Disclaimer: This story is a work of fan-fiction based on fictional characters and settings owned by Marvel Comics. No profit other than what may be inherent in the process of writing or reading the story is intended; no financial or material profit is intended or expected at all. Please send feedback or requests for permission to archive, pop-up, or MST to me at persephone_kore@yahoo.com . Many thanks to the assorted people who betaed this for me, especially Abyss, who sent the main one, and Duey and kaleko for the title help. All remaining errors or areas for improvement are still my doing.

Poison Light
by Persephone

She rose out of a pool of light like the Lady of the Lake rising from the water, sword uplifted over her head and bright flowing hair and bright armor shining in the sun, and I thought she was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, and rejoiced that she wasn't dead after all.

I should have killed her.

Then, when first I glimpsed the chill in those triumphant blue eyes, the chill that drove away even the warmth of a midsummer afternoon.

She seemed so innocent -- no. Never that, after her first sojourn in that ghastly otherworld, after its foul fingers of miasma first raked through her hair. Never innocent when Limbo lay chained to her soul. She seemed so desirous of being innocent, seemed to long for freedom from the taint she had taken on.

She seemed. Perhaps it was true once; perhaps in some corner of her heart she regretted, she loathed what she had become.

As the world loathes what it let her make of it.

It was easy to look at the illusion -- no, the truth that she had never wanted this, that she was driven to it step by step by circumstance beyond her control -- it was easy to accept that and try to forget what she always knew, that she'd made each choice and taken each step, aware, and that the circumstances that drove her along were no absolution and regret could never help unless she found way enough and will enough to leave the path she'd taken. It was easy to pretend she was innocent, a victim, to pretend until pretense became belief of both though only one was true.

She regretted once at least.

I should have killed her, when she warned me of what she would do, one night, and begged me to cut her throat, to stop her heart, anything, before she did it.

An aberration. She planned it all along. I should have known. Perhaps even her brief regret and change of heart were a plot and she laughed me to scorn in what was left of her heart. Perhaps she knew I wouldn't harm her.

Perhaps I would be dead if I had tried. I wish I had.

Can anguish that deep be false?

Maybe not. Her anguish need not have been a sham even if she had utterly lost remorse by then. I am learning that.

The telepaths were first. She had grown in power, as we all learned so bitterly, and I suppose she must have studied what she calls mind-spells. Normal telepathy could not touch her mind after her return; it struck only blinding-bright smooth eldritch silver, and she could spin smoky silver darkness about others, or break them, or tantalize them by proffering their secret desires, or simply take them through a stepping disc and....

Never mind that.

She freed the Shadow King first of all, tricked Betsy into losing her grasp. We didn't realize it at first, for she fought him, sword flashing impossibly against blackness on the Astral Plane, how we never knew... and then she bound him to her and we began to realize the world would be hers.

She used him against the rest, against the other telepaths and against the world, as a weapon and a shield, and alongside her sorcery he made her irresistible.

There was no hope.

None at all.

That sword broke any spell that tried to hold her; time and space formed no boundaries to her.

The foulness began to seep from her world into ours. We had never understood; we left her to it and it took her, or she yielded finally to the allure of its own peculiar power, and she was lost and we with her when she made her move.

The taint on the air, the taste of sulfur and the hint of darkness in broad daylight, these were nothing. We barely noticed them at first. It was the taint that leaked into the soul, the essence of the dark magic, that let her conquer the populace -- and our souls gave her the means to subsume more and more of the physical world.

I suppose it conquered her, first.

We failed to notice the deeper, subtler taint initially, too.

And that made all the difference.

It was insidious at first. Oh, there were those she forced or seduced to her side, those she deemed powerful enough to resist anything short of a direct assault, of her personal attention.

Madelyne, spirit crushed and twisted, knelt before her.

Selene, defeated, paid her homage. And the gleaming Darkchilde, remembering how the ancient sorceress had humbled her in time past, shook back her bright hair and laughed.

Apocalypse -- no one is entirely sure what happened to Apocalypse. Some say he is dead; others claim that he bides his time, or sleeps, and simply awaits her demise. Others still argue that his vaunted strength has never been suited to resisting this, for it does not lie in purity of heart, and his formidable will does not direct him so far from Limbo's aims that his acts cannot be brought silently into alignment with her purposes.

When anyone dared to ask her of him, she only smiled. That was all.

No one asks her now.

Those she thought she could not corrupt... were slaughtered. Any who showed mercy after the first six months were given special attention, and broken... or fed to her servants at the last. And still her shining beauty, majestic now as the world's queen, captivated me even as I shrank back from her acts, even as I reveled in them.

But the rest she left to hints, to creeping influences, to the slow encouragement of all the worst in us. To the miasma surrounding.

The worst is liking it. I see those I respected laugh at others' pain, enjoy causing it.

I see it in myself. All the pettiest things -- there can be more evil in petty spite than in fiery rages or grand and cruel schemes, for the smaller cruelties are so easy to fall into and gnaw so bitterly into all that is noble in the soul.

And we begin not to care, begin to enjoy inflicting suffering, for any reason or none, or only to lash out of our own misery.

I like it. What is left of who I was shudders at the thought, cringes and shrivels away from what I am becoming. What I have become.

That is why there is no hope left.

No hope.

Not because she destroyed it.

No.

Because we let her.

I had seen my own dark side before; with the X-Men or associates, that was almost inevitable. I knew I was capable of horrors, had seen some of them wreaked or plotted, had fought the evil twin of my soul to submission.

I never knew how miserable it would be to live it. I never knew the crawling nastiness and the loathing even evil has for evil, never knew how remorseless mocking glee went along with the sure knowledge that genuine joy was forever and always out of reach.

She taught me that.

She took the world.

We have no hope.

I should have killed her.

She was so beautiful.

I should have killed her.

It was so easy to believe she was innocent.

Innocent through victimhood.

Not her fault.

I should have killed her.

But she seemed so innocent....

So innocent...?

...Why did that matter again?