She was a sickly child. Thin and pale, she looked underfed, unhealthy for a long time, regardless of her mother’s loving and doting attention. Social services were called, but found no evidence of wrongdoing (though they did make a note that the father seemed to be somewhat distant, though that was later revealed to be his latent depression. Therapy helped). She was also quiet and distant, which didn’t help matters much. From her first day of school to her last, teachers had to fight to get a single word out of her. Once she could read, she devoured books, quickly exceeding the abilities of her age bracket. 

Her parents took her to a behavioural psychologist, who told them their child was gifted and that she just needed to interact with other kids more to learn social skills. They tried but nothing much came of it, or worked. She found others too difficult to deal with, and preferred isolation over company when the choice was offered. She would enjoy sports for a few years, because there was little talking in sports and even a quiet kid had value if they could perform well. 

When she was five, she was told for the first time what bullying was, and that the other children were simply jealous, that they didn’t understand her. She didn't really care why they did it, only that they did, and wanted them to stop. After some time, she gave up on sports and preferred sitting with the girls at school. They still said mean things sometimes, but they, at least, didn’t hit her when she was being too weird.  

She also spent a lot of time reading at school. When she wasn’t reading fantasy, she devoured books about nature, science and mythology. The latter especially sparked her imagination, conjuring worlds with gods and monsters, heroes and their villains and, especially, how easy one could look like the other. Her mother read her stories before bed. She could read all the stories fine herself, but there was something special about the way her mother did the voices. She never forgot. 

At eight, she still had few friends, and her birthday parties were heartbreaking affairs. The average party saw only one or fewer ‘playmates’ show up, and her parents had to find ways to explain to her why the other children didn’t want to be around her. Their child slid into a depression without understanding why. There were more psychologists, who told them that their child had a unique way of looking at the world and that this, indeed, made her different. She didn't connect with a lot of her peers, they said, and it isolated her. The disconnect, the doctors told them, was what was causing her distress. ‘No shit,’ the parents said, paid the exorbitant consultation fees and moved on to the next one. Some recommended math camps and similar gifted programs in the hopes that she'd find someone like herself there. She didn’t. 

At the age of ten, she hurt herself for the first time. She had learned about carbon monoxide poisoning and knew where the car keys were when her mom took her afternoon nap. Her mom woke up just in time and dragged her out of the garage. Her mother cried when she thought her child wasn’t looking, and tried as hard as she could to spend as much time as possible together, but more had to be done. The next few years were spent in all manner of institutions. Ironically, she made a few friends here, people whose skin didn't fit right and that society didn't understand. She could relate.  

At fourteen, she exclusively wore long sleeved shirts and hoodies. She hid her face in whatever ways she could without drawing the ire of the sterner teachers and figures of authority. She had few friends, and the ones she had were mostly people she played games with in silence, or could complain to about their difficulty connecting with others. 

At sixteen, a binge drinking experience ended with her in the canal. She survived because a morning jogger saw her and fished her out. She spent some more time bouncing between institutions and therapists, and came out with a love for the goth aesthetic, which a girl in her group rocked like nobody’s business. She was attracted to the theatre of it. Constructing a mask, a persona, that made you as visible as it made you invisible. She dove into the subculture and came out changed and with a newly acquired mastery of eyeliner, courtesy of her mom who had gone through a similar phase as a teen. Being able to transform so drastically actually improved her mood significantly, and she spent the last two years of high school fairly happy. If she wasn't going to fit in with normal people, there were others, she realized, and, as long as she wasn’t herself too much, these new people were far more accepting of who she was. Her mom took her shopping for clothes, to make sure her wardrobe reflected her newfound image. 

At nineteen, being goth didn't do it for her anymore. The rush of changing her awkward teenage appearance wore off, and she traded in her skinny pants and mesh shirts for baggy jeans and more hoodies. She hid her face again, behind scarves and high collars, and applied at colleges. Eventually she found an okay community college nearby where she would pursue a business degree. She even got to experience dorm room life. She didn’t do great. She didn't flunk out, but she had many retakes as she slid back into a depression, having lost contact with her old and few friends.

She binge-watched TV shows, and went back to her childhood hobby of reading up on the myths of the world, finding the different deities and their powers as fascinating as she had as a child, and imagined the changes she could make to the world if she'd had them. She was the hero, and even as an adult, there was a part of her that didn’t understand why she didn’t have those powers. The doctors had always told her and her parents that she was a special child. She felt special and different, so why didn’t the world bend to her will? 

At twenty-one, her mother got sick and she immediately dropped out of college to help take care of her. Since she could no longer work, and the family barely got by with her father's income, she started working part time jobs to earn enough for them to pay the medical bills. and spent the rest of her time at home taking care of her mother and trying to distract herself online.  

She had never been a deeply religious person, and neither had her parents. She had prided herself on her atheist and agnostic tendencies for years, and had even been quite smug about it sometimes, but her mother’s illness was not improving, and she was willing to try anything. So she prayed. Quietly, in her room, she prayed, and when she opened her eyes, there was a man in her room. He wore simple robes and looked exactly as he did on the painting that hung in her grandmother’s living room. His smile was kind and understanding. When she talked to him, however, he didn’t respond. After a few seconds, he slowly evaporated. She tried again, and the man appeared again. She asked him to say something. He didn’t. She asked him to please come forward and save her mother. The man took a step forward, then evaporated. She tried this several more times, her requests quickly becoming demands.

She quickly suspected she had not actually summoned the Holy Ghost to her room, but it took her days of experimenting in her room to fully come to grips with her powers. Remembering the many prayers she had read about as a child, she recited an old Norse prayer and there was Thor, exactly as imagined, big beard and bigger hammer, standing in her bedroom. Just as quiet as his predecessor and just as amenable. For weeks, she thought she had the ability to summon some kind of aspect of deities. After all, she figured, if you were a god, wouldn’t you create a kind of avatar who answered prayers for you? She rejected that idea quickly. 

At night, when even the less reasonable people had gone to bed, she tried another ritual and summoned Apollo, Greek (and Roman) god of, among other things, healing and disease. She told it to follow her quietly to her mother’s sick bed in the living room and commanded him to heal her mother. It stood there and simply looked at her, then evaporated. It hadn’t worked; the god simply stood there, and she realised that something as complex as healing might be outside the realm of their abilities. She began to realize that it was likely the people she summoned were simply constructs of her own design. They looked exactly as she imagined them. Loki wasn’t supposed to look like the handsome, thin-faced actor who played him in the movies. 

She decided to do one last experiment. She summoned Athena and Aphrodite and commanded them to give her the power to change herself into whatever she desired. She would finally fit in with other people, and she would finally make sense. Her body glowed and a warmth rushed over her. When the feeling dissipated, she got up to look at the mirror and saw… a human-like blue shell overlaid onto her clothes. It seemed this, too, had been too complex, and she sat down in resignation as the shell of Aphrodite cracked and evaporated. She cried herself to sleep. She had powers, she realized, but they were useless. They couldn’t fix her. They couldn’t fix her mother. Then what was the point?

She just went back to work. She tried to forget about the constructs in her room. They had given her hope and then taken it away, and that was almost unforgivable. Her mother noticed something was wrong but didn’t know what, and she didn’t either. Instead, she would sit by her mother, some days too weak to lift her head, and read to her. 

At the age of twenty-seven, she spent most of her time either at home or at work. She spent a lot of time online. At first it had been to find people she could talk to about her mother’s illness, but over time she found communities of people who saw things the way she did, who felt different, special. She was more special than them, obviously, her summoning ability almost but not quite forgotten, but she related to them. Over the past few years, her mother had seen ups and downs, and the insecurity was what hurt the most. She never knew what day with her mother would be her last. It wasn’t fair. 

At the age of twenty-nine, she was looking at an authentic Greek theatre mask in the window of an antique-and-jewellery store when she saw a wealthy-looking man bump into someone who was very specifically nondescript, and could have sworn she saw the latter person pocket a wallet. She began to realize something, and a plan began to formulate in her head. She began to practice summoning in her room again. Creatures. Objects. Giving them commands. Trying to make them last as long as possible. Seeing how far away from her they continued to exist. Having them persist despite her absence. Controlling them without verbal commands or having to think about it actively. She grew much, much more powerful. She finally realized that she’d been short-sighted, that her depression over her mother illness had blinded her to the possibilities offered by her abilities. 

She wasn’t going to fit in, she realized. She was too different, perhaps too broken or too unwanted, unwantable, but that did not mean she wasn’t special. She could help her mother. She was one of the heroes in her myths, beset on all sides by a world that was hostile to her. They wouldn’t understand, they’d hate and fear her, but was that so different from the life she already lived? But she couldn’t risk her mother, her family finding out, or worse, being targeted because of her actions. So she fashioned herself gala robes like the ones worn by ancient Sumerian priests and made her plans, did her research.

A few weeks before her thirtieth birthday, she sat opposite the store with the mask, her identity hidden in a large hooded coat, and she focused. Slowly, in the middle of a busy street, an angel manifested, glowing white and blue and twice as tall as a person. Its many wings unfurled. People screamed, but it ignored them. It walked up to the storefront and smashed it, took the mask and then strode across the street to the hooded figure, and knelt before her. She took the mask, put it on, and then threw off the coat, revealing her robes. Before her, a carriage manifested, drawn by two large cats. Several more angels appeared, taking expensive-looking items from the antique store, and before anyone on the street could react in any way more productive than panic, she took off flying. 

It turned out that creating flying constructs was a lot easier than actually being in them, and she held on for dear life as the carriage took to the skies. She quickly lost focus and the whole thing collided with a large apartment building. She looked down, behind her, where she could already hear sirens, and realized she had to keep going. There was no stopping her, now. She rode the carriage up the side of the building, her angels following her with bags of valuables. She heard windows shatter behind her, but she didn’t care. She was going to get away with this. 

She paused on the roof, where she knew she’d be safe for a bit. And if the police realized where she was, she could probably outmatch them with her constructs. The angels walked up to her and presented her their bounty. She looked over the items. Some of these would be easily pawned, others not so much, but it didn’t matter. This had been a test run and it had been a great success. She was still patting herself on the back when she heard a voice behind her. It resonated, made her teeth itch, like the tearing of cloth in harmony. 

“Hey!” it said, and she spun around. There was no way someone had already made their way up here, she figured. She figured wrong. There was a creature, hunched over on the edge of the building. It was massive and muscular and had black skin that moved like an oil slick. But what worried her even more was the fact that it didn’t seem to have a face. She wondered briefly if it was some kind of spandex suit, but that thought was dispelled when two milky white eyes, like a cat’s, appeared on the face. 

“WE,” the thing said, “WERE ON A DATE.”

Elamimax

I promise things won't stay this bleak <3

So I've been trying to make writing my official profession, and while I'm also talking to publishers, I'm also relying on all of you through my Patreon. I want to do this for a long time, and I can only do that with your support. I also have a twitter (here).

I also want to point people at the discord server of the ever-prolific QuietValerie (right here) where you can find her wonderful stories, like Ryn of Avonside, Falling Over and The Trouble With horns, as well as other authors' works, and talk about them with fellow fans, and even the authors themselves! I heartily recommend joining it and reading their works! 

Thanks again for reading, and I'll see you all in the next one. 

<3