by wildbow
Had he been one of them?
Something went wrong. The monstrous godling had a plan, a vision of the future it wanted, and this isn’t part of that.
It had crashed to earth, and something had broken free. Here and there, phantom images had appeared, brushing past people, and they changed. Others changed without touching any of the massive, ghostly gray hands that had appeared from thin air. She knew, because of this conviction in her head, that it was the food and water. It was tainting the landscape.
All coming from higher up the cliffside.
She found her breath, then scaled her way up.
The landscape she was as she reached the top wasn’t a familiar one.
A different sky, showing a different time of day. But the space in between was something else entirely. She had only to look and she knew what it was she looked at. The entity. The evil godling.
I have to kill it.
The plan formed in her mind. The haze of fog still hung over her mind’s eye, and it grew worse with every moment.
Her hand moved to the little knife at her belt. She wore it there for when she helped her mother with the cooking and gardening. Worked metal was expensive, and the knife was a personal treasure. Two inches long, curved. She used it for cutting stems and trimming fat.
She would use it here. She started walking forward.
There were people gathered, bystanders. An assorted mix.
Why are they here?
No, was there a way to find out, using this sight she had?
I want to understand why they’re here.
They’d come from different worlds. There were gates or doorways here and there. When the entity had fallen, it had left gaps.
They bellowed words in a language she couldn’t make out. Warnings. They were too far away to stop her.
A woman stepped in her way.
Strangely dressed, wearing a dress so short it might well be indecent, showing the calves, and a fair amount of the upper chest. Her skin was the strangest black color, her hair bound in thin, glossy braids.
One of the monsters? No. She knew right away it was a stranger from a distant land. A land much like the one she had glimpsed in her fever dream.
The woman said something in a strange language.
Fortuna strode forwards anyways. Her special knowledge let her push her way past almost effortlessly, choosing the right spot, the right amount of strength. The godling was in a chasm, a crater caused by the impact. It stretched out in every direction, a pool of flesh, and it reached into several worlds at once.
It was disorienting to look at.
Step twenty-nine, making her way down into the crater.
She stepped onto loose grit, and her weight did the rest. She coasted down, much like the boys riding down the mud-slick path they’d made in the hill, down into the pond, except she remained on two feet. It was a task only the oldest and most athletic boys could manage.
It was more dangerous here than it was on the hill. There were rocks that jutted out, and outcroppings of deeper roots and plant life that had rained down into the crater in the aftermath of the impact. It was more dangerous, but not harder. This, like scaling the cliff face, was easy.
Everything was easy now. It was disorienting.
The woman with black skin followed, moving slower. She used her hands and feet to control her descent, sliding from rock to rock, stopping before sliding down further. The black-skinned woman was a quarter of the way down before Fortuna was at the bottom.
It didn’t matter. Fortuna advanced into the living forest alone. Everything here was alive, hands moving, webs of skin stretching and folding. There was a cacophony of noises that made her think of a chorus of heartbeats, a choir of soft breaths and whispers. Gentle human noises that were all the more eerie because she could see right through the deception. She was well aware that what she saw here was the godling putting together a mask so it could lie to people, setting them against each other.
She advanced into the heart of the gray forest. She was terrified, but the feeling was disconnected from her actions. She only had to recognize the next step in the series. She was aware of the steps that followed…
Until she came face to face with the godling. Her knife was in hand, and she could see a figure before her. A human shape, in the midst of pulling itself together from the examples and experiments that surrounded them.
She set foot on one of those experiments, a raised hand, and used it until she was eye to eye with the being, a matter of feet away.
It swelled, lurching forth, creating few inches more of waist, another inch of one arm, two inches of another arm. Beyond the ending points, the arms and legs simply extended into nothingness. Parts of a tapestry she couldn’t make out. It moved again, and closed the distance between them.
The being raised its head. She could see its eyes open in recognition.
It’s teaching itself how to act like we act. Even this.
She raised her arm, knife held with the point down.
And the gray fog descended on her mind, blinding her. A barrier, a blind spot, a future she could no longer see. Had it set the limitation more firmly in place?
The godling smiled. It knew, because the power she was using was the same power it had used to glimpse the future, to find that particular future where it had the world divided, drowned in conflict.
As far as the godling was concerned, she was blind, as helpless as anyone else.
A voice, from behind her.
The black-skinned woman, shouting something in a foreign language.
I want to understand her.
One step.
She had only to think, ‘Stab it.’
Fortuna realized she still held the knife aloft.
But where had she wanted to stab it?
Indecision gripped her. For an hour now, she’d been absolutely certain of what she was doing, and now she faced the absolute opposite situation.
Her hand shook. She nearly dropped the little trimming knife.
She nearly fell as the hand beneath her moved. Her power failed her here, too. Because the hand was an extension of the being before her.
It was going to kill her, and then it was going to reclaim the ability to see the future. It would use that power to control the world, then to destroy it.
And she couldn’t bring herself to move an inch.
I want to tell her…
The words were alien to her as she spoke them. “I—I can’t.”
A hand wrapped around her shoulders. She felt a body press against her back, supporting her.
“I—I have seen visions. Things I was not meant to see, things this… godling wanted to keep to itself. I… have to stop it.”
But even as the words left her mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to move.
The woman leaned forward over Fortuna’s shoulder, her face in Fortuna’s peripheral vision. She said something.
“I believe you.”
The woman spoke in her ear once more, her voice insistent. She translated, asking for a way to understand the answers.
“It’s dangerous?”
Fortuna nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I—I would stake everything on it. Everything ever.”
Though she didn’t even know the words she was speaking, there was a conviction in her tone that seemed to reach the woman.
“Where were you going to stab it?”
Where? The image had fled her mind, erased from her memory.
“Where?”
The being moved again, and they stepped back, nearly falling. Fortuna managed to keep them both steady. Easier if she looked at it as ‘I don’t want to fall’ instead of ‘don’t let this thing make us fall.’ So long as she divorced her thoughts from the being, she still had this strange certainty.
It lurched, creating more of itself. Legs, a sexless groin, more of the arms. Hair flowed free, overlong.
It bent over, head hanging, arms suspended to
either side.
She saw the nape of the neck as hair slowly slid free, silky and straight.
Still unable to bring herself to move, she found her left arm extending, palm down, until the longest finger pointed at the spot in question.
The woman behind her took hold of the fist that held the knife. She stepped forward, driving the knife down, as if she were an extension of Fortuna.
Plunging into the spot where the spine met the skull.
They fell from the hand, dangled for a moment by their grip on the knife. It cut free, and they dropped to the ground.
Fortuna let one leg fold, pushing at the ground with the other. She rolled, breaking the fall. The woman fell a little harder.
The entity moved, and everything around them stirred. A thousand hands, a thousand arms, not all attached to the hands, legs, feet, ears, eyes, faces without features, expanses of skin, they twitched and writhed.
The noise around them faded, the heartbeats going still, the breathing quieting. The movements all around them stopped.
There was only the thing, hanging in mid-air, struggling to form itself and failing. It breathed in rapid huffs, in obvious pain.
It wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t alive. A connection had been severed in a moment where the godling was most vulnerable.
The woman spoke.
“Again? The heart?”
But Fortuna was sure this was it. They’d carried out the last step.
“Can you explain this? Do you know something?”
Fortuna nodded.
“Please,” the woman said. Though she begged, “My life just turned upside down. I’ve been lost here for three days.”
Fortuna looked back the way she’d come.
Home was gone. Tainted. She could find her uncle, but…
“I need food,” Fortuna said. “I have no home to go to, so I need shelter.”
“I—”
“I will take you back to your home.”
The woman nodded. “Yes, of course. And you’ll explain?”
“Yes. But there’s one more thing. I need help.”
“Help?”
“There is one more of these things somewhere out there.”
Yet she could reach out with her power to try to look for it, and all she could see was the fog.
* * *
Fortuna did up the clasps on the dress shoes she wore as the woman entered her apartment.
The woman gave the girl a once-over. “You know how to do up a tie? Wait. Dumb question.”
“A little dumb,” Fortuna replied.
“You’re getting a sense of humor. I’ve done like you asked. I bought the land with the doorway, using the money you got. Are you sure you want to keep it a secret? People could study that thing.”
Fortuna shook her head. This was a harder question to answer, but she could construct a kind of mental picture, then test her questions. What would happen? What were the most likely scenarios?
Panic. Fear.
Could they figure anything of value out by studying the half-alive thing? She couldn’t be sure.
But the emotional effect would be all the more pronounced.
“Well, the area is secured, people have found their way home, or at least, to other worlds they can call home. There was only one doorway people might find easily, and I blocked it off.”
“Thank you,” Fortuna said.
“What’s the next step?”
A heavy question.
How do we stop them?
The fog blocked out her view of any answer.
Can we stop something as powerful as the beings in my fever dream? How can we stop the Warrior?
Still too close to home.
The indecision gripped her again. When she wasn’t acting in the scope of her power, it was all the more difficult to act.
Fortuna frowned. She couldn’t be paralyzed like this. “How—how would we stop any powerful monster?”
“Weapons? An army?” the woman suggested.
One hundred and forty-three thousand, two hundred and twenty steps.
It was doable.
“We need some lab equipment,” Fortuna said.
Then she turned her attention to the next step, and it dawned on her just how they would be amassing this army. She thought of the monsters that had torn her parents apart, the infection that had ravaged her community and home. Stray bits of the godling had done that to them. It had killed people, turned others into monsters, drove yet others mad.
But it had given abilities to her. It would give abilities to others.
* * *
The man, Lamar, reached like a child clutching for candy. The Doctor pulled her hand away. “There’s no guarantee this will work.”
Fortuna remained silent. Her halting way of speaking, asking her power for the words or the translation, still made for a barrier in communication. It unsettled people, apparently.
“If what that girl was showing off wasn’t some fantastic magic trick, if this does what you’re saying it will, I’m willing to take the chance.”
Fortuna exchanged a glance with the ‘Doctor’. She could see the stress in the Doctor’s expression. The woman had taken on a moniker, to give just a little protection to her real identity. Easier to have an adult handling the negotiating and person-to-person interaction. Fortuna was young, and people wouldn’t be so inclined to drink a strange substance offered by a child.
She offered the Doctor a little nod, a go-ahead.
“Go ahead, then,” the Doctor said. She handed over the vial.
Lamar drank.
The changes ripped through him. Lines marked the areas where bones were closest to skin, and then split into craggy outcroppings, thick with scales the length and width of human hands. Lamar screamed, and the sound soon became guttural.
More scales sprouted, until the man looked more like a bush than a person. The scaly growth continued at one knee, spiraling around the knee over and over again, growing ever-lumpier.
The leg fell off. Blood began to pour forth.
Fortuna started to step forward to help, but her power told her it was too late.
Couldn’t see the outcomes, couldn’t counteract the outcomes.
Lamar was left panting for breath. the wound at his ruined arms and legs closed up. Holes had opened up throughout his midsection, exposing scale-covered internal organs.
He was trying to scream, but he couldn’t draw in enough breath.
His chest cavity is filled with the scales.
The Doctor stared, silent. Fortuna had stepped away from the wall, but remained where she was, rooted to the spot.
He wasn’t dying.
Fortuna stepped forward. Hand shaking, she drew a knife from her pocket. Not her knife, but a knife of similar length, straight.
She ended Lamar’s pain.
“Our first patient is a fatality,” the Doctor said. “Is it worth it?”
Fortuna couldn’t answer.
“Let’s wait, then. Try to figure out where we went wrong.”
She still couldn’t bring herself to answer.
“Fortuna?”
“Don’t. Don’t… call me by the name my parents gave me.”
The Doctor took a moment to reply. “Another name?”
Contessa nodded.
* * *
“It’s a sight unlike any we’ve ever seen. A man made of gold, floating above the ocean. Sightings continue to be reported around the world as he travels. Who is he, and why is he here? Some speculate he is Jes—”
Contessa muted the television.
The pair stared at the screen, watching the silent images.
“Is it?” the Doctor asked.
Contessa nodded.
“Do we try again?”
“I—don’t know,” Contessa said.
“If we explain to someone important, the army…”
“Disaster. They react with fear, and he’ll probably respond to the fear. He’s… hostile, I’m certain. He only needs
an excuse,” Contessa said. “They can’t beat him, because he designed himself to be unbeatable.”
“You’re the one with the ability to see the future,” the Doctor said, her voice gentle. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know!” Contessa said. “I—when it comes to him, I’m just a child. I’m useless, blind. I’ve only got some glimpses of him to work with. I know how important it is, but, I feel paralyzed, I feel, feel—”
“Okay,” the Doctor said. “Okay. What if I made the decisions from here on out? You tell me if I’m going down the wrong path, give me direction where it’s needed.
“You can’t.”
“I can. I’ve been thinking about it. What is the key thing about the one we killed?”
“It’s… broken. Something went wrong. It focused too much on the future, and lost sight of the present, it fell and the part that was supposed to guide it ended up inside me instead.”
The Doctor pointed at the TV screen. “This golden man, he’s more or less on track. He didn’t break, he didn’t go wrong.”
“Except… there’s a lot of power there, and he’s going to find out what we did, or he’s going to start acting more like the conqueror he’s meant to be, and he’s going to use that power at some point.”
“Why?” the Doctor asked.
“I felt the hostility. I felt how the one we killed, in the vision it had of the future, it almost enjoyed doing what it was doing. If the golden one is similar at all, then all it takes is an accident.”
The Doctor nodded. “See? You’re doing okay.”
“Easier when someone else takes point.”
“So our solution… it’s going to take one of two forms. Either we break him, somehow, or we find something we can use in the broken parts of the one we killed.”
“Feeding it to people.”
The Doctor nodded. “I’m inclined to go with the latter.”
Contessa nodded. “So am I. If we interact with him, and he figures out what we’re doing, it all goes wrong.”
“Then we need to start testing this. Figure it out. Is it luck? Or is there a way to get consistent results?”
Contessa nodded.
“I’m actually not that much of a scientist,” the Doctor said. “But I do know that if we want to get a sample size worth talking about, we need to test a lot.”