Banshee's heart ripped in two as some piece of it refused to turn away from the wall where Jason had been.

Refused, because she could not leave Pegasus to die.

She tilted her head towards the roof. "Pegasus, down!"

He glanced over his shoulder at her--a mistake, because both Manifested instantly pounced on him. One slammed into his chest, knocking him over for its partner as it went for Pegasus's injured wing. The three of them turned into a flurry of feathers and crystal as, with a curse, Banshee shifted to shadow and leapt for the roof.

These Manifested were made from a more solid black crystal, and were far smaller than the one she'd just taken down. Each one had four legs, a barbed tail, a mouth full of sharp, jagged teeth, and a body that was roughly twice the same size as her torso.

Banshee landed on top of the first Manifested with both feet, knocking it off Pegasus's chest and sending it skittering across the rooftop. Its claws had ripped the front of Pegasus's shirt open even further, exposing the entirety of his tattoo as Banshee grabbed the second Manifested by the tail and attempted to pull it away from Pegasus's wing.

It bit down harder. Pegasus cried out, his body seizing, arching back into the rooftop. With yet another curse, Banshee used her grip on the Manifested's tail to pull herself up to its head and jam Joy straight into its eye socket.

The Manifested released the wing to turn and growl at her. Banshee didn't give it a chance to do anything more, leaving Joy's hilt protruding from its head as she grabbed Pegasus and rolled them both off the roof.

Banshee held Pegasus with one arm and slowed their descent by digging Grief into the starstone wall beside them with her other. Whether through instinct or sheer persistence, Pegasus had enough presence of mind to flap, but it was clear that his right wing was almost useless. Blood matted the feathers together, and he couldn't seem to lift it off the ground.

They hit the ground. Banshee immediately backed them both into the centre of the street, unsure where the Manifested would strike from.

"Fix your wing," she said, her eyes never leaving the rooftops. She didn't have time for this. Every second was another step between her and Jason. "Did you come from the temple?"

Pegasus plucked three bloodied feathers from his wing, crushing them to cloud in his palms. "No. I was in the area and felt the tattoos and saw those two smaller Manifested circling behind you. You didn't hear me call out, so I--"

"No more specifics," said Banshee, grabbing his wing and lifting it up higher for him to place the cloud over. "Specifics are dangerous and we've got enough danger right now. We need to deal with these quickly, the Serpent's minions kidnapped Cryo's civilian liaison, Jason."

Pegasus winced as he pressed the cloud to his wing, instantly sealing the wound with soft, fresh feathers. He lifted the wing, giving it an experimental flap. "Skypillar, that hurt. It was like my arm was being sawn o--what happened to your arm?"

Banshee glanced down at her skin-stripped arm. "I dealt with the other Manifested."

Pegasus reached for another feather from his wing. "Here, let me--"

Banshee felt the Manifested's shadows before she saw them leap from the roof behind them. "Move!"

She dashed to the side, swapping the hand Grief was in to her non-bloodied grip. Pegasus launched himself several metres backwards with a flap.

"Fragment?" called Banshee, hoping he'd have some idea after spending a few minutes fighting them.

"Undersides of their stomachs!"

Automatically, Banshee's mind went to a million ways to utilise Cryo's ice, only for it to hit her again that he wasn't here. That he had never responded--and she didn't want to think about why.

She had Pegasus, which meant cloud-crafted objects, an ultimate that could change that cloud into any other existing, physical material, crash landings, and a whole lot of wind.

The Manifested stalked towards them, but finding themselves in the middle of two Luminaries slowed their steps.

"Okay, pony boy," said Banshee, moving closer to him as she watched the Manifested assess them and realise that only one of them was injured--her. "I need two long, wide, flat ropes made from that material you found in training. We're gonna air lift these two. Secure one end to roof, lay middle section flat, you hold the other end. Fly up when they're in position."

"I uh--ultimate?"

Banshee lifted Grief to meet the Manifested as they charged. "Ultimate!"

Shifted to shadow, she dodged strike after strike as the Manifested teamed up on her. Their attacks were coordinated, designed to limit the ways she could evade them, to block her escapes, to back her into the corner. The one with Joy still stuck in its eye didn't seem phased by it, but it did seem to realise just how much she wanted her dagger back. She used that to her advantage, lunging for the dagger to force its retreat and give herself space.

Behind them, Pegasus had taken to the air, and though she wasn't watching him, Banshee was praying that he was plucking out the longest feather from the end of each wing--white with four bars of brown--and pressing them together with a whole lot more efficiency than the fancy flourishes he tried during training.

"Ready!" called Pegasus.

"Land behind me, hard as you can, and throw the ends towards me!"

Pegasus shot down from the sky, and in one, beautiful crash landing, he landed behind her and sent a solid wall of air blasting towards them right as Banshee drove Grief into the ground.

The Manifested's claws scrabbled on the ground as the wind picked them up and sent them flying, four limbs and a tail flailing in every direction. With Grief anchoring her, Banshee avoided the wild flailing. She snatched the ends of Pegasus's ropes from the air, readied herself, and let go of Grief.

The wind swept her forward, just behind the Manifested, but with her shadow shift, it was more like she was soaring. It took barely a thought for her to figure out how to push herself about in the wind, to flip herself about the wind blast and wrap the ropes around the Manifested.

The Manifested slammed into a nearby wall. Banshee hit a moment later, but gracefully, knees bent with the soles of her boots flat against the wall, before she flung herself into the air.

"Pegasus, catch!" she called, and flung the ends of his ropes to the sky above her.

Pegasus obeyed. He wasn't as precise as Cryo, but he was faster, in the air with the ropes in his hand and shooting for the skies before Banshee landed on the ground.

The Manifested remained tangled in Pegasus's cloud-ropes. His ultimate had turned what would have been mere cloud into a gleaming, silvery, silky material they didn't know the name for. There was a little stretch to it, but was practically impossible to destroy. Banshee's daggers had been unable to cut it in their training sessions, and now, the Manifested were unable to claw or bite their way through it as Pegasus landed on the rooftop above them, keeping them suspended in the air.

"A little lower!" called Banshee as she pulled Grief from the ground. "I can't reach them!"

Pegasus lowered the rope, little by little until she called for a stop. When the Manifested were in range, their clawed limbs restrained from the way she'd wrapped the silk around them, she shoved Grief up, straight into their fragments like olives on a skewer.

When both Manifested once more resemble humans, their fragments crushed beneath Banshee's heel, Pegasus landed beside her.

Banshee retrieved Joy. Its hilt was still covered with her blood, darker now that it'd dried. The crack down her visor split the world in two. It hurt to swallow.

"You've got a few minutes before you dim," she said to Pegasus. "Go and kick the closest skyshrine bell to make it ring a few times to get Golem and Fae's attention. Tell one of the Speakers attending the Skyshrine what happened. This was a set up. They knew I was here. I'm going after Jason."

"You can't go alone!" said Pegasus. "What about Cryo? Where is--"

Banshee's chest felt tight. "I don't know, but I don't have time to wait."

She shadow shifted and ran to the wall where she'd last felt Jason's shadow. She pressed her hand against the starstone, squeezing her eyes shut, desperate to sense even a little piece of it, to follow the trail she was praying it had left behind.

A rush of wind and the clop of hooves landed beside her. "You can't go alone, Banshee. You're injured and your partner isn't here!"

Banshee ignored him, pulling pieces from the shadows that brushed the wall, embracing each of them, searching for his.

"Banshee? You can't--"

There, a piece--a tiny piece--of his shadow. A shadow of ice and flowers that was both gentle and harsh. A shadow that was quiet and soft, that recoiled into itself, that hid, that protected those fragile buds under a layer of frost.

"I can." Banshee stood up and followed the shadow. The shadows knew. They could track down a Manifested. They could track down Cryo when transformed. If something cast a shadow, then she could find it. She just had to give enough of herself to them. "I will not sit here while they escape."

She followed it down the street, into a building with a door that was locked until she drove Grief into the handle and broke it.

"Then I'll come with you," said Pegasus, his shadow ducking as he followed her in.

It was harder to follow Jason's inside, where the shadows were thicker. She pulled pieces of Jason's shadow into her shift, letting them whisper to the rest. I am you, she told them. You are my shadow. Come to me. "You're about to dim. Ring the bells. Alert the others. Get help."

"I can't leave you alone, Banshee, not after you--"

Her shadow flickered from frost and flowers into fire and smoke. She fought to smother it, to quench the flame that would so easily consume those flowers and melt that snow.

Come to me, she sang. I am the soft snow on the sprouts, the gentle frost over the buds. You are my shadows. We should not be apart. Where are you? "I lost Jason because I saved you. If you dim down here with me and go Dark, then I lost him for nothing."

A piece of Jason's shadow lingered in an alcove. A dead end, but beneath the floor, older, stronger shadows clung to every part of the large, open space.

"Get backup," was all Banshee said before she dropped straight through the floor.

Her boots hit the ground with dead silence. The air tasted of Serpent. She crouched low, fingers curled around her daggers, and let the shadows be her sight. The room was square, and as far as she could tell, the only entry point was above the stairs on the opposite wall. Most of the shadows here were angular--furniture stashed in a basement for later use, but against the wall, one of them was different.

Jason.

Banshee was beside him in an instant, the shadows of the room sweeping around him, encasing him, protecting him in a veil of the deepest night. They embraced every hair on his head, every pore and eyelash. She saw him clearer than she ever had, saw the gash across his forehead, the blood that had dried down the side of his face, hastily cleaned off by Adande.

But he was breathing. Breathing. And he was here, every piece of his shadow, alone and unharmed and--

Suspicion shot through her as she stood and turned, facing the rest of the room.

It didn't make sense for the crimson siblings to abduct Jason and simply leave him in a basement--not unless they thought they'd evaded her, or Adande had decided the risk of Vengeance wasn't worth it. With the echo of Aya and Alma's shadows all over Jason's body, however, far more recent and numerous than the traces of Adande's on the bandage and blood, Banshee suspected otherwise.

In the perfect dark, nothing stirred.

Yet Banshee, taking two steps away from Jason, could not shake the feeling that he was bait.

She had not made a sound since dropping into the basement. It was dark enough that no one could have seen her. Even with some kind of night vision, her shadows swirled thicker, stronger. They might know she was in here, but they couldn't know where she--

The shadows scattered.

A flash of pain shot through Banshee's skull as she was left completely blind, her all-encompassing vision reduced to cowering flecks in the corners by the beaming lights now flooding the basement.

Banshee launched herself forward--away from the place she'd been standing in the centre of the trap. The familiar sound of a Lightblaster fired before her boots had hit the floor. She landed two metres from where she'd been and immediately rolled to the side, trying to remember how to use her own eyes, to squint through this blinding, splitting light.

She cracked her eyes open before throwing herself forward once more, ricocheting herself off the wall.

Every corner. Every wall. Bright strips of light covered them all, every crack and crevice until the room was painful to look at--or maybe that was just her. Without her visor, she doubted she'd have been able to make out even the slightest details of the room.

Banshee dodged again. Two--no, three--directions were firing at her. Blind or not, they'd sorely underestimated her motivation. For all their lights, the shadows within her had only swelled.

Swelled, because these three had dared to attack him.

Though still barely able to see more than the basic shapes of the room, Banshee had already seen every particle it through her shadows. There were still small pockets of darkness lurking in the corners, safe from the light, and it was with those that she oriented herself.

Banshee targeted the attacker with the best aim.

She ducked under the first blaster shot and sidestepped the next. This attacker didn't have a chance to fire again as Banshee launched herself forward and grabbed her by the outstretched arm, twisting it behind and wrenching the Lightblaster free. She kicked their backs of their knees, causing them to fall forward before removing the second lightblaster from their hip.

One down. Two left.

Banshee's sight had returned enough that she could make out the shapes of the people, their Lightblasters. Their features were still hidden, the colours bleached from the world of white light, but it meant she knew what she was aiming at.

In a flash, Banshee lifted her arm and threw Grief straight at the second attacker's Lightblaster. The dagger flew, skewered the blaster and ripped it from the hand of its wielder before embedding itself in the wall up to the hilt, shattering the blaster on impact.

Grief hadn't yet hit the wall when Banshee started to move. She dodged two more shots--pathetically easy compared to the first attacker's aim--and reached them in a few seconds, disarming them easily.

Or so she thought. They yielded the lightblaster, and as Banshee pulled it from their fingers, this third attacker grabbed her wrist and squeezed.

Banshee had forgotten about her arm, about the bleeding, raw skin that was in no way getting better, but as this person dug their nails in and hissed, Banshee's body gave out in one overwhelming wave of pain.

She didn't have a choice as her knees collapsed, as everything became focused on that one point of existence. It wiped away her shadows, her name, her grip on Joy, his name--

No. She refused. She'd lost his name before. His eyes. His face. Not this. Not this nightmare. Not her own, not now, not while she could still breathe.

Banshee pulled her arm forward with a scream--not her ultimate, but a raw, brittle cry that wrecked her throat and destroyed the soft edges of her mind. Free, but her arm was useless. She couldn't move it through the pain from the shoulder down. Could only feel the hot blood dripping onto her other hand as it hovered below, wanting to hold it, to seal in this... this agony that was ripping her apart.

The shadows within her swelled higher, faster, thicker, until they clogged her throat and suffocated her.

Jason.

She blinked once. Pieced a little bit of herself back together and swallowed down the shadows. Her daggers, where were her daggers? Grief was in the wall behind her, but Joy was here. She'd dropped it. Her fingers searched the floor in front of her, looking for that hilt as her head began to spin and the world twirled around her.

She knew the feeling. Her mind was slipping into a blackout. She wasn't going to be able to cling on much longer. She had to Scream. To pray Pegasus brought backup in time. To... to...

Banshee's fingers locked around Joy's hilt. She lashed out with her foot as the person in front of her approached, knocking them over with a shout of surprise, but the movement left her dizzy. Banshee found her feet, could barely stay on them in this maddening silence of bright white light and silence and light and silence.

The third attacker went down and stayed down, just like the first had.

The room went still. Banshee swayed on her feet, struggling to focus on anything. She could no longer feel her shadows. She couldn't hang onto her shadow shift. She could only feel the fire of her arm, the splitting headache behind her eyes.

But Jason. Jason was safe. It was all she could do with her limp arm and blood-soaked transformation to gather the dregs of her power and step towards him. All she had to do was get them both out of this basement, and then she'd accept what this blood loss was doing to her body.

"No blunt trauma!" called someone. "She won't handle it at the moment. The Scale of Skypillar will not be pleased."

Banshee turned, finding the first attacker she'd taken standing once more, and someone else, closer, a long, thick object raised above their head, ready to bring it down on hers. She lifted Joy, stepping forward with the intent to slice through their weapon.

Instead, something sharp pierced the side of her neck.

"Nowhere near as fun as it could have been," grumbled the male in front of her, lowering their weapon.

A scaled arm wrapped around Banshee's waist from behind. "Oh, I beg to differ. This wassss far more fun than I'd anti-sss-ipated. Make sssure that she livesss."

Banshee dropped Joy, fell backwards, and blacked out.

*+*+*+*

A/N - I'd just like to remind everyone that uh, if you kill me, I can't write more. Ty. 

Bonus points if you figure out a certain something about the ending.

Please remember to throw the chapter a vote ((and a comment? =>)) if you're enjoying it so farrr! <3 SS doesn't rank anymore, big sad ;-;

Also i'll probably post a bonus chapter this week I dunno heck I need motivation to get back to writing after a 2 week break curse you easter show