New SHAZAM in Flashpoint World - Chapter 19
Chapter 19: Everest of Tears
The flight from Wayne Manor was a raw, tearing shriek of pure, unadulterated anguish given physical form. Kara didn’t steer, didn’t navigate; she simply fled, a desperate, instinctual bolt away from the faces of her rescuers, away from the well-meaning but uncomprehending humans who had dared to ask for her help. Their words, their expectations, had been like salt rubbed into an eight-year-old wound that had never been allowed to heal. The sky above Gotham, bruised and heavy, mirrored the storm raging within her. She punched through the cloud cover, the Speed of Mercury propelling her at velocities that blurred the world below into an irrelevant smear, the wind a scouring, insufficient balm against the inferno of her emotions.
She wasn’t aiming for anywhere in particular, only away. Away from the soft grass that had felt like a mockery after years on cold stone. Away from the gentle sunlight that had revived her body but left her spirit still trapped in the frigid darkness of her cell. Away from the resonant Kryptonian words spoken by the tall, powerful stranger, words that reminded her of a home she would never see again, of a life stolen before it had truly begun.
Her mind was a chaotic tempest of fragmented memories: the sterile white walls of labs, the prick of needles, the constant, invasive hum of machinery, the faces of her captors – sometimes blurred and indistinct, sometimes shockingly clear, their eyes cold, curious, utterly devoid of empathy. The endless, crushing darkness of her cell, a sensory deprivation so profound it had become a physical ache, a gnawing emptiness that consumed her from within. The gnawing hunger, the biting cold, the constant, underlying thrum of fear that had been her only companion for three thousand sunless days.
And now, freedom. But what was freedom when it was just another, larger prison? A world populated by the same species that had caged her, tortured her. They wanted her help? They wanted her to fight for them? The sheer, galling audacity of it burned through her like her own burgeoning heat vision.
She flew higher, faster, the air thinning, the curvature of the Earth becoming apparent. She needed solitude, absolute solitude, a place where no human voice could reach her, where no pitying or demanding eyes could find her. A place as cold and desolate as the landscape of her own ravaged heart.
Her trajectory, guided by an unconscious, primal urge for the extreme, for the inhospitable, began to curve eastward, then southward. The vast, indifferent peaks of the Himalayas, the roof of the world, eventually rose to meet her. And among them, one stood above all others, its summit wreathed in ice plumes, a jagged, unforgiving finger pointing towards a cold, uncaring cosmos. Chomolungma. Everest.
Here. This was where she could break.
She landed, not with grace, but with a jarring impact on a high, windswept col, a desolate saddle of rock and ice just below the main summit. The air here was knife-thin, colder than any Siberian winter, the silence absolute, broken only by the howling, banshee cry of the wind whipping across the jagged peaks. Far below, the world was a distant, hazy dream. Here, there was only ice, rock, and an infinite, empty sky. It was perfect.
For a long moment, Kara simply stood there, a tiny, vibrant figure in her magically restored health, yet utterly dwarfed by the colossal, indifferent majesty of the mountains. She trembled, not from the cold – her Kryptonian body, supercharged by the flight through sunlight, was a furnace of internal energy – but from the sheer, overwhelming force of the emotions she had held captive for so long.
Then, the dam broke.
A single, choked sob escaped her lips, a sound immediately snatched away by the ravenous wind. Then another, and another, until she was consumed by a storm of weeping, great, shuddering gasps that tore through her frame. The tears, when they came, froze instantly on her lashes, on her cheeks, tiny, glittering icicles of pure, crystallized anguish.
She sank to her knees on the frozen rock, her fists clenched so tightly her knuckles were white, her head bowed. Eight years. Eight years of terror, of loneliness, of unutterable despair. Eight years as a lab rat, a specimen, her body poked and prodded, her mind starved of stimulation, her spirit systematically crushed. She had arrived on this planet a frightened, orphaned child, her world turned to dust, hoping for refuge, for a sliver of kindness in a vast, uncaring universe. And this world, this Earth, had met her with bars, with darkness, with pain.
Her grief was a physical force, a maelstrom within her. And as it raged, the power of a Kryptonian under a yellow sun, a power she had barely begun to comprehend, began to respond in kind.
The wind around her intensified, no longer the natural currents of the high Himalayas, but a furious, localized gale that shrieked and tore at the ice and snow. Dark, angry clouds, not born of any weather pattern, began to boil and coalesce around the summit, an unnatural, swirling vortex of black and grey. The temperature plummeted further, a bone-deep chill that even the mountain gods would have shivered at.
“Why?” The wordless cry ripped through her mind, a scream of pure, uncomprehending agony. “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?”
Flashes of memory, sharp and cruel as shards of ice, assailed her. The terror of Krypton’s final moments, the desperate hope in her parents’ eyes as they launched her escape pod into the void. The long, lonely journey through the stars. The jarring crash on a cold, alien world. And then, the faces. The hard, unsmiling faces of the soldiers who had dragged her from the wreckage. The sterile, white-tiled rooms. The needles. The restraints. The endless, suffocating darkness.
Her own screams, muffled and unheard in that lightless prison, now echoed across the desolate peaks of Everest, amplified by her grief into something akin to thunder. The ground beneath her began to tremble, not from any tectonic shift, but from the raw, uncontrolled energy pouring out of her, the Strength of Hercules manifesting as a furious, frustrated tremor.
With a primal roar of pain, she threw her head back, her eyes, blazing now with an internal crimson fire, fixed on the roiling black clouds above. Twin beams of incandescent heat vision, raw and unfocused, lanced upwards, not aimed at anything, just pure, destructive energy given vent. They tore through the storm clouds, vaporizing tons of ice and snow in an instant, the superheated steam hissing into the frigid air. The concussive force of their passage, the sudden displacement of atmosphere, triggered a series of deafening cracks from the surrounding glaciers.
Avalanches.
Great white serpents of snow, ice, and rock began to pour down the steep slopes of Everest and its neighboring peaks, a terrifying, unstoppable cascade of elemental fury. The mountains themselves seemed to cry out in response to her sorrow, the roar of the falling snow a chorus to her own heartbroken lament.
She didn’t see it. She didn’t care. She was lost in her own personal hell, reliving every moment of her suffering, every betrayal, every lost hope. She pounded her fists against the unyielding rock, each blow sending shockwaves through the ancient stone, each impact a physical manifestation of her rage against an unjust universe.
She was just a girl. A girl who had lost her parents, her planet, her people. A girl who had been sent across the stars with a dying hope, only to find a new kind of torment on a world that should have been a haven. She had endured. She had survived. But the cost had been immense.
The storm she had inadvertently created raged around her, a maelstrom of hurricane-force winds, blinding snow, and rolling thunder, the sky split by her own uncontrolled bolts of heat vision. The avalanches thundered down into the valleys below, reshaping the landscape in their fury. It was as if the very planet was recoiling from the depth of her pain.
After what felt like an eternity, the violent crescendo of her grief began to subside. The fury of the storm lessened, the winds slowly dying down, the dark clouds beginning to dissipate, though the snow still fell heavily. Her heat vision faded, her eyes returning to their luminous blue, now swollen and red from weeping. The tremors ceased.
She collapsed onto the snow-covered rock, her body wracked with a final series of shuddering sobs, emotionally, if not physically, utterly spent. The power was still there, a warm, steady hum beneath her skin, courtesy of the distant, unseen sun, but the will to use it, the will to do anything but grieve, was gone.
She lay curled in the snow, the fresh powder already beginning to blanket her, a tiny, broken figure in a vast, storm-scarred wilderness of her own making. The tears still flowed, freezing on her face, mingling with the falling snow. She was alone. Utterly, completely alone, on the highest, most desolate peak of a hostile world, with nothing but the ghosts of her past and the crushing weight of her own immense, unwanted power for company.
The last daughter of Krypton, the girl who was meant to be Supergirl, wept in the thin, icy air of Mount Everest, her sorrow a vast, silent scream that even the indifferent gods of the mountain seemed to hear. Her journey to Earth had ended not in hope, but in a fresh agony. And the path from this Everest of tears, back to any semblance of light, of purpose, seemed an impossible climb.