Arisa’s concern was growing; her friend had not spoken in two days.
The two sat together, as all others did when the workers were herded into their pens, some fifty bodies packed into one room to steal what sleep that they were able. With their confines so cramp, they huddled together for what little comfort that they could find, a living foundation beneath a crushing regime.
Kara had not slept, cradled in a corner, her eyes downcast as she trailed a lazy design in the dirt with the tip of her finger, searching for some manner of clarity that refused to find focus. For the briefest of moments, frustration furrowed her brow and she swept the imagery away, anger fracturing through her depression before retreating rapidly back into a prison.
Arisa seized her moment, reaching over to take Kara’s hand in her own, holding onto it tightly, squeezing for attention.
The Kryptonian looked up, blinking once as if searching for recognition, before leaning over and squeezing her friends hand back, the Green Lantern exhaling a sigh of relief. The tether that held ones sanity together in this hellish place was fragile, and she was thankful to see that Kara’s had not yet snapped, however frayed it might be.
“I’m sorry,” Arisa whispered, the two young women interlinking arms under the Mountain.
“I know,” Kara answered, her own voice creaking from disuse.
“We couldn’t save him,” Arisa ventured.
“I know,” Kara nodded, the blonde’s own gaze returning to downcast, unwilling to look upon where the Old Man had once slept.
“Vartox lied.”
At that, the teenager looked up, Kara’s bright blue eyes finding some semblance of focus, questioning for clarity.
“Wrex didn’t attack the guards,” Arisa explained, the elfin blonde looking to the exit of their pen before continuing. “He wasn’t trying to escape. When the quake hit, when the Mountain shook, the Overseers tried to seal the breach before the workers could get out. He didn’t let them; he held the Mountain on his shoulders until the others could get past. He saved lives Kara, hundreds of them, and I don’t give a damn that he killed one of those bastards to do it.”
From Kara, there was to be no answer, not immediately, her fugue state slow to process the information, “How do you know that?”
“People are talking, everyone is talking,” except for you, Arisa did not add, “they’re angry, angrier than I’ve ever seen them. Vartox might have thought he was cowing the broken masses, but he might as well have poked a hornets’ nest. It’s getting ugly Kara; I don’t know what will happen next.”
The Kryptonian was silent, some manner of memory itching at her subconscious, clawing to get out.
Arisa was the one to break the renewed silence, “He’s not the only one.”
Kara’s confusion was obvious, her brow furrowing.
“They’re talking about you too.”
“Me?” the blonde blinked, the Last Daughter of Krypton startled.
“After what happened,” Arisa dropped her tone back down to a whisper, “people saw what you did, what you were willing to do.”
As if answering to her own name, the slumbering child huddled up against Kara’s hip mumbled in her sleep, a hand about her small shoulders from the girl who had saved her life.
“People know who you are Kara, what you are, where you came from,” Arisa pushed on, determined to make her point, “they remember how you got here.”
“I don’t understand,” Kara answered, genuinely confused.
“You’re a Kryptonian Kara, you fell from the sky, one day I’ll explain to you what that means, but right now it’s plain and simple,” Arisa squeezed her friends hand tight, “You’re the girl who fell from heaven, you’re here to save the world.”
**********
Her shoulders burned with exertion, Kara swinging for the Mountain, driving the pick of her axe into the granite wall and prying from its confines a scant few shards of precious minerals. Unrelenting she worked, one blow after the next funnelling her anger, her frustration, her grief, her vision burning red as tears dried upon her cheeks, each and every swing driven home harder than the one previous.
With laboured breathing, she finally ceased, closing her eyes tight as the clamour of industry continued around her, the tunnels filled with workers digging their own graves. With her eyes closed, she leant her forehead against the Mountain, feeling its beat driving into her temples, speaking from the roots of the earth, old and angry and writhing in a fitful slumber.
Kara opened her eyes and stood frozen, swallowing once as she looked up, blinking several times as she looked left and right, her mind still tumbling over revelations. Arisa stood beside her, driving her own axe into the wall, just as did a dozen others, hundreds of others all along the tunnel. They worked, both tirelessly and with exhaustion, caught between the two, stubbornly refusing to falter.
Something was amiss, now that she was listening, Kara blinking again as she held her own axe in hand, the echoes having shifted, evolved, saturating the air in a way that was different. All along the line, none of the carts stood empty, the strongest of their number ripping free a greater quota and passing the surplus forwards.
Where one man faltered, another stood taller, where the weight grew heaviest, the burden was shared.
They were watching, they were all watching, with sideways glances and quick stares, mutterings spreading upon lips and whispers hushed. The echoes had altered, something desperate to replace despair.
Kara looked back to the wall, her eyes now unblinking, pick axe in one hand as she touched it with the fingers of her other. She could see something, locked away in her memories, glass that was broken and stabbing into her thoughts, an impression, a pattern lying just beyond her reach.
She could feel it, through the soles of her feet, through the thrum of her shoulders and the beat of her heart.
She could feel it.
The Mountain was waiting.
**********
She couldn’t sleep, Kara Zor-El unable to slip into the safety of slumber, her blue eyes staring deep into the ceiling of their pen, the cavernous expanse that was their oppressive sky. It bore down on her thoughts, oppressive, unrelenting, billions of years old and utterly without mercy or remorse, waiting...
Waiting...
Kara blinked, her breathing slow, arms folded across her torso as she felt her own heart beat, her mind’s eye narrowing to single point, an imperfection, an anomaly that itched in her thoughts, revelation on the cusp of finding light.
She could still hear them, in her waking nightmares, the screams of Argo falling, the chasms of a planet splintering and shattering of silver towers, she could still hear them as a single tear stained her dirty cheek, she could still hear them as she saw the imperfection.
It was an anomaly, a chink in the granites armour, the smallest of almost invisible blemishes, a crack in the Heart of the Mountain.
She could see it, Kara tilting her head sideways, her eyes narrowing as she focused all the harder, the granite high above her head seamless, impenetrable save that one, small fissure. It was fresh, she realised, it had not been there days before, it was a scar that had been torn open the day that the earth had shook, the day that she had relived an hour of cataclysm. She could feel the whisper of a fresh wind whistling through the fissure, she could almost see the light...
Breathing.
Waiting.
The Mountain was waiting.
“Arisa,” she spoke, scarcely above a whisper, turning her head slightly to gaze upon her slumbering friend, raising her voice when she would not awaken. “Arisa.”
The Elfin Green Lantern opened her eyes slowly, disgruntled and unhappy, “What?”
“The earthquake, Arisa.”
“What about it?” the other young woman grumbled, shifting her aching frame and blinking.
Kara lingered on her own answer, her own question tied to a flash of revelation that lingered stubbornly just beyond her grip.
“What caused it?”
**********
“Greed,” Thane replied flatly, his muttering monotone with a hint of remorse, eyes staring vacantly into his bowl of gruel. It sat untouched, the man whose skin shone with a green sheen breathed fitfully through the gills in his throat leaving the fowl food where it had be slopped. He did not look up, he never looked up.
Not anymore.
Arisa had found him, by Kara’s request, and now the Kryptonian sat opposite the Drell amidst a sea of representatives of hundreds, thousands of different species, all of them confined to the same, bleak fate, cattle clustered together to be fed. She waited, feeling it was critical to allow her new, would be ally to speak at his own pace.
“Always, it seems,” Thanes droll tone continued to rumble, “it returns to greed. The Mountain delves deep, so deep that you can hear the heart beating. That is where the minerals are richest, that it where we open the new seams.”
“How?” Kara pressed when an answer did not seem to be forthcoming, Arisa sparing her a sideways glance that was not entirely approving.
“With fire,” he replied.
“With explosives,” the young woman clarified.
“Yes.”
Still, Thane would not look up.
“Greed,” he muttered finally. “We delve too deep, too quickly, we steal what we do not keep, we open the wrong seams, the Mountain always answers.”
“So, it’s an accident,” Kara fidgeted with her spoon, tracing an outline.
“Yes.”
The Kryptonian paused, feeling the eyes of Arisa burn into her, “Could you do it on purpose?”
“Kara!” Arisa scolded, keeping her tone low and seizing her friends arm tightly, trying her utmost to keep her temper mooted and unnoticed. “You can’t be serious?”
“How long have you been here?” the teenager pulled her arm away, her own tone low yet insistent. “You tell me you want an opportunity, and yet none ever arises. If we want a chance, we need to make one.”
“An Earthquake?” Arisa was struggling to keep herself quite, “that’s not an opportunity, that’s insane!”
“We will know it’s coming...”
“People will die!”
“People are dying now!!” Kara’s voice spiked, higher than she intended and loaded with far more of her own anger, a rage that had been festering within her gut and feeding on misery. She quenched it, burrowing it down deep and, within her friends eyes, Arisa could see the conflict within, the pain, the desperation, and something else...
With the aggression bleeding out of her own tone, the Green Lantern had last point to make. “You’re not asking for his help Kara,” she looked to the downcast Drell, “you’re asking him to die.”
It was Thane who would find an answer, when Kara was unable to do so, “There is no-one left who remembers that I am here.”
He finally looked up.
“I died two years ago.”
**********
Amidst a sea of bodies, Kara was alone, sat huddled with her eyes closed as all others slept, her mind reeling as her thoughts refused to find peace, her friends accusation lingering like a thorn in her conscious. People were dying, people had died today, more would die tomorrow, an endless parade of suffering with no end in sight, no chance of redemption lest they seized it themselves.
She winced, her eyes burning, her heart beating like a drum as she felt some manner of mania drive her, clawing to be free, memories flooding to the surface that she struggled to repress, the Last Daughter of Krypton on the verge of drowning beneath a sea of uncertainty. Something was there, a thought given form, an idea given substance, a belief given shape.
Kara Zor-El burst out of her cradle as the memories came crashing back, seizing a rock as she could not hold back the tide, jabbing the sharp end of her impromptu tool into the nearest wall. Furiously she began carving, driven by a frenzied impulse, her eyes seeing only the day that her world had ended, Krypton itself wreathed in baleful fire as the skies fell and the streets drowned in blood.
The horror of it all, the sheer magnitude of watching a world burn scaring her soul for all time and yet... still... just beyond recollection...
“I have to try,” he Mother had uttered, right in the face of Armageddon, with no hope of success, still she had believed.
“I have to try.”
With a possessed fervour Kara hacked at the Mountain, carving deep into its flesh with conviction that would not be denied, her breathing heavy as her cheeks burned, a flash, a thought, an idea being brought into reality.
A way of life.
With a shout she threw the rock away, the stone clattering far as she fell back onto her haunches, Kara gazing upon the revelation that had itched at her thoughts for months, finally finding focus and form.
Her Shield.
Her Sword.
The Emblem of the House of El carved deep into the Heart of the Mountain.
Hope.
“I have to try...”
To Be Concluded...
The two sat together, as all others did when the workers were herded into their pens, some fifty bodies packed into one room to steal what sleep that they were able. With their confines so cramp, they huddled together for what little comfort that they could find, a living foundation beneath a crushing regime.
Kara had not slept, cradled in a corner, her eyes downcast as she trailed a lazy design in the dirt with the tip of her finger, searching for some manner of clarity that refused to find focus. For the briefest of moments, frustration furrowed her brow and she swept the imagery away, anger fracturing through her depression before retreating rapidly back into a prison.
Arisa seized her moment, reaching over to take Kara’s hand in her own, holding onto it tightly, squeezing for attention.
The Kryptonian looked up, blinking once as if searching for recognition, before leaning over and squeezing her friends hand back, the Green Lantern exhaling a sigh of relief. The tether that held ones sanity together in this hellish place was fragile, and she was thankful to see that Kara’s had not yet snapped, however frayed it might be.
“I’m sorry,” Arisa whispered, the two young women interlinking arms under the Mountain.
“I know,” Kara answered, her own voice creaking from disuse.
“We couldn’t save him,” Arisa ventured.
“I know,” Kara nodded, the blonde’s own gaze returning to downcast, unwilling to look upon where the Old Man had once slept.
“Vartox lied.”
At that, the teenager looked up, Kara’s bright blue eyes finding some semblance of focus, questioning for clarity.
“Wrex didn’t attack the guards,” Arisa explained, the elfin blonde looking to the exit of their pen before continuing. “He wasn’t trying to escape. When the quake hit, when the Mountain shook, the Overseers tried to seal the breach before the workers could get out. He didn’t let them; he held the Mountain on his shoulders until the others could get past. He saved lives Kara, hundreds of them, and I don’t give a damn that he killed one of those bastards to do it.”
From Kara, there was to be no answer, not immediately, her fugue state slow to process the information, “How do you know that?”
“People are talking, everyone is talking,” except for you, Arisa did not add, “they’re angry, angrier than I’ve ever seen them. Vartox might have thought he was cowing the broken masses, but he might as well have poked a hornets’ nest. It’s getting ugly Kara; I don’t know what will happen next.”
The Kryptonian was silent, some manner of memory itching at her subconscious, clawing to get out.
Arisa was the one to break the renewed silence, “He’s not the only one.”
Kara’s confusion was obvious, her brow furrowing.
“They’re talking about you too.”
“Me?” the blonde blinked, the Last Daughter of Krypton startled.
“After what happened,” Arisa dropped her tone back down to a whisper, “people saw what you did, what you were willing to do.”
As if answering to her own name, the slumbering child huddled up against Kara’s hip mumbled in her sleep, a hand about her small shoulders from the girl who had saved her life.
“People know who you are Kara, what you are, where you came from,” Arisa pushed on, determined to make her point, “they remember how you got here.”
“I don’t understand,” Kara answered, genuinely confused.
“You’re a Kryptonian Kara, you fell from the sky, one day I’ll explain to you what that means, but right now it’s plain and simple,” Arisa squeezed her friends hand tight, “You’re the girl who fell from heaven, you’re here to save the world.”
**********
Her shoulders burned with exertion, Kara swinging for the Mountain, driving the pick of her axe into the granite wall and prying from its confines a scant few shards of precious minerals. Unrelenting she worked, one blow after the next funnelling her anger, her frustration, her grief, her vision burning red as tears dried upon her cheeks, each and every swing driven home harder than the one previous.
With laboured breathing, she finally ceased, closing her eyes tight as the clamour of industry continued around her, the tunnels filled with workers digging their own graves. With her eyes closed, she leant her forehead against the Mountain, feeling its beat driving into her temples, speaking from the roots of the earth, old and angry and writhing in a fitful slumber.
Kara opened her eyes and stood frozen, swallowing once as she looked up, blinking several times as she looked left and right, her mind still tumbling over revelations. Arisa stood beside her, driving her own axe into the wall, just as did a dozen others, hundreds of others all along the tunnel. They worked, both tirelessly and with exhaustion, caught between the two, stubbornly refusing to falter.
Something was amiss, now that she was listening, Kara blinking again as she held her own axe in hand, the echoes having shifted, evolved, saturating the air in a way that was different. All along the line, none of the carts stood empty, the strongest of their number ripping free a greater quota and passing the surplus forwards.
Where one man faltered, another stood taller, where the weight grew heaviest, the burden was shared.
They were watching, they were all watching, with sideways glances and quick stares, mutterings spreading upon lips and whispers hushed. The echoes had altered, something desperate to replace despair.
Kara looked back to the wall, her eyes now unblinking, pick axe in one hand as she touched it with the fingers of her other. She could see something, locked away in her memories, glass that was broken and stabbing into her thoughts, an impression, a pattern lying just beyond her reach.
She could feel it, through the soles of her feet, through the thrum of her shoulders and the beat of her heart.
She could feel it.
The Mountain was waiting.
**********
She couldn’t sleep, Kara Zor-El unable to slip into the safety of slumber, her blue eyes staring deep into the ceiling of their pen, the cavernous expanse that was their oppressive sky. It bore down on her thoughts, oppressive, unrelenting, billions of years old and utterly without mercy or remorse, waiting...
Waiting...
Kara blinked, her breathing slow, arms folded across her torso as she felt her own heart beat, her mind’s eye narrowing to single point, an imperfection, an anomaly that itched in her thoughts, revelation on the cusp of finding light.
She could still hear them, in her waking nightmares, the screams of Argo falling, the chasms of a planet splintering and shattering of silver towers, she could still hear them as a single tear stained her dirty cheek, she could still hear them as she saw the imperfection.
It was an anomaly, a chink in the granites armour, the smallest of almost invisible blemishes, a crack in the Heart of the Mountain.
She could see it, Kara tilting her head sideways, her eyes narrowing as she focused all the harder, the granite high above her head seamless, impenetrable save that one, small fissure. It was fresh, she realised, it had not been there days before, it was a scar that had been torn open the day that the earth had shook, the day that she had relived an hour of cataclysm. She could feel the whisper of a fresh wind whistling through the fissure, she could almost see the light...
Breathing.
Waiting.
The Mountain was waiting.
“Arisa,” she spoke, scarcely above a whisper, turning her head slightly to gaze upon her slumbering friend, raising her voice when she would not awaken. “Arisa.”
The Elfin Green Lantern opened her eyes slowly, disgruntled and unhappy, “What?”
“The earthquake, Arisa.”
“What about it?” the other young woman grumbled, shifting her aching frame and blinking.
Kara lingered on her own answer, her own question tied to a flash of revelation that lingered stubbornly just beyond her grip.
“What caused it?”
**********
“Greed,” Thane replied flatly, his muttering monotone with a hint of remorse, eyes staring vacantly into his bowl of gruel. It sat untouched, the man whose skin shone with a green sheen breathed fitfully through the gills in his throat leaving the fowl food where it had be slopped. He did not look up, he never looked up.
Not anymore.
Arisa had found him, by Kara’s request, and now the Kryptonian sat opposite the Drell amidst a sea of representatives of hundreds, thousands of different species, all of them confined to the same, bleak fate, cattle clustered together to be fed. She waited, feeling it was critical to allow her new, would be ally to speak at his own pace.
“Always, it seems,” Thanes droll tone continued to rumble, “it returns to greed. The Mountain delves deep, so deep that you can hear the heart beating. That is where the minerals are richest, that it where we open the new seams.”
“How?” Kara pressed when an answer did not seem to be forthcoming, Arisa sparing her a sideways glance that was not entirely approving.
“With fire,” he replied.
“With explosives,” the young woman clarified.
“Yes.”
Still, Thane would not look up.
“Greed,” he muttered finally. “We delve too deep, too quickly, we steal what we do not keep, we open the wrong seams, the Mountain always answers.”
“So, it’s an accident,” Kara fidgeted with her spoon, tracing an outline.
“Yes.”
The Kryptonian paused, feeling the eyes of Arisa burn into her, “Could you do it on purpose?”
“Kara!” Arisa scolded, keeping her tone low and seizing her friends arm tightly, trying her utmost to keep her temper mooted and unnoticed. “You can’t be serious?”
“How long have you been here?” the teenager pulled her arm away, her own tone low yet insistent. “You tell me you want an opportunity, and yet none ever arises. If we want a chance, we need to make one.”
“An Earthquake?” Arisa was struggling to keep herself quite, “that’s not an opportunity, that’s insane!”
“We will know it’s coming...”
“People will die!”
“People are dying now!!” Kara’s voice spiked, higher than she intended and loaded with far more of her own anger, a rage that had been festering within her gut and feeding on misery. She quenched it, burrowing it down deep and, within her friends eyes, Arisa could see the conflict within, the pain, the desperation, and something else...
With the aggression bleeding out of her own tone, the Green Lantern had last point to make. “You’re not asking for his help Kara,” she looked to the downcast Drell, “you’re asking him to die.”
It was Thane who would find an answer, when Kara was unable to do so, “There is no-one left who remembers that I am here.”
He finally looked up.
“I died two years ago.”
**********
Amidst a sea of bodies, Kara was alone, sat huddled with her eyes closed as all others slept, her mind reeling as her thoughts refused to find peace, her friends accusation lingering like a thorn in her conscious. People were dying, people had died today, more would die tomorrow, an endless parade of suffering with no end in sight, no chance of redemption lest they seized it themselves.
She winced, her eyes burning, her heart beating like a drum as she felt some manner of mania drive her, clawing to be free, memories flooding to the surface that she struggled to repress, the Last Daughter of Krypton on the verge of drowning beneath a sea of uncertainty. Something was there, a thought given form, an idea given substance, a belief given shape.
Kara Zor-El burst out of her cradle as the memories came crashing back, seizing a rock as she could not hold back the tide, jabbing the sharp end of her impromptu tool into the nearest wall. Furiously she began carving, driven by a frenzied impulse, her eyes seeing only the day that her world had ended, Krypton itself wreathed in baleful fire as the skies fell and the streets drowned in blood.
The horror of it all, the sheer magnitude of watching a world burn scaring her soul for all time and yet... still... just beyond recollection...
“I have to try,” he Mother had uttered, right in the face of Armageddon, with no hope of success, still she had believed.
“I have to try.”
With a possessed fervour Kara hacked at the Mountain, carving deep into its flesh with conviction that would not be denied, her breathing heavy as her cheeks burned, a flash, a thought, an idea being brought into reality.
A way of life.
With a shout she threw the rock away, the stone clattering far as she fell back onto her haunches, Kara gazing upon the revelation that had itched at her thoughts for months, finally finding focus and form.
Her Shield.
Her Sword.
The Emblem of the House of El carved deep into the Heart of the Mountain.
Hope.
“I have to try...”
To Be Concluded...