Chapter 1:
I awoke strapped to a metal table.
As one might imagine, I freaked, hard.
The bands of metal snapped like silly putty. Instantly, I began to float towards the ceiling like a balloon. My wings snapped out and paused my ascent.
Wait, wings? A glance to my left and right showed the same thing, brilliant white wings seemed to fill my vision in either direction. With a thought, I moved them, gently flapping them, inadvertently sending myself hurtling back to the metal table. My head clipped the corner of the table and I bounced off onto the floor.
"What the fork…" I rubbed the back of my head instinctively. Freezing in confusion when I realized just what I had said. "What the fork?" Doing a double take when it happened again. Had I given myself a concussion? "Fork. Fork! Fork!...Fork?" I knew what I wanted to say, but it was like my tongue didn't care.
"Fooooooorrrrrrk." Even slowly trying to enunciate the word didn't work. I shook my head, I had much bigger, fluffier concerns than possible brain damage. Slowly, reaching out a hand, I touched the wing to my right, trailing fingers through resplendently soft feathers.
I couldn't help but shiver at the sensation, the wings, my wings sent back to me. Even the slightest brush of my fingertips caused my wings to twitch away, they were hypersensitive. One would think that suddenly having new limbs to feel with would be weird, but it honestly felt natural. In fact, if I hadn't had 16 years of memories telling me otherwise, I would have assumed that I always had wings.
And what wings they were, I marveled as I spread them out. Easily touching each side of the room, I guessed they were at least 15 feet across, and I hadn't even spread them fully yet! Even in the drab sterile lighting of the room, the wings shone a glorious impossibly luminous white.
I suddenly had the urge to be outside, to see them bathed in the sun's holy splendor. To see my feathers gently caressed by God's loving winds and-
I froze. Holy splendor, God's loving winds? I didn't talk, let alone think like that! A thrill of panic shooting through me.
"What the Hell is goi-" A sound like a tea kettle escaped my lips as my tongue and throat suddenly burned. The pain only lasted for a few seconds, disappearing without a trace. Experimentally I moved my tongue around, but it felt completely normal, as if it hadn't felt like I had poured scalding hot tea down my throat only a few moments prior.
"Ms. Hebert?" A man's voice crackled from the ceiling.
Looking closer, I noticed a speaker. "Yes?" I said hesitantly, the confusion and seeming barrage of surprises in the last few moments leaving me incapable of anything else.
"To confirm, your name is Taylor Anne Hebert, daughter of Daniel and Annete Hebert?" The man spoke with a calm well practiced cadence.
"Yes." With time, my mental facilities returned, along with my concerns. "Where am I? Why was I strapped to a table? Why do I have wings? Why-"
"Ms. Hebert, you're currently in PRT custody, I promise we will answer all of your questions to the best of our abilities. We mean you no harm, but first we need to confirm some things." Truth.
I blinked at the ceiling, a sense of assuredness washing over me, in the form of an almost physically pleasant tingle. I knew he was being serious, in fact I would have gone as far as to say, I couldn't doubt him. I wanted to, I really did, but it was like my brain refused to entertain the thought that he could have been lying. Even thinking about thinking about doubting him felt odd, almost dreamlike in how distant it felt.
"Could you please recite your date of birth and current age?"
"June nineteenth 1995, and I am 16 years old."
"What is the last thing you remember before waking up here?"
I opened my mouth, then paused. My brow furrowing as I tried to recall my most recent memory. It should have been easy, just say the first thing to come to mind. But for some strange reason, I couldn't. Like when a word is on the tip of your tongue, you know it's there, but you just couldn't make that last important connection. I could grasp something for a moment, get the vaguest flash of something, but then it just slipped away like smoke, utterly refusing to be caught.
"I don't know?" I closed my eyes in concentration.
"You don't remember?" He asked, without any accusation in his voice. A simple request for clarification.
"No, its-" I sighed in frustration as I tried to verbalize what I was feeling. "It's like a dream. I know I remember something, but the moment I try to recall it, it disappears…I don't know how else to describe it. All I can get is the impression of something big…and bright, so impossibly big and so impossibly bright I can't even describe it. The word biblical comes to mind." I rambled as my mind tried and failed to comprehend what little I could even get.
My head began to hurt and my nose felt weird. I rubbed at it idly, the feeling of something warm and wet made me pause. Pulling back revealed a distinctly gold liquid staining my hand. Was this coming out of my nose? I stared incredulously at the metallic gold smeared across the back of my hand, before my very eyes it began to flake and float upwards off my skin, the individual flakes barely making it a few inches before seemingly disappearing entirely in little bursts of golden fire. Some of it dripped into my lips, and I tasted something simultaneously sweet and spicy.
"Ms. Hebert? Are you okay? Are you in pain?" The man sounded concerned. Genuine.
A wave of warmth made me almost beam up at the speaker grills. "I'm fine, I think? Just got a headache, and…I seem to be bleeding gold?" For some reason despite common sense telling me that I should be freaking out, that I should be alarmed at leaking unknown and seemingly flammable fluids. I couldn't bring myself to, my body seemed convinced that it was normal.
My memories distinctly said my blood should be red, but my body negligently brushed aside my worries. And for reasons I couldn't explain, I couldn't bring myself to rebuke the feeling. Intellectually I knew it was weird, but I couldn't bring myself to care. It seemed to be a running theme so far. If anything, these alien notions seemed to just be gaining strength with every second that passed.
"Ms. Hebert-" His voice dragged me out of my thoughts. "-do you believe you are in need of any medical assistance at the moment?" At my head shake he continued. "Alright," he sighed, " can you confirm that before today you didn't have wings or a halo?"
"No, I didn't have wings or a ha-" Halo? I looked up, but only saw the barest edge of something gold just out of sight, it moved with my head leaving me unable to properly see whatever it was. Tentatively reaching up, I groped around blindly above my head, my hands coming into contact with something hot, but most importantly solid.
It resisted my attempt at pulling it. After gripping it with both hands and putting some muscle into it, I was able to slowly drag it down until it was in front of my face. It fought against me the whole way, seemingly getting hotter with every inch I moved it. My white knuckled grip and shaking arms the only thing stopping it from snapping back to its original position.
It was a seamless circle, made from a lustrous gold and polished until I could see a warped reflection of my face in it. Just a tad thicker around than my thumb and nearly as wide as a basketball. It was unmistakably a halo. The metal resting just on the edge of being painfully hot.
Even the domineering sensation couldn't wave away what I was feeling just then.
"What the fork?!"