A continuation of this

Preface

"Space is limitless

Space is the where of all things

Space is the fabric upon which all things rest

Space is the all-filament, easy to bend, but all but impossible to truly master

Space is the bedrock of all things, whose cracks and holes can destroy whole worlds

Space is the ocean whose waves reach all wheres and whens

Space obeys few, and masters so many

And now it has a new mistress, a witch to command it, to use it's fury against evil.

A free spirit, a roamer of the stars and dancer of the cosmos

A maiden of hair as black as the void and eyes as green as the crystal that gives her her name

With the fires of the Green sun coursing through her and blood of the fabric of space"

Far, far away

Jade blinked as she was surrounded by a mass of stars, the sights of the universe wheeling around her, clearly a stylized depiction given that galaxies could be seen in the same frame of reference as planets, but to a three year old, it all just seemed so fantastic. But a warm green glow soon entered her field of vision, finally coalescing into the shape of a white dog with no eyes, nose or seemingly a mouth for that matter. Indeed it's ears seemed to be more shapes than actually functional organs.

The hound gave her a nod, as Jade reached a hand out to the dog as it formed a massive barrier around her, creating an entire pocket universe for her to grow up in, seeming to warp the very fabric of reality around it, making it twitch and quiver before it's thoughts and touch. The sights of all the universe had to offer flashing around her as the sphere was constructing itself.

No not constructing itself, expanding out of a larger realm, one that seemed to simply spill forth from elseworlds and what ifs, ethereal psuedo-realities building upon each other to form true, solid matter, coalescing, compounding, building something out of nothing. For such laws as thermodynamics were meaningless to something of the hound's abilities.

Already distancing herself from the painful memories of maple valley, Jade found herself now dwelling in what seemed to be a tropical island, replete with an artificial sun and the beautiful majesty of all sorts of life and a great white tower for her to dwell in. "For me?" She asked as the Dog nodded, watching her as she rushed towards the magnificent dwelling it had created for her, a land for her to dwell in like a princess.

She took in the sights, like a vast fantasy scape that seemed to mold itself to her thoughts, breathing and beating as she did. The dog seeming to vanish out of sight by the time she turned back to face him. "Wait, where are you going?" She asked, but he was already gone, like a dream. For a moment, she briefly thought of christmas, and seemingly reading her mind, the weather changed. Frost swirled around the green, blue gales brushing through the snow and green landscapes as they were covered in snow.

And yet she didn't feel cold. Not even a little. If anything, she felt warm even as the snow built up, summer turning to winter, tropical becoming polar. But ever did the tower remain untouched, sticking impossibly high into the sky, just reaching forward towards infinity before capping out in a great orb, a palace for the princess of this domain. But for a brief moment, as the blue sky turned to black, she spotted a black blot roiling through the domain of winter.

She narrowed her eyes as her thoughts drifted, the snow giving way to the riot of summer weather, the green once again pushing out through the white. But the blot was gone, seemingly no more than just a Phantasm of her imagination. Or perhaps it was more? She couldn't tell...she didn't care anyway, because she wanted to see the interior of her new adobe.

Pushing through the doors, Jade was greeted with halls of gleaming white, testaments and monuments to science. Some would have preferred a more...medieval dwelling, but to Jade, this was where she always dreamed of living. Just like in those space age picture books. And once again, the hound was waiting, crackling with green fire and lightning for the briefest of moments before it's faceless alabaster form stabilized.

"It's great!" She said, grabbing onto the dog and squeezing it, feeling the soft fur as the hound facelessly, wordlessly nodded. It didn't bark or even pant to acknowledge her, but simply laid it's head on her shoulder. But for a moment, it seemed to face in one direction in particular, spotting that troublesome black blot again. But now was not the thing's time.

May 2008

Jade had grown considerably in the intervening four years, she had even started to explore beyond her surroundings. Now was the time to look outside. Clad in armor, she remembered her training. Move with the armor, it is one with you, and you are one with it. She was excited to see what lay outside of her little slice of heaven, what sort of wonders lay out there in the stars.

She had seen glimpses of it from the observation facilities within the emerald sphere, but now was the time to see it for herself. For years now, she had been exposed to the energies of the green sun, which had steadily changed her, molded her, empowered her. And when she engaged in her teleportation, she warped space around her, not going through any sort of alternate dimension, but instead literally folding and warping the very fabric of space around her.

If space were a sheet, she was essentially scrunching up the sheet and then popping over to where she wanted before letting it return to normalcy. The universe was hers to play with, and play with it she did. She explored every nook and cranny she could find. Teleporting from place to place, she looked everywhere she could, seeing many worlds, some dead, some thriving, some peaceful, some warring, some large, some small, but each unique in it's own little ways.

She went among the planets, observing them, looking at how life unfolded on them. She smiled as the people on them went about their lives, scurrying about like insects as she flitted between them. It was easy to think herself as better than they were. She was a being that could defeat most gods, they were...tiny. But she saw that some spanned many worlds, their civilization going from planet to planet. Some even across galaxies or beyond.

But most didn't bend space in quite the same way she did, so she was curious about how the got around. Teleporting down, she thought of hiding, and just like that, through gravity she bent light around her so that she couldn't be seen. She watched as a civilization of somewhat insectoid like people milled about, looking onward at the launching of a new spacecraft, kilometers from stern to stern.

The craft began to lift itself off the docks it was constructed in, pushing itself away from gravity's embrace. Using her own manipulation of gravity, she locked herself onto it's pull, going along side it. Watching it go past her and upwards, shooting beyond the world until she could see it's very curvature. And then it began to bend reality in a slight way, making a hole into it, a ring before it as it suddenly shot forward, disappearing in a gravitational corridor to leap off into metaspace.

Thinking about what she saw, she gasped in amazement as she went down again, her dogeared headband twitching slightly as she observed more ships launching away beyond light, seeing more things pushing against gravity's power. She wanted to try it. It seemed so much more fun than teleporting. She tried just stopping gravity's effect on herself, but all that did was make her start floating with little real direction.

She tried lowering gravity, but all that did was let her jump really far, sending herself sailing through the air like a flea would, except she had far greater proportional strength than any flea, and with the manipulation of gravity, she could sail so much farther. She thought that it was a bit dangerous to jump around on a planet with people, and after sailing by a city of surprised aliens, she teleported in a green flash, off to a desolate world made of Adamantium that many had killed and died for far from anyone she could hurt as she smashed into a mountain of pure adamantium, shattering it like so many lego bricks.

Regaining her bearing and hopping again, she landed on a flat plain, feeling the adamantium beneath her as she lowered herself to the ground, trying to think of a way to really fly, searching deep inside herself as her black armor's space garb fluttered in a cold wind. Pressing a knuckle against the ground and closing her eyes, she looked deep inside herself. Feeling her heartbeat, feeling the pulsation of space inside her, the burning fires of the green sun. And she finally felt it, the part of her lineage that got her chosen for this role.

The primordial part of her, that primal part of her. Calling to her, speaking to her. And she finally knew. She breathed out, opened her eyes slowly, and the very ground began to shake beneath her as she suddenly rocketed into the sky, her first take off being so powerful that the ground despite it's first grade adamantium construction, began to crack beneath her. Even such a potent material was not able to withstand her inadvertently putting too much into her first forray into the realm of flight.

With a massive sonic boom, she lifted into the air, ripping through the air particles she went through, spiraling around the world with the utmost ease and speed as she looked up into the sky, thinking to go towards the sun and with that, she ripped right through the atmosphere, the sonic boom reverberating across the world as she brought herself into a massive loop, briefly circling around a planet three times before the faintest hint of a second could have passed as she slingshotted out towards the blue sun of the solar system.

Going around it, she keyholed herself through the arches of a massive solar tendril, spinning herself and smiling with the glee of an eight year old who had finally learned to fly. Making a hard right, she looked at the sun and decided to try and go through it. And with a boom that pushed away the solar tendril behind her, she shot into the star with so much force that she actually created a depression in the roiling sea of plasma, pushing it inwards briefly as she hit it so quickly that the particles couldn't move out of her way.

She giggled as she went through the star, pushing past it's immense diameter before one could blink, and smashing her way out of it, ripping large chunks of plasma free of the star, letting them spiral out into the corona before re-impacting into their parent body. She for a moment, felt something try to slow her down, a barrier that tried to halt all things. Light speed, to most, this was an obstacle none could pass without cheating the laws of physics. But to her, it was just another wall to break.

In an instant, she powered through the light speed barrier, space rippling behind her as she created a shockwave through reality. Jade roared through the universe, ripping by planets, going through nebulae so fast that the bow waves created by her passage started to swirl and form into accretion discs, rip straight through the event horizons of black holes without even slowing down, and in the case of one, smashed straight through the singularity, making the black hole explode outwards in a titanic flash of light as the event horizon collapsed, freeing all the energy and matter that it had long trapped within it.

She whipped past cosmic strings, massive cracks in the fabric of reality, and by the shockwave of her movement, bent and altered their trajectories, making these colossal filaments, supposedly unbendable, shift just by her movement. She was the happiest girl in the universe. And nothing would have changed that. Not even for the briefest moment. The feeling of power growing, and resistance being overcome, the feeling of seeing the sights of the universe as she raced across it.

She shot past a very confused cosmic entity as it looked across the stars in search of worlds for it's maker, waving to the earthen elemental as she spun herself into a spiral and sped beyond him. She moved past a vast fleet of ships currently strip mining a planet bare, the Zolkri commander's eyes bugging out when he read the purported speed that the object his scanners were detecting was moving in.

A fleet of Chaos ships, marshalling out to war, were caught by the shockwave of her movement, and were sent scattered across space as the wave of deformed reality followed her like how a sonic boom follows a jet moving faster than sound can follow. The Daemons screaming as they felt something of a sort of power that had not been felt in aeons race past them, even as their commanders roared their defiance at this tempest created by her simple movement, scattering their ships across light years while she still kept on accelerating.

For a moment, she even shot right out of the universe, poking out of the vast cosmic bubble of reality, and with her backed turned to it, she spread her arms and let herself circle around reality itself, smiling as she went into a powered orbit around the universe, circling around to it's other side before turning back and punching right back in.

But as she shot past, that black blot once again seemed to appear, and for a brief moment, seemed to form baleful yellow eyes as it regarded her coldly. But now was not the time for action.

Realm of nightmares

Shifting back out of the material plane, the evil king Koshmar pondered what he had just seen. Yes...this one had power he thought as he wrapped his cloak around his body. She was capable of going so swiftly that her movement path was one of destruction, though she seemed to have avoided damaging anything that Koshmar knew to be pure of heart...an instinctual understanding of morality perhaps?

Koshmar had been a long time foe of the Entity, who had constantly foiled the Dream King's plans to expand into the land of the waking. Across so many aeons, it was always that creature that acted against the one time Daemon Prince. Even...he thought as he clutched his staff of change...when he was still a servant of Tzeentch.

Wrapped in a batwing styled cloak with the texture of the night sky possessed of a purple tinge, connected by a batwing clasp, the conical head of the demon king bore large bat ears, a small black mask from which it's pointed solid yellow glowing eyes peered out of, and a shifting mouth with too large shark teeth bore a seemingly eternal grin.

"But zuch times have passed like ze days ov my servitude. Zis gurl, she vill be usevul. So says Koshvmar!" He said with a slight cackle to his monstrous dream demons in a heavy but nonspecific slavic accent.

"But King, how do vou plan to vuse ze gurl?" One of the batwinged monsters asked the ex-servant of Chaos as he hatched many an evil plan in his head.

"Ve vill bend her vaking vurld to my vill, make her zee zat ze vurld of nightmares is ze only vurld vorth vighting vur." He said in response, cackling a screeching cackle, his grin somehow widening even further.

"Vhen vill ve attack?" Another of the creatures of the night that the bat king surrounded himself with asked, keeping itself low to the ground.

"In two yearz time, zchee zchall have attained a great mark in her life. Zhen, ve vill strike." He said, turning to his great claivoryance machine, through which he observed the waking world. Always waiting for a place to attack.

April 2010

By now, Jade had already met her brother, a blond boy she felt funny around, and his sister, whom she thought was pretty cool. But as she tried to look around the stars for something to do, she felt a ripple...an unnatural ripple, the tinge of something in the pool of the universe that does not rightfully belong in it. And with a simple thought, she teleported towards it. There, she found a group of soldiers in blue with an eagle emblazoned on their armor fighting against creatures of gothic fantasy and nightmares.

Almost as if the classical monster stories had now come to life. The motif of bats and the stench of dreams clung to these creatures like a crazed lover. It seemed that whatever sort of classical monster pulled out of the storybooks used was twisted to have at least some form of overall bat motif. And whats more, Astartes, warriors of the Imperium, bearing the same bat motif with their own traitor guard forces, seemed to be accompanying these demons of fear.

The creatures seemed to mold themselves to the fears of their targets, all while the cackling traitor Astartes and soldiers did their best to accompany their masters. If she remembered, these were the Visicount order, an order of the Astartes that went traitor with Xaraghoul, but ended up rejecting Chaos and instead pledged allegiance to another entity, living like piratical raiders and terrorists, fighting with beings not born of the warp, but none the less hateful towards the rest of existence.

The soldiers in blue, then, had to be the peacekeepers.

"Keep firing, keep fi-oh god" One started as a swarm of microscopic bat monsters flew inside the seams of his armor.

"No, no, no aahhhh! AAHHHH!!!" He said as the bats started to expand to regular size, flailing and screeching, eating the chewy center of the suit, the man inside flailing constantly before suddenly falling stiff until the micromonsters inside started to animate the suit with their hive minded movements.

Others were caught in sudden of flashes of darkness, and when the light returned to them, they were found dead, some mutilated, some ripped apart, others stripped to the bone, and others intact, just...unnaturally still. A constant electronic laughter filled all channels, making radio communication impossible as the voices of a legion chattered their madness away.

Looking around, Jade tried to make sense of what she was seeing, only for some of the night creatures to turn their attention towards her. The micro-bats that attempted to eat her were simply stopped by her shielding, and even if they could penetrate, her armor lacked the flaws of mortal technology and her flesh was far tougher than anything these creatures could have mustered.

With a pulsing gravitational wave she sent the swarms that tried to slice and bite at her scurrying away before shrinking the skulls of others while expanding their brains, detonating their heads wherever she could find them. But as she went forward, tearing through the ranks of terror like a spear pushing through water, two figures, molded into effigies of Ishmael sprang at her, and immediately she went cold.

Locking up in fear, her breath became shallow and rapid, trying to push away these visages of fear that presented themselves to her. "No, no, g-go away! Please! Go!" She screamed, her voice faltering and cracking as she tried to shield herself.

"Vhat is ze matter, gurl. Avraid of ze visage of death?" One asked, clutching it's scythe as it tried to hack into her shielding, memories starting to flash before her. Visages of death, destruction, chaos going across her eyes.

Shivering, choking on her own breath, and crying, she reached her hand out, thinking of anything that would get them to go away. And with a thought, a bow wave of kinetic energy slammed outwards, ramming and clearing away the lesser beings, but the other two remained, empowered by her fear of Ishmael.

Wrapping herself in shields formed by her own powers, she curled up, just hoping it would all go away. The rapidly shifting cueball eyes...the green skull mask. The spiked hat, that wicked scythe. She didn't want to remember it. She didn't want to see it.

She retreated into her own mind, the monsters outside raking at her shields with increasing force as the ten year old girl huddled to the ground. She could still see the blood, the fire, she could still hear that constant screaming, and the image of the scythe going through her father's neck and mother's back wouldn't stop playing for anything.

"I wanna go home..." She whimpered, trying to blink back the tears, finding herself in that awful, awful place again. In the burning wreck of maple valley. But a sharp PING echoed through her mindscape, and a soft light started to pour in, washing away the images of despair like dirt before a wave.

"H-huh?" She said, looking up, squinting as her puffy eyes refocused, seeing the Alabaster hound appear before her again.

A faint realization came across her as the outside world stilled, the monsters outside freezing as the creature stopped time. Finally, another shape began to materialize, clad in his cape bearing armor.

The hound then shifted the images to more pleasant ones, displaying the green fields of Tir Na Nog, where her mother still lived, where her brother was talking to Dave's orange clad sister.

Then Dave himself advanced up to her, offering her a hand. "H-how?" She sniffled, raising herself up to her feet.

"He can tell when you're in trouble." He smiled for the briefest moment before returning to his usual stoic face.

"R-really?" She asked of the faceless dog, which simply flared up in a crackling display of energy before the flare up died down.

"Umm." Dave asked, quirking an eyebrow at the sight.

"That's a yes Dave." She giggled afterwards, finally breathing normally as the pain started to vanish.

"So are you really here?" She said, perking up significantly.

"Yeah...check this head out." He said, craning his neck around to take it in as the last vestiges of fear started to fade away.

"But if you're like...here here...how can you help?" She asked before the scene was taken out of her mind, the time stop barrier still keeping all the monsters frozen.

"Like that." Dave gestured over to the entity as she gave it a tight hug.

"Good boy." She repeated, rocking a bit back and forth on the dog as she held it close before it nodded and vanished, the time stop barrier fading as normalcy returned.

By the time the ishmael effigy was ready to take it's next swing, Dave's sword stabbed into it's chest, and it vanished with a shriek as his Hyperphase sword ripped into it before she shot the other in the head with her green sun gun, firing at it repeatedly as it started to go pale before exploding back into a cloud of bats.

"Vat? How is zis possi...of course...Ze entity...Bah! I vill do zis myzelf." Koshmar said as he appeared in an explosion of bats and stray nightmares, looking at the two and laughing.

"Ah zey bring more of ze children! Good! I shall have vou both!" Koshmar declared as he unfurled his cloak, revealing his ornate gothic armor beneath, textured like the midnight sky and detailed with scenes of nightmares and horrors.

And before the fight could begin in it's earnest, all Dave could say. "Who's this douchebag?"