For a moment, Rora felt nothing, and she thought the anger was gone for a moment. She started to turn to Mori, honestly impressed and a little apologetic. Perhaps she hadn't been so angry as she th --
But when she opened her eyes, she didn't see Mori. Or at least, not as he had been. No gentle calmness about him, none of the lingering joy of the flight. The canyon was gone, too. Instead, she stood in a simple but spacious marble courtyard, the kind reserved for richer Cerebrae back in the Matriarch's city. There was a viewing window at the far end, opposite the mansion-like home. Clustered outside were a group of wealthy Cerebrae watching with expressions of mingled curiosity, boredom, and interest. Over their shoulders, Rora could see into the window, into a white cell. She didn't have to look to know Mori was in there, screaming. Starving. Dying.
She looked anyway. Just for a moment. It was as long as she could handle. She saw him screaming, begging for mercy, and a small, strangled whimper left her throat.
She found her anger.
The first stone was at least twice Mori's size, like thrice his weight. It trembled only a second before stilling and crumbling into a dust so fine, Rora didn't flinch as it washed over her. She didn't even seem to notice. Her eyes were shut, and her face was blank. But she shook from head to toe. The canyon had vanished. Before her lay hordes of Cerebrae, each and everyone one of them having turned a blind eye on Mori in his time of need.
She had obliterated three of the larger stones before Rora stepped out of herself again, watching, quietly impassive. The Empath in the red canyons had not changed physically. Her skin was a bit paler, the markings on her face a bit brighter. But she appeared to have shrunk within the canyon nonetheless, at least compared to the stones the landslide had produced. And yet not one of them gave her pause as she moved forward with an inexorable deliberateness, venting her anger while her mind strayed.
A Cerebra, a former Keeper called Pia. Mori's first owner. He screamed, she smiled. Rora struck.
In the canyon, six boulders rose into the air, whistling with speed, and collided overhead like an explosion of stone. The Empath had barely so much as flicked a wrist. Her eyes were still closed as she moved forward through the ever clearing canyon. The stones overhead, little more than pebbles now, began to rain down on the canyon, but before they could reach the earth, they picked up speed, becoming tiny projectiles to drive themselves into the hard, dead earth around the canyon, somehow avoiding the wide gap in the ground altogether.
Rora saw nothing. She had already moved further down the canyon, head bowed almost reverently. Her face had gone a bit paler, but it was difficult to notice from the trembling. For all the anger showed in her body, it left her face untouched.
Mori's second owner had beat him, struck him like some disobedient animal. The Empath drove several more boulders into the sides of the canyon hard enough to shake the earth and carve new caves. In her head, she could hear the Cerebrae screaming, pleading, like Mori had. Her finger nails bit into the palms of her hand, and she crashed another round of boulders into the sides of the canyon, again and again and again until neither remained, the formerly straight sides bowing and waving like fanatical onlookers.
The third owner earned the canyon a hole in the ground, a crater, large enough to swallow half a city. By the fourth, the air was whipping around the Empath and her Aavan both. In her head, she could hear screaming. Maybe the soil and stone, or maybe her own. She couldn't tell. She didn't care. She pressed forward.
The last owner was Risa, and it gave Rora pause, but the Empath in the canyon did not so much as hesitate. Every boulder, every tree, every shrub and speck of stone in a half mile radius raised itself off the ground, higher, higher, higher still, until the screaming wind threatened to carry them off. They began to swirl around each other, a great storm of debris, throwing off pieces to whistle through the air.
Before her, the Empath saw the Aavan Elders, and the Cerebrae who hadn't helped. Every Cerebrae who had ever owned an Aavan. The Empath was shaking so hard, she couldn't breathe. Blood dripped down her fingers from where her nails bit deep into flesh and stayed there. The anger had come full circle to devour itself and vomit a rage unlike any Rora had ever known.
The storm converged over the cruel Cerebrae and traitorous Aavan. Risa stood at the apex of the crowd, and beside her...Rora herself.
The screaming redoubled, and this time, the Empath knew it was the host she used. The Rora who existed outside of the monster could only stare. Twenty minutes the Empath had been raging. Her voice was, had been, little more than a tortured whimper. But at the side of herself leading those who had hurt Mori, the scream grew louder and louder still until it tore itself away in the eye of the storm. It was then she heard the word: useless. Sinitrus.
The Empath had been faltering. Stumbling, swaying, as the storm sapped her energy and anger. She paleness had been replaced with a flush to rival the brightness of her markings. The canyon had been leveled in places, carved deeper in others. Three inches of rubble and debris covered the ground in every direction for a quarter mile. Her hands stung where she'd cut herself, but that was less noticeable than how she struggled to breathe, or even stay on her feet. Her throat ached as if somehow had forced her to swallow broken glass. She felt dizzy enough to fall through the earth.
But at the sight of herself standing beside Risa, at the single utterance of the word, she broke. The mass of tree, stones, shrapnel and wind descended, fierce and fast, upon the imagined group.
The collision might have been mistaken for an explosion. The canyon itself appeared to tremble.
There was a moment of deafening silence.
Then, from the palpable cloud of dust, a small voice, hoarse, exhausted, but victorious.
"Mori?"
