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When the Light Washed Me Away

By Magik

I am the one whose light was darkness. I am the one who battled on both sides of the never-ending war between good and evil. I am the one who was prepared to die to save the world but ended up leaving it instead. I am the one who is prepared to give up the peace I have found in order to fight in the great war again.

I am the one whom you have forgotten.

Yet, I am still a dreamer, just like you.

***

I remember when the world came crashing down around me, when the balance of heaven and hell in my soul was inadvertently tipped, sending me sliding down into the darkness that had been burned onto my being when I was only seven years old, a taint that had been nurtured by the black lord of Limbo, Belasco, himself. My brother died or I thought he had. At least, that’s the catalyst that I claimed when people asked me why I had suddenly lost such a grip on myself. “It’s because of my brother,” I would say.

It was also because of Doug and Kitty. It was because I was getting to be so tired, so stretched thin trying to keep S’ym and the other demons in Limbo in line while, at the same time, attempting to be not only a normal  teenage girl, which would have been stressful enough, but a mutant, a member of the New Mutants, whose job was to pick up the pieces of the puzzle that the world had cast aside.

When I arrived here, they knew. They sat me at their feet and told me that it was no wonder I had crumbled inside, that I had allowed myself to fall. “The pressure, Illyana, was too great for one such as you. You are too young, too fragile.” In short, they told me that it wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault. That was what I needed to hear. My whole life, those years spent fighting the demons inside and outside, all I wanted someone  to say was that it wasn’t my fault, that it wasn’t some kind of grand, cosmic punishment.

To the world, I was dead, replaced by a slip of time that allowed Peter to have his little snowflake back, his sister as he remembered her, as he wanted her. I watched the world through a looking glass, I saw her. I saw them all accept her and I knew why she would fade. She wasn’t me. She contained no part of me. And the world was crying out for me. It needed me. It killed her.

When I thrust my sword into the sky, when I called out to all the power in the world and asked, pleaded, for the demons to go away, I meant to die. I meant to be swept out of all existence, to find some peace at last.  Instead, the high gods came down to me and whisked me away, fixing the Inferno problem as the light consumed me and my armor collapsed, leaving the child huddled inside.

The light was all around me. I could feel it burning me, the pureness cutting through my skin and pulling the evil out of me. Spiritual cleansing. I revealed in it expecting death to be around the corner waiting for me. I never expected to find them. I never expected to see gentle eyes peering at me, eyes that weren’t real, that only just began to conceal the immense power and immortality of the beings around me.

“What are you?” I asked, standing there in front of them, suddenly so small and unimportant, so human.

“Everything,” one of them whispered and I didn’t just hear that voice. It would have been impossible to just hear it. I felt it, I saw it. It shook me. I knew. I knew what they were. I knew what I was. I was their instrument but I had been played too soon, used up and dented. I would never play the song they had meant for me to create. I was their failure.

“No, child, you are just young.” They laughed at me for being so innocent.

Innocent. They thought I was. The one word I had hated, avoided, dreaded, and they used it freely.

I was the only human child they had and so they lavished me with gifts. They gave me the reflecting pool so that I could watch the progress, and eventually death, of my counterpart. Swords, armor, lessons in fencing, in combat, history studies, literature from the Middle Ages. They wanted me to have everything. They gave me everything. Nothing was beyond my reach in that place between worlds.

Love. They gave me love. I was their child. I was special. Somehow, when I had managed to fail everyone else, even myself, I had not failed them. They were not disappointed, the high gods. “Mistakes are common for the young. For human children. For god children. For all.”

Acceptance. Training. Education. Guidance. Love. I found it all in that world of peace that they had built to be my home, for they had built it for me. For only me. Just me. No one else.

I loved them. I never wanted to leave. I never wanted to be ready to take the next step. There was a next step. I knew that. I saw it when I looked into the mirror, when I saw the world. At night, I could hear it calling for me. When I had walked it, I had held the balance of light and dark. I had been the human host for the great war and as long as I lived and fought, the good battle would continue. That battle was too strong for my counterpart and the strain soon claimed her life.

I should have departed the moment the breath left her tiny body but I was afraid of the earth, of the people on it who had been friends, enemies. How could I explain to them that I had come to be a warrior of the light? That my purpose was above all their dreams, all their detours into human/mutant relations.

The high gods did not force, they never forced. They asked and I declined, for the time being, saying I needed to learn more, prepare more. Years they gave me without the slightest murmur of discontent.

I even began to dabble with magic again. It wasn’t that I needed this power. The high gods had taught me how to do many other things. All the secrets of energy and thought were mine now but I felt the need to have  something else, something familiar to fall back on. Like teleporting and Limbo, which I still held onto by the slightest of threads despite the fact that they taught me how to teleport without using it as my weigh station.  Magic was a comfort.

Then they finally drew me to them. “Child, you can wait no longer. The war. It is growing out of hand. There are many wrongs, much imbalance.”

I nodded. I knew the day was coming. I was ready. So I left them.

***

Standing outside the doors of the mansion, I run through a thousand different lines in my head. What will I say to them when they open the door? Will they even know me? I am older now, leaner, more muscular, and my hair has gotten so long and there are dark circles forever under my eyes. I am scared that they will disapprove and turn me away.

Worse, I fear that they will not trust me, will not understand the quest that I am on. I cannot fight them but I cannot allow them to stay my hand. I am guided by other forces. No longer am I a pawn of the war between  good and evil. Now I am the warrior of the light. I am the Lightchilde, in soul, in name.

The door begins to open and I smile. It has been years since they’ve seen me smile. I hope to do it more often now then I did previously.

The end?