Olivia woke up in the dark.

It could have been seconds, minutes, hours, or years that she lay there, staring into an endless void that looked the same whether her eyes were open or closed.

Some part of her knew that she should have felt panic. Fear, even, but her mind was so heavy. Every emotion felt... dulled, she supposed. It was an effort to care. An effort to move. An effort to breathe. If not for some deep rooted instinct that made her lungs burn, she likely wouldn't have bothered with that, either.

She... she remembered fighting. She remembered a fury so great that it could have burned her alive, if she'd let it. She hadn't, because she'd been holding onto a shadow. A shadow of flowers and snow.

That... seemed important, for some reason, but her head... her head was just so heavy...

She continued to lay there, aware of nothing but her own breath, of the cold, flat floor beneath her, and likely would have remained that way forever if not for something that dug into her side. She ignored it for a while, but eventually, like the burning of her lungs that forced her to breathe, it became uncomfortable enough that she moved a hand to remove it.

It wasn't a graceful movement. It was slow and awkward, taking several slogs of effort to get her fingers close enough to touch whatever it was buried under her side. The tip of her middle finger touched it first, a nudge to test its resistance. The object didn't move. She inched her fingers a little closer, touching it with three this time, but still it refused to budge.

With a long, exhale of breath, Olivia found the energy to wrap her fingers around the object and drag it free with a metallic scrape. She was surprised to find that her fingers fit around it so well, almost like it'd been made with her grip in mind.

A flicker of curiosity flashed in the fog on her mind. She brought the object up to her chest, her right hand holding the object as her left explored its details. In the dark, she was left to her own imagination. The object was long and narrow. The tip closest to her gripping hand was blunt, but the other end was sharp. Yet it felt like it was missing something, like there was supposed to be another one--

Olivia's left hand reached for her lower back automatically.

Weird, she thought as her fingers found her scabbards empty. Grief should be around here somewh--

Grief.

Her fingers tightened around Joy's hilt.

Grief wasn't here, because she'd thrown it at a wall. Because the crimson siblings had taken Jason, because she'd chased them, because they'd ambushed her and stripped her shadows away and laid a trap that ended with a scaled arm around her waist and a sharp pain in the side of her neck.

Oh, I beg to differ. This wassss far more fun than I'd anti-sss-ipated. Make sssure that she livesss.

The Serpent.

The Serpent had her.

She wasn't Olivia. She was Banshee--but if she was Banshee, why couldn't she see in the dark? Why had she been so content to just lie there while he had Jason?

Why hadn't she cared about anything?

Her earlier aversion to breathing evaporated as it started coming too fast, too hard, the panic that'd been held at bay sweeping over her in one, huge wave that now sought to drown her.

Sought. Why was she using the word sought? That was a word that Cryo would have used.

Olivia--Banshee--she didn't know which one she was supposed to be at the moment, but it didn't matter. She had to force herself to calm down. To remember what Jason's shadow had felt like, that snow, that soft, muting, calm snow that she could not risk melting. It wasn't Cryo's ice that would sweat but hold. It was precious. Fragile.

She let the thoughts trickle in one at a time.

The first that made it through was Harpy: Dark and dressed in a mockery of her transformation, still believing that she was a Luminary, that she was fighting, trapped within the depths of a pit. Maybe that's why she couldn't see. Because she was Olivia, merely dressed as Banshee. She felt over parts of her transformation, checking them for accuracy, for anything that would provide a hole in any hallucinations.

Her fingers reached her visor, still ruined by the crack from her earlier fight with the Manifested. Her arm was still stinging and sticky with blood where the skin had been stripped away, and though she searched the floor for Grief, she found no evidence of the dagger.

Olivia--no, Banshee, she decided--didn't see why they'd bother being so accurate if they'd pulled a Harpy on her, which meant they'd found a way to block her powers, or it was aurora time. Whatever they'd injected her with could be responsible, but she had no way to know how long she'd been out.

Banshee resisted the urge to snort. She had no idea about anything except that it was dark and her arm was stinging like Skypillar itself sat on top of it. She was thinking too much like Cryo, and not--

Her hand flew to her tattoo and pressed down. When nothing came in reply, she attempted to tap five times and waited yet again. As the nothing stretched on, a little piece of her reasoned that, if she were Dark, she'd no longer be linked to Cryo, that he'd be given a new partner, that--

No, she told herself. No. If she were Dark, Cryo would know. Cryo would not stop until he found her. He would not leave her to the darkness, to the shadows and the Serpent alone.

He would not leave her.

Banshee adjusted her grip on Joy and stood up on unsteady feet.

Okay, she thought. I've got one dagger, a cracked visor, uncooperative shadows, one MIA partner, a bleeding arm, absolutely no idea where I am or how long I've been here, and have likely pissed off the Serpent one too many times. What do I do first? She exhaled. Let's see if I can figure out more about this room I'm in.

The strange thing about the darkness was that it completely blinded her to the concept of time.

Banshee had no idea how long she spent inching forward in the room, looking for the wall. After what she felt was about two minutes, she started counting her steps. One. Two. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred. No matter how many steps she took, her outstretched fingers never found the wall. She never found a corner.

It left her feeling... exposed. Knowing that behind her was all that space. Anything could have been behind her and she never would have known. The wall could have been just beyond an arms length to her left, and she never would have known. There could have been anything.

Watching. Staring.

Stalking.

And... and not being able to see herself. Her fingers, her dagger--was any of it even real? She kept bringing her hands together, running them over her arms, her sides, her legs just to convince herself that she still existed, that she was more than just another shadow in the endless night. Every time her mind slipped a little bit further, every time her throat got too tight or the urge to thrash and scream and cry threatened to break her, five words brought her back.

He will not leave me.

Eventually, she heard it. A sound that was just beyond her hearing. A sound she couldn't quite make out but she knew was there all the same. It was behind her, then in front of her, then above her. It was hunting her, taunting her, teasing her, waiting for the perfect moment, when she broke enough to become prey.

She would not. She refused. Even if she couldn't see, even if they were suffocating her, drowning her, crushing her, these shadows were hers.

Another sound--a slithering, sliding sound, just off to her left.

Banshee whirled around to face it. "Face me, Serpent. Or have you decided you can't handle me alone?"

A chuckle, this time to her right.

"I'll take that as a yes," said Banshee, following the sound. "Cryo and I have been waiting for you to actually show up so we could finish you off once and for all. I was planning a long, happy life after that. No Vengeance needed."

"Aaaah, yesss," whispered a voice. It was behind her now, where the sound of a massive tail sliding along the ground was coming from. "The Ssshadow of Ssskypillar. Ssso brave, ssso courageousss."

"Can we cut it with the 'Ssspooky Sssnakey' thing?" said Banshee. "You're just making yourself look like one of the hundred Serpents from those bad Manifested-Luminary comic books. You can do better than that. Have some self respe--"

The whip-like sound of a tail came from her left, and before Banshee could react, something jabbed her in the side, hard enough to drive the air from her lungs. Banshee staggered, trying to recover her feet, readying Joy for the next one when it struck between her shoulder blades and slammed her to the ground.

For the second time this transformation, Banshee heard her visor crack as it slammed into the floor. The weight of the Serpent's tail lifted off her back. Banshee scrambled to get upright but didn't quite make it before the Serpent's tail whipped across her chest.

It was like every nightmare she'd ever had where she'd been too slow. The Serpent struck her over and over again, every time in a different place, a different direction, like it wanted her to know exactly how little the dagger in her hand meant. It never gave her enough time to recover, to catch her breath, striking over and over and over and over and over and over until confusion and panic and terror were stronger than rational thought and strategy, until her movements became less about a potential counterattack and more defensive, as she desperately tried to protect her head, her chest, her tattoo--

He will not leave me.

She didn't know where the thought came from, how it broke through everything else, but its flare was enough. In a heartbeat so fast it was a flutter of breath on her lips she sang, one pure, perfect note that let her eyes pierce the darkness, to see the upright shape that lurked within it, to lift her arm and fling Joy straight at its unsuspecting head.

The darkness closed in once more as the note vanished, but in its place, the Serpent's hiss carried on.

To Banshee's feral grin, that was a far sweeter music than anything she could have done.

She launched herself off the floor, towards where that figure had been, some quiet part of her knowing where she'd find Joy, still embedded between the scales of the Serpent. Her fingers wrapped around its hilt, her boots against the Serpent's body as she positioned her own, ready to drive the dagger deeper--

"I thought you ssshould know," hissed the Serpent. Banshee swore she felt its tongue on her cheek. "Your partner isss not coming."

The Serpent's body vanished.

Joy clattered to the ground like there had never been anything there in the first place. Nausea swelled in her chest, so strong that she retched, though her stomach was too empty to produce anything.

A hallucination?

Her body ached as she forced it to turn left, to turn right, to search for the next attack and stay focused, but the darkness was squeezing her again. The fog was closing back in over her thoughts, her mind, and... and she wanted to let it. Because it was exhausting holding onto this hope. Because one little fight already had her cracking. The darkness was easy. It asked nothing of her. It only wanted her to lay there, to give up and stop fighting.

Some, small, tiny, insignificant part of her still raged and burned against the numbness that was suddenly swallowing her whole, but it was an ember on a dying wind, drifting down, down, down, into the endless ocean that lay beneath it.

Banshee forced herself to take a deep breath. To inhale that nausea and swallow it down as she bent over, running her hand over the ground, searching for Joy. She found it lying not far away and picked it up, placing her other hand over her tattoo.

Cryo, she called through the fog. Cryo, where are you?

The silence that echoed back was heavier than the darkness around her.

Your partner is not coming.

He hadn't come before. He'd left her alone to face the Manifested. Because the Serpent had already captured him? Was Cryo down here, lost in the darkness with her? Or... or had the Serpent already... No. She would have known. Wouldn't she?

My partner is not coming.

Banshee's thoughts tangled and twined with her doubt until she could no longer tell them apart.

Not coming.

"He will come!" said Banshee. "I don't know what you've done to him, Serpent, but he will come, and you'd better hope he does. Because if he doesn't, I will rip each and every scale off your body before I let you die."

Never coming.

Banshee gripped Joy's hilt with both hands and continued forward into the endless dark.

*+*+*+*

A/N - We've found her, but it doesn't look good. 

U h o h