Breefolk

Billie's recommended listening for this chapter: https://youtu.be/DyXF8dfl0Ao

Something did, in fact, break.  I didn’t think it was the world, but it also, somehow, wasn’t my face.  All I knew in that moment was that I had felt SOMETHING snap.  Something fundamental, intangible.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting there, where I had been, between two broken halves of a sunglass hut sales counter, my back to a wall, and I was holding the giant’s arm back with a single hand.  My left hand, and, to quote The Princess Bride, I am not left handed.  Then I realized that I was not alone.  There were people beside me, on both sides.  Dozens of them.  The two closest to me I recognized as Arey and Astveig.

But it wasn’t them.  They were both a glowing, translucent green, as were the dozens of viking-like warriors beside them.  I had, in my desperation, conjured up a small army of jötnar to fight beside me.  I had never been able to create more than a single creature before this point except… except when I let my emotions get the better of me.

Everything suddenly made perfect sense: to prevent losing control of my power, I had learned to suppress my emotions, but that had also suppressed my power.  My will to live had been great enough for me to create these jötnar to aid me.  I now have enough skill to control them all.  And in that moment, I had one emotion worth channeling more than any other: rage.

Together with the “people” I had created, I threw the giant’s arm away, steel and wood crashing to the ground around me in a snow of destruction as the arm tore through the walls of the building I was standing in.  Paying no heed to the debris, I walked back out onto the boardwalk.  Even in the dark and through the giant, I could see the look of shock on my mother’s face.  It was definitely familiar: the same expression she had whenever I told her “no.”  Just a stare of confusion and anger at the audacity of someone refusing her.

“How?” she asked, finally saying something that didn’t sound like a shriek.

The jötnar constructs filed out one by one to line up on either side of me as I found my voice at last.  “I have had enough of you, ‘mother.’  You have done nothing for me.  You’ve done nothing for Dad.  You have used us as set-dressing all my life in your dollhouse of misery as you try to prove that you aren’t worthless in a world that doesn’t even care.”

“You ungrateful little bitch!” rang through the cool night air as the giant’s arm came rushing down over my head.  The jötnar moved to block it, and the arm stopped dead mere inches above my head.  I didn’t even flinch.

“‘Ungrateful?’” I laughed, pacing along the boardwalk.  “How can I be ‘ungrateful?’  You said yourself you don’t even believe me that I am who I say I am.  If that’s so, I have nothing to be ‘ungrateful’ for!”

“You are NOT my son!” she screamed.

“Now, that is where you’re correct,” I agreed.  “I am not your son.  I never was.  I realize now that this is who I was always meant to be: the daughter you were too self-centered to ever realize you had.  And I don’t.  Need.  You.”

The giant tried to raise its arm out of the jötnar’s grasp, but the collected strength of my psychic constructs was too much.  Mom decided to just use the other arm to try to smash.  More jötnar popped into existence to catch that arm and hold onto it, too.

“Uh oh,” I said with all the sincerity of a cat playing with its prey.  “Looks like you’ve got yourself in a bit of a bind.  Shame.”

The Arey and Astveig constructs appeared at my sides.  “But you see, ‘Mom,’ I have a new family.  People who care about me and not just what I can provide them.  They may not be what I wanted.  They may not be what I expected.  But they are what I NEED.”

Now that she saw what I was capable of, Mom finally came to her last resort: bargaining.

“Honey, please, can’t we talk about thi-”

“Don’t ‘honey’ me!” I snapped.  “You are NOT my family.  We may share blood, but that does not make us family.”

The Arey and Astveig constructs took on attack stances as hundreds of other jötnar constructs appeared around us, on the rooftops of buildings, in the streets, even hanging from the streetlights.

“We are jötnar,” I said.  “And we… are… LEGION!”

Cue Megalovania.

My army of psychically constructed jötnar charged, leapt, and even danced forward.  It was absolute chaos, but it was the most beautiful kind of chaos.  I was too busy concentrating on controlling them to join in the fight, and I must have looked like a mad woman.  I was grinning, but it was not a grin of happiness.  I was a ball of mad fury, filling my army with all the rage I could channel, every bit of it directed, deservingly, at my own mother.

The giant construct flickered a moment as the combined force of a hundred jötnar pummeled it and my mother’s concentration waned.  Mom stayed there, hovering over the waves, as she brought the giant back, only for it to flicker again.  Its arms flailed wildly, trying to bat away warriors, but for every one she knocked away, a dozen more rushed in to fill its place.

“I need more,” my mother screamed.  “Please, great dragon, give me more power!”

The giant grew larger and fought harder.  I just sent more of my unbridled hate at it, and at my mother at its heart.  I had enough anger and pain in me to keep this up all night, and I was wondering if my mother could say the same.

After what seemed like hours of her struggling but must have been no more than a minute, something truly unexpected happened.  My mother, trying desperately to summon enough power to fight off my jötnar army, which now was clinging onto her giant’s body all over, broke… something.  The night sky opened up, and silhouetted against the dark grey clouds of the marine layer was a… hole?  Of some kind.  A blackness even deeper than I had ever realized could exist.

Everything stopped.  Absolute silence settled over the world around me, broken only by the sound of a helicopter somewhere in the distance.

That’s when I heard the words that still haunt me in my nightmares, spoken in my mother’s voice as she stared into the void.

“A thousand eyes in the dark, blinking like stars.  It’s so… beautiful.”

And then the hole - and my mother - were gone.

My army faded away into the night, and I let loose one final scream of pain and anger as tears poured from my eyes.