A Lullaby for Gods

[Jade Harley]

Accompanying Music: Mother [Piano Bonus]  Rating for this installment: G. I guess? There's character death, though.
 
3. I Beg The Earth To Let Me Go.

 
 
Whole planets are whisked away in a blitzkrieg of fire, viridian flame leaving them destruct and propelled explosively apart before her very eyes. Jade blinks, hard, and the vision passes by in a daydream; her body slumps to the floor of the laboratory in an exhausted heap, miniscule flakes of snow sticking in thick clumps to her eyelashes.
 
The windows are totally shattered, jagged panes of glinting glass running like ripples of dry lightning in her peripheral vision. She is cold, her clothes are damp, and there is still so much necessary work left to be done. With great effort she rises from the floor, her hair an icy, matted mess and her nose burnt bright red from the frigidly cutting winds tearing through the room.
 
A mountain sits in a large, grey slope in the distance as she crosses over to a different corridor, silvery white coils of snowfall tinged with blue meandering gently around it. Stale grey walls close around her; for the first time since she woke up, Jade shivers, all at once becoming aware of the ice sluicing between her toes and the cool, frosted sweat congealing at the nape of her neck.
 
She arrives at the transportalizer platform, a flat circle of faintly embossed metal with several looping shapes crisscrossing over it. As she steps upon it, preparing for the expulsion of green galaxies that will hopefully teleport her someplace warmer, Jade gives one last appraising look to the lab before being transported downstairs.
 
Only, that doesn’t happen. The platform heats up somewhat, and she hears a desiccated mechanical stutter emanate from its center, but in the end it doesn’t let her leave the open-air floor. Jade is left confused and fatigued, a look of considerable disbelief worming its way across her face as she dismounts.
 
There isn’t time for this. She has to find the frogs, has to reach the right genetic sequence, has to save herself and her friends and those cute little critters inhabiting their planets so they can live on in a new game, safe and untouched by the ferrous fires that consume her dreams, and yet she cannot sleep for fear—
 
Urgency rises in her breast as Jade mutters bitingly to the steel platform, stamping her frozen feet against it before dropping to her knees to fumble at its inner workings and hopefully identify the problem. Purple-tinged fingers that lack any kind of feeling tug uselessly at the intricately interwoven mechanisms inside, as if they have forgotten the motions that Jade has spent so long perfecting. Soon, she has an array of tangled wiring splayed out around her, rivulets of red, blue, and the softest lavender she has ever seen pooling uselessly in her lap and wrapping loosely about her ankles.
 
A shuddering gasp shivers through her rib cage as Jade stumbles to her feet, throwing off the useless, stupidstupidstupid wires as she goes. The long skirt and sleeves of her clothes are no longer as confining as they had been in the stifling summer heat of her island— in fact, it feels more like she isn’t wearing much of anything at all to fend off this sinister wintry chill with.
 
Breathe, she thinks, balling her hands into fists and tucking them under her chin to better preserve warmth, and so she does. Each exhale is shrill and high-pitched to her ears, like an organ key pressed wrong during a familiar hymn, and still the snow caves in towards her from all sides in drifting, oppressively light drafts.
 
At one time she had enjoyed this snow simply for being a novelty. Now, staring helplessly at her shoes and how deeply they have already been submerged with a few short steps, she desperately wishes that it would just stop.
 
Jade starts, looking keenly up. All hope isn’t lost yet! Her sylladex would assuredly help— it contains her Iron Lass armor with its repulsor rays and rocket boots, more than enough oomph to keep her warm and boost her to a new floor level that actually has stairs. Now, just to call it up…
 
With a light, flustered wave of her hand, Jade smiles tensely and waits for her salvation to appearify out of thin air. Nothing happens. She tries again, this time with a bit more feeling, but yet again the result is exactly the same.
 
It is at this point that Jade begins to panic. She stares wildly around, hair flipping stiffly about as she tries to root through the snow for one of her many computers. Her search amounts to the discovery of a single communications device, her Lunchmuffs, and she hunkers down beside a table covered in mostly decimated potted plants to try and reach one of her friends, one hand combing fretfully over the top of her frost-dusted head as she waits.
 
To her horror, the candy red earmuffs resolutely refuse to spring to life and give her a direct line of contact with any of her fellow players. It takes a moment, but Jade begins to realize that she is effectively marooned here, dozens of stories up, in tremendously freezing weather, on a floor completely inaccessible by stairs.
 
Someone should have warned her about the stairs.
 
“Oh, no,” she breathes, covering her face with her hands, only just barely letting herself peek through her fingers at the snowy wastes far below. “Oh nononononono.”
 
She’s trapped. There’s snow way out of this one, and that was an abysmally bad pun but oh my goodness she can’t even think straight right now.
 
Rubbing furiously at her dripping nose and wind-numbed cheeks, Jade stands and wanders over towards the edge of the room, still attempting to drum some electronic life into her communicator with one hand. Her shoes crunch across shattered glass and bits of ice, sliding a bit as she nears the precipice that leads to nowhere but open air and an awfully long drop. She comes to a standstill a few short-lived inches away, the gears in her brain grinding together feverishly as she attempts to formulate a proper escape plan.
 
Abruptly, her fingertips stall in their agitated movements as her eyelids slide closed, lucidity and something far more cosmic sealing off from her mind like a bolted clasp. Her torso twists, bound by gravity and suspended as if by strings just as she crosses the margin between dreams and wakefulness, disturbed only faintly by the flocculent cloud layer spread out all around her.

In a loose tumble of limbs and rippling fabric, Jade slips over the edge.