[The cover is the same layout as that of #112, but now Lady Sable sits atop the throne of skulls in the burning city, and only present-day members of ASH lie defeated around her.] .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED presents ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES #113 --X------------------------------------------------------------------------ '|` /|(`| | A Suit of Sables Part 4 of 4 - But A Shadow /-|.)|-| copyright 2011 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES ROLL CALL CODENAME REAL NAME POWERS ASSIGNMENT -------- --------- ------ ---------- Solar Max Jonathan Zachary Spacetime Control AMERICA "JakZak" Taylor Meteor Sarah Grant-Taylor Superspeed AMERICA Scorch Scott Handleman Pyrokinetic CANADA Centurion Salvatore Napier Strength, Regeneration MEXICO Fury Arin Kelsey Concussion Blasts MEXICO Contact Aaron Zander Psi, Mind-over-Body DIPLOMATIC Breaker Christina Li Telekinesis DIPLOMATIC Essay Sara Ana Henderson Gadgeteer VENUS Peregryn Howard Henderson Jr. Elemental Mage VENUS Beacon George Sylvester Living Light VENUS Geode Unknown Living Crystal VENUS Lightfoot Tom Dodson Velocity Control TRANSIT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [October 30, 2026 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin Sector] Darkness poured from the mouth of Akuryu's new draconic form, corroding the pavement where it struck but missing its targets. Lightfoot had used his ability to impart speed to hustle Solar Max and Scorch out of the way, Centurion and Contact had simply used superhumanly powerful leg muscles to leap to safety, Meteor had yanked Justice out of the beam's path and Arin had detonated her power from the soles of her feet and launched herself away even more quickly than her lover's leaping had managed. Other than Justice, it was a maneuver they had practiced together hundreds of times in various simulated combat exercises, and Justice was well-trained enough to trust Meteor to pull him away. The lack of cover in the urban wasteland of deconstructed Milwaukee offered no obvious place to escape *to*, though, and the team simply scattered. If Akuryu had brought any allies, they'd just set themselves up to be defeated in detail. "Romeo-five!" Solar Max ordered, indicating the fifth rallying scheme they'd trained for, one of six on the list that assumed an ally who wasn't in on the training. While not forming a tight knot, everyone quickly moved so that they'd be within support distance of Justice, except for Centurion who deliberately lagged in order to present a tempting target. Akuryu took the bait, sluicing through the air like an ink spill and slapping down a man-sized claw at Centurion. The hero tried to parry with his sword, but it was like cutting smoke. The claw passed through Centurion with an angry hiss, and the big man grunted in pain as Akuryu's assault hit him on a spiritual level rather than the physical. The others hadn't just been idly watching, however. Scorch's flames passed through a gravitational lens that Solar Max formed, becoming a sort of solar lance that burned away chunks of the shadow dragon wherever they touched. Contact switched to a psychic assault, probing at the mind that lay among the shadows and trying to find a weak spot. Those with more physical powers peppered Akuryu with their attacks as well, since it was possible that the ancient sorceror's body was still present and controlling the beast from within, but they weren't having any effect. And then Justice ran up Centurion's back, leaping for the dragon's head, and brought his sizzling and crackling axe down between its gray-lit eyes. Akuryu HOWLED, a tormented sound that momentarily stunned everyone within several kilometers with its wrenching agony. Justice landed roughly, his timing thrown off by the howl, but Akuryu didn't take the opening this presented. The inky serpent simply shot off into the distance, quitting the field of battle after a fight that had lasted mere seconds. "That sorted 'im," Justice panted, smirking as he hefted the axe. "Guess he wasn't expecting 'Slaversbane' to be so effective." "Why not?" Centurion brushed at his chest, as if trying to wipe away the darkness he could feel clinging to his soul. "Lady Sable has to know about your axe by now. Unless she wanted Akuryu to fail, she'd have told him to avoid it." "Sal's right," Solar Max nodded, although in his armor he almost had to bow at the waist to do it. "I think we've just been used...." * * * * [October 30, 2026 - Columbus, Ohio Sector] In his human form, Akuryu now suffered a head wound that wept dark ichor, and he was holding a bundle of silk to it in a vain attempt to stanch the bleeding. "I have performed my part of the ritual, my Lady," he reported, wincing. "I only regret that I failed to slay any of them." Lady Sable shook her head languidly. "That was never necessary, and it might have been undesirable in any case. All I needed from you was a credible re-enactment of the final battle for my ritual, as well as a distraction from my other endeavors. Endeavors that have been quite successful, in fact," she stroked an ebony sarcophagus that sat next to her "throne," the office chair that had served Lord Ebon himself for a time. She reached up and wiped a small bit of ichor from Akuryu's eyebrow with a slender finger, then licked the blood off. "Never underestimate the usefulness of letting an enemy *think* he knows your weakness. Now go, heal. Take it as a compliment that I don't trust you anywhere near this ritual." "Indeed," Akuryu bowed with great outward humility, an effect spoiled only by the faintest of gleams in his dark eyes. The Chinese sorceror had never read Shakespeare, but he would have definitely concurred with the playwright about the chafing nature of gratitude...and the power to be gained as the servant of a god was nothing to that one could have should he manage to become the god himself. * * * * [October 30, 2026 - Chicago, Illinois Sector] "The only thing we know for sure is that whatever her endgame is, that wasn't it," Solar Max frowned. Centurion was getting checked out by an apprentice mystic healer for possible shadow contagion, but otherwise everyone from the battle had reconvened to brainstorm, with help from Peregryn's video image. "If it had been, we'd be dealing with a new goddess now." "Maybe she just had better things to do upon ascension than mess with puny mortals?" Beacon suggested, having reached Earth a few minutes after the battle. Peregryn shook his head. "Even if that were the case, I doubt I would have missed the signs of apotheosis. Having witnessed the birth of a god, I know what to look for, and Lady Sable would not have been able to hide it entirely. Nor has Inanna felt anything that would have indicated such an event. The ritual has not yet finished, assuming it didn't simply fail." "What else is there?" Scorch asked. "The analyticals have gone over every clash Ebon had with ASH, and with the Raiders before that, and found at least something recent and unexplained at each site. A few minor thefts, probably physical tokens of the old battles, some strange sightings. There's nothing left for her to revisit." "It could be that her ritual will close with something totally original," Peregryn suggested. "This would make it almost impossible to predict or intercept, unfortunately." "No. It feels wrong," Contact shook his head. "I've spent enough time with profilers, telepathic and mundane, to see that even disregarding whatever the magic demands, Lady Sable is a classic copycat. Radner would love working with her, she's a stickler for the forms of the old villains. She wouldn't work up a ritual like this without the payoff being at least related to Lord Ebon. Is there anything we know he wanted to do...other than become a god...that he never managed to implement?" "You mean, like a plot that got scuttled early in the planning stages?" Solar Max frowned. "I'm not sure we could even find out about that sort of thing. It's not like Lord Ebon left a journal with his hopes and dreams for the future." "Dear Diary," Scorch affected a deep and creepy voice like Lord Ebon had used the few times he'd been captured on tape. "Today I flensed Bobby McGurk. He totally had it coming, for making fun of my new shirt." Peregryn furrowed his brow thoughtfully, ignoring Scorch with the ease of long practice. "Actually, he may well have. The problem is that Lady Sable would have it, should it exist. That could explain many things, if she were reading Lord Ebon's journal and using it to help plan her own ritual. Mages generally keep notes of unfinished rituals and experiments that we wish to revisit later. Lady Sable could have stumbled upon an apotheosis scheme that Ebon abandoned, and decided she could make it work. Perhaps it was something that couldn't have been performed in the 20th Century because the stars were not yet right..." "Wait. Stars," Lightfoot interrupted. "We ARE missing one of Ebon's conflicts. It wasn't with heroes, though, it was with other villains," he started tapping away at his terminal as quickly as the system could keep up. "They Might Be Villains, an obscure little group that fought the Raiders a couple of times before vanishing. I only know about them because I was mining the databases for information about someone I wrote about online in the early 90s. Constellation." Images came up on the main screen, showing the starry-bodied supernatural. "Oh, shit," Contact spat, the first to make the connection. "Lady Sable wants to try a soul fusion. Like the one that created Constellation, or the Family." +-Or that I thought I'd achieved with you, Paul,-+ he added silently. "It's not apotheosis, but it's definitely a step into the semi-divine," Peregryn nodded. "A more conservative path than leaping directly from mortality to divinity, and not without its own dangers, but success could place her beyond our ability to affect without bringing her to the attention of jealous gods just yet." "If she really wants to be a goddess at the end of the game, I don't see her merging with an equal," Arin pointed out. "Too much chance of becoming the junior partner. So Akuryu wouldn't be it. We haven't heard from Chiaroscuro since he flamed out during the Orange Skies incident, but I doubt he'd put himself subordinate to her either, even if she found him at his weakest." Justice's blackcel buzzed at the same time that alert messages popped up on everyone else's terminals. "Well, there's the answer," Meteor pointed to the main screen. "Looks like the guy Contact and Justice captured the other day was faking it. He escaped and took his prize with him. They just discovered the fake he left behind." "This is extremely dangerous," Peregryn's image looked at the main screen. The alert itself would no doubt arrive on his personal comm once the lightspeed lag had passed. "Even if we're wrong about the soul-fusion, TerraStar's body represents the sort of unique resource that might make true apotheosis possible. And if soul-fusion is the goal, Lady Sable could merge with the ba, or lower soul, still present in the gross matter of the body. It might not be as powerful as a fusion between equals, but having the power of TerraStar's body added to her own sorcerous might...?" * * * * [October 31, 2026 - Columbus, Ohio Sector] "They Might Be Villains operated out of a strip mall?" Arin quirked an eyebrow at the drone footage. They were at the local DSHA enforcement office downtown, the only signficantly built-up part of the city. Outside of the small downtown, the city of nearly a million people was functionally just a lot of suburbs stitched together. That decentralized nature had made it a natural for absorbing the better-off refugees from cities like Cincinnati or Detroit, and what losses it had suffered in 1998 had been reversed since then. Finding the exact location of an obscure villain group's base had been fairly time-consuming by modern data sifting standards, so rather than come blazing in on a suborbital shell or military helijet, they'd simply taken a nondescript commuter jet and landed at one of Columbus's smaller private airstrips. As speed didn't seem necessary, as much stealth as could be practiced was in order, even if they had no illusions about being able to make it all the way in without being detected. Lightfoot shook his head. "It was a disused auto body shop, actually. But I guess it finally got torn down at some point and a shopping center built at the site. Hm," he scrolled over the data on the location, "looks like the strip mall hasn't seen a lot of business lately either. The neighborhood net news seemed pretty excited that someone had rented one of the units a few months ago, and there's some speculation about what sort of business it'll be once it finishes renovations." "Bad business for everyone," Solar Max frowned, cradling the helmet of his armor under one arm. "Although it's probably a good thing that the place was so moribund...Lady Sable probably wouldn't have had any qualms about a few discreet murders if that was what it took to acquire the site of TMBV's old base." "We have the warrant," Centurion held up his comm, then scanned the specific wording. "Looks like there's been a few complaints about noise and odd smells from the location already, so the judge had no problem signing." Everyone was relieved at that. While they could generally force their way through the legal process and make the evidence stick in court anyway, that only worked if they were *right*. If this was just bad luck for some innocent citizen, there were fewer public relations reprecussions if they could get a "clean" warrant from a judge who wasn't doing so under protest. Especially with the Freedom Alliance making noises about how ASH was trampling on American Rights. Maybe sending in the nation's top superteam to deal with someone who hammered on drywall too early on a Sunday morning would be blasted as overkill, but it wouldn't be of questionable legality. "Do we go in fast and hard, or knock?" Centurion put the comm in its specially shock-padded pocket on his uniform. "Warrant doesn't specify." Solar Max pondered that for a moment. "Knock. If we had a combat mage along, we could try to get surprise on our side, but it's pretty safe to assume that if Lady Sable has been set up here for a couple of months that she's got mystic tripwires all over the place, and none of us is equipped to find them. And if this is a wild goose chase, we won't cause as much trouble this way...none of the reported activity at the site is inconsistent with remodeling for a new business, after all," he nodded to some additional data that was scrolling up the screen. "Expect her to know once we're within a few blocks, be ready for attacks. Meteor, Lightfoot, I want you on a sweep for civilians. The neighborhood has a low population density, but you never know. Beacon, try to be the Rad: I doubt she'll ignore the danger that Justice's axe presents, but I want her focusing on your more obvious threat instead. We knock, but let's move briskly about it. If we're lucky, she'll be deeply involved in something, and having to break away to deal with us will take her precious time." A short drive north in a city maintenance van brought them into the neighborhood they'd been watching via the spydrone. A mix of industrial, commercial and rental residental in various states of "just this side of condemned" decay. Their briefing told them that there were parts of town with more danger, but none with more despair, as the post-1998 inrush had largely passed this neighborhood by. The few modern structures, like their target, just made the rest of the TwenCen-vintage buildings look worse by comparison, rather than lifting up the neighborhood. But people still lived there, still ran businesses there, because it was cheap. And, in some ways, that made it more heartbreaking than demolished Milwaukee. Not dead, but not really alive. Not good enough to attract interest, but not bad enough to require attention. A twilight community surrounded by people who passed through it on the way from one better place to another, and feeling like it had been that way for a long time. In short, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better place to hold a dark ritual that you wanted to keep under wraps. And being All Hallows Eve was just a layer of corroded gold on the withered lily. The parking lot was empty except for their van. They'd seen some trick-or-treaters and general holiday revelers in the general area, but none came to this block. It had no houses with tenants, and the few active businesses closed early on Saturdays. The Sun hadn't set yet, but the shallow rays it cast across the neighborhood only made everything look more decrepit. The two speedsters had come along on their own power, and were busy making sure the area was as clear as it looked at first glance. Now, the rest of the team exited the van, and the DSHA officer driving it took off as quickly as was prudent. She could come back if it was a false alarm, but the fewer "squishies" in the area, the better Solar Max felt. No sign yet adorned their target, although it lacked the "FOR LEASE" notices of the storefronts that flanked it. Butcher paper sheets had been taped up to cover the glass front and conceal the work going on inside, and the fact that none of the sensors in Solar Max's helmet could get anything past that told him that this wasn't a case of an innocent but annoying tenant. There was some serious concealment magic behind that paper...if it wasn't Lady Sable, it was at least *someone* who needed a talking-to from the authorities. As the most generally durable of the group, Centurion stepped forward to knock on the glass door, exercising care to not shatter the tempered glass. "No candy here, go away," came the muffled reply. It had the sort of mocking tone that told Solar Max that the speaker didn't actually think they were trick-or-treaters. "Breach," Solar Max said over the closed comlink. Centurion gave a quick tug on the door. A normal door of that sort should have come off like the plastic lid of a fast food coffee cup, but it merely rattled in its frame. Rather than waste time finding the minimum required force, Centurion simply drew his spatha, its edge reinforced with collapsinum threads, and sliced through the hinges. The door flew inward easily at his kick, the warding spell having been disrupted by the loss of physical integrity. The sight inside was almost unremarkable. There were a few candles filling the air with a sickly incense, and an ebony sarcophagus that clearly wasn't part of a normal business plan, but lay on an utterly mundane folding work table. Remove the sarcophagus and the candles and it would look like any other strip mall store in the middle of renovations. Lady Sable, her skin gray and hairless save for eyebrows, had the look of someone who was trying to not look annoyed at an interruption. Shadows wreathed her hands, and she was poised as if to dive into a pool. "Ah well, midnight was more showmanship than need," Lady Sable smirked, and tensed to complete her ritual. Arin's power bolt sliced neatly through Lady Sable's face, followed a split second later by a gout of Scorch's flame and a green flare from Beacon's hands. None of them had any effect on the sorceress, although they blew out the back wall of the room and continued on through the outer wall of the storeroom. Sable did flinch, as if perhaps uncertain her defenses would have really worked, but she recovered quickly and started to FLOW into the container housing what they suspected was TerraStar's body. Justice leapt, a lapis scarab in his outstretched left hand. The sculpted eyes of the sarcophagus started to open and glow redly. The scarab struck the surface of the sarcophagus with a dull CRACK. Justice stumbled as he twisted to avoid knocking the makeshift altar over. The sprinklers went on, triggered by Scorch's flames. Lady Sable was nowhere to be seen. "So...?" Beacon looked to the others. * * * * [Spirit Plane] A small black figurine of Polla rested in Lady Sable's hand. The Egyptians called it the "sheut," the shadow soul. The extradimensional sorceress's soul was badly splintered from months of separation, a fact that Lady Sable had been counting on. Divide and conquer. Assimilate the sheut first, then the heart, the thought, the lower soul and the name. Should Polla's higher soul ever return, it would find no purchase. She would have liked to have lingered over this process, slowly devour the wholly alien and unique shadow and savor every aspect of it, but time no longer favored her. While time flowed differently on the spirit plane, it still flowed, and it was just possible that the "heroes" in the room with her might be ruthless enough to destroy Polla's body before Lady Sable could fully take control. Lady Sable raised the sheut to her lips. "Hold, usurper!" shouted a new voice, accompanied by a blue-gold flare of light in the shape of a stylized sun disk. "Polla? Too little, too late," Lady Sable swallowed the sheut in a single gulp. "You may have my shadow, but this is my body, my soul," Polla countered. "My father's court considered body-theft to be a mere parlor trick in games of palace intrigue, do you think I was left untrained in its nuances?" While all that took place here was merely a metaphor, Polla's metaphorical kick to Lady Sable's metaphorical stomach was quite painful in a very real way, and she had to fight down the urge to vomit up the stolen shadow soul. "I suppose I should thank you, though...if not for your clumsy maneuvering, I would never have had the pretext to return to my rightful body!" Polla advanced again, only to be restrained by what at first seemed to be an immense and craggy stone wall appearing between the spirits of the two women. "NO. I DO NOT WANT TO BE ALONE AGAIN. YOU WILL NOT GO," boomed the wall. Lady Sable expanded her perceptions, and realized that it was no wall, it was the smallest foreclaw of a titanic stone beetle. It radiated the power of semi-divinity, power that sang seductively to her. If only she could control that! But no, it would be too much, too soon. Best to take advantage of the distraction and find the "ib" or heart-soul. If she could control that, it would take the fight out of Polla, quite literally. "Don't you see she's trying to become a god?" Polla screamed from the other side of the claw. "NOT MY CONCERN, LITTLE ONE. LET HER TRY. SHE MAY FAIL ON HER OWN. OR SUCCEED. MAYBE SHE COULD BE SOMEONE ELSE FOR ME TO TALK TO." Yessss, Lady Sable thought. She could use this, play the beetle spirit against Polla, lay the groundwork for absorbing the scarab's power later on, once she had adjusted to her new status. Lord Ebon, for all his merits, had been too hasty. He hadn't wanted to wait, and it cost him not only godhood but his mortal existence as well. "No, I'm afraid that won't do at all," a new voice declared. A sharp pain flared from Lady Sable's midsection, and she doubled over clutching her stomach. Was Polla's sheut aware enough to fight free? She started to retch uncontrollably, her throat stretching wider and her jaw dropping like that of a serpent as something forced its way out. In a burst of silver light, a metal wolf flew from Lady Sable's mouth, clutching the tiny sheut figure like a stick in a game of fetch. A quick toss of his head, and the figurine flew over the claw-wall. "I can't say I expected my afterlife to look like this," the metal wolf said. "Then again, I can't say I expected to get an afterlife." "PUPPY!" the scarab boomed, sounding like a delighted child. Lady Sable cursed. She'd underestimated the spirit of LU-62. BADLY underestimated it. And as a machine intelligence, she doubted it would take him long to comprehend the true nature of his situation. She knew it was time to cut her losses and flee, but LU-62's emergence had hurt her in ways that she couldn't just shake off...she was trapped, at least for the moment that it would take her to regain some of her strength. Polla's higher soul stepped through the interposing claw, which had become insubstantial once the scarab was distracted. "This little mageling seeks to steal my body, as she seems to have tried to steal your soul." LU-62, whose current form only bore a passing resemblance to the robotic body in which he had lived, replied, "I noticed. Your shadow woke me up from my death-trauma. And this large fellow doesn't want to let you go?" "I DO NOT WISH TO BE ALONE," the scarab boomed. Lady Sable started to force herself back to the physical world, ignoring the horrible pain in every part of her spirit that this caused. "There's no time! She's escaping, she'll destroy my body out of spite now that she's been thwarted!" Polla exclaimed. "Thwarted?" LU-62 cocked his head quizzically. "Madame, you sound like a supervillain. In fact, you look somewhat like one...assuming your facial features in this dimension are representative of your physical appearance, I calculate a 95% chance you're related to the invader known as WarStar." "My father," Polla lunged for Lady Sable, but was once again restrained. "Let me GO!" "I hate picking among bad choices, but..." LU-62 started clambering up Heraclius's foreleg, moving at the speed of mechanical thought until he reached the massively armored head. "If you let this woman reclaim her body, I will take her place as your companion. I'm pretty sure I no longer have a body to return to in any case, I sort of blew it up in order to save someone. Just don't call me George." "WHY WOULD I CALL YOU GEORGE?" "Old media reference," LU-62 shrugged. Lady Sable could tell that he had figured out exactly how long it would take her to force herself back to the physical plane, and now was just taunting her with the digression. "Do we have a deal?" "I WILL MISS POLLA, BUT I DO NOT TRULY WANT HER TO BE SAD. VERY WELL. IF I CANNOT CALL YOU GEORGE, WHAT SHOULD I CALL YOU?" "Louie will do." Polla, released, fell upon Lady Sable with a snarl of rage and then there was only a flare of pain and a decidedly non-comforting darkness. * * * * [October 31, 2026 - Columbus, Ohio Sector] Just as she had flowed into TerraStar's body, Lady Sable now flowed back out, but the form that solidified next to the table bore little resemblance to the sinuously dangerous Lady Sable. Oh, it was female and mostly hairless, but the skin was a normal human pallor, sagging in places in a way that suggested recent starvation dieting. She stood more than a head shorter than Lady Sable had, and looked like she'd once been moderately plump and somewhat squat. As recently as a few months ago, she must have been an utterly unremarkable woman in her early 20s. The Lady Sable they'd confronted moments ago had been an illusion, a disguise. With a pained groan, this woman slumped to the floor. Justice, who had recovered from his awkward landing, moved to scoop her up, but then she melted away into shadows. "Should've aimed at her chest," Arin muttered. "The illusion made it a big enough target." Suddenly, the lid of the sarcophagus smashed upwards through the roof, splintering and breaking open the pipes feeding the sprinklers. "By the nameless ones, it feels good to be back in my proper body!" Polla exclaimed as she sat up. If her lack of clothing bothered her, she didn't show it. "Um, I could've sworn she was in a hospital gown when we had her," Justice muttered. The armor had, of course, been removed for analysis. Not that such a gown would have done much to conceal the almost disturbingly well-defined musculature once the water from the broken pipes hit it. "But I've gotten so flabby," she frowned, stepping out. While not the tallest person in the room, even "flabby" her build along with her almost regal bearing commanded attention. If anything, the stone avatar through which she had communicated during her time sharing a body with Heraclius had been modest by comparison. "Thank you for helping keep that slime out of my body," she nodded to Justice. "Now, if I can have my armor and my mace, I will be on my way." * * * * [October 31, 2026 - Orono, Maine Sector] Jane pulled off the wire and nylon butterfly wings and tossed them on the kitchen table. "Worst...Halloween...party...EVER," she sighed, dropping a pair of plastic antennae next to the wings. "Well, okay, maybe junior year of high school was worse, but only because Jimmy dumped me the week before and everything sucked for a while." Unsaid was the fact that there'd been a few really rough Halloweens after she'd been orphaned, but there hadn't been parties those years either. Plopping down on the couch, she ran her hand over the top of the one-eared metal wolf head on the table next to it. "Guess it's another Saturday night home alone, just the two of us." It doesn't have to be, the bars are still open, and there's definitely guys drunk enough to be interested. And time enough for you to get drunk enough to find them interestING. Jane shook her head a little. "Louie, did you say that? Heh, maybe I'm drunk enough already, actually. And why should I waste the rest of the night because of Erica and her loser friends?" She went to her bedroom and started going through her clubbing clothes, reinventing her costume to be a bit more daring. "Don't wait up, Louie!" she called over her shoulder as she left the apartment. The minor elemental spirit that Lady Sable had left behind in LU-62's head sighed contentedly. Feeding Jane's darker side...and feeding ON it...was proving to be a very satisfying task. * * * * [October 31, 2026 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin Sector] Lady Sable still hurt to the core of her spirit, but she'd rebuilt her glamour. Her own natural body sickened her, she wanted nothing to do with it, but lacked the power to simply reshape it to match her whim. So she starved it, living on magic, and appearing even to herself as something she wasn't. Flesh was the lie, shadows the truth. All was shadows and subterfuge, including this haven underneath the very feet of those who had come hunting her earlier in the day. "I have done as you require, my lady Nyx," she prayed. "I have provided a stalking horse, to distract the mortals from your actions, and to give your less subtle followers a new beacon. I live only to serve your dark and terribly glory." At least, she thought in such a deep place within herself that she dared to hope the goddess could not see it, until she could make herself a goddess equal to Nyx.... ============================================================================ Next Issue: Polla has her mind and body together and free for the first time since 2003 (real time...February 14 2025 in-story), what's she going to do now? Would you believe Disneyland? Well, okay, not Disneyland, but it might be just as strange as "A 'Star Is Torn"! ============================================================================ Author's Notes: "A dream itself is but a shadow." - Hamlet 2.2 In writing some of the atmospheric sequences for this issue, I ended up bumming myself out and having to take a break. :) Urban wastelands are definitely a recurring theme in this issue, and they crop up from time to time in ASH in general. Some, like Milwaukee or Dallas, just get erased completely. Then there's parts of Manhattan that were deathtraps of no maintenance for a couple of decades before Rex Umbrae took over and started rebuilding. And Detroit is an odd case all its own. Cities die, sometimes it's murder and other times more of a wasting away. Even in the real world, a search on "urban wasteland" can find plenty of pictures just as depressing as the ones I tried to paint with words here. The Family was created wayyyy back in ASH #3, and the false fusion of Contact and Paul Mahler took place in ASH #9. TerraStar was last at liberty and in her own body in CSV #25, but sent her higher soul wandering some time before ASH #50, when it landed in the shattered form of Base of the Pillar, transforming it into Geode. From Geode to Heraclius in ASH #70, putting her off-planet by the time her original body was freed in Four To Never (ASH #76-78). She first appeared in ASH #29, but mostly skulked around behind the scenes until after the Pyramid Scheme, at which point she joined the CSV. Briefly. I first used Nyx as a recurring "background threat" in the Beacon miniseries, establishing her as one of the few purebloods active in the mortal realm during the first 9/10ths of the 20th Century. In case anyone was still unsure about it, the Black Buddha of Bhutan can also be traced back to Nyx, and several of the mysterious voices in the shadows over the past twenty issues or so were also her (although Lady Sable started picking up that duty recently). I've actually been fiddling with background stuff involving Nyx in the main ASH book since shortly after City of Lights, but she's always seemed too subtle to rush into the sort of big story I had in mind, so it became one of the longest-running danglers in ASH. :) And it's going to keep dangling, at least for a while...Rising Sun isn't far enough behind me that I want to go Big Damn Epic again yet. "A 'Star Is Torn" may be a one-shot, or an extended arc, I haven't decided yet. Suffice to say, though, TerraStar has had a LOT of time to think and observe, and the plans she had when she arrived in the ASH "Mainline" a couple of years ago have probably changed. The roster spot that Triton left open for her way back in CSV #25 may not have been left open once Glyph assumed leadership, either.... ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================