were shaking. She rasped, "Hans," and snapped her mouth shut, trying to force herself to keep breathing, to swallow until she could actually make enough noise to have a shot in hell at being heard. She tried again: "Hans!"

Nothing.

Desperate, she tried to bargain with the empty air around her, afraid to go forward, afraid to go back lest the Fallen Stars notice her scent and follow her out of this dark, distant place. "I can't go back there, please, you've got to listen. Hans?" A wild howl rose up from the city, and the laughter of thousands; the bodies dangling from the city walls suddenly caught fire, and Alice had to turn away a moment, retching. An old, deep anger started burning in her gut while she waited for it to untwist enough that she could bring herself to look again. "I'll go back to Mars and die, if that's what you want. If I deserve that. I understand, but. Not this. Anything-- anything but this."

An answer came from not far off in the darkness, some shadowed figure crouched in the most brilliant patch of the broken green. "Well," it said laughingly, "There's not anything else here, now is there?"

The burning in her gut turned hot and white, and she could feel herself shaking with it. The words fell out of her lips before she knew what she was saying, and the flames of her staff began to roil from their usual orange to a white-blue heat, hands gripping the staff so hard her fingers hurt. "I'm going to kill you."

When it rose, the figure resolved into the shape of a dark, heavyset woman, her face covered-- as was typical of the Fallen Stars-- by a grinning helmet. Hers was horned and set with six eyes, and she swung her head to a disconcerting angle, reminding Alice forcibly that the simple physical constrictions of a human body didn't apply when it came to the Fallen Stars, if only because they were no longer truly human. "Go on and try, little Ranger. Make me laugh! I like a show with my dinner."

Everything started to go curiously silent, except the roaring sound of blood in her ears. Alice didn't notice, didn't care. She shot forward at top speed, staff out like a spear, and rammed it clean through the Fallen Star's stomach, rending from navel to neck as she pulled the pronged head of her staff free with a tiny, hissing sound of triumph. "I'm going to kill all of you," she said, very matter of factly, to the thing she had disembowled, watching as it twitched and struggled, waiting until it stilled to shake the blood off of her staff. She felt calm, much calmer than she probably should, and underneath it there was a fine tremor of mind-blanking terror that she knew would eventually overcome her. Looking down upon the city, Alice grit her teeth and fought as hard as she could to bury the memories that this place brought back up, flinching at the sound of another jubilant scream down in the city streets. "That's what I should have done before."

She felt driven as she stepped away from the body of her victim and started to run, streaking down the vast, green trench of the city's wake for its front gates. Alice supposed she should have realized sooner that this was why she felt uncomfortable. After spending weeks- maybe months- chained up in one of those glittering black buildings, she recognized the particular smell of the city's exhaust, a sort of powdery, dull, metal stink that had pervaded the air since she'd arrived in the nothing, growing stronger the closer she got to the city limits.

The city of the Fallen Stars was one of the most dangerous places she'd ever been on Ranger business, and not by choice. It was small for a city, and overcrowded with its inhuman citizens, practically bursting out of the sturdy outer walls. What it lacked in size, it made up for in versatility. It could slip in and out of dimensions like a shadow, connecting with a reality just long enough to steal a few victims to feed on, and then disappear again to sail through empty space while the Fallen Stars feasted on their catch. Not all Fallen Stars stayed in the city, but those that didn't worked alone or, at best, in very small groups, making them easy targets for Starlight Rangers to find and defeat. It might be a place of residence but the city was a fortress, too, replete with dungeons for the captives. Alice was completely unfamiliar with its streets or its buildings, with the exception of one room she'd learned to hate, in the time she spent there, so her plan was wildly simple:

Get through front gates. Kill as many of the Fallen as necessary until the city docked somewhere in spacetime. Get out.

The ground became increasingly dangerous as she drew closer to the city, forcing her to keep most of her attention on her feet and where she put them. Even without looking up she could hear the howl of the lookouts posted on the guard towers over the front gates, sounding the alarm as soon as she was spotted. The answering, exultant cry of the masses within nearly broke her resolve and she considered turning back, feeling small and mad and violent, as trapped as she had been the first time they'd found her. She pressed on, ignoring the wave of befouled air that rushed out of the city as the Fallen charged forth to meet her, spilling through their gates in a frenzy.

They shrieked and giggled, they scampered on all fours or skittered sideways on extra legs they'd attached to themselves from the bodies of their victims, and they grinned, every last one of them, their masks etched with nightmare teeth, their beady eyes glittering through the darkness with some internal light. There were too many of them to take alone. Logically, she knew that: but the hate burning through her wouldn't let her stop, not when she was still shaking with the satisfaction of killing just the one, of taking some small measure of revenge for all the suffering they'd caused. They laughed mockingly at her, advancing like a plague of insects, and she screamed back, raw and wild. She'd been willing to sacrifice herself on Mars, wrought with guilt over the things they'd done, had made her do, the last time she had seen them. This time, she was going to get it right.

She was going to raze their city with her bare hands.