I woke to a pounding headache that was accompanied by a sharp stabbing pain on the side of my head. Hissing, I opened my eyes and saw that one of my horns was damaged. The very tip had broken off, and cracks had spread up its length. I tried to ignore the pain as I climbed to my feet, but every movement triggered a fresh wave of agony that made my stomach twist.
Standing was harder than it should have been; my head felt lopsided, and it was throwing my balance off. In the end, I settled for just kneeling on the floor while I tried to keep my breakfast down as the floor trembled under me.
Feet padded across the floor, and I looked up to see the cat creature from before looking at me, its yellow eyes shining with something I couldn't identify.
"What're you looking at?" Pain and confusion had to be the only reason I snapped at the creature when I should have rightfully been trying to go unnoticed.
The panther stepped closer, but the collar of smog tightened around its neck before it could do any more than growl.
"Good, you're awake."
Looking past the panther, I could see the woman from the rooftop standing at the far side of the room. She had her back to me as she traced a rune onto the wall, her staff propped up nearby.
"I doubt I need you awake for this, but the book was sparse on details." As she moved, tendrils of smog followed her like an eager puppy, pressing against the lines and worming its way into the runes, filling them with a sickly glow.
"Book?" Ugh, my head was still foggy, and I had to fight back the impulse to shake it in an effort to clear my thoughts.
My question went unanswered as I glared at her back. My vision was a bit blurry, stopping me from really making out the runes she was drawing, with one exception. On the wall next to her was a large 'light' rune — almost as tall as the woman — that was pulsing softly. The pattern flowed outwards from it, down the wall and across the floor.
Whatever spell she was writing, it was huge and complex. Runes had been scribbled on the floor, walls and even ceiling in a spiralling pattern. In the very middle of it all was a large brass tub, the smog circling above it.
Madison was on the far side of the room, her hands pressing against the air around her. A glowing set of runes circled her, trapping her in place.
"What's going on?"
"Be quiet," the woman snapped. "I need to get this finished. That stupid girl didn't tell me there were two of you."
Leaving the wall, she marched in my direction, stopping maybe a meter away, and started scribbling more runes on a bare patch of floor, muttering quietly to herself the whole time. "Because of course she didn't, that would be too easy, I should have known better than to trust her."
"Where are we? Are you the one who created the smog?" There were no windows and only one door, but we had to still be in the school. I could hear the wailing noise coming from somewhere above me, like a constant itch in the back of my skull.
"Who told you about us?!" Ignoring the way the room spun, I got my feet under me, finally standing up.
Huffing, the woman spun around, pointing a piece of chalk at me like a finger. "Will you shut up!"
"Always asking questions, always demanding, always walking around like you know everything—!" Stopping, she rose back to her full height with a deep breath, her hands raising as if to push back her hair, only to stop when they reached her hood.
It was almost comical to realise I was a good few inches taller than her. Without stopping to think, I lashed out, my fist hitting her jaw with a satisfying crack.
As she stumbled, I grabbed for her hood in an effort to keep myself standing and stop her getting away, my wings stretching out to form spears. The panther slammed into my side before I could impale the woman.
It roared as we fell, its claws raking across my chest and knocking the wind from my lungs. There was a ripping sound, but it was drowned out by the pain in my head as we hit the floor. I wrapped my arms around my head as the panther swatted at me and rolled to my side.
When nothing else happened beyond some growling, I opened my eyes to see Principal Blackwell cradling her jaw in one hand while the other held the panther back with a leash made of smog.
"Run!" Madison screamed, still trapped in her circle.
Jumping to my feet, I sprinted for the door, adrenaline and fear driving me on. The pounding of paws reached me before I was even halfway there, and I threw myself to the side.
The panther flew past, claws outstretched. Hitting the ground, it skidded to a stop, twisting around to face me, but I was already raising my arm. A bright flash and loud bang echoed through the room as I unleashed my flash-bang spell, making it screech in pain.
A fireball exploded against my shoulder, the heat of it washing over me. The lines on Mom's jacket glowed as they absorbed some of the impact, but I honestly doubted the fire was hot enough to hurt me.
"Really?" I snapped, my temper flaring as I spun around to face Blackwell. "You do know what I am —"
"I know exactly what you are!" she shouted, clutching her staff with shaking hands. "You're another weirdo, another little geek sitting in the corner who can't take a joke about his glasses!"
Anger and grief poured off her, and the smog surged, all of it twisting together and wrapping itself around her staff. A shard of ice longer and thicker than my arm formed in the air and shot forward like a missile, barely missing me and slamming into the door in an explosion of cold.
Staring at the now-frozen-shut door, I wasn't able to dodge as the panther slammed into my back and drove me to the floor. Standing on top of me, it growled down my ear, and I could feel its hot breath on my neck.
Walking forward, Blackwell pointed the still-glowing end of her staff at my head.
"All of you are no better than him. You spend your days glaring at everyone, then your evenings at target ranges, boxing practice, or hiding away in your basements until you walk in here and kill good people who deserve better! People who actually had a chance to be something more than a statistic!"
She was looking at me, but her eyes were unfocused. I didn't know what she was talking about, or who she was really seeing.
"Good children die and wastrels like you get set free after a couple of years. Well I'm sick of it! Why should you get to live?" Tears were running down her face. "My son didn't!"
Lying there, unable to move, I wasn't sure what to say as she took a shuddering breath.
"So that's it!?" Madison shouted, breaking the tense silence. "You're tearing reality apart because your fucking son died!?"
"Be quiet!" Blackwell snapped. Reaching down, she grabbed my broken horn, and I screamed in pain as she pulled me upwards with surprising strength. Without thinking, I scrambled to my feet and let her lead me forward in an effort to lessen the pain.
"Creatures like you could never understand!" Releasing my horn, she shoved me forward, and I felt the magic of the circle snap closed behind me.
"I understand more than you do!" Madison screamed, yellow eyes glowing as she pounded at the invisible shield keeping her trapped. "The walls between reality will collapse and things will pour through! The ward outside won't last five minutes—!"
"I know that!" Blackwell snapped. "I know what I'm doing and what will happen if I don't get this finished soon, now be quiet!"
Giving the panther a shove, Blackwell sent it to the corner of the room and started redrawing the runes that had been damaged by the panther's claws when it attacked me.
Ignoring them both, I focused on the runes. I knew maybe one in every five, but there was a clear pattern throughout. Life, direction, life, light, stability, unity, store, restoration, contain, direct, life; these were the ones I recognised, all of them heading towards the tub in the middle, which was starting to steam.
"This is a healing spell? Madison, this looks like a healing spell! She's trying to gather… life and direct it to the center?"
My eyes kept being drawn back to the far wall. The large rune Blackwell had carved there was glowing brightly now, but something about it was off. It looked like 'light', but there were some extra lines that changed the meaning. I tried to focus on it, but the pounding in my head was making it hard to think.
It almost looked like 'order', but —
Something in my mind clicked and understanding flooded in.
"Heaven!" I gasped. "That large rune means heaven!" There were dozens of runes for heaven, and all of them were inert. There was no one true heaven, just like there was no one true hell.
"You're trying to invoke heaven?"
"No!" Madison sounded almost frantic now. "She's trying to open a door to the divine realms! You can't do that! Do you even know what will happen if you do?!"
"Of course I know!" Blackwell roared, standing up and striding across the room. "I've spent years working on this, researching every scrap of information I could find, testing again and again until I finally got it right!"
Taking a shuddering breath, Blackwell visibly forced herself to calm down. "Despite what you may think, I'm not crazy. I'm not going to open the way to a divine realm. I just need to make a crack, just a small one. Just big enough to bring him back."
"You're trying to bring someone back to life?"
"That's impossible!" Madison scoffed. "You can't resurrect the dead!"
"Yes, I can!" Blackwell snapped. "It's happened before, people have been brought back, good people, special people, like my son..."
"Your son," Madison growled, "is not some chosen hero! He's the same useless sack of-"
Her words cut off suddenly, a shimmer appearing in the air around her as Blackwell activated a spell to silence her.
"My son was a gift," she hissed, her eyes wild and hands twitching. "He was everything to me and I will get him back, even if I have to slaughter this whole fucking school!"
Walking away from us both, she took up position in another circle, forming a triangle with Madison and me and the brass tub in front of her. Kneeling, she started to channel power into the spell.
Above us, the smog started to move, wrapping around Blackwell's body and following her arms to enter the runes.
The circle around her lit up, the runes glowing a sickly green that spread outward, filling the spiralling patterns like water. The glow reached Madison and me at the same time, the runes around us bursting into life, magic arcing like lightning into our bodies.
I screamed in pain as fire and ice danced across my skin. Needles drove themselves into my skin, hooks peeling the flesh from my bones as the magic of the spell grabbed hold of me and pulled the energy from my body in wave after wave of agony and keeping me upright.
On the far wall, the heaven rune was glowing like a sun, the light from it bleaching the paint around it. The runes encircling it came alive, smog bursting from them like grasping fingers and driving into the rune.
With a deep rumble I could feel in my melting bones, the rune split apart, a crack splitting it in half, and gold fire burst free. The runes on the ceiling captured the fire, directing it down their length and into the circle above the tub.
I couldn't hear anything over the sound of the fire as it poured into the tub like molten metal, filling the air with steam and making the brass glow cherry-red with heat.
Then, with a crash of thunder, the magic stopped, and I dropped bonelessly to the ground.
I wasn't sure how long I lay there, feeling the cool ground on my skin. A bone-deep ache filled my body, my arms and legs nothing more than dead weight as I tried to force unresponsive lungs to move.
Every breath felt like an age, the sound of it echoing in my ears and drowning out the world around me.
"H-Harrison?" Blackwell's voice was weak, and she seemed to be having trouble standing. I could just see her out of the corner of my eye as she tried to rise.
Feeling was slowly returning to my body, a constant tingle in my fingers and toes that became a stabbing pain with every movement. Ignoring it, I tried to lift myself up but only succeeded in twisting myself enough that I could see the tub and the pale boy that was pulling himself upright.
He was handsome, with a mane of blonde hair that hung to his shoulders and shining blue eyes. Smooth, blemish-free skin was wrapped over a well-muscled physique that was struggling to keep itself upright.
"...M-mom?" he asked, his voice a perfect tenor.
"Oh, my boy, look at you!" Rushing forward, Blackwell wrapped him up in a hug, hands pushing his hair back as she tried to take him all in at once.
Watching them, I wanted to scream at the wrongness of it all, but my voice wouldn't work.
He didn't look real. He looked like a picture of a male model, photoshopped beyond perfection then brought it to life. His eyes were too blue, his hair was literally glowing and his skin immaculate.
Fear coiled through me, a deep instinctive terror that even the monsters outside couldn't match.
"Are you okay? Does anything hurt?" Blackwell said, oblivious to everything but her 'son'.
"It burns…" he said, his words slightly slurred.
"What does? I know it's hard, but you need to tell me sweetie."
"The air, the light… it's all wrong." Its voice was growing stronger, words coming smoother and more practised. "This world is wrong…"
"I-I don't understand," Blackwell said quietly, cupping his face with one hand while the other helped guide him out of the tub.
"Get away!" Madison managed to shout, her voice hoarse. "That's not your son."
"You be quiet! He's just confused," Blackwell snapped, turning to face us and trying to shield her son from us.
"No…" I was barely able to speak as the 'boy' wrapped an arm around his mother. His lips moved, saying something I didn't hear, then his hand burst through Blackwell's chest, gold fire spreading outwards from the wound.
He watched, his face expressionless, as she fell lifelessly to the floor.
Looking at us, he stepped forward, opening his mouth to say something, only for Blackwell's panther to charge across the room with a roar. With an almost idle gesture, he sent a stream of fire at it.
The attacked passed through the panther harmlessly as it turned to smoke. Reforming, it pounced, driving them both to the floor, claws and teeth raking across his body.
With a wordless shout, light burst from the boy, and a wave of force threw us into the walls with so much force that I felt something in my chest crack.
As the boy climbed to his feet, his skin was peeling away, golden fire consuming him. Rising into the air he became a mess of limbs and faces, his body formed of shining glass and fire, and a voice as clear as a bell rang out, its mouths shouting a language I'd never heard before.
The sound of it seared into my mind, filling me with pain and demanding my surrender. My skin was blackening and charring under the heat, and my vision was going grey.
In a panic, I reached out, and what little smog that remained poured into me, flooding my veins with ice, the foul taste of anger, hatred, bitterness, and every other negative emotion that formed it rolling across my tongue.
Then, in a moment of clarity, I let it all go and the world went black.
##
"Taylor! Taylor you need to wake up!"
Madison's heart was in her mouth as she shook Taylor's shoulder. She was barely breathing, her skin unnaturally pale with dark black lines running across it, and her left arm was nothing more than a blackened lump.
Her other self, the succubus she was fused with, was all but screaming in rage. Blackwell, the stupid bitch, had pulled a fucking lord of order into the world.
Barely sparing Blackwell's corpse a glance, she tapped Taylor's face. To her relief, and horror, Taylor opened her eyes with a groan. They were a foggy-milky colour and she seemed to be having trouble focusing.
"Madison?"
"Yeah, it's me. Come on, we need to get out of here. Can you stand?"
Taylor shook her head in an effort to clear it. "Not sure…"
"I know, but we need to leave…" Whatever Taylor had done, it had made that thing scream in pain before flying up through the ceiling like it was passing through water.
Putting one of Taylor's arms over her shoulder, she half-carried, half-dragged her upright and towards the door. Blackwell's panther was still slumped in a heap by the other wall, the steady rise and fall of its chest the only signs of life.
"Feels weird," Taylor muttered, struggling to get her feet to move.
"Don't worry, you're going to be fine." She hoped.
As it turned out, Blackwell had been holding them in some sort of bunker under school. The door opened easily enough, even with them having to shuffle sideways through the narrow corridor and up the stairs.
Emerging on the school's ground floor, Madison shivered as the quiet part of her imagined the twisted horrors waiting for them around the corner. Giving Taylor a worried glance, she moved forward. Her apprehension only grew as they walked through the empty halls. Even the absence of the smog was more worrying than reassuring at this point.
It wasn't until she turned a corner that she saw them: a dozen students lying on the ground. As they approached, it became clear that they were dead.
Her heart broke at the sight of them, the succubus side of her mourning the deaths of more children.
Putting her confused grief aside, Madison pushed forward. More bodies appeared, but the further she got from the basement, the more she found that were still breathing. Some were awake, quietly crying or clinging to each other in confusion now that the effect of the smog was gone from their minds.
Their bodies were still twisted, but they were alive.
Eventually emerging from the school, Madison looked up at the clear sky overhead. The ward likely hadn't even slowed the lord of order down. In the distance, she could see flashing lights as emergency services and PRT fought to contain the few students who were still able to move.
Turning away from them, Madison did her best to guide Taylor down a side street. As soon as she could, she would call Danny to pick them up.
This had not been a good day.
AN: chapter written under commission for Koalakiller on .
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