Banshee had been Olivia, sitting with Ericka and Ariel at their usual table in the restaurant discussing a new dress that Ericka was designing, when the darkness swallowed her again.

It spat her out at the usual place, straight on the floor of the padded starstone room. This place, real or not, was more constant, more comfortable than any time she spent with Ericka or Ariel or Ella or Jason or anyone else the Serpent conjured from her mind. Every time the darkness brought her back here, she allowed herself a small sigh of relief.

She knew it that relief was dangerous. She knew that giving up any measure of trust only gave the Serpent another edge to slice her open with, but it was all she had to hold onto.

Except recently, she'd had something else: the aurorasong.

It had delivered her from the darkness, created the portal and brought her to float above the City-yet-not. It had calmed her, steadied her, and followed her back to this padded cell. Once she'd noticed it here, she'd realised that it was constantly there, a sleepy Song that would occasionally flare in the moments where she couldn't stop herself from shaking.

She'd thought herself crazy at first. There was no way the auroras could reach where she was. She'd told herself it was another trick. Another trap. Another false hope. But... she could never quite make herself believe it. It'd been the light that had led her from the dark. There was something real, something deeper than sight or sound or touch that the Serpent's hallucinations couldn't reach. It had a song. A soul.

Yet accepting that the aurorasong was real, that was dangerous, too. It meant that this place was real, as the Serpent had once claimed. It meant that other things here were real. It meant that she was still powerless. It meant that the corrupted fragment bound to her wrist was real. It meant that its Song, that broken, shattered Song that was there, ready, always ready to tear away another scrap of her when everything crashed into her. It meant that Cryo...

Banshee squeezed her eyes shut and counted her breaths. One. Two. In. Out. Joy's hilt in her hand, the texture of the padding beneath her. Three. Four. The aurorasong brushing against her fraying edges, smoothing her out, helping her breathe. Five. Six. She was calm. She was together.

And then the aurorasong began its crescendo.

Frantic, jagged notes that she'd never heard before but knew how to read like she'd been born in its Song raced around her, and she rose with their warning. She let the aurorasong lift her straight to her feet, let it sweep through her, clearing her mind of the heavy fog, steadying her, bracing her as she flipped Joy's blade outwards and scanned the room.

Outside the walls of starstone, eyes were appearing. Eyes, so many eyes. Eyes that she knew. Not their names, but them. She recognised each and every one of them as the aurorasong introduced their melodies, riding on heartbeats and breaths. They were above her, standing atop sleek, black steps carved from stone that held the light captive on its edges. The stone wasn't as elegant as starstone. It didn't have the same inner glow, but Banshee couldn't stop herself drawing the similarity.

Among them, one was far louder, far stronger, and far more... familiar than the rest.

Banshee turned to face the Serpent.

His scaled form stood atop several of the black stone steps, the tip of his tail resting four steps below the rest. In the dim lighting--lighting that Banshee realised was entirely focused on her box--the Serpent's details were still far from clear. She couldn't tell if it was simply the light, or if the green and black scales that covered him were actually shifting across his body.

Green and black. Black and green.

The Serpent. Always the Serpent.

Banshee closed her eyes against the thought. No--those colours were not his. Those colours belonged to another in her mind. They were the one thing she hadn't let go of, that she'd refused to yield to the hallucinations.

"Shadow of Skypillar," said the Serpent, offering no trace of the spooky snakey accent that'd driven her nuts to begin with. He lifted a hand, gesturing gently around the rest of the room. "Welcome."

The lights increased, nearly blinding her under the glare. She winced from it, shielding her eyes with her bandaged forearm as she looked around the room, desperate for a face that she had a name to and dreading it at the same time. "Well if it isn't my favourite spooky snake guy. Brought an audience this time?"

"Family should always look out for each other," said the Serpent. It was... entrancing, the way he shimmered in the light. His scales played with the light, embraced it, changed it. The smallest movement created a ripple that Banshee found hard to look away from. "We stand together, or not at all. Now that you are one of us, our family has been doing just that since you've been with us. Some are yet to take that chance, but for others, it seemed a struggle to take their eyes from you. I believe you've even met one of them previously."

Banshee kept her mouth shut, struggling to focus on anything.

The aurorasong was still agitated, still highlighting every set of eyes in the room, a single voice of a million parts that was completely overloading her. She didn't know how to harness it, didn't know how to stop it. It surged through her, tearing her apart even as it rebuilt her over and over again.

"Not even a little curious?" asked the Serpent, curling his fingers delicately under his chin. "I must admit, I'm somewhat disappointed. Your banter is often creative, if nothing else."

"Hard to be curious when everything probably isn't real anyway," Banshee managed to get out with a large, exaggerated shrug. "I'm pretty sure I've been in this exact situation at least twice. Usually more chains though." She grinned at him. "Didn't think you'd have that kinda kink going for you, I mean, given that you're a snake you'd think that there'd be more--"

The Serpent cut her rambling short with someone, shoved forward to share in her spotlight.

She knew who it was immediately.

She saw him, but she couldn't believe it.

Wyvern.

His hair was longer than it'd been before and unkempt, but it wasn't dirty. His face was about as clean-shaven as it'd ever been, yet there was something different about his eyes. They'd always been narrow and squinted from his stubborn suspicion and disdain for creation itself, but now they seemed more... sunken. Like they'd retreated to a silent, dark place of lonely secrets.

He stood there, his jaw set, his chin lifted, his shoulders back, daring her to speak.

"Don't tell me you've forgotten him already," the Serpent said in her silence. "Given the time he's spent watching you, I can't imagine he's forgotten you."

Banshee swallowed, Joy feeling strange in her grip. "You told me that you weren't holding anyone else."

"He isn't holding me," said Wyvern. In the echo of his voice, her own didn't seem enough. The Songs in her ears faltered. "He found me. He gave me a purpose when everyone else had given up on me."

Given up.

Banshee snorted and looked to the Serpent, steeling herself against his stare with the same colours as his scales. "If you're gonna pretend Wyvern's here, you gotta get it right. He isn't one for talking about purpose, he usually just sneers and snarls around the place."

"I assure you, Banshee, this is as right as I'll ever get," said Wyvern in a tone so derisive, so perfectly Wyvern that she almost believed it. "This is where I should have been all along. I never should have wasted my time with any of you."

"No one gave up on you," Banshee said bluntly. "Harpy didn't, I didn't." Without exactly thinking about it, she shoved her bandaged hand into one of the hidden pockets in her garments, wincing from the stab of pain as she pulled out the cracked starsong amulet she'd carried for so long. "I wouldn't have bothered with this for so long if I'd given up. The only person who gave up on you was you, buddy."

Wyvern drew a sharp intake of breath. "Give that to me."

"No can do!" said Banshee, pulling the amulet back towards her chest. "It belongs to the real Wyvern, not some crappy imposter."

"Give me my amulet," snarled Wyvern, stepping forward, his fingers curling by his sides. "Or I'll make you."

She shoved the amulet back into her pocket and flicked Joy around to face him. "You're not getting it. Fight me if you want, but I'm the one with a sharp object, you decrepit old bat."

Wyvern's expression darkened. His stance widened, and Banshee shifted her feet, ready to meet him.

"Enough," said the Serpent, setting Wyvern's shoulders tense but still. "None of our family has laid a hand on you yet, Banshee, and I intend to keep it that way."

"Oh, well that explains everything," said Banshee. "Y'no, the arm really had me fooled, same with the little visits from everyone else that you sent down to me in between times. What, was it always two hands at a time, so technically a hand was never laid on me?"

"Your physical injuries were all self-inflicted," said the Serpent. "Your arm, when you plunged it into a Manifested. The cracks upon your visor were also your own fault. The cuts, the bruises--I assure you, none of them were our doing. You gave yourself every single one."

"No," she said, fighting the urge to run her good hand over her other arm. "I didn't. You did that. You did all of that."

"It's strange, the things a mind can do to its body," said the Serpent. "I did try to warn you of the effects, but you're admirably stubborn." He flicked his tail, and somewhere to Banshee's left, a screen flicked on. "And so, a short compilation, just for you."

She watched.

A familiar box of starstone with a padded floor. A girl with long amber hair and a cracked visor and a ruined arm. A dagger lifted, a dagger drawn across her own skin as she screamed another's name, screaming for their mercy. A girl who stood, who fought her own shadow, who threw herself against countless walls until she was aching and bruised. She claimed darkness and corridors and the stacking agony that she couldn't endure yet did.

"You see, our little Shadow," said the Serpent, continuing from some sentence that she'd been too far from reality to hear. "No one in this family will ever lay a hand on someone else from the family, not even myself. We are all our own judges, our own executioners. We hold our own fate in our hands, but we must be strong enough to hold it at all."

She remembered speaking the words that she now heard in the recording. She remembered screaming for mercy as Aya had cut into her skin. She remembered running through shadows, she remembered being chased and hunted and stalked. She remembered the walls closing in, crushing her, confining her, she remembered being chained and bound and shaking.

But on the screen, no one else ever entered the room.

Banshee shook her head as the recordings kept going. "No. That's not real. None of this is real."

"Isn't it?" asked the Serpent. "Check your dagger, Shadow."

She didn't want to, but she had to.

There was blood on Joy's blade. Her blood. Blood that was not from her ruined arm, but blood that had been extracted from careful, shallow cuts. No one else could have used the blade on her, not unless she'd wanted it. Her daggers were as much a part of her as Cryo's wings were a part of him.

But it couldn't be true. She couldn't have. She'd endured it in spite of them.

"The mind is a strange thing, is it not, little Shadow?" asked the Serpent as she continued to stare at her dagger, searching for some sign that it was an illusion and finding none. "You believed you deserved punishment, so punishment is what you recieved. When I released your mind to its desires, this is what it chose. It chose pain. Sacrifice. This is what you believe you deserve."

The aurorasong wove among the Serpent's words, but the notes didn't seem as powerful as they'd been before. They were slipping away as fast as she could hear them, the tempo too fast for her to keep up with. She faltered and fell in its rhythm, leaving her hands trembling and her knees weak.

The Serpent raised itself up higher on its tail. "Let me show you what I mean."

The air flickered as some hallucination wove its way through reality. Banshee held her breath, waiting for the change, for whatever trial the Serpent would force her into--darkness? Pain? Friends? Every second that ticked by doubled her anxiety, but nothing seemed different.

Nothing, that is, except Wyvern.

Wyvern had gone stiff where he stood, his eyes wide, tracking something that Banshee could not see. His muscles twitched like he intended to move, twitched like Banshee's had on the screen when she'd believed herself in a fight.

"Wyvern?" she said quietly.

Wyvern's response was not for her as he adopted a stance that she'd seen so many times during his transformations. Arms that would lift his wings wide, hips angled in such a way that'd give his barbed tail a clear shot. "Stay back! You'll let her go, or I'll--"

Banshee stepped towards him, almost falling over. "Wyvern! It's not real, whatever you're seeing, it's not real!"

"You can't pull him from it, Banshee," said the Serpent softly. "No more than anyone could pull you from your own."

"I pulled Harpy out of it," said Banshee. "And I'm going to pull Wyvern out of it, too."

Banshee grabbed Wyvern's shoulder, shaking him, trying to turn his face towards her, but nothing worked. She rammed Joy's hilt into his side, desperate for some kind of reaction out of him, only to have Wyvern stagger backwards, clutching his side.

"No," breathed Wyvern, his eyes staring vacantly at something he saw on the floor. "No, she can't be--I--I had her, she was there, she was right there, it was all under control..."

Wyvern's legs collapsed, and Banshee barely caught him before he hit the ground in a single, pathetic pile.

"I'm not giving up on you, you dumb bat," she spat through gritted teeth. "I need you to stand up and I need you to at least try to pretend that you're worth saving for two damn seconds."

"My fault," he whispered, tears streaming down his face . "All my fault."

With no small amount of effort, Banshee reached into her pocket and pulled out Wyvern's cracked starsong amulet. She shoved it in front of his face, and when that didn't get a reaction, she pressed it against his cheek as hard as she could. "Look! It's your amulet--remember, that thing you were gonna fight me about like two minutes ago? Wyvern!"

Wyvern thrashed in her arms, tangled in her torn garments until his wild arms managed to shove her away. He scurried to the side, clutching his throat with great, heaving gasps and incoherent words.

"You have two options in your mind." The Serpent's voice floated over the room, coiling around Banshee's thoughts, around Wyvern, tightening with every heartbeat. "You fight, or you have given up. This is one who has given up; who is too broken to be pieced together."

Wyvern's Song was broken, it was true. It was a broken, shattered Song that'd been lost for so long it was stuck in an infinite loop, just waiting for that sole note to sever it forever. But in spite of it, he was alive. There were other ways to silence a Song, ways that did not require the sound to silence him. He had not sought them out. He was still here, still clinging to one sole, twistedly clear melody that continued to force his Song onwards.

Banshee shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing Joy to the side of her head.

Somewhere two thoughts ahead of her own, she could hear the way that the aurorasong had melded itself to Wyvern's Song, filling in the holes and the cracks, smoothing over the harsh sounds and the irregular rhythm. It made it whole--or rather, it was showing her how she could make it whole.

It echoed on her breath, coiled and quiet, waiting for her to speak it where others could hear. If she sang, then the depth, the drowning, the suspicion--she could free Wyvern from all of it. But the aurorasong shoved her, pushed her, too strong and too fast and too overwhelming for her to harness. She was too fragile, too weak, too little, but she had to. She had to.

"And for the broken, there is only one end."

Banshee looked up.

Wyvern was kneeling on the floor and holding a knife to his throat.

The sight was enough to rip the remainder of the aurorasong straight from her mind.

Silence roared, and in it, another instinct surfaced, rising through one of the hundreds of cracks that now ran through her soul.

An instinct that said enough.

The knife in Wyvern's hand flashed as he tilted his head back and closed his eyes.

Banshee threw the starstone amulet in her hand, striking Wyvern's hands and knocking the knife off course. It gave her little more than a few seconds, but a few seconds was all she needed as she sheathed Joy and threw herself on top of Wyvern. She grabbed his wrist, fighting to keep the knife at bay, to secure her grip on his skin.

"You cannot stop the inevitable, Shadow of Skypillar," said the Serpent, but Banshee barely heard him. The instinct was still moving her, driving her past the point of thought as she made sure she was in position when Wyvern returned to his kneeling position. "Your efforts will only be that much more tragic. You are only..."

The Serpent finally shut his dumb, scaled mouth, realising what she'd done.

Wyvern kneeled once more, low to the ground, and this time, Banshee's chest was between his throat and the knife.

She'd thought it'd be harder to throw herself in the way like this again. There should have been fear pounding through her. She should have been shaking, praying that the knife wouldn't come down, trying to think of another way out of it as she stalled for time.

She wasn't doing any of that. Maybe it wasn't real anyway. Maybe this was just yet another trial, another thing that didn't matter anywhere but her own mind. If that were true, if she found herself swallowed by the darkness and lying back on the starstone once again, counting her breaths with Joy in her hand, then she was okay with that. Maybe it didn't matter to anyone else, even if she grabbed Wyvern's knife and shoved it down, but she'd know the choice she'd made when faced with the situation.

She'd know, and she'd live with it, and she was okay with that.

"You said it yourself, he can't see me, and I can't stop him, can't pull him out of it," Banshee said, taking a deep breath and releasing her grip on his wrist. Immediately, she felt the tip of the knife against the place where her tattoo sat. Her body was trembling from exhaustion. She could barely hold herself up without the aurorasong, but she did. She did, stars be dimmed. "But I can protect him. I can take it instead of him."

She faced down the knife as it trembled in Wyvern's grip, like he was fighting it. For himself, for her, she didn't know, but it was enough that he was just fighting.

"I hear him," Banshee said, breathless. She sucked in a gulp of air as the knife dug a little further. "I hear him like you never could, and he would never surrender like this. Not Wyvern. He's way too stubborn, and I'm not going to give you the chance to take that away from him, because I'm pretty sure at this point that being a stubborn old bat is all he's got."

"You disappoint me, Banshee," said the Serpent.

She heard the sound of his scales sliding across the black stone. It was almost melodic, entrancing to listen, but it meant he was getting closer, close enough to reach out and rip her away. She wrapped her hands around Wyvern's, locking herself in place.

The Serpent's hiss slithered inside her head. "Disssappointing and aggravating."

"Awh, c'mon," said Banshee with a small laugh. "Back to the spooky snake? Come on, buddy. You can do better than that."

The Serpent stopped in front of her, his slitted eyes threatening to swallow her down as she stared straight back, right along the back of the knife.

"I thought you ready." The air flickered with the Serpent's breath. "But I wasss wrong."

Behind her, Banshee heard Wyvern gasp, felt his fingers loosen under hers. She released her grip as Wyvern's curses filled her ears and the knife clattered hilt-first to the ground between her knees. Even as Wyvern scattered backwards and she heard his palms slap against the starstone floor, she did not take her eyes off the Serpent. She didn't move an inch.

"You are no protector, Banssshee," hissed the Serpent. "You are an avenger. You were born one, you will die one, you will live asss one. Your pattern will not allow you to be anything elssse."

"Yeah, well, I don't like being told what to do," said Banshee. Her mind felt loose inside her head, like it wasn't really hers anymore. Patterns, partners, death, it all seemed too distant to be real. Nothing mattered when your existence changed, so what was acting on a few impulses? "So screw you, snake boy."

"Indeed," said the Serpent. He lifted his head, the rows of scales on the sides of his head that swept down to the back of his neck gleaming in the light. "You will rejoin when you underssstand, Ssshadow of Ssskypillar. When your mind hasss crumbled and your ssspirits broken, only then will you be ready to embrace Ssskypillar's true family, to bring about the world that wasss alwaysss meant to be."

Banshee raised an eyebrow. "You wanna elaborate on that, or not feeling it?"

The Serpent reached forward, curling a finger as if he intended to place it under her chin.

"Ssskypillar's true massster isss returning to deliver thisss City from the darknessss," the Serpent said softly. "And all, essspecially you, will play a part."

Before Banshee could do anything else, the Serpent flicked his wrist over, leaving her staring at the mass of green and black diamonds--scales, the diamonds were scales--on the back of his hand.

She didn't look away fast enough before they flashed.

The darkness rushed up to meet her, but she didn't want to go under this time. She was elsewhere, higher than the darkness could reach, or at least her mind was. She was drifting, floating and free as she turned to face Wyvern, sprawled on the ground behind her, his eyes wide and watching, holding the reflection of a warm, golden light that she couldn't remember being in the room.

She reached out.

She grabbed Wyvern's hand.

Air rushed and light swayed, both pulling too many pieces off her as she dragged them down a corridor of smoke and shadows, reaching for a familiar place. A safe place. A place where those eyes of green and black had stared into her own and some part of her had crashed.

It ended too quickly.

A wave of roaring agony slammed her back into her senses. They reconnected with a jolt, burying her in light and sound and pain as her body began to shut down to cope. Days, weeks, years since she'd slept or eaten or rested and now, she felt it all in one, enormous, smothering wave that she didn't have the energy to fight off for more than a few seconds.

The smoke and shadows collapsed around her. Banshee hit the ground in a place that was dark and unfamiliar. She could only stare at her fingers, her sight laid out across the ground. Behind her, Wyvern's cursing was growing quieter, harder to hear, just like his touch on her shoulder as he rolled her over, but his face was almost impossible to see.

As her thoughts leaked out and the blackout approached, there was only one thing she was sure about.

They were out.

*+*+*+*

A/N - SHE. IS. OUT--or is she?

On a side note, this chapter was a nightmare to write. I wrote the damn thing literally 4 times (~12 words of hell) before I found a version I was happy with and 'painful' doesnt even begin to cover it. 

((P.S: If fluff is your thing, I recently posted up two new things to the Not-Legit book: An Indigo Onesie party, and a deleted ShadowSong scene with dancing <3