Stuck in the grip of the deity, my pulse hammered against her palm like it was trying to break free on my behalf. I never felt more like I was one wrong move away from being snapped in half.
I looked down. We were far above the ruined city. Then my lower torso swam into focus, pierced by several tendrils of golden hair. Pain clouded my mind. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to raise my head.
Vibrant green eyes stared back, searching my face for something. Funny, I would have expected red ones.
The Goddess was held aloft by her own hair that extended indefinitely behind her.
Then, to my surprise, she slackened her grip a little.
“Speak,” she said. She sounded shockingly normal.
“I’m not the girl who woke you,” I wheezed. “Although I treasure a piece of her within myself. I was her Wolf.”
Disbelief crossed her face and the pulsating glow of her organs beneath her glass skin quickened. “I feel her pain within you.”
I needed to assimilate the tendrils, but they were stubborn and incredibly dense, refusing to melt easily.
“Something tragic happened, it resulted in her death.” My breath hitched, just saying it aloud made the ache in my heart feel new again.
I saw Nell’s disapproving expression. Right. I was coming at this the wrong way. You’re part Witch now. Instead of trying to dissolve the hairs, I focused on turning them into something else. I felt the fibers unravel into shoots of green and curled leaves. I absorbed these.
Skies free of pollution. Piano music dancing in my ears. A familiar boy calling me by my name as he ran his fingers across the keys. And then fire and darkness swept it all under the rug, erasing it like it never happened. Like it didn’t matter.
The memories overlapped with my own and the loss hit me like a truck.
She looked confused as my tears dripped onto her wrist.
“It feels like I’ve known you for a long time,” I said, trying to give her my best smile. “Even if you were just sleeping up there, you’ve been present since the beginning. It’s nice to finally meet you, Cecily.”
A fitful red glow surged up from her belly, all the way to the tendons in her neck.
“You woke me,” she said insistently. “You cried out in grief and that’s how I knew the destruction of mankind was the only way to fix this.”
Quiet days… Hard days too, but it was all so precious in hindsight.
I clasped my hand over hers.
“The woman who woke you, she experienced a lot of pain, that’s true. But she took all that and shared it with me, we bore it together. In the end, she chose to transform into someone who could strive for something better instead of being held in chains by anger and sorrow. She didn’t want… this.”
Cecily was quiet for a moment. Then she met my eyes as fibers of gold danced on her head like gouts of flame on the surface of the sun.
“But I do,” she said.
The tendrils ripped free, making my vision go fuzzy. Her grip loosened and I fell.
She turned as something flew at her from a nearby building.
WHUMPF.
A fireball engulfed her as the rocket detonated. The explosion seared the air. I slammed down onto a slab of overturned road, barely feeling the pain.
My shattered bones corrected themselves as quickly as they were broken and I hauled myself to my feet.
A dark cloud of smoke hung overhead. Two shimmering tendrils, the size of tree trunks, shot out of the smoke and snaked across the air before slamming into the building where the rocket had been shot from.
A streak of red leapt from a nearby rooftop and plunged into the smoke. The main arm of hair that held Cecily aloft lowered, exiting the bottom of the cloud. Daria rode atop Cecily’s shoulders, hands deep in a wound on the Goddess’ shoulder, muscles straining as she tried to rip the wound wider.
Cecily roared, shaking the earth with her voice. Blood ran from Daria’s ears but she held on with a wide grimace. Golden spikes erupted from Cecily’s head like a pufferfish, but they passed straight through Daria, one even going straight through her eye socket without a drop of blood.
“That ain’t gonna work on me, baby,” Daria shouted, her voice unregulated due to her injured ears. “Now open wide!”
A car swerved past me and skidded to a stop on the tilted road. Several people jumped out and one was holding an RPG and took aim. Another rolled and then flung out their arm. I could barely see whatever they threw, it was translucent against the sky, but I could hear it give off an unearthly hum as it sped towards Daria and Cecily.
Daria looked only a little less surprised than Cecily when her hand was severed at the wrist, along with the invisible weapon cutting a deep v-shaped gouge into Cecily’s shoulder, making that arm hang loose. Daria acted first, wrapping her stump arm around Cecily’s neck in a chokehold.
I felt my sixth sense warp as twenty Witches all focused on holding Cecily still at once. Her muscles bulged as she strained against the invisible force.
The RPG holder pulled the trigger and the rocket took flight, leaving a trail of smoke.
There was a terrible sound, like a dozen people screeching in perfect unison and from the top of the leaning skyscraper, a fountain of darkness erupted, like an oil pipe had just sprung a leak. The fluid arced and fell like a waterfall, intercepting the rocket and detonating it before it reached Cecily.
The explosion flung black tar in all directions. A large glob landed next to me. Something moved within it.
A nearby Shaper had been hit by the sludge and oily black limbs had latched onto them. Other Shapers were dealing with the same, their attackers grabbing hold with however many limbs they had left to grip with, even severed hands wetly latching onto faces, digging fingers into any available crevice.
I tore the dripping assailant off of the Shaper near me. The thing was human. The Herald’s corrupting sludge poured from every orifice. I felt sick to my stomach as the thing spasmed and grinned through tar-stained teeth, laughing silently as it tried to jab its fingers into my eyes. Not human anymore.
“She’s on the move!” AJ’s voice shouted over the din, close to my ear.
I glanced upwards to see a loop of the main coil disappearing around a building. I Shaped the puppet of the Herald, sprouting vines from their body that cinched their limbs tight, restraining them. Taking a moment to scan the area, I saw that many of the Wolves were looking worse for wear, keeping the spawn away from reaching the more vulnerable Shapers during the ambush.
“Tell everyone the first resupply is incoming,” I said to AJ. Then I reached out with my sixth sense, searching the earth in specific spots where we had scattered bundles of seeds ahead of time. Launch points that I could spur forth with the energy of the Lacuna.
A tree erupted from a gap in the frozen golden wave, ripe fruit glistening on its boughs. I spread the growths in a wave across the city. Our Wolves took advantage of the nutrient rich biomatter to eat and heal.
Not wasting time, I ran, kicking across the uneven surfaces, building speed. I spotted Daria near a tree ahead. Her hand was healed. She turned to me with a fruit in her mouth.
“Good?” I asked.
“Mmhmph,” she uttered before she took out the fruit and whistled.
Several Wolves converged on our location, jumping onto the branches of the tree. Once they were all in position, I breathed in and seized the tree’s Shape, stretching it out. It grew rapidly, bark exploding off in chunks as it expanded beyond natural limits. We were launched onto the rooftops where the group moved in unison with graceful agility.
“Zone V,” Vanessa’s voice said, fading in and out as I passed the flying drone.
Daria sprung over a fan unit and leapt between rooftops. “If we can split her up from the Herald, then we’ll have her!” she shouted to the group.
Is this truly the right path?
I knew everyone was fighting against the urge to give in to despair. Our enemy was too powerful. It was likely just seeing her injured for a moment had raised their spirits and I didn’t want to voice my doubts. My newly formed connection to Cecily wasn’t helping.
She used to be just a girl.
Another drone swooped past. “No,” Bailey said, sounding nervous, “she’s changing course. Heading to Zone Z. Right for us. Evacuate!” That last word had been shouted away from the mic, to the people she was with at the command center.
How did Cecily know where they were? Had the Herald found them?
We changed course and I was at the head of the pack. The slowest Wolves were having to avoid the easiest paths, which were the hair, as it was primed to attack anyone who stepped on it.
I spotted Cecily floating in the air next to one of the tallest towers in the city and breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t in the right spot. She didn’t know.
I could see the black spidery Shape of the Herald clinging to the exterior of the skyscraper. They were conversing.
“Hey!” a Shaper up ahead shouted, waving at us with strange helical-shaped arms. They gestured to the wrecked car in front of them. “Get on!”
Kay sat inside. She leaned out the window and slapped the outside of the car. Half of her body had already spread out into butterflies across the interior.
I jumped onto the crumpled roof and the Shaper picked it up. Their arms shrunk, coiling tight before accelerating us into the sky atop the car wreck, heading straight for the Herald. Wind whistled through the car’s open windows.
The Herald saw us too late, reaching blackened hands out as if to catch the projectile. The car slammed into the building, shattering glass and bending metal supports, smearing his blackened body across the carpet inside.
The car scraped across the carpeted floor inside the building and came to a rest. I hopped off.
The Herald reformed his body easily as butterflies swarmed the air around us.
“You’ll lose,” he said smugly inside of my head, like I was monologuing to myself, “and I will string up each and every one of your comrades as puppets to dance around your dying body.”
Black arms gushed forth in a wave from his body, jerking like lightning bolts. I retaliated with Shaping, changing drops of the goo into bladed sunflowers that spun and sliced off the arms before they could reach me.
Then I targeted the severed arms, Shaping them into a man made of wicker-basket weavings. The puppet lurched towards the Herald, intent on capturing the sludge within its body.
Rats poured out from beneath the Herald’s liquid cloak. They sprung onto the puppet and gnawed away at it.
But with the distraction of the puppet and the stinging butterflies fluttering about, he didn’t notice the potted plant that I’d Shaped behind him.
Giant leaves with teeth, like a Venus flytrap, yawned open and then snapped shut, wrapping around his form to contain it best I could. I grabbed the organic iron maiden I’d created and then I flung it out the window.
“Cecily, my divine Goddess!” the Herald cried out as he fell. “You know what must be done.”
He plummeted away and small bits of the oily substance followed out of the building after him.
Cecily hadn’t moved an inch to help him. A vein pulsated in her neck.
“Why help them?” she asked. “That pain you experienced? It is the same as mine. I watched the angry mobs tear my brother apart, piece by piece.”
“I saw,” I said quietly.
Her eyes widened. “I thought I could have hope. So I waited. Each day I was tormented by nightmares. For years I endured the awful whispers of the Marquess. But now I truly understand. I could have waited a thousand years and that sickness still wouldn’t have vanished from people’s souls. They see someone different and try to strip every good thing away from that person. That can’t be fixed. They won’t ever understand, but I can ensure they at least experience the same undoing.”
I stepped onto a sheaf of gold and turned it into flowers so I could absorb it.
She’s willing to talk. We didn’t expect this.
I sifted through the visions of her past frantically. There must be something here I can use.
Extravagant balls, fancy dresses, bountiful feasts. All that they had and they would crush a child under their heel if it meant getting an ounce more power. In all the memories of Cecily, that man was always there. A pressure on her mind, stifling and malevolent.
“That man,” I said. “The Marquess. He’s the reason you suffered. People can be cruel, yes, but that’s not-”
“You’re wrong!” Cecily snarled, face warping into a sharp-toothed snout for a moment. “It is because I was linked to that monster that I know. I could feel his thoughts, his intentions. That’s why I know it wasn’t him that made my neighbours stab me with burning irons and pitchforks. He did not tell them to call for my hanging. He did-” her voice caught. “He did not force them to cut off my brother’s fingers one by one, dropping them to the dirt to be eaten by the worms.”
Her shoulders relaxed. “No. That was all inside of their hearts already.”
She held out her arm to the side and threads swam to it, winding themselves together into a new form. A massive cross shape, extending across the space between buildings. Its edge sharpened, reflecting the sunlight. A titanic sword of gold. She rotated it effortlessly, like it weighed next to nothing so the edge faced me.
A heartbeat passed.
And then she had already swung it., lazily following through on the motion.
I couldn’t feel anything below my waist as the ceiling of the building crashed down on top of me, supports severed. I was buried under the weight of hundreds of tons of building materials.
The Marquess chuckled in my mind.
The weight shifted as I focused on healing my crushed body. The severed building would tip and then it would fall. Then, buried in concrete and metal, I realized that they did know where the base was.