But she didn’t know that.

And so she merely fell.

Ever downwards.

Forever and all eternity.

The great Goddess Who Falls.

***********

The sight of Akane falling snapped Ranma out of the strange half-awareness that he had been trapped in since falling down after being struck by Mars’ Fire Soul Bird. His last memory suddenly roared its way to the forefront of his brain with the blazing fury of a runaway locomotive. Pain flared up incandescently bright in his mind as his body began convulsing from the memory.

His wings flickered rapidly, fluctuating in strength, color, and length and guttering wildly. Just before the vanished entirely, his head shot backwards and his mouth opened in a wordless scream of agony and two beams of the most brilliant light any of the Senshi had ever seen before shot from his eyes into the night sky. Then the wings broke free of his back with a hideous sound of rending flesh and bone and fused with the soil that surrounded the gaping maw of the pit to form a new seal on the hole. He landed hard upon the seal and immediately curled about himself as tight as he could manage screaming the entire while.

"Burning! I’m burning!" was all that the girls could make out, though he was obviously not burning at all. Usagi and the others stared in disbelief at his convulsing figure. Rei, on the other hand, fell back in horror, the terrible secret that she had been keeping so close to her heart suddenly tearing its way out into the light.

Without having a complete grasp of what was going on, the girls saw little option before them but to transform. They didn’t know why he was acting like he was. And given the amazing display they had witnessed not even two minutes ago, they didn’t feel like risking the chance that it could possibly be a youma influencing him and trying to catch them unawares. After the attack of the Tellytubbies, they were willing to see horror in anything.

Finally, in response to his painfilled shrieks, Mercury used her control over ice to chill the air around him significantly. Unfortunately, she didn’t know about his little "condition" like Mars did. As the super-heated air around him suddenly found itself chilled significantly in an extremely short period of time, the tiny particles of water in the air around him condensed and begin to fall upon him in a icy cold personal rain cloud.

As they watched in alarm, his muscular frame suddenly shrank to a third of its original size almost as if in slow motion from fighting with the heat still lurking around it. His arms and legs became thinner and shorter. His waist dwindled surprisingly fast considering how long it was taking the rest of him. His chest alone stayed prominent as the rest of his body apparently caved in on itself.

Then, as his hair slowly took on a carmine hue in a languid wave, they came to a very startled and abrupt, though varied, realization. Mars’ eyes filled with tears as she recognized the small woman-child form her strange dreams who had disappeared so abruptly so long ago around the same time as an extremely nasty courtier had. Moon, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter on the other hand had an extremely different reaction, especially since they recognized her from an earlier battle that month in the same grotto.

As much as their reaction varied, however, they were all forced to the same conclusion. The time was wrong for thought, for the time was for battle.

The red-headed girl on the seal lifted her head languidly from her curled position on the slab. Casually, she twisted about until her sapphire eyes locked with the ring of young women on the skirt of the grove. She pushed herself up from the block with a bonelessly fluid sort of grace.

Never breaking eye contact with them, she coolly shook out her arms and legs and twisted her neck from side to side, causing her body to emit sharp cracks of bones snapping into place. Reaching down, she idly adjusted the sash of her baggy pants. Then she reached up with one thin hand and brushed her carmine bangs out of her face. Finally, her ruby lips parted and she spoke with a voice sweeter than any song.

"You harmed my Ojisama." She whispered softly, her eyelids slowly dipping shut over those accusing orbs as she spoke. "I cannot abide any who would harm my Ojisama. For that crime, you must die!"

Then her eyes flashed open again. This time glowing with a startling emerald fire, she leapt towards them with a wild snarl of rage. Her tapered fingers hooked into feral claws as she charged.

She was a whirlwind of pain as she landed among them. Calling not only upon the abilities granted by Ranma’s extensive martial training but also upon an almost esoteric style of fighting that seemed to be at once the unpredictable flickering of fire and the untamable rage of the wild beast, she fought. She was all fluid grace and energy. At any given point she would seem to be in at least two places at once. And always the emerald fire clung tenaciously to her body.

Jupiter and Venus fought to the utter extremes of their abilities. They used everything they had at their beck and call to protect their princess. Every single technique that had ever been learned in or out of their sacred uniform was summoned, and quickly laid to rest. All of the strange and mystical powers at their command had been exhausted.

From time to time, as they fought two on one against the diminutive young girl, a strange glowing rod would appear in her hands to either deflect their launched attacks away from her or to deliver painful strikes upon their persons. For a short time they thought that it was like Venus’ stolen chain, then it would alter shape and color and that particular pattern of thinking was abandoned. Finally, after an arduous battle, they were reduced to flinging themselves bodily upon the raging beast and attempting to subdue her through grappling techniques.

That had to have been the worst possible mistake they could have made in the entire battle. For in doing so, they threw themselves upon the tender ministrations of one who could easily be called the Grandmaster of her Art. And that Art was known formally as the Saotome School of Indiscriminate Grappling after all. Even if a great many people, who shall remain nameless, preferred to refer to it as the Saotome School of Anything Goes Martial Arts, it was still at its heart, a school of grappling techniques and aerial maneuvers.

Thus did the one of the best hand-to-hand combatants of the Senshi and the very leader of the Inner find themselves idly discarded by the skillful techniques of a diminutive girl, little more than a child. It was at that point that Mercury chose to act in the better part of valor and quickly cloaked the entire grove in a dense fog. She knew from experience that she didn’t have what it took to go after that particular girl in the arena of hand-to-hand when the girl WASN’T extremely pissed off. She had no intention of finding out it she was any better when the girl WAS.

"I know you are there!" The mysterious girl called out. "Do not think for an instant that I cannot find you in your little cloud, Amilia-hime! It will not stop me!"

Hidden in the cloudbank, frozen in the very act of fleeing to gain aid from the more powerful Outer Senshi, Mercury stood statuelike in confusion and terror that the girl was right. She knew the name! The name that Mercury had not told anyone! The name from the dream!

Sudden bursts of emerald flames blasted at the fogbank, causing it to drift slowly away. As Mercury stood so close yet so far away from the edge of the trees that would have concealed her madcap flight to were the Outer Senshi waited she could see them, she could feel the rays of the full moon’s light trickling down upon the pale skin of her arms. A single tear trickled down her face as she realized that the light of the moon was a omen of terrible portent instead of the harbinger of justice that it had so oft been in the past.

Then a slender hand fell upon her shoulder and she nearly sobbed in her desperation. Slowly, she turned about to face her attacker that had no doubt already dispatched of Mars and her princess. The face her eyes met was not the horribly disfigured mask of hatred, disgust, and madness that it had been. Instead the expression it displayed were those of confusion mixed with a strange sense of betrayal barely overlying a raging undercurrent of fury. And as Mercury glanced past her, she saw that the fog was still dense in all other parts of the clearing but the one they stood in.

"Why, Amilia-hime?" the girl asked. "Why did you betray Shima-sama? He trusted you. You were his friend_! How could you betray him?" There was a bizarre touch of anguish in the softly musical voice.

"I-I don’t know, Ranko!" Mercury sobbed, falling down to her knees as sudden and inexplicable grief welled up in her breast at Ranko’s words. The name had come unbidden to Mercury’s mind, but it seemed to fit perfectly. "I didn’t know it was him! I didn’t know!"

"I cannot forgive you what you have done, Amilia-hime. Perhaps Shima-sama may in time. But, I cannot. I will leave you to his justice though. It was him that you betrayed."

Then she was gone. Disappeared back into the mists. Slowly, the thin sound of Jupiter and Venus’s groans of pain filtered through the remaining fog to Mercury’s ears. Then there was a horrible cracking sound that tore through the fog with the piercing echo of a siren’s wail. Soon after there was the massive thud of something extremely heavy slamming into the ground followed by a dim echo through the grassy surface.

***********

Akane fell.

She didn’t know how long she fell. Or why. Or even where she was falling to. She just knew she was falling.

She remembered another time when she fell like she was falling. That time was different though. Ranma had been with her. She had been able to feel his strong arms about her as they hurtled down to their eminent demise. This time though, she was completely alone.

And she fell.

Though now she thought she could possibly see the bottom.

The fire that flickered there looked hot.

Very hot indeed.

***********

When the fog finally cleared away, thanks no doubt to the flaming efforts of Mars and the multitude of Fireballs she launched into the air, Ranko was long gone. And so was the seal that had been covering the Pit. All that was left was the splintered remains of the once massive slab.

Jupiter lay where she had landed after having been flung across the clearing with an almost contemptuous ease by the tiny girl. Massive amounts of bruises covered her body, blood trickled from her nose, split lip and a varied number of relatively small but plentiful cuts and abrasions. Other than that though, she was fine.

Venus was in worse shape. In addition to the numerous cuts and bruises, Ranko had managed to tear through the protective body armor provided by their senshi uniforms in more than one place. As a result, Venus was suffering from not only being slammed painfully into a tree after being flung away, but also from three cracked, if not outright broken, ribs and a nasty laceration across her back.

Moon was doing the best off everyone. If being tangled in the upper branches of the tallest tree in the grotto could be considered good, that is. She had managed to get off with just being stuck up there and not actually beaten though.

Mars was rather confusing. She didn’t appear to have any injuries aside from a stray bruise here and there that could have been obtained during the Tellytubby attack earlier. However, other than her assistance in clearing away the fog, she had neither moved nor spoke beyond violently shuddering where she curled against the base of a large log that had been felled during the battle.

Mercury was the one moving shakily about the clearing with the assistance of the newly arrived Uranus, Neptune and Saturn trying to get everything back into an orderly fashion. Pluto was no where to be found, and neither were the cats. But no one had really expected them to show up.

Besides, the cats were never around when it came to cleaning up the mess that came after any of their battles. They claimed it was because they would just be in the way, but the girls were beginning to think it was because they were lazy. Pluto was just plain rarely around since they had awakened to their duties. She spent much more time at the Gates then she did on Earth it seemed.

It took them the better part of an hour, but the three Outer Senshi working in concert with the younger Inner Senshi eventually did manage to put the grove back to a semblance of how it had been before. It wasn’t perfect. But then, it never could be with the launch of the obsidian column that had marked Ranma’s return from the depths of the Earth and the subsequent fall of Akane and the Senshi’s royal butt-kicking ceremony at the hands of the woman-child called Ranko by Mercury.

They had done the best they could. It wasn’t like anyone was expecting perfection. Not even from them.

***********

Akane still fell.

Yet now she was not alone.

There was another with her. A familiar, somewhat comforting presence. At once the essence she wanted to be with her, and yet different at the same time.

Soft arms wrapped themselves around her stomach just below her breasts. A tiny shape compared to her own bulk nestled against her. Elfin lips beside her ear whispered softly.

"Do not worry, Akai-hime. It will be alright." The soft voice whispered. "Shima is waiting for us."

And they fell no longer alone.

For eternity downwards.

And when they reached the bottom, they burned.

***********

AUTHOR’S NOTE: For those who are curious, the comment about the Goddess Who Falls is from the book The Legend of the Blue Crown. Or it might be Hero and the Crown. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I read it. But I remembered the little comment about being the Goddess Who Falls from when the heroine was falling down through time as the evil tower crumbled around her. Before that she was the Goddess Who Climbs because she felt that she was climbing for eternity, just because there were a LOT of stairs.

And if you’re curious as to what music I was listening to in order to cause this chaos, it was a CD entitled ‘Up From The Ashes’ by Don Dokken. And may I add that I find it is the perfect CD for the Phoenix Prince. Not only is the title simply perfect, but the songs are great too! I really recommend it if you like rock! (It’s hard rock, I think...)