Summary: Ten years later, Sarah revisits her past (in her typically dramatic fashion).
Author's Note: This is obviously a work in progress. If you like it, let me know and I'll relocate the remaining chapters currently living in my head to a more tangible location, here at fanfiction.net.

Creation Myth
by R. Renfield

Prologue

Goblin King, Goblin King, wherever you may be, come and take this child of mine far away from me!

A thunderous noise, perhaps the natural clap of a gathering storm, perhaps the cosmic impact of a new reality forming. A screech, perhaps a baby's startled cry or perhaps the wail of a newborn world. And then a flash of brilliant, shimmering light –

And then nothing.

To her credit, Jenny covered the nothing beautifully, immediately improvising a nervous admonition to not to be scared of the thunderstorm and convincing most of the audience that the nothing was actually part of a still-impending something. The assembled goblins played off their confusion in character, squirreling back into their hiding places like a video rewinding. Janine, in the booth, skipped back a few sound cues without missing a beat, slowly bringing the squeaking and chittering back up, softer this time. The whole moment was played, by mutual consent, like a fake-out in a horror movie, the made you look that really was just a clap of thunder.

The real terror, of course, was backstage. While the pseudo-Sarah onstage kept calm and feigned nervousness, the actual Sarah was trying to cover her panic with directorial outrage. Whether or not they bought it, the crew still scrambled to stay out of her way as she stalked through the mad rush to find the truant star and throw him onstage. Sarah had proven to be as remarkably capable a director as she had been a writer; she was just a trifle uptight. Which is not to suggest that Sarah's a control freak – more of a responsibility freak. This show was her baby, and I could tell it irritated her to have to leave it in the hands of –

Idiots... incompetents... morons...

– anyone else.

What I'd like to know is what idiot, or lunatic, put the Arts Council Theater's dressing rooms at the top of four narrow and badly-lit flights of concrete steps. As Marc flew – not ran, flew – down all four in what seemed like a single leap, startling things happened in about six places at once, and I think the stage manager's head spun around and exploded in the midst of it all. Next to me at the foot of the steps, Sarah gasped and choked, her eyes widening as if she's just seen Marc become a sticky, bloody mess in front of her. At the same moment, Marc very nearly became a sticky, bloody mess in front of us as the perpetually loose handrail that he'd made the mistake of vaulting off of gave way. From the theater, we heard the second thunder crash that was supposed to cue Marc's entrance. And, in an apparently unrelated fit of random chance, one of the glass globes that was supposed to juggle later in the show escaped and rolled off the prop table, shattering into dust on the black concrete floor, the noise in perfect sync with the thunderclap.

Marc defied a half-dozen laws of physics, landed with the grace and aplomb only fitting the Goblin King, leapt onstage and burst through the French doors, glitter scattering wildly in his wake. Our valiant stage-manager Leslie, her head back in its usual place, magically produced from somewhere deep in the massive canvas bag where she stashed her manager-gear (including but not limited to: goodies for bribing Bullseye the Dog, goodies for bribing the children of the cast and crew, goodies for bribing the cast and crew, props lists, cast lists, schedules, first aid kit, a cell phone or two, an extraordinary quantity of stage makeup, and a handful of fake snow scooped off the stage of a recent production of RENT) a spare crystal; another crisis averted. Vic, the manager of the Arts Council Theater, said a silent prayer of gratitude to the gods of litigation that Marc hadn't been killed.

Ordinarily I live for moments like this.

Yet something in Sarah's face as Marc had plummeted down those stairs and her strangled scream as the crystal had shattered gave me pause. I grabbed her arm as the collective adrenaline rush around us resulted in mass dancing, hugging, and collapsing. What I thought I'd seen in that moment was fear: not just fear for Marc's safety or for her beloved production, but of something more overwhelming, something from the depths. Not only fear, either, but, in a shade so subtle that only someone who'd known Sarah almost since infancy would have picked up on it: guilt. Not guilt like when she spilled grape jell-o on my white bedspread when we were seven, or like when she went out with the boy I was crushing on in ninth grade, or like when she'd had to give the lead in this show to a woman who she knew I hated. This was guilt of a sort that the particularly fortunate among us never see up close, the sort that I myself was only tangentially acquainted with, the guilt that goes along with real loss, real pain.

I should have remembered that later, but it seemed at the time that I might have imagined it. Sarah turned to me, eyes wide but smiling, and mock-collapsed onto my shoulder. Too close, too close, she sighed, and I pulled her into a floppy waltz of relief. That was the first of those frozen moments, the first inkling of what was coming, coming far faster than we could have imagined. The first rumblings of the storm.