I coughed and warm blood dripped down my chin. A bundle of the Goddess’ hair, as thick as rebar, had punched through my chest. It still shivered with potential energy.
A canopy of her hair stretched over my head, only allowing in a few beams of sunlight here and there. There was so much dust in the air that the lightbeams danced and swirled. Or maybe I just have a concussion.
My back was to a steel beam, bits of concrete still stuck to it like bits of meat left on a bone. Another beam in front of me had a spiral of hair wrapped around it.
I started to assimilate the hair piercing me and found that the absorption into my body was slow. Despite the size, it was incredibly dense. I sucked in a breath as I was assaulted with visions of a different age.
Vats of dye, a castle, people eating at a long table, and a dungeon cell.
The tremors of fear, resentment, and pain that was the throughline of the memories actually gave me some reassurance. Whoever she was, she was human. Or she had been, a long time ago.
Once I finished absorbing the tendril, I healed my wounds. Bones snapped back into place, skin closed, and muscles sewed back together. Nell’s Lacuna was a bottomless pool of energy that I could tap into. There was no longer a need to find sustenance to fuel the regeneration.
I leapt towards a gap in the ceiling of hair. When I grabbed hold, the hair reacted to my touch, trembling like it was made of nerves. I hastily pulled myself through.
Wind whipped through my hair as I bore witness to the devastation of the city. It was like a tsunami of gold had crashed into the buildings, the waves finding channels in between skyscrapers, surging forward to smash into the next obstacle and then it had frozen like that. Hair coiled halfway up one building like a snake as massive as an ancient tree, another wave created a hill high above the streets, the terrain was entirely changed due to the toppling of structures and the frozen waves. I watched as another building groaned as whatever supports were still in place gave out under the stress and it collapsed. Dust plumed high into the air.
The section of the city closest to the Goddess’ starting point had been entirely eradicated. Only a crater inlaid with gold remained.
I stood on a large coil that ran through the middle of a hospital. Despite the appearance of gold, the hair was hard; thousands, maybe millions of individual hairs were woven so tight that they became as tough as diamond. I focused through my sixth sense, searching for life. There was someone trapped nearby, close to street level.
I dropped off the coil, falling a few hundred feet and landing on the cracked asphalt. An armoured car had been swept up and pinned to the side of a building by this wave of hair. I jumped onto the wave and ran towards the car.
A shiver ran down the length of the hair and a portion of it sprung free, whipping and coiling in the air next to me like I’d just woken a boa constrictor. The end became a sharp point and struck out. I caught it in my hands, attempting to hold it still so that I could try something.
I delved deep into my sixth sense, peering into the hair, attempting to grasp it at a cellular level. I was still very new to this and any changes I made had to be carefully guided or they would run rampant and risk affecting the people in the armoured vehicle.
The hair became rough under my fingers, turning to bark, losing mobility until it became petrified. A lovely willow sapling growing out from the hair.
I detected another life was approaching my position from behind.
It was Daria, bounding across the street below. There was blood on her ripped tank top, but she must have healed the damage as she wasn’t injured.
“Sage!” she called up to me. “We need to figure out where she went!”
I nodded. “Help me free this person, but try not to move around on the hair too much. It can sense it.”
Daria and I set about assimilating the hair around the car until we could get to the door. I tried pulling and found that the hinges were busted. So I wrenched back hard and tore the door clean off.
The man inside was pointing a gun at me. He was wearing H.E.S.P. gear, his helmet sat next to them on the seat. He looked around my age. He had a few days old beard that somehow made him look tired.
He lowered the gun when he saw we were allies. But his eyes widened as he stared at me. “Uh…”
I extended a hand. “Are you hurt? Let me carry you down.”
“No, that’s-”
“The hair is reactive. Let me drop you off at street level.”
The man continued to stare at me, not taking my hand.
“I know this is a lot to take in, but I can’t take all day. Pull yourself together, soldier.”
“I’m not…”
I grabbed them and they flinched and pulled away, but I held on firmly and gently carried them down to street level.
When I put them down, they continued to look at me as if waiting for something to happen.
“Stay away from the hair,” I reminded them before turning away.
“Nick.”
I paused and looked back.
“You… don’t remember me?”
A tremor of unease passed through my stomach. I studied him, waiting for my brain to give me something, any emotional reaction I could use as a guidepost. His blue eyes looked a little sad. There was nothing.
“No.”
His eyes flicked downwards. “I see.”
“Sorry. I lost some pieces of my memory.”
He gripped his gun tightly as he glanced at Daria. “Of course… I did hear about that from the others. But I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
“Were you close with Nick?”
He blinked rapidly, not raising his eyes. “I’m… not sure. Maybe at one point, a long time ago?” Then he shook his head and met my gaze with a firm expression. “Nevermind that. Nice to meet you. I’m Mac.”
He extended a hand.
I shook it. “Sage.”
“Nice to meet you, Sage. This is going to sound weird coming from a stranger, but if you’re willing, I’d like to see you again. I’d very much like to try to be your friend.”
I tilted my head. “Okay.”
“Please don’t feel obligated because of old history. Only if you want to. Anyway, you should go.” He smiled in a quiet and intimate way. “Go make a difference. You’ve always had that power.”
Daria tapped my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s find a vantage point.”
I let go of Mac’s hand and gave him a small wave before going with Daria.
We found an old historical brick building that looked like it had been carefully maintained, with architecture that would make for easy handholds. Daria began scaling the exterior and I followed after her.
The buzz of propellers grew louder and then a drone came into view as it rounded the building and flew towards us.
“Nick!” a bubbly voice came out from the speaker.
“Shush, it’s Sage now,” another voice corrected the first.
“Sage, you are absolutely slaying right now,” the first voice gushed. “The covered-in-blood-and-dirt look really suits you. I’m snapping so many pics.”
“This is Bailey and Vanessa,” Bailey said. “Some of our drones got taken out in that wave, but we’re here to support.”
“It’s been a while,” I said, barely breaking a sweat as I ascended rapidly, practically running up the side of the building. “How’s the podcast?”
“We ended it,” Vanessa said. “Left it as a legacy and inspiration for our listeners to start their own local ones. It seemed more important during the apocalypse that people heard from people physically close to them.”
“No reports of our rampaging Goddess so far,” Bailey cut in, getting to business. “She must be on the move. That being said, we need to free some of our teams that got hit by that initial wave. Two units in zone A and one in zone C.” The drone shone a laser projection on the wall next to Daria and I, displaying a map of the city marked out in zones.
“Zone C was one of the places hit the hardest, they didn’t have enough cover. I’d like to reach them ASAP, they’re buried in the hair.”
“I’m on it,” Daria said. She waved a bundle of thin golden threads she had in her fist. “My occlusion Shape will help me check on them quickly, as long as there are big enough gaps for my organs to squeeze through haha,” she said without actually laughing.
“Be careful,” I said.
Daria let go of the building to blow me a kiss and kicked off the wall in the direction of the zone.
I kept climbing, seeing through the large windows where coils of gold had run through the structure. Another jump upwards and I caught a flash of movement through the window pane just before it shattered. A hand with needle-like claws swiped at me. I seized it and pulled the spawn out into open air, letting it drop. Two more attacked as I stepped through the broken window.
One dove at me, its hollow chest strung with piano wire. I jumped out of the way and struck the other in the head as it was raising a blade dripping with some dubious substance. The blow sent it flying until it crashed through a wall and rolled to a halt, limbs broken. That gave me pause as I stared at my fist.
The other spawn started to get up and I Shaped it. It was easier to grasp than the Goddess’ hair and I quickly turned it into a bed of bone-white flowers.
A tingle of euphoria spread through my chest. I was strong. And I had the ability to transform myself and others, unrestricted, unlike Witches and Wolves.
“The first trapped group is just east of here,” Bailey said, drone hovering just outside the window.
I cut through the building and spotted a tower that was leaning at a slight angle, stopped from toppling by quite a number of tendrils running through it like roots. Sweeping over it with my sixth sense, a cluster of lights were on the ninth floor.
“I see ‘em.”
Movement was such a rush. I could leap huge distances and not worry where I landed. Even as the hair I ran on tried to stop me, I was too fast, outpacing where the snakes emerged to stab at me. It was like I’d become the protagonist of one of the video games I played as a kid. I was at the ninth floor in less than a minute.
The interior was split down the middle, the office floor crumbling away where the tendrils had passed through.
“Over here!” a voice called out shrilly.
A man and a woman waved at me from the other side. They were huddled in a corner, avoiding the stretches of hair that ran across the floor in front of them.
“It- it attacks us when we get close,” the man said. “You’ll have to come to us.” His voice was shaking badly and his bald head was covered in a sheen of sweat. The woman was equally distressed and she kept rubbing her eyes, spreading mascara and redness over her cheeks.
I jumped the gap and got close to where the hair covered the floor. “If you don’t have the will to keep fighting, you should just stay put,” I told them. “It isn’t any easier on ground level.”
“N-no!” the woman practically shouted, eyes wide. “We can still fight. I’m a powerful Witch. I just need to get across this. You can carry me.”
The man tried to say something and doubled over, coughing.
I sighed. “Fine.”
I jumped over the hair, a thought crossing my mind mid-flight: Why would she be wearing mascara?
The man looked up at me as I landed. A black liquid dripped from his mouth, staining his teeth.
“T-trap…” he said, eyes rolling back in his head. Black fluid rushed out of his mouth at the same time that same sludge burst from the woman’s eyes as she screamed.
The Herald’s face emerged from the converging ink. The people’s skin detached in places and slid together, shifting pieces interlocking until the Herald formed a body made of four arms and legs. He lunged at me, his voice pounding inside my skull.
“Submit to your judgement.”
I jumped backwards, landing on the hair in my haste. It began to writhe under my feet and I lost my footing, landing on my butt.
A river of black sticky fluid poured towards my face, carrying with it pieces of fingers and teeth. I pulled a swath of hair in front of my face to block the attack and then rolled backwards, dropping through the gap in the floor to land on my feet, a floor lower.
The Herald held his body over the gap, chuckling at me. The faces of his victims floated in the morass of sludge that was the main mass of his body. His own face, made of patchwork flesh, stayed anchored in one place, orbited by the body parts of his victims.
“You accepted a gift from me before, Nick. Why not this one?”
There were little flickers of remembrance like sparks at the sides of my vision. The Goddess knew the Herald personally. I stepped back from the dripping ichor, frowning.
“You came from the same time as her. Did you used to be a Witch? …Was she your Wolf?”
The Herald’s eyes were bulging rings of white with black pits at the center.
“Once I was. Now I am unfettered from that body, free to claim any mind my essence touches. What was a curse of poison became a blessing. Such is the transformative power of the Holy One.”
I felt the grip of his Witch powers grasp me and then slide off.
His lips curled. “It seems you have found your own path of ascendance. Despicable. Profane. My Goddess shall have you answer for your sins.”
“Are you trying to sound evil? Cause you sound evil.”
“Evil is where God is not. How can there be evil here?” His laugh was guttural. “If there is any, She will make sure to quash it.”
The air shifted. It was like I had plunged a hundred feet down into the ocean. Cold weight pressed down on me from all sides. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. There was a presence that hadn’t been there a moment before.
I turned to see her, a golden avatar of fluid lethality, armoured in intricately woven tapestries of rage and bloodshed. I saw knights atop horses and burning cities. Crosses and guillotines and spiked wheels as though she held the souls of those she had killed, trapping them in hell on her skin.
I ran as fast as I could, darting through the building, seeking an exit. How had she gotten here so-
The building was gone.
Pain stung my skin from a dozen places as I realized I was being held by my throat in a vice grip. She held me in open air as I coughed, blood spraying onto her gauntleted arms. Bits of plaster fell from my hair and drifted down to the streets far below us.
Her helmet writhed with narratives of rage and revenge, playing out across its surface. Then it pulled back, revealing her face.
She was almost ordinary without it. Just a woman with semi-translucent skin, red veins visibly pulsing beneath.
Her lips pulled back as she spoke with a voice that was barely a whisper, ragged at the edges from screaming.
“You’re her. The girl who called me here.”