Amaranthine

Like everyone else on campus, Dawn was woken up by the titanic crash from the front gate. Also like most people, she knew it wasn’t her job to deal with right now. Unlike most people, she didn’t accept that. Her pulse picked up, and her mind, brain fog cleared and as sharp as it had ever been, raced as she listened to the night.

Gunfire, explosions, screams…. A little laughter, was that Gwyn?

Concerning girl, Dawn thought, moving to drag herself out of bed. She knew, intellectually, her recovery speed was amazing after the cranial trauma she’d endured. However, as the right side of her body let her down once again, moving slowly and clumsily in response to her commands, she found she had finally had quite enough.

She let out a growl that would have surprised no-one coming from the lips of a predator, but from the pretty deer lady sounded entirely unnatural. With her magic, she reached towards the ever-growing bouquet of roses at her bedside. Elizabeth brought a fresh rose to add with each visit, and there had been far too many visits.

The stems grew towards her, carrying their flowers, leaves, and thorns. As they wrapped her arm, side, and leg, those thorns dug into her flesh, drawing blood, but Dawn welcomed the pain. Indeed, she grew the thorns, screaming as they pierced deeper, hardening to puncture bone before they spread out to anchor themselves.

She healed the trauma as it was inflicted, but the pain was not to be compromised. Were it not for the frustration and anger she felt bolstering her willpower, she had no doubt she would have lost consciousness, falling to the ground and bleeding out from the massive damage she was inflicting on herself. Instead, she let the pain feed the anger, the anger fight the pain, and part of her was reborn.

The rosevines inlaid themselves in an intricate latticework all over her right side, thorns out, and thorns in. Experimentally, she moved those vines using her magic, bringing a hand in front, and forming a fist. She smiled at the spike of pain, and the strength she could feel in the limb.

Her first steps were faltering, but as she took a lap around the room, she found her stride evening out. That was when the shooting started.

Dawn snarled. The inborn fear response she should have to gunshots was completely overridden by the pain and frustration fueled rage she was experiencing, and for maybe the first time ever, a doe walked towards the gunshots.

The thing about a hospital, despite its crisp white sanitized ouvre, and the association with death, is that its patient wings teem with life. Not just the patients fighting this ailment, or that injury, and not just the loved ones visiting. Dawn was far from the only person to have received flowers as company while they recovered, and as she strode confidently down the hall, those plants joined her.

At her command, they ripped off the silly hospital gown, and replaced it, weaving a living, shifting dress that was part of her, interlinking into the vines that controlled her arm. As she approached the doorway, eyes glowing an angry verdant green, she could see flashes of gunfire light up the lobby beyond. She bared her teeth, raising a fist that was mirrored a hundred times larger by the life she had collected along the way.

The doors to the lobby burst off their hinges at the impact of the enormous fist, and Dawn shot through. She hissed as the vines of her right arm shot out, snaring the head of one of the invaders, slamming him to the ground hard enough his helmet split in two, forehead meeting the ground with a sickening crack.

His companions immediately shifted fire from the fleeing staff to the wrathful god that had been woken from the hospital depths, but Dawn let out a wicked laugh as her mass of life reformed into a wall in front of her. The gunfire pattered out, and her excellent ears picked up confused whispering from the other side. Then the wall grew thorns, and slammed forward. With a squelch like a crushed bug, the lobby was cleared.

“Mmm, plant magic,” said an amused voice from the hospital entrance. Dawn looked over to see a figure made of pure shadow, only for an instant, before it melted into the floor. The lobby, already dark from night and the power loss, fell even deeper into blackness, Dawn’s excellent night vision now the only way she could see at all.

“This newest batch of Guardian pets is very interesting,” the voice said, figure now seated in the receptionist chair. Striking vines smashed it to splinters, but the voice came from the balcony now. “Dragons, empaths, annyoingly indestructible women and…. some little bitch my dad would have hung over the fireplace.”

The last two words were in her ear, and a searing cold slashed against her back as she used vines to whip herself away.

“Your friends took the tower bait like it was a pill wrapped in bacon,” it continued, now seeming to come from every dark corner of the room at once. “Turns out, all you have to do to distract the strongest lapdog Altereds in the city is kill a few teenaged Cattle. We should have done this years ago.”

It was in front of her in an instant, and she slashed a razor thorned vine through it, only to have it dissipate with a chuckle.

“Every nature magician I’ve ever killed was so certain they controlled the primal force of the universe,” it said, as another spot of burning cold broke out on Dawn’s leg. “But do you know what was there before nature? Darkn—”

Dawn had had about e-fucking-nough of the monologue, and when this asshole predictably teleported to whisper into her other ear, she was ready for him. The vine that shot up from her right shoulder might not have done anything to him normally, but the bioluminescent moss covering it? That was something shadow could not accommodate.

Her foe gave a wailing shriek, staggering back, the first time she’d seen it move instead of just teleporting. As it did, it stepped on another vine, that burst into light. From that burst, the vines Dawn had extended to every wall, every crevice, every nook of the room came alight, and that shriek rose in timbre and volume for an instant, before cutting off in a death rattle.

Dawn shook her head, allowing herself a smug smile.

“Stars, if the Risen River had monologued like that New Davenport might have had a chance.”

Dawn swept the hospital, checking in on each room as brave doctors began to do the same. It seemed she had killed the team attacking them before they had been able to enter deeper than the lobby, although that had still been too far for some staff. Dawn’s vines lined the bodies up, arranging them respectfully as she could.

If only nature held sway over death, instead of the other way around, she thought, looking over their faces. She’d seen one or two, doing the work of healing throughout the building over her time here.

“H-hey,” she heard from behind her, spinning to face the approacher, much more inclined to hostility than she typically was. When she saw Siobhan, she let her vines, poised to strike, relax. To her credit, the fox-doctor didn’t allow herself to flinch. Instead, she smiled, scared and sad, but genuine. “Thank you. For saving us. That’s twice now for me, and once for the rest of us.”

Dawn returned an apologetic smile of her own, wishing she hadn’t scared the young doctor.

“I’m a Guardian, Siobhan,” she said. “It’s what we do. I wish I could be more help with the chaos around here, but I don’t believe this attack is finished.”

Her smile shifted from sad to mischievous.

“Consider this me discharging myself,” she said, and bounded off, vines pushing and pulling her legs with each step.