The Ascension

8: The gang actually dies

 Wren died on the way down, smashing his head against a falling boulder. Aster watched it happen, at least the skull smashing part, but due to her own descent she was unable to ration whether or not he was dead. She was too preoccupied with screaming.

And then she hit the lava, and screaming was no longer and issue because she was dead. Same went for Senya- quite luckily, both had hit the molten lava head-first, resulting in a lesser amount of suffering.

It still burned, and hurt, of course. But then they were dead, and pain was no longer a concern.

The heroes of a story were not allowed to die. Unfortunately, while they were busy elsewhere, Ikina had left his divine protection on a sort of auto-pilot. A direct link of pure essence, a stock that wouldn't be activated in case truly needed- and now, as they were all dead, was the time.

So truthfully, Aster, Wren and Senya never actually died. They almost did. Over and over again, their flesh burned and their eyes melted, teeth were blackened and hair sizzled. They screamed with mouths that were in the process of unhinging and healing in cycles of agony, and fire ran into their throats and their organs as they tried to move with limbs that were only occasionally attached.

In short, it was awful, and really, really terrible. Just the worst, even.

Ikina felt the metaphorical string of energy they had left to keep the kids alive tug at them, but now was a not a time they could attend to the matter. Even if the matter in question was burning through a suspicious amount of their energy.

In the end, the thing that stopped all those frankly disgusting things from harming Aster any further was not a god. It was the light in the sky- and the man that it belonged to.

Artemis had not done much more than make a game of the scene that had played out before him, watching between his dinners with relative interest. But when people started dying and regenerating without a senseless end, he sent a few orders to some of his inferiors and had Aster pulled out.

Traction beams did not make all that much scientific sense, at least to Aster, but that is essentially what pulled her out of a bout of torture so stressful to her still-reforming mind that she had almost already succeeded in forgetting it.

The beam was like sun, and it rose her slowly into an air like thick fog. Lava came with it too, thin blobs that burned her skin. Fatal wounds would heal, but non fatal scarring had begun to collect all over her body. Pink and black wounds that bled a thin pus coated her body by the time she stopped ascending.

And found herself on something metal.

The shock of her many deaths had one effect on her: she was tired. In pain, too, but mostly tired. Shaking, she curled up on the unfamiliar floor and stared at the open wounds on her fingers slowly heal until someone picked her up and carried her away over their shoulder.

Senya and Wren were left in the volcano.

Whatever had picked Aster up was not human. It had claws that dug, with the clear aim of being gentle, into her skin. And something that felt like fur brushed against her cheek. Her eyes were closed, or maybe they weren't, but she surely was retaining nothing she saw.

This place seemed alien, which was dumb, since aliens probably existed but had no reason to be hanging around her boring planet- but then again, she had just been lifted by an anti-gravity beam.

She was placed in a chair in front of someone, and in her blurry vision she thought she had an identity to place on him. He didn't seem alien. But she was still unconfident that her eyes were even open.