Worm belongs to Wildbow
Read it if you haven't already, its quality is only slightly surpassed by its length
This is an altpower! Worm story, it hopefully won't be clear exactly what power that is until later in the story.
Enjoy, and please critique. I need all the help I can get!
Priestess: Prologue
Taylor jerked herself awake for what must have been the thousandth time. Or, at the very least it felt like the thousandth. Manic whispers tugged at the edges of her mind, the last portions of her nightmare fading away. Quickly grabbing her journal, she wrote down everything there was to remember about the dream.
Whispers, greater intensity, the prelude to something?
City, no one around, walls in distance?
Somewhere around 15 to 20 different voices
It was sad to say that none of the info was new, she had managed to differentiate a few more of the voices but that still didn't reveal anything about the world she kept dreaming about. The dead city she'd seen for the past week. She'd tried looking up anything about "repeating dreams." A fat lot of good that did, only spitting out useless answers like:
"A recurring dream is a dream which is experienced repeatedly over a long period. They can be pleasant or nightmarish and unique to the person and their experiences."
Thanks, Wikipedia, very helpful. The rest of the article was the same, exactly none of it helping her figure out what was happening. It was kind of sad the only other useful article she found was some no-name blog:
"Most dreams contain messages that serve to teach you something about yourself. However, soon after you wake up to go about your daily routine, you tend to quickly forget what you dream about. The message in recurring dreams may be so important and/or powerful that it refuses to go away."
Yeah, no kidding, of course, it's important. The site went onto list how anxiety or stress (and oh boy, did she have those in spades) could be the cause of the dream. With Emma and Sophia's year-long campaign against her, she had forgotten what it meant to not be stressed. Constantly on her toes, hoping that maybe, just maybe she would have a calm day. Something that seemed a virtual impossibility.
Until she did, the few weeks before winter break had been almost quiet. Some insults and light pranks, but nothing serious at all. Taylor was almost willing to believe they'd given up, guiltily hoping that Sophia had found someone more interesting to bully, someone else's spirit to crush. Unfortunately, that was almost certainly not going to happen, not even Scion could perform that big of a miracle.
Taylor's "depressing thought quota" finished, she rolled out of bed and threw on the first clothes she saw before stumbling down to eat whatever she could find in the pantry. Her dad was gone again, he'd probably fallen asleep at work. The Merchants had been demanding protection money from the Dockworkers and Dad had been needed to help maintain order. She couldn't fault him for it, sadly that couldn't stop his absence from hurting.
Her morning passed in a haze, by the time Taylor came off autopilot she was already walking through the doors of Winslow. With her head down and slouched posture, the only ones to notice she even existed were Emma's lackeys. Who hopefully wouldn't care enough about her to do anything. She was nothing to them and everyone knew it. Plodding down the hallway put her in the path of an unnaturally large crowd. Winslow may be overcrowded but people tended to stay distant; gang ties and the negativity engraved in the school walls (or graffitied) tended to separate the students. The foreboding that had begun when she hit the human wall ratcheted up when she realized that one her locker was in this hall, and two, it smelled worse than the girl's locker room out here.
With the posture of someone walking to her execution, Taylor pushed her way through. Maybe it wasn't related to her, it could just be that someone died, if someone died she wouldn't need to go to school, when had someone else's death become preferable to school? Unfortunately, that question would remain unanswered, as no one had died (surprisingly) and it was related to her. If the fact the crowd only broke into a semicircle around her locker wasn't a clue; then the fact that the smell only got worse the closer, she got was.
Kids near the locker had their phones out and shirts pulled up to their noses. Laughter, probably nervous or shock, broke out when she opened the locker. No, the hellhole, calling it a locker couldn't do it justice. Maggots and other bugs crawled around, the walls were stained red, the smell had turned from horrific to vomit inducing (which was exactly Taylor's reaction), and to top it all off like a cherry from the mind of Satan the thing was filled with what must have been weeks' worth of old tampons and other trash. All this flew through the suddenly quite sick mind of Taylor Hebert. All of this would have been traumatic enough; if the perpetrators had decided to end there. Yet, Sophia Hess for all her many faults could not be said to do things by only half. If anything, she was the kind of girl who did upwards of 110% on anything she put her mind to, doubly so when annoyed.
So, with vomit covering her front, Taylor found out the true extent of the prank as she was picked up by Emma and Sophia and stuffed into the locker. The throw left her with a mouthful of garbage she refused to name and the sudden and complete urge to freak the fuck out. Which is exactly what she did.
She screamed, no one heard or cared. Especially with her head plunged into a mountain of toxic waste.
She beat against the locker or at least tried to. Something about being six foot and crammed into an already very full locker made that difficult.
She cried, the tears mixing with blood and other unidentifiable substances.
She blacked out. An outcome no one was surprised by, especially her Shard.
She saw great worms writhing in the sky
She saw a shard broken
Broken in a battle between gods
Jettisoned on landing, to repair and remake itself
Melded, to survive
Remade, to thrive
Repurposed, from Queen to Priestess
From Royalty to Weaponry
When she awoke hours later, a single word was left from the dream. The rest being wiped from her mind.
[Priestess]