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Description
It had been years since a premonition had come to Alice. Up to the day of the first journey over to the colonies, she'd dreamed of the other Rangers constantly, often so much that she could not focus on the here and now. Sometimes she was able to help them. More often, she was too late by the time the vision even came. There was something about the karma of the wishes her fellows made that seemed to always disguise the deaths as disappearances, suicides or accidents. When she was too late, there was no way to even prove that the deaths she had witnessed in her visions were murders. When she was in time, she wasn't always enough to avert disaster, not on her own.

Discouraged, Alice had signed up to move to Mars, thinking that at least in a smaller community on a partially terraformed world, she could never be too far away to assist a Ranger in trouble. She followed the tide of curious explorers, telling those few that asked why she was going that she had signed on in search of a grand adventure. Once she was on Mars, the images that had plagued her for the last fifteen years or more seemed to cease transmission. Like a radio losing signal, she'd gradually seen fewer and fewer visions, until after a month or two they had been completely gone.

It had been a relief, that loss. Some part of her had known she should feel guilty, but Alice had been happy to give that unwanted burden up, to stop tallying the dead on the inside of her helmet. The score was too high in the favor of the Fallen, anyway. So, gradually, Alice had forgotten what it was like to have a vision, forgotten the sheer, unbending intensity of them.

Now, pinned beneath the boot of a woman bent on claiming the Omega Star and tearing the universe apart at its seams, Alice was hit.

She could taste the stars, a pure, hot chalky flavor that burned her throat going down. She could see the death rattles of the Rangers of an entire world, an entire universe, see the colors of each dying breath as they etched their mark into a cold black slab of rock. Each death sealed the black prison tighter, and Alice could feel its heartless pull, even just seeing it from this far away. She was overwrought with despair and clawed at the dirt where she lay, body arching up into the painful weight on her chest.

The smell of a soft green name, of the Atlantic ocean on the cliffs above it, filled her head. It was cloying and intense and tickled her nose. It unfurled like the petals of a flower and broke free of her dry, aching, burned throat:

"Iris!"

The woman's eyes widened in shock, and then the Earth itself reached up to swallow Alice down, stealing her into the depths of its clay and dirt, six feet beneath.

She should have fought but truthfully, Alice was tired. The earth shaped into a hallway and Alice fell to the floor of it. Slowly, she sat up, curling over to rest her head on her knees, just trying to breathe. Wet rock and the faint smell of lichen came to her, under the sharpness of blood and smoke that clung to her, but it was several minutes before the smell stirred her from the fugue of her terrible vision. Alice looked up at the solid rock of the ceiling and wondered if Iris still stood there, enraged that her prey had escaped. She couldn’t bring herself to laugh; really, she felt sorry for that woman, that thing that was consuming her. Alice, of all people, had long understood what it felt like to be alone.

Her strength was rapidly fading, so Alice took stock of her surroundings and pushed herself to her feet, leaning heavily against the stone wall at her right. There was nothing behind her but sheer rock, just as above. The floor was etched with the familiar symbol of the constellation Cetus. From here a long, dimly lit walkway stretched out, curving until its end was out of sight. The light seemed to be coming from where ever the hall eventually led, made pale by the sheer distance from here to there.

It would have helped if she could summon the Staff of Stars to her hands. Alice tried: there was not even the answering spark she’d grown to expect, and she pressed on instead with one hand bracing her weight against the wall. Alice limped along, guided by the distant brilliance of the light that let her see where she walked. She thought she might have heard a faint humming, deeper down the passage. Perhaps it was the source of the light.

As she walked, Alice began to find it difficult to remember where she was, or when. It seemed that she might have been a schoolgirl, limping home with a sprained ankle on the first day her grandmother had forgotten. Or, perhaps she was sixteen, shuffling dead-eyed through the church to the coffin laid at the front, to the body that had been her grandmother, the husk of a great woman, the shell of her most dearly treasured friend.

Alice's fingers brushed across a stripe of jewel set in the hallway, a bright red arc of rubies laid within a dark lead band, and the humming thing let out a bellowing chime that resonated in every bone of Alice's body. She stopped a moment, startled, and when she started forward again it seemed that her breath came easier. She felt a little less weary than she had before. The hallway, though it still seemed to shift and change-- a train tunnel, with Sunny by her side; now a walkway between two enormous buildings in New York, with Colette beckoning her onward-- was definitely real, and her steps came ever more certain as she struggled and shuffled and limped along its serpentine coils.

There were jeweled markers, like the first, every six meters. Each was a different color: the first, red; the second, orange; the third, yellow. By the time she had reached the end of the corridor, Alice realized that she was no longer limping, her aching leg responsive and painless. She was breathing easily, and even the exhaustion that had nearly killed her, back on Mars, was gone.

The final jeweled marker was a deep, pure indigo, set just before two shining stone doors, and when Alice touched it, the doors that had held the overpowering glow of the central room back receded into the floor, rolling smoothly open. The stone was cast aside, and Alice stood awestruck before the smoking mass of a still-glowing, still-living star. Its surface, crystalline and hypnotic, flickered brightly with internal light. The room itself was superheated, and each breath she took of the air within scalded her lungs.

Unperturbed, Alice stepped forward into the room, and let the doors roll shut behind her.

As soon as she had crossed the threshold, the massive fallen star disappeared from her sight, the room and world and time and place supplanted by the face of Alice's grandmother, as it had been before everything, before it all.

And Alice was nine again before her, and started laughing until she cried, throwing herself into her grandmother's arms to simply hold her until the ache in her heart began to fade.

"Are you all right, little dear?" Wrinkled, strong hands smoothed along Alice's shoulders, cold against the heat of her sunburnt skin. "I thought you didn't have a swimsuit, yes? And you've been out for hours. I was worried."

She was stricken by the same sense of guilt she remembered from all those years ago, and stammered, overcome with embarrassment for her crime. "Well-- I saw that mother wasn't using hers, and I'm not that much littler, so I used it. I cut it and made it the right size and everything. See?"

“And suppose your mother had wanted to go swimming, too?”

She caught her breath, feeling her throat close. It was an awful feeling, that sense of disappointment and displeasure in her grandmother’s voice. Just as much as she wanted to answer correctly, to show that she understood, Alice had been possessed of the strong desire to lash out at her mother-- who never wanted to do anything with Alice anyway-- and her father, who couldn’t be bothered to buy a swimsuit for his daughter so that she could play with the other children at the beach. Rather than risk recriminating her parents, which was surely not permitted by her grandmother, Alice had said, vehemently, “Well, I didn’t go and steal one-- doesn’t that count for anything? I just wanted to go swimming. I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Her grandmother had pulled back, and when Alice met her eyes, she smiled. “You didn’t ask, first. Even if you think the answer might not be something you want to hear, you should always ask, and respect the answer you get.”

The memory, which had seemed as strong as a vision, vanished in a smoky blast of hot air, and Alice was again in the room with the fallen star, sweating before its heat, her breath coming in short, sharp gulps. She licked her dry, cracked lips and took a step forward, another, stopping just shy of its flaming, glittering surface. Extending one, shaking hand, Alice hesitated before touching her fingers to the crystal.

She could barely think, let alone hear herself when she spoke over the hissing of the steam that it exuded, but Alice lifted her head and said, “Are you waiting for me?”

The star did not seem to respond, or even to notice her (if stars could notice anything in the first place), but the heat didn’t seem quite as bad as it had a moment ago, and Alice steadied her hand, taking a deep breath for courage.

“If it’s all right with you, then-- I have to save Iris. And I think I’m going to need your help to do it, okay?”

Its myriad surfaces began to flicker and chime with a deep, resonating laughter, a wild roar of belltones that rang deep in her thoughts and made her dizzy. Alice laid her hand on the crystal, and was surprised to find it suddenly pleasantly cool in the room. The star’s surface under her gloved fingers was still slightly warm, but that was it: and then its voice filled the room, booming and unfathomable.

It did not speak in words, its power flooding and flowing through her, but it told her the history of the entire universe that it had witnessed. It told her of the heart of the star, which still beat far off in the distant reaches of space, a Neutron star that had cast off this particular fragment billions of years before in a supernova explosion as it collapsed in upon itself. It showed her the universe in its infancy; it showed her all the Starlight Rangers, of all the species that had risen and gone before. It showed her those that had Fallen, and those that had simply died.

Alice was suffused in its energy, and felt herself rising from the ground, borne up by the light of the star fragment that she had found. She reached out for Francine, and was delighted when she felt the touch of her fellow Ranger’s mind, startled and hopeful and incredulous.

“Francine,” she whispered, and turned to find her, far below on the battered ground of the wasted world they had come to. Francine was the only one still standing of their small party, Jonathon crouched protectively over Felix and Hans still trapped in the rapidly fading prison his powers had constructed for him. Over Felix and Jonathon, Iris stood with the long, deadly point of one sword pulled back, poised to stab it forward and through them both, and in the distance, laserfire and smoke stood still, as if frozen.

Alice dropped to the Earth, and rushed to interrupt the tableau before its unhappy conclusion could be realized, crouching between Iris’s blade and the fallen forms of her friends.

She caught the blade in one hand, and as time seemed to slowly catch up to her, she pushed through it with her fingers, calmly watching as it melted before her touch, half of the metal evaporating away, the rest dripping harmlessly to the dirt. Iris’s response came in slow motion, her fury turning desperate, wounded, as she flinched back from Alice.

“You--!” Iris hissed, tears in her eyes, looking shocked. “How could you-- how could you!”

“Alice!” Francine’s voice sounded confused and surprised, and she shouted in shock as power lit up her armor, lifting her from where she’d knelt.

“What?” Jonathon dared a glance over his shoulder for an instant before his battle instincts took hold, and he leapt out of harm’s way, carrying Felix’s unconscious body with him to protect his friend. “Did we-- what? What happened?”

Alice summoned the Staff of Stars to her hand, and drove it into the Earth with a crash of lightning; it flickered and crackled where she had planted it, and when Alice stepped away, the Staff’s energy struck the sky, summoning thick, cool winds. The smoke began to dissipate, and clouds formed in its absence, almost from nothing.

It began to rain lightly over the city, and Alice stood beneath, relishing the cold. She told Iris simply, “Because you didn’t ask, first,” and lifted her hands into a defensive position.

Description
It had been years since a premonition had come to Alice. Up to the day of the first journey over to the colonies, she'd dreamed of the other Rangers constantly, often so much that she could not focus on the here and now. Sometimes she was able to help them. More often, she was too late by the time the vision even came. There was something about the karma of the wishes her fellows made that seemed to always disguise the deaths as disappearances, suicides or accidents. When she was too late, there was no way to even prove that the deaths she had witnessed in her visions were murders. When she was in time, she wasn't always enough to avert disaster, not on her own.

Discouraged, Alice had signed up to move to Mars, thinking that at least in a smaller community on a partially terraformed world, she could never be too far away to assist a Ranger in trouble. She followed the tide of curious explorers, telling those few that asked why she was going that she had signed on in search of a grand adventure. Once she was on Mars, the images that had plagued her for the last fifteen years or more seemed to cease transmission. Like a radio losing signal, she'd gradually seen fewer and fewer visions, until after a month or two they had been completely gone.

It had been a relief, that loss. Some part of her had known she should feel guilty, but Alice had been happy to give that unwanted burden up, to stop tallying the dead on the inside of her helmet. The score was too high in the favor of the Fallen, anyway. So, gradually, Alice had forgotten what it was like to have a vision, forgotten the sheer, unbending intensity of them.

Now, pinned beneath the boot of a woman bent on claiming the Omega Star and tearing the universe apart at its seams, Alice was hit.

She could taste the stars, a pure, hot chalky flavor that burned her throat going down. She could see the death rattles of the Rangers of an entire world, an entire universe, see the colors of each dying breath as they etched their mark into a cold black slab of rock. Each death sealed the black prison tighter, and Alice could feel its heartless pull, even just seeing it from this far away. She was overwrought with despair and clawed at the dirt where she lay, body arching up into the painful weight on her chest.

The smell of a soft green name, of the Atlantic ocean on the cliffs above it, filled her head. It was cloying and intense and tickled her nose. It unfurled like the petals of a flower and broke free of her dry, aching, burned throat:

"Iris!"

The woman's eyes widened in shock, and then the Earth itself reached up to swallow Alice down, stealing her into the depths of its clay and dirt, six feet beneath.

She should have fought but truthfully, Alice was tired. The earth shaped into a hallway and Alice fell to the floor of it. Slowly, she sat up, curling over to rest her head on her knees, just trying to breathe. Wet rock and the faint smell of lichen came to her, under the sharpness of blood and smoke that clung to her, but it was several minutes before the smell stirred her from the fugue of her terrible vision. Alice looked up at the solid rock of the ceiling and wondered if Iris still stood there, enraged that her prey had escaped. She couldn’t bring herself to laugh; really, she felt sorry for that woman, that thing that was consuming her. Alice, of all people, had long understood what it felt like to be alone.

Her strength was rapidly fading, so Alice took stock of her surroundings and pushed herself to her feet, leaning heavily against the stone wall at her right. There was nothing behind her but sheer rock, just as above. The floor was etched with the familiar symbol of the constellation Cetus. From here a long, dimly lit walkway stretched out, curving until its end was out of sight. The light seemed to be coming from where ever the hall eventually led, made pale by the sheer distance from here to there.

It would have helped if she could summon the Staff of Stars to her hands. Alice tried: there was not even the answering spark she’d grown to expect, and she pressed on instead with one hand bracing her weight against the wall. Alice limped along, guided by the distant brilliance of the light that let her see where she walked. She thought she might have heard a faint humming, deeper down the passage. Perhaps it was the source of the light.

As she walked, Alice began to find it difficult to remember where she was, or when. It seemed that she might have been a schoolgirl, limping home with a sprained ankle on the first day her grandmother had forgotten. Or, perhaps she was sixteen, shuffling dead-eyed through the church to the coffin laid at the front, to the body that had been her grandmother, the husk of a great woman, the shell of her most dearly treasured friend.

Alice's fingers brushed across a stripe of jewel set in the hallway, a bright red arc of rubies laid within a dark lead band, and the humming thing let out a bellowing chime that resonated in every bone of Alice's body. She stopped a moment, startled, and when she started forward again it seemed that her breath came easier. She felt a little less weary than she had before. The hallway, though it still seemed to shift and change-- a train tunnel, with Sunny by her side; now a walkway between two enormous buildings in New York, with Colette beckoning her onward-- was definitely real, and her steps came ever more certain as she struggled and shuffled and limped along its serpentine coils.

There were jeweled markers, like the first, every six meters. Each was a different color: the first, red; the second, orange; the third, yellow. By the time she had reached the end of the corridor, Alice realized that she was no longer limping, her aching leg responsive and painless. She was breathing easily, and even the exhaustion that had nearly killed her, back on Mars, was gone.

The final jeweled marker was a deep, pure indigo, set just before two shining stone doors, and when Alice touched it, the doors that had held the overpowering glow of the central room back receded into the floor, rolling smoothly open. The stone was cast aside, and Alice stood awestruck before the smoking mass of a still-glowing, still-living star. Its surface, crystalline and hypnotic, flickered brightly with internal light. The room itself was superheated, and each breath she took of the air within scalded her lungs.

Unperturbed, Alice stepped forward into the room, and let the doors roll shut behind her.

As soon as she had crossed the threshold, the massive fallen star disappeared from her sight, the room and world and time and place supplanted by the face of Alice's grandmother, as it had been before everything, before it all.

And Alice was nine again before her, and started laughing until she cried, throwing herself into her grandmother's arms to simply hold her until the ache in her heart began to fade.

"Are you all right, little dear?" Wrinkled, strong hands smoothed along Alice's shoulders, cold against the heat of her sunburnt skin. "I thought you didn't have a swimsuit, yes? And you've been out for hours. I was worried."

She was stricken by the same sense of guilt she remembered from all those years ago, and stammered, overcome with embarrassment for her crime. "Well-- I saw that mother wasn't using hers, and I'm not that much littler, so I used it. I cut it and made it the right size and everything. See?"

“And suppose your mother had wanted to go swimming, too?”

She caught her breath, feeling her throat close. It was an awful feeling, that sense of disappointment and displeasure in her grandmother’s voice. Just as much as she wanted to answer correctly, to show that she understood, Alice had been possessed of the strong desire to lash out at her mother-- who never wanted to do anything with Alice anyway-- and her father, who couldn’t be bothered to buy a swimsuit for his daughter so that she could play with the other children at the beach. Rather than risk recriminating her parents, which was surely not permitted by her grandmother, Alice had said, vehemently, “Well, I didn’t go and steal one-- doesn’t that count for anything? I just wanted to go swimming. I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Her grandmother had pulled back, and when Alice met her eyes, she smiled. “You didn’t ask, first. Even if you think the answer might not be something you want to hear, you should always ask, and respect the answer you get.”

The memory, which had seemed as strong as a vision, vanished in a smoky blast of hot air, and Alice was again in the room with the fallen star, sweating before its heat, her breath coming in short, sharp gulps. She licked her dry, cracked lips and took a step forward, another, stopping just shy of its flaming, glittering surface. Extending one, shaking hand, Alice hesitated before touching her fingers to the crystal.

She could barely think, let alone hear herself when she spoke over the hissing of the steam that it exuded, but Alice lifted her head and said, “Are you waiting for me?”

The star did not seem to respond, or even to notice her (if stars could notice anything in the first place), but the heat didn’t seem quite as bad as it had a moment ago, and Alice steadied her hand, taking a deep breath for courage.

“If it’s all right with you, then-- I have to save Iris. And I think I’m going to need your help to do it, okay?”

Its myriad surfaces began to flicker and chime with a deep, resonating laughter, a wild roar of belltones that rang deep in her thoughts and made her dizzy. Alice laid her hand on the crystal, and was surprised to find it suddenly pleasantly cool in the room. The star’s surface under her gloved fingers was still slightly warm, but that was it: and then its voice filled the room, booming and unfathomable.

It did not speak in words, its power flooding and flowing through her, but it told her the history of the entire universe that it had witnessed. It told her of the heart of the star, which still beat far off in the distant reaches of space, a Neutron star that had cast off this particular fragment billions of years before in a supernova explosion as it collapsed in upon itself. It showed her the universe in its infancy; it showed her all the Starlight Rangers, of all the species that had risen and gone before. It showed her those that had Fallen, and those that had simply died.

Alice was suffused in its energy, and felt herself rising from the ground, borne up by the light of the star fragment that she had found. She reached out for Francine, and was delighted when she felt the touch of her fellow Ranger’s mind, startled and hopeful and incredulous.

“Francine,” she whispered, and turned to find her, far below on the battered ground of the wasted world they had come to. Francine was the only one still standing of their small party, Jonathon crouched protectively over Felix and Hans still trapped in the rapidly fading prison his powers had constructed for him. Over Felix and Jonathon, Iris stood with the long, deadly point of one sword pulled back, poised to stab it forward and through them both, and in the distance, laserfire and smoke stood still, as if frozen.

Alice dropped to the Earth, and rushed to interrupt the tableau before its unhappy conclusion could be realized, crouching between Iris’s blade and the fallen forms of her friends.

She caught the blade in one hand, and as time seemed to slowly catch up to her, she pushed through it with her fingers, calmly watching as it melted before her touch, half of the metal evaporating away, the rest dripping harmlessly to the dirt. Iris’s response came in slow motion, her fury turning desperate, wounded, as she flinched back from Alice.

“You--!” Iris hissed, tears in her eyes, looking shocked. “How could you-- how could you!”

“Alice!” Francine’s voice sounded confused and surprised, and she shouted in shock as power lit up her armor, lifting her from where she’d knelt.

“What?” Jonathon dared a glance over his shoulder for an instant before his battle instincts took hold, and he leapt out of harm’s way, carrying Felix’s unconscious body with him to protect his friend. “Did we-- what? What happened?”

Alice summoned the Staff of Stars to her hand, and drove it into the Earth with a crash of lightning; it flickered and crackled where she had planted it, and when Alice stepped away, the Staff’s energy struck the sky, summoning thick, cool winds. The smoke began to dissipate, and clouds formed in its absence, almost from nothing.

It began to rain lightly over the city, and Alice stood beneath, relishing the cold. She told Iris simply, “Because you didn’t ask, first,” and lifted her hands into a defensive position.