The flood of power through Woe feels like glory itself, like brushing her fingertips against the unsmiling face of God. There is the chill, miraculous current, the apex of an unspeakable art, and if there is terror it is a holy kind.
The world pales around them in a numinous, earthly glow, and Woe turns back to the creature (creatures, now) with her hand upraised, and she unleashes hell upon them. The blood spilled around them bubbles and rises madly, filling with jagged clots and lavish globules of fat that engulf the Beasts and smother their still-healing patches. Through it, she reaches - she finds the immune system, unfamiliar and bucking against her, but with the power she holds now it is nothing to pin it down by the throat and command it.
She does not turn it off. She incites it to riot. The Beasts shriek as she turns their own healing against them, their bodies whirling inward to devour themselves as swiftly as they once healed. They collapse into swelling, malformed heaps, twitching and dying in another wonderous flash of thanergy, and she has not felt so much like a Saint since -
The hand in her hand is wrong.
Woe looks to 2B again, at last, and she forgets the Beasts. She forgets herself, lambent with the aura of siphoning, as she slaps her other hand to 2B's beeping chest and pulses her with thalergy, forgetting that 2B is not human even with the brutal, ugly evidence laid bare before her, and in this forgetting she does not recall that she cannot understand the strangeness of this body, so she does.
"2B," Mercymorn says, "I bid you return."
She knocks aside the stakes she planted down in the anchors of 2B's soul and reaches out to it even as the power in her gutters out, a thread cast where a rope should have been.
"I bid you return. I bid you return - I bid you return - you are not done, do you hear me?"
cw: body horror
The world pales around them in a numinous, earthly glow, and Woe turns back to the creature (creatures, now) with her hand upraised, and she unleashes hell upon them. The blood spilled around them bubbles and rises madly, filling with jagged clots and lavish globules of fat that engulf the Beasts and smother their still-healing patches. Through it, she reaches - she finds the immune system, unfamiliar and bucking against her, but with the power she holds now it is nothing to pin it down by the throat and command it.
She does not turn it off. She incites it to riot. The Beasts shriek as she turns their own healing against them, their bodies whirling inward to devour themselves as swiftly as they once healed. They collapse into swelling, malformed heaps, twitching and dying in another wonderous flash of thanergy, and she has not felt so much like a Saint since -
The hand in her hand is wrong.
Woe looks to 2B again, at last, and she forgets the Beasts. She forgets herself, lambent with the aura of siphoning, as she slaps her other hand to 2B's beeping chest and pulses her with thalergy, forgetting that 2B is not human even with the brutal, ugly evidence laid bare before her, and in this forgetting she does not recall that she cannot understand the strangeness of this body, so she does.
"2B," Mercymorn says, "I bid you return."
She knocks aside the stakes she planted down in the anchors of 2B's soul and reaches out to it even as the power in her gutters out, a thread cast where a rope should have been.
"I bid you return. I bid you return - I bid you return - you are not done, do you hear me?"