Snowflakes twirled down to Earth while every living thing fell into the sky.
Humans screamed. Cats and dogs writhed around, snapping at nothing, trying to escape the invisible grasp. Even the trees were being uprooted. Everything was swept up into growing masses in the sky. These living spheres roiled with conflict as they slowly migrated west.
I whistled a jaunty tune as I watched them ascend.
I couldn’t see the point of convergence yet. Nell was resisting the process, but it was evident she was only slowing it down, not stopping it.
My group headed through the suburbs towards our objective. A follower in front of me pushed me back as a tall tree tipped over, crashing straight through a fence, snapping power lines on its way to crush him and cut us off.
Nell’s creations still pursued us and my Wolves stepped up to engage them. Every second that passed for my followers outside my range, they were being bled and broken from Nell’s Shaping. Some tried to absorb the creations they fought in order to heal, but it was a losing battle.
Regeneration can sometimes be misled. Repairing tissue is fine if there is damaged tissue. But what about new tissues created by an invasive force? That requires more precise measures to restore back to the original state.
The fallen tree shook and started to rise into the air. There was a loud crackling and rumbling coming from the east. Soon, the source came into view, an entire park had been uprooted, the grass, trees, and flowers all rising in unison to join the coalescence.
My followers returned from battle, sporting fresh injuries but still intact. Obviously I didn’t have the capacity to create Wolves myself, but I found them to be easy to persuade. Many had warped psyches from their exposure to heightened emotions. They weren’t hard to recruit.
My Shape pointed out observations from the battle as we moved on: Smaller plant growths. Weaker development speed. No new adaptations in this wave of creations. Nell is becoming distracted, losing focus.
She was losing control and wouldn’t hinder us much longer.
We came to the objective, a parking lot Maria had reserved for us. At some point, there had been people here, perhaps taking pictures of the high-end Forte automated vehicles still parked in the lot. Now only their cellphones and bags remained, like they’d been taken in the Rapture.
Hah. Not that far off, I suppose.
The gate unlocked and opened and I realized that the cars may not have been the only attraction.
Crows perched on every available surface. On the curbs, the lightpoles, and the cars lightly dusted with snow. A figure wrapped in swirling birds stood behind one of the cars.
I smiled and walked towards the Crow Watcher.
“Not another step!” he snarled, the crows cawing and replicating pieces of his voice.
I stopped. “We’re being pursued. Best if we save this chat for later.”
“No. We’re having it now.”
I motioned for my followers to defend the entrance. “Nick is dead. You got what you wanted.”
A large bloodshot eye stared at me through feathers and wings. A Cast undergoing a metamorphosis. His Shape is unstable. Intriguing… Is this a side-effect of the Lacunae?
“That wasn’t what you promised. You promised to show me his corpse!”
“You want to go back in there and see for yourself? Be my guest. But I don’t think you have any leverage in this situation. Move or die.”
The Crow Watcher and all of his murder looked at me at once, as if engraving my face into their collective memory.
“You won’t get what you want,” he intoned. The way he spoke made it sound like a curse. “May it be in this life or the next, Nick has yet to finish his suffering.”
I grinned. “Sure. I’m open minded. If Nick wants to haunt me he is welcome to it. But he’s gone from this life. You need to move on.”
I gestured and one of my Wolves leapt over the car and plunged into the morass of crows. When the cloud of birds dispersed, he was left with only a few feathers in his grasp. The Watcher had vanished.
“Everyone in!” I called out. “We’re going on a roadtrip.”
Plan B was simple. A procession of cars would keep us moving, making it harder for resonance to grasp us. Hopefully that would make up for the fact that I couldn’t keep all of my followers within my range.
The electric engines fired to life quietly and the cars rolled out of the lot one after another. I reached over and turned on the linked call system before speaking into it, “We’re heading west. Follow the migration. No way am I gonna miss seeing this.”
The convoy obliged and we weaved through the apocalyptic streets, dodging stopped cars and delirious people crying on the road.
I leaned over the dash to peer up through the windshield. It was visible now, a great shadow in the distance. Rivers of biomatter slowly drifted through the air to join this central sphere, the beginning of the new Lacuna. It was a sight to behold, decidedly more green than the other, fully matured, Lacunae that hung in the sky, standing witness to the birth of another of their kind.
Plant matter composes a large portion of the observed resonant organic materials.
I supposed that made sense. It was Nell’s specialty.
The call system crackled as a follower shouted through it, “Contact!”
I looked in the rearview mirror to see one of the cars weaving all over the road, smashing into another convoy car which barely corrected itself.
“An unknown Shaper is attacking the convoy,” another follower reported in.
More unforeseen problems. Allies of the Crow Watcher? It didn’t fit. That Cast was patient. He would wait for a less chaotic moment if he wanted to hurt me.
Surely Nell didn’t have the ability to make something fast and strong enough to catch us this deep into the Lacuna formation process?
“Targeted car, get closer to me,” I ordered, only to nearly hit my nose against the dash as our car’s front wheels left the ground for a moment before slamming back down. My driver yanked the wheel to get us back under control, taking the car out of automated steering mode.
The road ahead was being torn up by roots breaking through from beneath. An unearthed animal mid-ascension hit the windshield, cracking it. My driver weaved, maneuvering on the most intact parts of the road.
I looked back and saw that the car being attacked was still swinging from side to side. A lattice of thick roots rose in front of it and it failed to steer away. The chassis folded under the impact, the back rising into the air.
A blur shot out of the side window just before the impact, crashing into the side of another car, before smashing the window and crawling inside.
“Assailant has swapped cars.”
Whatever. It was fine. Our attacker could pick off the ones outside my apathy field. Whoever it was, they wouldn’t be able to act once inside it. Hopefully they would enter the field mid-leap and fall. Either way, I wasn’t concerned. I kept my eyes forward, drinking in every last detail about the rising Lacuna.
I began to feel the pulses on my skin as we got closer, like waves of pressure, the ebb and flow of the tide.
Massive parts of the sky were blotted out by the huge rivers of biomaterial heading towards the Lacuna. We fell into the shadow of one, the landscape looking truly hellish with the darkness and red light intermingling.
Our car turned off onto the open roads of the highway. It was a straight shot to the prize.
“Fuck! We lost another-”
I turned off the call system. The incessant updates were annoying and I wouldn’t be distracted at this monumental moment. History was being made.
It was likely that no human before me could say that they experienced the formation of a Lacuna with a clear mind. My Shape was working in overdrive, compiling every observation of the phenomena we were witnessing.
I laughed. It was storm-chasing to the extreme.
“It’s so beautiful…”
I looked over to my driver. He’d removed his mask and tears were spilling down his face. His teeth ground together as he sobbed. “And so sad.”
The Lacuna’s influence is getting too strong for the apathy field.
He reached over and grabbed my arm.
“Why did you do this?!” he shouted, spraying me with spit.
His grip was strong. He was a Wolf after all.
I pulled out my knife and stabbed his arm. That only made his grip tighten.
He began to rise in his seat, head touching the roof. Leaves sprouted out of his ears and roots crept up the trail of his tears.
He seized the top of my mask with his other hand, dragging me towards him.
I changed tacts, blindly reaching for his seatbelt and undoing it. Then I rolled down his window with my controls and kicked him with both feet. My mask slipped off. He drifted back like he was in low gravity, legs leaving the car. He still held onto my arm, his eyes crazed from the Lacuna’s influence.
“Join us!” he shouted. “Grieve with us!”
I was dragged into the driver’s seat and forced to put a hand on the wheel to keep us on the road, my knife clattering onto the dash. I strained against the Wolf’s strength, craning my neck and biting down on the knife handle. Then I began sawing at his tendons, knife gripped in my teeth. His blood drifted against gravity, rising up and staining the roof.
The Wolf didn’t react, just continued on his tirade, as if he couldn’t even feel the pain. Finally something snapped. He released me and was sucked out the window.
I spat out the blood knife and wiped my face, chuckling.
Only for something to slam into the hood of the car.
My Shape immediately shifted from Lacuna observation to threat assessment.
The unknown assailant. How are they acting in the apathy field and Nell’s influence? One or the other should make it impossible.
The cracked glass of the windshield distorted the assailant’s face. My Shape told me it was Chiara. No, that’s incorrect. There are facial features of Nell recognized. Characteristics of Nick are also present. A stolen face? A psychological attack?
I stared, mouth agape as the assailant smashed the glass, their arm reaching through to seize the wheel, turning us off the road.
Who? Who? Who???
My Shape spun in circles, buzzing with confusion. None of the explanations lined up. The person’s face didn’t match with Chiara, Nick, or Nell, but it had parts of all three.
The car rolled and the assailant leaped away, features spinning dizzyingly in my sight as I was thrown about the car.
Glass shattered. Metal groaned and bent.
I laughed.
There was only one explanation and my Shape was too logical to see it. There was no reasoning behind it, no grounded logic, yet I felt assured that I was right.
It was a feeling I had been ignoring.
Nick had died and yet…
He was alive.