The Guardians - The Collapsing of the Wall (Book 3)
Chapter 12: For love and in the war

Sometimes people don’t believe in legends, and other times they just believe in them too much. Now, the shining pearl was forming next to the wall, with every creature that was passing through it. It wasn’t at all like Lily had imagined it, and it was huge, big enough for her to put her arms around it, and it seemed pretty heavy.

She knows what she had to do, for she needs to get to it, lift it up, throw it in the portal, and this was the only way she could slow down the monsters from entering their world. The mission wasn’t going to end there, but when she will smash with hew sword the place where the pearl was created. Then the Portal was going to close, and she needed to sacrifice herself for this thing. Only she knew that she was going to die after her last mission, so she squeezes her nails into her palm, and she desperately wants to tell Dean something, anything, just to talk to him.

The dragons rise up in the air, too high in the sky until they seem some black spots on the heavenly blue. The time had stopped, for it was a sunset since the Wall’s Portal had broken. They continue to go up to gain some speed, and Lily looks for a second at the sky. She grabs Dean’s arm, she puts her other hand around his neck, and she kisses him like it was the last time. They had both wanted this for so long, and they had waited for their reunion for too long, and now they had too little time left together.

The energy that seemed to surround the Wall sometime seemed now to be around them. His hands are around her waist, and hers on his cheeks. He feels the tension from that kiss, and he wonders why is Lily so rushed to do this right now, with such great passion and speed, in the middle of a war.

“I know that you were impatient to see me, I was too… But I didn’t get the chance to say how sorry I am for our last meeting…”

“Dean, shut up!” she says and kisses him again when she notices the dragons falling from the heights.

He lets himself overwhelmed by the moment, and he is now sure that something had happened, for Lily was acting extremely weird.

“What have you done?” he asks when he hears wings above them.

“I lied to you”, she answers.

Dean doesn’t get the chance to learn some more details, for the monsters attack the Guardians with brutality. They are not fighting each other anymore, but they are fighting together to stop the creatures that were slaughtering without mercy everything in their way. The view mirrors the legends as they were supposed to happen, with the Guardians fighting together against these atrocities out of control from the Portal.

“I can stop this!” Lily yells at Dean.

“I know this!” he says confused.

“What you don’t know is that I will die when I close the Portal!” she shouts and gets away, trying to reach the shining pearl next to the Wall.

Dean can’t focus anymore when he hears the news, and Isaac hears them as well, but only a part of it, without knowing what that was really about. Addison closes her eyes, trying to figure out a good decision. She is not sure if it’s the right thing to tell him the truth, but she finally decides to let him know that she was inside Lily’s head. So she starts shouting him the story, among the sounds of hitting swords and gunshots.

Brook doesn’t stop from hitting Mark, and she soon doesn’t feel her hands anymore, and she makes the terrible mistake to stop and take a look at them, just for a second, when he pushes her from him with his last powers. He takes out his gun, and he shots her in the belly, and he aims her one more time, but only the gun doesn’t work anymore.

She gets up slowly and touches her pistol, and she shots him in the leg this time, with her last bullet left, for she doesn’t want to make his end a simple one. He falls on the ground, and she moves hardly, keeping pressure on her wound, and the sword squeezed in her other hand. Mark is struggling on the sand, but Brook doesn’t show him mercy and she hits him with her legs, until he remains still on his back, looking at her hopeless.

“Did you enjoy what you’ve done, you bastard? Now I will enjoy it!” she shouts cutting his chest open with her sword.

She stabs him again, and again, and one more time, and so on until she feels life flowing out of her body, and she falls to her knees next to Mark’s body. She squeezes her wound, but she notices that the blood is too much and it’s flowing too fast, and she is too dizzy to save herself. She lies down, just a few steps away from Leo’s murderer, and she’s about to cry, but she keeps it together and makes a sound of relief instead.

Lily’s running among the Guardians, stabbing every single creature she sees. When a dragon grabs her from the back with his claws and tries to lift her up, she makes a painful sound, but so long and loud that it sounds like an echo, drawing looks on her. Her eyes light up, the Mark burns her, and she stabs the dragon, which releases her the next moment. She doesn’t fall from a big distance, and she gets up fast, running then to recover her sword. Then she heads to the pearl, for it’s her duty to take it out of there, but her run is stopped by Ray, who suddenly appears in front of her.

Instead of fighting the monsters, he prefers to attack Lily, who barely gets out of his way in time, stopping his sword with hers. That sound makes the Guardians around look at them, for it wasn’t a sound that was heard in the last dozens of minutes around them.

Addison is the closest one to her, and she sees Lily in danger, so she tries to help her, running at them without second thoughts, for she knows damn well what would happen if Lily dies. She wasn’t going to let the worlds to be destroyed, so she attacks Ray when he puts Lily on the ground.

“Go! Get that pearl!” she tells Lily.

She looks at her confused about where did she learn those details, but she has no time to think about it now, and she heads there. After a few steps though, she hears Ray’s laugh, who had hit Addison to the ground. Lily doesn’t think twice and she abandons her mission with the pearl, turning around. Addison’s face gives her away though, and Ray turns and hits with his sword. Lily grabs it in a jump, and while the shadow dragons are flying among them, they start fighting without giving any signs that they are going to back off soon.

Addison gets up and protects Lily from the flying creatures that keep attacking her, and Isaac, who sees what’s happening, tries heavily to get to them.

Ray manages to scratch Lily on her belly, cutting off her suit. But she doesn’t feel pain, more like anger, and she blocks his next hit with so much strength that she makes his sword fly out from his hands. Her eyes become yellow, and they light some fear inside Ray, who tends to step back now. Lily doesn’t forgive him though, and with the same strength she cuts off his head, leaving it to fall in the sand, right under Addison’s terrified eyes.

“Now go and help the others!” Lily tells her and runs forward.

Another strange sound starts, like a heavy buzz, and the Portal breaks one more time, and from the black hole appear dozens of beings, all colors and sides. Some look like them, others not even close, and that’s the moment when Lily realizes she has in front of her the Children of the Moon, and also a part of the Children of the Sun. They had got inside through the portal and were now killing with the Guardians the dragons and demons.

She manages to reach the pearl, and she climbs to it, but she is pushed back by a powerful energy. She had thought this will be easy, but there was a protection, a powerful one, which was keeping her away from that shiny object. Lily gets up scarcely, and so she tries to get further through the energy field that’s pushing her away. The dragons which hit the energy field turn into dust and the Guardians who are watching Lily’s actions are wondering why she isn’t a bunch of ashes yet.

Brook watches what her friend is doing too, and she leans on her elbows, trying to get up. She takes shelter by putting over her head a long piece fallen from a ruin, and she feels her body lacked energy ready to collapse under its weight.

Lily arrives in front of the pearl, puts her arms around it and pulls it powerfully, but she doesn’t move it. The moment she lets go she has pushed away again, so she tries to keep herself on her feet, and grabs the pearl one more time. She breathes heavily, and she gathers all the energy she has left, screaming from the bottom of her soul.

“Come on, Lily”, whispers Tamara, who was observing what she has been doing and only now she understood who she really was.

Leonor, who had witnessed from a distance Ray’s murder, is looking for Lily outraged. She wants to kill her, but she also wants Dean dead for treason. She is occupied with the monsters at the moment, but she’s still looking for her and, when she sees her, she remains shocked. She doesn’t see the connection between the legends and the little child from Base R, and she can’t believe her eyes that she was the chosen one for carrying the Dragon’s Sign. She knows too little about the story of the Mark, so she decides to stop hunting her for now, at least until she was going to get them rid of the creatures and close the Portal.

When Lily pulls the pearl and grabs it with her arms, Leonor fixes Dean with her eyes. She runs at him, but Isaac’s voice from far away warns him to jump aside. He bends down when Leonor pulls the trigger, and he turns at her, twisting her hand and trying to steal her gun. He doesn’t have the time to thank Isaac for warning him, but he hopes to survive enough time to do so.

In the crowd that’s fighting the monsters, Lily replaces a lane made by the Guardians for her, leaving her a clear way to carry the pearl where she needed to.

When she arrives in front of the Wall’s Portal, Lily leans on the back, and she throws the pearl into the darkness of the hole that had taken the portal’s place. At this moment, the dragons which are near the spot are attracted inside, and then, instead of a bunch of creatures comes out a single dizzily demon. The same happens with the Children of the Moon and Sun, who had helped them with the creatures all along, they are pulled inside too, back to their worlds.

Her actions had slowed down the activity of the Portal, and now all she had to do was to destroy the place where the pearl had been created. But when she’s about to head to the next step from her mission, she sees Leonor hitting Dean, and pointing the gun at his head.

She doesn’t think things through and she heads to her, shouting her name angrily:

“Leonor! Stop it!”

She looks up at her and grabs Dean’s neck with her hand, and with the other hand, she is still holding the gun pointed at him. There’s some blood flowing on his face, and Lily doesn’t know exactly how to proceed, so she acts from pure instinct.

“I believe that you want me.”

“That’s not true. I don’t want you. At least not now. I want him to pay for treason. And now I am grateful that he didn’t kill you, for you are the Marked One and we all would have been dead.”

“So you don’t want me dead”, says Lily with an idea in her mind.

“No. I want you to carry on with your mission, and we will settle things after that. We will see who is the best.”

“Let Dean go or you will remain unsaved”, she says positioning the sword at her own neck.

Dean opens his eyes and sees a view he doesn’t quite understand. The others are fighting the mythological creatures around them, but they can’t help seeing Lily’s gesture.

“Lily, what the hell are you doing?” Dean asks huskily.

“You’re bluffing,” says Leonor touching Dean’s head with the gun. “You wouldn’t sacrifice everyone here for him. If you die, then he dies too. They all die.”

“Not really. Some of them will survive, and he has a chance of being one of them. You don’t want to test me”, says Lily making a step at her.

Isaac is coming from behind, trying to take Leonor by surprise, but the situation gets out of Lily’s control when she pushes the charging button from the gun, getting ready to shot Dean.

“I’m not bluffing!” shouts Lily remembering the times when she didn’t feel the pain when the car exploded or the cut she gained on her belly.

She takes the sword and, from a pure instinct, she presses its edge on her neck, leaving a trace of blood behind. Leonor remains shocked and she takes her hand off the trigger, putting down the gun.

“You’re mad!” she shouts. “You’re killing us all!”

Isaac jumps on Leonor, making her lose her balance, and they both fall on the sand, but they can’t continue fighting each other because the shadow demons attack them again. Lily slaughters two, and then she wipes her blood from her neck right under Dean’s shocked eyes. Her wound was closing during those moments, and she wasn’t feeling any kind of pain. The Mark burns her though, and it remembers her about her mission.

She looks confused at Dean and Isaac, who are fighting the monsters, and then she looks over her shoulder, to the place where the pearl was created. She sees Leonor sneaking among the Guardians, trying to save her skin, and Isaac running after her. Dean, though, is trying to get to Lily now, but there are too many demons between them. They start spitting fire and leave ashes behind, and they make Dean’s pass even harder.

When he sees Lily making a step back, ready to run to sacrifice, he disapproves it with a shake of his head, and he sees the view breaking apart in front of his eyes. He wants to yell at her, to stop her, but his voice won’t come out of his throat, and the demons don’t let him pass. He wants to tell her so many things, but all he can do is to look in her eyes one more time, while she’s getting away slowly, and then she turns around and starts running to accomplish her last mission, the one she was actually left alive for.

With every step, with every breath, with every breeze and smell of burnt, Lily feels her body catching fire. She was supposed to be dead too many times by now, but something had kept her alive so she could end her mission. And now, with tears in her eyes, with her sword squeezed in her hands, with clean and honest heart, she’s running in the arms of death, ready to sacrifice herself for the greater good.