Book Five: Hero Transcendent

Everybody is changed by their experiences, and hopefully they grow. Sometimes it is a small change, or subtle, and sometimes it is a larger change, and profound. Sometimes these changes don’t become fully understood until much later.

Jeanette never wanted to be a hero, and she has suffered many changes — physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is her sense of duty, but more than that, it is her compassion for the enemy’s victims which keeps her going. She is even willing to give up her life. But she is getting tired.

She has met and talked with beings who exist within the reality which contains her physical world, and that changed her; with others in the greater reality which contains hers, and has been changed even more; and with those who dwell beyond the greater reality, and she has come away changed yet again. And though she is no longer truly human, dealing with the depredations of the enemy remains a challenge.

She has met and overcome Arkenomes, though she has not always had to kill them. She has met and neutralized Ecliptors, one way or another. She has met the enemy, called Kada Barros, and has escaped at great cost. She has met some beings of an even higher order, whom Kada Barros cannot understand, and sometimes fears. All this has changed her too.

She is taken to a special place of heroes, where those who have reached their own limits can wait, if they choose, until the threat of the enemy is at last ended. There she learns that she has reached her limit, and will not be allowed to finish. There is still another choice to be made, or she can just stop. 

She chooses, and will do what she must, but this is possible only by transcending her mortality. It is the highest price she can pay.