Chapter Text
The door exploded off its hinges and light brighter than anything he had ever seen came pouring down into the spiral stairwell, blinding the young man who just yesterday had been a boy. He covers his eyes with his hands but that sheer white brightness hardly diminishes at all from such a small obstacle. All it this feeble attempt to block the light does is illuminate the sticky red oozing blood that covered his arms, his face, his torso, his legs, and from how he feels what must be his soul as well. The memory of what he had just done sends a twin shiver of horror and extacy down his spine one way and back up the other. The screams of the priests hasn't yet faded from the pounding of the drums in his ears, he is deaf to the world outside his own mind.
He takes a step forward, out of the world below and into the one above. Into the unknown, the unimagined, the outside, the beyond, the gateway to an existence that he cannot even bring himself to believe will truly be better despite the stories he had thought of before he recieved his name, before the true horror of darkness and bloodshed had claimed him, before he came to find the only hearts other than his own that ever brought comfort still beating in the palm of his hand. He takes a step forward into the light of the sun for the very first time. An unnoticed calendar clock reads June 21st, 5:19 am. Elijah takes his first steps away from the Order of the Final Dawn, into the light of the Summer Solstice, and the sunrise is beautiful.
Behind him the hidden door closes, returning once more to a simple mirror in a barber shop yet to open. Ahead of him, more glass and paint and color than he has seen in his entire life. The below had always been dark and cold, but here there was bright yellows and red like fire and blood, but also so much blue and green like the eyes of some of the boys he had known. There are shades of brown that in the light to him seem to have nothing to do with dirt and rock and instead feel full of life somehow. He steps through the glass door, the material shattering around him at the slightest touch and realizes that he can barely feel the shards that shower him, knowing full well that just a day ago they would have covered him in cuts and scratches. There is one thing he feels, however. Something new, something that never existed in the below. He doesn't know what it is, but the being inside him does and it laughs that he is too stupid and worthless to even know what the wind is.
He tries to silence the monster with a surge of willpower as he had before, but he is tired. He has full command of his body, at least, and the thing can do nothing to change that on its own, but his mind and soul were are not free of its influence. It cackles madly, full of glee that it has been given the gift of eternal battle with Elijah's defiance. It thinks that it will destroy him from the inside out and claim what belongs to it. It is aware that his strategy will be to fight it off for as long as he can, and then kill himself before it can claim victory. It does not care. Destruction is destruction is destruction. He can hear it chortling to itself about it's inevitable victory. He ignores it.
He feels the wind for the first time blowing through his shoulder length chestnut brown hair, drying the blood that covers him, caressing him as the first embrace from a world that had seemed so hateful and uncaring until just this moment. As his first tears in three years start to fall from his face, the entire street around him implodes with magical force as he loses control of his emotions, his power, his burden, for just a moment. He falls to he knees, not caring about the damage to the buildings on either side of him or the wailing of the cars, or the peeling of the bells of alarm that alert someone not so far away about his presence. He falls to his knees and he weeps tears of joy for freedom and life and the ability to simply be without needing to scrape and fight and kill. He weeps tears of despair for loss and grief and hate, for the friends he has left behind but who even now he carries with him, for the hundreds of lifetimes worth of pain and the suffering his 18 years have contained.
He isn't sure how much time passes like that, but it can't have been long before something in his instincts alerts him to someone getting too close. He leaps back like a startled cat, instantly adopting his favored fighting stance. His left shoulder faces the enemy with his arm held taut like a spring at his side, a half fist formed for either striking or catching. His right hand hovers inches behind his own head, obscured from clear view to be used in any number of follow-up combinations. He was never the strongest candidate, nor was he the cleverest. Certainly his friends always said he was the kindest, but he couldn't see it that way. He had developed a method of fighting for himself that excelled at sealing away all of his opponents best weapons one by one, taking any beating he needed to without fail to systematically and ruthlessly steal their strengths piece by bloody piece, joint by ruined joint, and bone by crushed bone. His friends called him the kindest of them, but he knew that this method was no kindness. If there was one thing he was confident in compared to the others, it was that he was the best at taking. Taking hits, taking the blame, taking their sins, taking their dreams, taking their breath and their blood and their life. He had taken on everything that was theirs. If there was a second thing he was confident about, he was damn good at keeping going too. Take it and keep going. Never stop. Never give up. Never give in. Never forget the weight of everything you cary for those who can't cary them any more.
Standing at the other end of the small crater that Elijah had created in the street is a short woman wearing… goodness gracious what is that outfit? The woman was a petite coppertopped young lady with a pink and white headset with an integrated visor and decorative cat ears on her head, and her body was almost completely covered by a mostly pink one piece that was a kind of cross between an acrobat's jumpsuit and a flightsuit with lightweight white armored plates integrated into several places. There was also a light blue belt that slung loosely around her waist that looked to contain several compartments and which trailed off behind her like a tail. For a man who had just come up from a dungeon where the only clothes anyone wore were black burlap robes or bare scraps of cloth around their waist, the ensemble was shocking.
Another figure quickly appeared, flying into view from behind a tall building. She was a taller woman, perhaps slightly older than the first, with long slender limbs and a pretty statuesque face. Her hair was made of short purple curls, and she wore a light blue tunic with white shorts beneath. Her gold colored sandles had little wings, and so did the gold headband around her forehead, but those were nothing compared to the magnificent white wings that spread wide from her back easily four feet in either direction.
Elijah adjusts his footing to better be able to react to either of the two threats. If he were still the same as he was yesterday then a bead of sweat would be forming on his brow as his eyes widen and the instincts that had been beaten into him start to kick in. But then the two women do something that surprises him. They start to speak.
"Hey there, big guy. No need for all that." The winged woman calls out from across the arena he had accidentally created. "We don't need to turn this into a fight. How about you start by telling us who you are and why you, uh, broke this street and the buildings?"
"And why you're naked and covered in blood, maybe?" Adds the redheaded girl.
"I... I don't know you. You might be trying to lower my guard." His voice quivers and cracks with years worth of dehydration, dust, fear, and rage. "You don't look like priests," His eyes dart around in an instant, searching for any hidden observers or traps, "but that could be a trick! How do I know this is really outside? How do I know you aren't biding time for more of you to come up from behind me?" His body begins to vibrate slightly as his bright almost yellow eyes cloud over with the pure darkness of an utterly black void and the shining red runes of the beast form.
"Hey, man, listen!" The redhead starts to lower her stance into one ready for a fight, "We're not sure what you're talking about, but if you're planning on causing more damage or hurting anybody we're going to have to stop you. Why don't you just try to calm down for a second, okay?"
Despite her words, he can hear her muscles tensing and her attention focusing on him more intensely, ready for him to make the first move. The enhancement to his senses was new, but the feeling of attention, that sensation of knowing where an opponent was focusing; that was something he knew well, and it was telling him everything he needed to know. They might not be part of The Order, or maybe they were, but either way they were combatants. They were threats. They were opponents. He allowed himself to pull away from himself, his sensations, his feelings. He floated above himself as he had in so many fights before, distanced himself from pain, from anger, from fear, from love, from care, from his body, from his mind. He was a soul, a consciousness, and the thing around him, below him, was just something for him to control.
'So, Elijah. This is how you were so proficient at spiritual combat, is it? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I understand how you suppressed me, now, mortal.' An all encompassing voice inside of him would have deafened him and drowned out everything else if it had spoken physically but instead only seems to pulse like an energy that makes him feel both weak and strong at the same time. The voice of Destruction, of Doom, of his Prisoner, of The Beast. He knew it would be here, in what was once a place of comfort. But it wouldn't matter, it has no more power over him here than it does normally.
'Be silent, creature. Eli has no use for your taunts.' A familiar voice, this time. One of a youth which was never named while he yet lived. Of a boy who had given up his life for Eli. Of his dearest friend, who for lack of a proper name had taken the moniker Ghost for the last eight years.
'Nor, indeed, for our advice. I told you, Eli, that you should have left the scene as quickly as possible before enemies appeared.' This the third and final member of his busy soul, his beloved friend and partner Vlad, who just yesterday had sacrified his own chance at victory for him and in doing so become one with him just as Ghost had years earlier. It was likely only through the three of their's combined effort and will that they had stopped The Beast, this god of destruction and pain, from taking over his body. They sealed it, consumed it, and Took Its Power For Themselves!
'That's right… We won. We're free. No one can hurt us anymore… And that includes these two. I just need to put them down gently, I don't even have to kill anymore, and then we can leave. We can live!'
Elija moves his body. He is faster than either of the two can see clearly, but not so fast that they can't react to the sudden shift. In less than the span of a heartbeat, the winged woman takes off twelve feet higher into the sky, just as Eli's hand passes through the space her shoulder would have been a moment ago. Falling into the space behind the redhead, he ducks and spins and takes a grabbing swipe at her, connecting with a leg that he crushes immediately, sending the woman to the ground with a yelp of pain. Only for him to be met with five more of her standing nearby each launching an individual but well coordinated assault on his position.
"Throne! Call for backup! He's faster and stronger than we thought! I'm pretty sure that red stuff is some kind of magic, too!"
"Already doing it, Copycat! Try to keep him occupied but stay safe!" She has some kind of metal brick she must have stored in a hidden pocket or something. He doesn't waste time looking at it more than that.
'End this quickly, Eli. They've got reinforcements.' He can feel Ghost observing Copycat with disdain. 'She's weak, using numbers to try and confuse and overwhelm. Their blows didn't register, but they went for crippling attacks. You don't need to kill them, but with enough of them they might drown you."
'He's right, you should either flee or crush them all at once with a sweep.'
'A sweep he suggests! Ha ha ha ha! Our power is far grander than that. Simply will them to die, Elijah. They are insects, nothing more. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.'
'No. I'm going after the flier. The multiplying woman is annoying but not dangerous.' The conversation passes in the span of a single thought, and so he acts only an instant later.
Elijah kicks off the ground, sending a red shockwave of force through the crowd of Copycats, shattering several hundred bones between them and creating a second crater in the street. In the moment that he paused to consult with his soul, however, the Copycats had become a small army of several dozen, and his retreat had only injured around half of them. Those that remained were fruitlessly pulling weapons from their belts, from collapsing bo staffs to stun batons and tasers, to even expanding nets and smoke bombs. None of these were well aimed or fast enough though to land on him. His leap had taken him nearly as high as Throne had flown, but she had already placed some distance between them. His eyebrows tighten though the rest of his expression remains completely neutral as he cocks back a fist despite his physical range falling well short of where the woman was flying. He lets loose anyways, and the Chaotic magic of Destruction responds to his will, sending a pulse of energy towards the woman with the same force as the punch. She nearly dodges it, nearly, but one wing is clipped and she cannot stop herself from falling into a spiral that meets the pavement.
Just as he allowed himself to feel satisfied that one opponent was subdued, a flash of silver light on the horizon flared and grew at speeds that seemed to stretch the world around them. Eli can physically feel his perception shift as his mind and body enter the realm of true speed to match the oncoming attacker. Despite this, he is only just barely able to raise an arm to block the fist that would have connected with his jaw and is sent crashing back to the ground himself at an angle that entirely avoids the mass of Copycats.
Looking up at the figure who had just landed so staggering of a blow on him that he had felt it despite his degree of separation from his own body and the sheer might contained within that body, Eli saw a young man maybe only a few years older than himself hovering in the air with shining dark skin, glowing purple eyes, a platinum emanating aura of pure power, a close shaved military style haircut, and a beautiful face that seemed to contain all the world's stern but caring love in a single expression of disappointment directed straight at Eli.
Their eyes are locked, and the only thing he can bring himself to do is start to smile and say.
"You're strong."