Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

body. Once again she was lying on her back on a stranger's bed, staring up at a dirty ceiling in search of answers it didn't have. There were others Diana could have tried to contact, but after her disappointments with the Maze people, she couldn't see any point in exhausting herself any further. She was going to need her strength, where she was going.
    All right. I'll just have to do it alone. I've always had to do the most important things of my life alone.
    She allowed herself a few moments to say goodbye to her life. She'd always hoped it would amount to something more than just a mistaken saint, and a hero of the rebellion that most people seemed to prefer not to remember. Oh, they'd written her into a few of the holo films they'd made about the rebellion, and its heroes, but she didn't recognize herself at all in the enigmatic sorceress or total psychopath they'd chosen to portray her as. Some accounts weren't even sure which side she'd fought on. But then, Jenny Psycho had always been a little too extreme for most tastes.
    She would have liked to have known love, friends, family; but there was never any time. She knew duty, and sometimes honor, but few friends, and never a love or a lover. She scared people. She gave so much to the cause, only to discover in the end that it wasn't worthy of her dedication.
    At least the elves had put up a statue to her.
    So; time to face down the impossible, master the monster, put her life and sanity on the line as she had so many times before. Alone again against a powerful enemy, while those who might have helped her went their own way.
    Business as usual for Diana Vertue. She summoned up all the old berserker rage and dedication of her Jenny Psycho persona, and dived deep into her own mind, down past the shining columns of conscious thought, and into the dark unexplored areas of the mind; the backbrain. Some joking part of herself showed her a bright neon sign. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here, and then she'd left the outside reality behind, diving down into the dark miracles and mysteries of the inner mind. The face behind the mask, the place where normal humans couldn't go.
    The backbrain.
    Most people didn't know what the backbrain was, though a few bandied the name about as though they did. Most people only used a small part of their brain,
    accessing only the merest fraction of what it could do. The esper gene allowed some people to delve deeper into their minds than most, and make use of the powers they found there. Telepathy, pyrokinesis, precognition. Others, like the Maze people who'd had their minds forced open by outside forces, could call up even stranger and wondrous abilities. Diana had studied the concept of the backbrain during her time in the esper Guild House, trawling tirelessly through its massive files in search of knowledge. The espers had been studying themselves almost as long as they had existed, and they had discovered many things about who and what they were, most of it disturbing. Most of that knowledge had never been released, even inside the esper community, and much was actively suppressed, for a variety of reasons. Partly because if the normals ever got hold of it, they'd just use it to better control their esper slaves.
    And partly because the Mater Mundi made sure some things were forgotten, rather than risk their true nature being exposed.
    Perhaps the greatest secret of all was that the human mind was capable of far more than either normals or espers ever dreamed of. Anyone could become like the Maze people, if they could only access and control the secrets of the backbrain.
    All that grey matter and potential that was never used. Diana had written it all down, and hidden it in a file that couldn't easily be found. So that if the Mater Mundi did win in the end, and Diana Vertue disappeared, never to be seen or spoken of again, what she'd learned might still survive. We could all shine like suns, she wrote.
    She still believed that. Even after all the horrors and tragedies she'd seen, she still believed.
    She passed through the backbrain, and on into the undermind. Few people knew
    about the backbrain; fewer still knew about the undermind. Mainly because you could only reach the undermind through the backbrain. It was a vast, awful, magnificent place, and not everyone survived encountering it. The undermind was the collective unconscious of all Humanity. The dreamtime. The race memory. The bedrock of human existence. As far as Diana