Xaviers!

"<I am what I have to be,>" she says, trying to harness the cold and pull it back into herself and away from the others.

"We have to stop playing by its rules," she says as she steps away from the admiral.

"It's trying to herd us. We need our own path."

She concentrates on envisioning heat. Not just literal heat, but emotional heat. Anger. Passion. She tries to kindle that heat into flames surrounding her person.

"Our own path huh?" Bruce grinned before approaching the nearest wall, intending to imagination-punch a hole in the nightmare itself.

Between the massive temperature difference created by Sam's flames and Bruce mustering his mental faculties to channel into a punch the ice crumbles but not in the way a wall should. It splinters like a flat mirror and behind it is just an empty voice. The cracks spread through the whole cave, even the frozen corpses and bursts into nothing. Shards of the reality of the ice cave fall all around the three, crumbling into smaller and smaller fragments until they're nothing but dust. Tiny little particles filling everything around them. Coarse against their skin while the sound of crashing waves slowly brings their attention to the fact that they're lieing on a beach and the coarse dust is simply sand.

"...forgive me if I'm wrong here, but this seems drawn from you now," she says to Bruce as her flames die down.

"Yeah... I think I... know this beach," Tosh said as he looked around, suddenly his human self again. "But why would it use this place?"

"Because it is trying to use yourself against you," Siberia says, looking with distinct distrust.

The beach does look familiar to Tosh although as they begin to take in their new surroundings the first thing that assaults their senses is the smell. The acrid sweetness of death mixed with the sea hangs thick in the air and it's easy to see why. The ocean's waters are dark, putrid and filled with dead fish. The beach is littered with more dead sealife that has been washed ashore and, unlike the beach Tosh is familiar with, the tips of jagged cliffs just about rise above the water line, on and among them the rotting bulks of larger fish and whales.

Tosh started to look a little green at the sight of horrible perversion of somewhere full of such happy memories.

"This... this is seriously messed up..." he said with revulsion.

"...yes, because the room full of frozen dead girls was so pleasant."

"It's not meant to be pleasant. It's toying with us, trying to give us cause to turn on each other."

"I can't see how this could accomplish anything but make me sad and us puke. Granted, doing that collapsed on the floor wouldn't be very good."

"Then don't get sad. Get angry," Siberia says, beginning to wander around the beach to get a better look at things.

"Oh but the death that washed upon these shores is no phantasm or deception, it's memory alone." a voice informs them as the water near the shore bulges upwards until it bursts, the foul water revealing a woman of undetermined age, red hair pulled back tightly, blind eyes moving from one person to the next despite being so clouded no iris or pupil is visible anymore. She's clad in what appears to be just darkness and decay clinging to her, being dragged behind her through the water as she slowly walks to the shore.

"Of what was left to behold of this place after the men and women from the frigid wastes denied the armies of the one who cannot die. Many unleashed their sparks to wreak havoc on these shores. Your homeland." she says, staring at Tosh. "Scorched, salted and poisoned so none may have it."

"It can show us anything it can imagine. Anything," she says as she gestures at its chosen form.

"And she can describe it however she likes as well," Siberia says, "The best lies always have the grain of truth in them, but that doesn't mean they're not lies." She eyes the 'blind' woman.

"Grain of truth? So your California was destroyed," he asked accusingly.

"Oh how comfortable the warm embrace of ignorance, how painful admitting the truth to oneself..." the strange woman says, stopping some ways away from the three and looking straight at Sam now.

"The Battle of San Francisco was terrible, yes. I wasn't in command then, but the Order had threatened to use some of their mutants to activate the San Andreas Fault. It was either do what we had to do or risk half of California sliding into the ocean. War isn't pretty."

"It doesn't matter how much you mimic me. You're not me, and they know that."

"Excuses, excuses, excuses. War forced my hand. This isn't me. This couldn't happen in my world." the woman rolls her head, milky eyes wandering from Siberia to Sam to Tosh. "How can you hope to escape back to reality if you refuse it's truths. And if you stay then worry not, I will be with you soon to collect your Sparks. It has been so long since I had such a splendid feast."

Sam grits her teeth, choking something back.

Then, just as suddenly, her expression smooths. Traveling from her roots downward, her hair turns white.

"...it's not a feast. Not yours, not anyone's."

"Why was Russia even in California?"

"Because California asked for our help," Siberia says distractedly, watching with interest the exchange between Sam and the mystery woman.

"Fine. I don't know your world. But you could give me more than that, because this," he said, motioning to the death around them, "...sure seems like overkill."

"Ah, a glimmer, a cracked door in the night! Tell me, sister, what is your true name?" the woman grins, her face showing too many wrinkles and creases for just a moment before her skin smooths itself out, old crone turning back into young maiden.

"I am one of three. I am the washer at the fords, and you have not earned my name if you wish to gobble these little lights like a glutton."

"You've seen how the Order operates. You don't think they're above a little scorched earth? Proportional response is a term you should become familiar with."

"Oh, she thinks she's better because she doesn't keep them close to her chest. How uncaring and cruel to send them into the dark all on their lonesome."

"God I hate the 'the other guy would do it' defense. It's childish playground bullshit. You can't be morally right and commit the same atrocities as your enemy."

"Then you will end up dead, because your enemy will be willing to do things that you won't including killing you. Unless your world is some mythical utopian paradise, you know I'm right." I would be hard to get more condescending in tone.

"They are lights. Pushing back the dark is what they do. It's what they've earned. To smother them by holding them too close is selfish..."

"Then the people of this Earth are screwed no matter who wins," he said pityingly. He turned to look at the weird 'goddess'-off, ignoring the Admiral.

"And then one day they'll all be gone. No dear sister. No no no. You don't understand because you don't belong, but I'll make sure you will, don't worry."

"I'd hoped you weren't this far gone..."

The red starts to flow back into Sam's hair as it grows wild and her outfit seems to blur, shifting into something a bit more striking as she takes on a mien that Tosh and the admiral likely haven't seen her in before.

"...mostly because she can never admit that I'm right."

"Uhh... what the hell is going on?" Tosh asked, meaning to think it. This was the land of thought after all.

"If I had to guess," Siberia says, putting a hand on Tosh's shoulder to pull him back a few steps, "We have two not-insignificant telepaths about to get very angry with one another."

"Behold! The Battle-Crow is here to play!" the woman cackles. "But she's weak, she brought the wrong friends! Left the hearth to plunge herself into the darkness with non-believers!" Plunging her arms into the shadows and filth she's clad in she tears her chest apart, darkness and sickly dancing lights swallowing the beach until they encompass everything. Strands of shadow knot together to form a creature towering over them. It has no real shape, always changing in the corner of the eyes, only temporarily taking on one form or the other almost as if watching it gives it definition or maybe their minds just see it as the closest thing they can comprehend. Pseudopods, tentacles, limbs protrude from it around it's maw and the lights trapped within as the only somewhat permanent characteristic.

Meanwhile in the real world a dark shape skulking through the shadows freezes, mere meters away from where Siberia and Sam collapsed, it's attention forced fully into it's own mindscape.

"The Battle-Crow is always called upon when an ending is needed."

Starting at the hem of her dress, a flock of ravens circles, moving its way up her frame. She seems to be unraveling into it.

"Come, you overgrown peat bog. You're long overdue for me to sing you one."

The figure collapses into the flock, surging upwards in a wide spiral around their jailer.

Siberia watches the exchange, trying to keep her eyebrows from creeping up any further as she draws her own defenses together to try to protect herself from the ensuing telepathic cataclysm.