She was floating in nothingness. 

No, that wasn’t the correct term to describe the boundless expanse that skirted the limits of infinity. After all, it would be a profound disservice to dismiss the billions of twinkling lights hanging in the black void as anything but ‘brilliant’. The ebony sea was like ink spilled across the entire breadth of outer space, dotted with stellar luminosities. White and orange pinpricks mottled the obsidian black blanket, bespeckling the emptiness of space like opulent gems. It was breathtaking and worthy of reverence. 

Enraptured by the effortlessly aesthetic beauty of nature, she reached for the nearest dot. Her fingers closed around nix. She glowered at her hand in bemused betrayal before her attention skipped off. With a giggle that bordered on scandalously flirtatious, she rested her chin on the back of her left hand and ogled at the treasure trove that was laid bare before her. Each sparkling light, no matter how dim or vivid, was priceless. 

Bringing her hand over to one, she pretended to pinch it between her index and thumb, rolling it back and forth between the two digits. She was enthralled with the way the fringes of the dot fuzzed, ruining the otherwise perfect circle. The core of the star blazed but waned towards the edges, producing a bleary, almost smudged effect that had her wanting to tickle the stars to see if they would be soft to the touch. 

She stared at one star that was so Lilliputian that she almost lost it in the midst of a mob of its older and bigger siblings. Did it feel overshadowed by its brethren? What would it be like, to snuff a star out of existence? It looked so puny and inconsequential, but what if a solar system brimming with sentient life was contingent on its heat? It filled her with a giddy dread; the power to control the fate of billions of lives with the simplest of actions. 

Omitting the stars, there weren’t any other celestial bodies in her vicinity. Not that she was disheartened to not see Earth—there were some people on it that she would be rather happy if she never had to see again—but she felt a bit cheated out of the chance to descry a shower of meteorites or a gluttonous black hole sucking in planets. Without anything to do, she loitered aimlessly across the cosmos. 

She caterwauled through space, trying to chase a rogue star. A giddy giggle tumbled out between her lips before she felt something clip onto her. It was like an invisible hook pinning her by the back of her belt and the thought ‘oh no’ flashed through her mind before she was yanked backward. The star fell away in a matter of seconds and before she knew it, all she could see was an endless ocean of black occasionally interrupted by a smattering of stars. 

There was a rip! as space and time failed to withstand the unfathomable speed she was streaking through the universe at, and reality was torn asunder. Her back met resistance, striking what felt like a wall made of glass. Dismayed, she wondered if her exhilarating expedition had ended already when the almost-imperceptible hook tugged on her again. She passed through the plane, which shattered into a hundred sparkling glass shards. Time slowed to a crawl and the brittle smithereens surrounded her like a batch of local, overgrown fireflies, catching the light and refracting them back to her, giving her eyes a five-course buffet to feast on. The pleasurable phenomenon took her breath away, and the awe-inducing factor was magnified by the snatches of her reflections she was lucky to catch. 

She took unbelievable glee in scanning the multitude of shards and finding her likeness staring back. Sometimes, the school uniform was swapped with exotic-looking garments or a rugged ensemble of dreary gray and black that looked tailored for warfare. Other times, it was her face that was altered; tiny scars splitting her eyebrows in half, warped flesh that was likely the result of an inferno, steely eyes like flint that demonstrated an inner strength she definitely didn’t possess now. Even her luscious locks of hair which presently spilled down to her ribcage had been chopped down to her shoulder, resulting in uneven, jagged edges tickling her collarbone. Her barber would have wept if he could see this monstrosity of a haircut. Some variants were on the opposite end of the spectrum. There was one who wore a crisp dark blue suit and was striding into a lavish office, a golden plaque with her name resting on the desk. Another reflection was standing in front of a crowd in Parokampos Square, her face displayed on every billboard and her speech broadcast to the entire world. Despite the large cast of alternate versions of her, every single one wore the same expression on their face: absolute confidence in their abilities and the conviction to see their plans through to the end.

Before she could reach out and touch one of the fragments, the hook jerked her back impatiently and she resumed her journey at a breakneck pace. She whooped and promptly forgot about the different versions of herself, caught up in the adrenaline rush and allowing her inhibitions to run loose of the reins for once. There was no one to leer at her, to judge her behind perfectly crafted facades that masked disdain. Here, she could be free as a bird—a bird in free fall, that is.

Planets, nebulas, black holes, comets, asteroid belts all whizzed past her. Natural marvels too plentiful to count blurred into the next one in line, and she desperately wished she could ask the person on the other end of the fishing tackle who was reeling her in to slow down. Although she was spared from the ravages of absolute zero space, she could still feel her particles jiggling more than she was comfortable with as the awe-inducing, absolute gravitational pull of the black holes vied with each other to rip her chemical bonds to shreds. Honestly, she would have died a thousandfold by now if it wasn’t for this being a dream. The scorching surface of the stars she passed by made her feel like she was stuck inside an oven cranked up to the highest setting, especially when she narrowly avoided a solar flare that lashed out. It was the most bonkers acid trip; something only a daft, barmy, old lunatic could cook up.

And she loved it.

She hurtled through the cosmos, not relenting in her blistering velocity. She must have been approaching relativistic speeds, but it felt like she was just cruising down the road with the roof popped open and the wind ruffling her treacherous hair so it whipped in her face and found its way into her mouth one too many times. All of a sudden, she made a sharp turn to the right and her stomach got left behind in the void of space. It wasn’t long before she arrived at her destination: the meeting grounds that her family had settled on. 

In the spider-webbed cadre of creation, twelve constellations eclipsed all others caught in their orbit. Even if she gathered all of her children and meshed their individual glow into a single nova, it would pale in comparison. The sight of her siblings provoked a peculiar cocktail of longing, embarrassment, resentment, and above all, a yawning emptiness that she desperately needed to fill before it consumed her. 

I should be up there, she lamented, peering at the cluster of nebulas and quasars ignominiously like a pining dog. The impossible phenomenon was a regal anomaly to behold, the crowning jewel of the tapestry of life, and the answer of an abecedarian quagmire about the secrets of the universe all rolled into one. Forcibly, she ripped her gaze away from her siblings and decided to rivet her attention onto the progenitor of everything: the tree. 

It was the mecca of the universe; the cradle of existence. In terms of kin, if the twelve luminaries were her siblings, then the tree would be her custodian. It was the only thing that predated us, and was at the root of everything. Its branches propagated across the entire cosmos.

To her, it looked like forks of lightning or a network of arteries; the heartbeat of the universe personified, pumping life-fueling ichor into galaxies. Over a hundred branches spawned out of the candescent trunk, made entirely out of corporeal and intangible energy alike. Each lone branch flared with enough potency to match a dozen supernovas, and there were a further thousand twigs springing out of the boughs. Some were slim but still noticeable enough to discern their route from a cursive glance. Most were wafer-thin, bearing a striking resemblance to wiry nerves. It was fitting, she supposed. The tree acted as the nervous system of the entire universe, so it made sense that the offshoot branches were the cables that funneled orders from the tree to the rest of the universe.

With hundreds of boughs and thousands of twigs all splaying outward, each taking their own unique trajectory, the tree was the epitome of chaos. She could spend years trying to track the route of every single branch, and never grow bored. There was no rhyme nor rhythm in the unkempt labyrinth of branches, but that was part of the appeal. Each one, crooked as they were, had a life of its own, winding and zigzagging erratically like tendrils of electricity, searingly bright and just as arbitrary. She preferred to liken the tree to a many-fingered hand stretching upward vainly in an attempt to touch the heavens—and succeeding.

The branches had to come to an end eventually, and when they did, time and space was sundered. Reality was fractured into millions of geometrically flawed fractals. It was as if someone had taken a close-up on the surface of a diamond and blown it up to behemoth proportions, far outstripping the dimensions of a galaxy. If the trunk of the tree was the shaft, then the branches and the ruptured segment of reality would be the canopy of an umbrella. As the branches rounded off, the spherical awning they manifested also tapered off, the rims tinged with an incandescent violet that buried so much more meaning than a simple shade of a secondary color. Before the marquee completely dissipated, it changed hues to a stunningly ostentatious crimson. 

If she closed one eye, cocked her head to the side, and flipped upside down with her legs crossed, then the tree was pretty much a dead-on replica of GC lightning. The singular strand of energy protruding from the ground that branched out into thousands of electric tendrils, each one prickly and spindly and profound. Or it could be a filigree of veins, an enmeshment of avenues where rose-gold lava gushed out like the blood of the universe. The dome that the tree conjured—where time and space was crystallized, and made tangible—was the personification of the tenth dimension. 

She faintly recall spending most of her embryonic phase in the tenth dimension, her puerile conduct proving too unfledged to safely traverse dimensions. It had been several millennia since her siblings and she had been there last, but she remember it being a realm of crystallized duplicity. Space and time were rendered obsolete in the tenth dimension, and longitude-latitude was antiquated. It was a fluctuating domain that reigned at the top of the hierarchy, and the exclusive region where the universe could be viewed in its entirety. The tenth dimension was a phantasmal kingdom, where one had to discard their corporeal form to enter. Spirits and phantasms were the denizens, which played a part in her reluctance to frequent the tenth dimension. She didn’t enjoy exfoliating her body.  

The tenth dimension was essentially a metaphysical kaleidoscope that simultaneously held the other nine dimensions within its perimeters and existed in a non-linear pattern, out of sync with its brethren. Time was but a bauble cloistered in the ranks of the other rhinestones, all hidden behind a diaphanous looking-glass. 

She only brought up the tenth dimension at all because the prongs of the tree’s branches punctured the thinly veiled barrier that separated the dimensions, and the obstreperously ungovernable nature of the tenth dimension was leaking through the aperture. The tenth dimension’s trademark casual disregard for the laws of physics that tempered the third dimension was wreaking havoc on the delicate balance. The space-time continuum thinned the more she approached the tree, seesawing back and forth haphazardly as the tenth dimension contaminated its surroundings. It was like poison seeping into this dimension and dismantling the orderly commandments bit by bit. 

Thick clouds of anti-matter gathered around the breach, a brewing storm shrouding parts of the perforations. She knew that the tenth dimension exclusively predated the Big Bang; it was an incarnation of the initial singularity that had existed before the universe imploded into being, a relic of the past preserved in an endless trance. The crystal prisms that composed the tenth dimension were supposedly a remnant of the initial singularity. Neither she nor her siblings had been alive to witness the genuine article themselves, but if the tenth dimension was any indication, then it must have been a real doozy. 

The amount of CMB radiation skyrocketed in the tree’s vicinity, a corollary of the outpouring of strikingly gossamer cosmic rays from the loftiest point of the tree. It was egregiously incandescent, an azure-white nova that shone with such virgin purity that it chased away the monolithic shadows with gumption. A ring of emerald cosmic energy fanned out from the center nova, the luminous band crackling and popping and fizzing with a recalcitrant power that resisted against its constraints, itching to fulfill its predetermined course and be released. Wisps of vague seafoam cascaded from the band, lashing out gently like the emissions of a solar flare, or an aurora. Streaks of juniper sprang from the circumference of the hoop, blazing outward into the void of outer space like a smattering of shooting stars. It looked as if an unhinged painter had anointed an ebony canvas with bold sweeps of their paintbrush, daubing and slathering the canvas with thick dashes of green. 

An orange loop bound the extravaganza, taking on the role of a boundary to leash the spectacle to the tree, lest it unravel the entire universe. Constructed of raw plasma, the thin strip emitted an eerie pallid glow that managed to stand out even against the nova’s illumination. The ring stretched across the width of the eruption before curving around the bend and vanishing out of view, although she knew that it girdled the entire phenomenon and the two ends met behind the nova. The immaculate belt of light was interrupted by thirteen orbs of cosmic energy, located sporadically across the wreath: a handful were bunched close together while some were positioned on the far end. They didn’t seem to be anything special other than concentrated spheroids of plasma, but she had it on good authority that they were somehow crucial to the belt barring the exploding nova.

In all honesty, the belt bore an uncanny resemblance to an Angel’s halo, and the paroxysm of cosmic matter ferreted out an unnerving memory of reading an manga with the eye of a celestial entity peering through a hole in space and looming in the sky like the moon’s beefier cousin. If the nova represented the pupil and the purple ring around it signified the iris, she could definitely see how the spectacle could be viewed as the eye of a [God], so incomprehensible to mortal minds that it was all they could quantify it as. Omnipotent and omniscient, there was no escaping judgment from the all-seeing gaze.

Of course, it wasn’t the physical projection of a [God]’s lens. It was what humans had christened as the Big Bang, the onset of creation captured in suspended animation. It chronicled the inception of the universe, and signaled the 11th hour of the initial singularity. The plasma band prevented the Big Bang from carrying out its prime directive and reducing the universe to the nothingness it had originated from, and until the band wore away, the universe would survive. Just as there was a beginning, so too must there be an end; and all things started and finished at the tree.

Without the tree to provide sustenance, the balance would decay and the universe would eventually become devoid of life, an empty, cold husk filled to the brim with billions of uninhabitable planets floating across the vastness of space. The tree was the munificent provider in this little ecosystem of ours, and all it asked for in return was that everyone coexisted as serenely as possible. Which is where her siblings and she entered the picture, traveling the universe to carry out the tree’s will along with the aid of some plucky mortals who had a better grasp of the universe than the vast majority. 

Given all this, she should have probably been happy to see her staunch allies approaching. After all, if anyone could hasten the cycle and see her true range of powers restored to her, it would be them. Still, something about the millions of eyes studying her rubbed her the wrong way. A sense of unease permeated the space, and despite her best efforts to placate the anxious voice that averred that something was wrong, the hair on the back of her neck prickled. She made a last-ditch effort to collect her nerves, raising a trembling hand to wave awkwardly at the piercing stares. In unison, millions of eyes blinked as one before snapping back open, as if they were all connected in a hive mind. Bile rose in her throat as the imagery triggered a resurgence of her trypophobia. Rather than helping alleviate her climbing worries, all it did was cement her apprehension.

It wasn’t just the multitude of eyes strewn across black fresco, surrounding her in an omnidirectional barricade and somehow making her feel claustrophobic in outer space, that made her jittery. It certainly didn’t help—feeling like the walls were closing in on you at a tantalizingly slow rate, almost as if it was taunting you, was never a fun experience—but the true horror laid in the extrinsic alien nature of the eyes. 

That probably sounded stupid—oh no, the alien eyes feel too alien!—but it was more than just an extraterrestrial origin that was disquieting. Something about the detached, pococurante gazes set off warning alarms in her mind. Nobody was that stolid without being seriously emotionally stunted or having psychological issues. The type of issues that resulted in siring the most vile humans in history who set the world aflame to satisfy their own greed. ‘Aloof’ was too generous a term to describe the calculating eyes that tracked her every motion, the keen gazes never missing a beat when it came to analyzing her. All of a sudden, she felt the incorrigible urge to cover herself up, her hands instinctively twitching to do just that before she aborted the action. Her cheeks burned, and she braced herself for the impending barrage of mocking laughter.

She tried to bolster her spirits by championing a buoyant facade when all she wanted to do was sequester herself away from the sector of the universe where the mortals administered. She knew with pernicious certitude that if she lingered the subject of the mortals’ contemplation, they would debunk her masquerade and unmask her true identity, that she was a spartan human appropriating the Authority of a god—

Wait, what?

She wasn’t a human, she was……she wracked her brain, trying to ignore the growing dread in her stomach as she failed to answer what should have been a simple question. The assuredness of being a deity-like figure had been the underpinning on which she constructed her armor to shield her from the mortal’s self-serving anatomizing, drawing false confidence from the misguided hope that the fact they were allies would ward off any chance of her being saddled with any unwanted diagnosis. If she wasn’t her, then who was she?

A name floated through murky waters to the surface of her mind like a waterlogged plank: Eris. She furrowed her forehead, stifling the urge to pinch the bride of her nose to lessen some of the pressure banging on her cranial walls—wait, what? she didn’t have a forehead, or a nose, or even a cranium. Her host tended to possess some of the aforementioned features that were commonly found in native species across the universe, but her siblings and she were essentially living energy. There were no set characteristics to their form; they molded to accommodate our host’s biological preferences, and even that was a hassle that they only did to assuage the burden of a receptacle. Therefore, it should have been impossible for her to possess attributes that she defaulted to, and certainly not with the level of acuteness that she’d displayed a moment prior. The sheer infeasibility of the whole situation didn’t sit well with her, and exacerbated the germinating dread in her that began to spread like mold in a damp corner of a public bathroom. 

Aaargh! She didn’t even use bathrooms! Much less deign to utilize a communal lavatory! She shuddered at the thought, traumatic memories of finding a deceased rat next to the toilet or eyeing a suspiciously brown smear staining the stall involuntarily flashing through her mind. Her heart stumbled like a particularly clumsy, lead-footed fawn tripping over its too-large hooves. She felt disoriented, off-kilter in a way she couldn’t pinpoint. The world was too animated, kinetic colors blazing and flaring like the vivacious hues were locked in a fierce competition to see who could make her head combust from a migraine first. She uttered a quick anathema under her breath levied at the cursed architect of this garish hellscape, but it wasn’t the same nonsensical dishevelment that was commonplace in the tenth dimension. It was far more poignant, more directed towards her, like a honed dagger rather than a blunt sword. The variegated chance-medley seemed to reflect the deteriorating state of her mind as she spiraled further into an empirical quagmire. 

She wasn’t Eris….but she was. She remembered waking up to the alarm set by Prometheus even though she didn’t require sleep. She relived attending elementary school and getting into a scuffle to protect Zoe, and subsequently slouching on a bench outside the principal’s room with a smarting purple-and-blue bruise on her face while trying to exude an outward patina of confidence to comfort an unconsolable Zoe, who was weeping next to her and repeatedly beating herself up over ‘not being strong enough’ even after she affirmed it was those nasty bullies’ faults; yet humanity hadn’t succeeded in catalyzing a weapon capable of even making a dent in her. 

There were so many muddled memories, confounding and fallacious in their desultory advent, frustratingly choppy and inconsistent but all too coherent and pristine; as if the owner of these memories—Eris, a voice in her head insisted—had preserved these priceless fragments of the past like they were inestimable treasure, taking the time and care to rub each one clean until they sparkled. 

She felt like a stranger in her own flesh, a charlatan who was drowning under her self-imposed falsities. She'd tried to craft a facsimile of invincibility but the cracks were starting to show. She'd gotten drunk on nigh-omnipotence and she was now choking on it. She remembered witnessing the nascency of the universe as clearly as she recalled Zoe holding her hair out of her face and patting her on her back while she hunched over a toilet, her mouth rank with bile and her knees growing damp in a puddle of mysterious origins that she would rather not think of; her knobby joints ached as she leaned her weight onto cheap, cracked ceramic. 

This whole debacle was an incongruity of the highest order, and it was a tough pill to swallow. Her flesh itched and her hands shook like she was suffering from withdrawal, fighting the urge to relieve herself of the tenacious chafing. All of a sudden, her skin was too constricting, like she was ensnared in the coils of a cobra who was slowly squeezing and flexing its massive body against her brittle bones. Her throat closed up and she struggled to maintain her intake of air. She wanted to claw at this suffocating second layer that was more like a too-tight jacket than flesh; it was unnatural, and it was adhered to her body through sweat and blood. She wanted, no, needed to be free. Her own skin turned against her, becoming the ironclad walls of her prison, the robust chains that lashed her limbs to the ground—abrading her wrist raw until it was bleeding and rubbing away—, a ready noose strung tightly around her neck, the cage and the key simultaneously. She wanted to tear the flesh off her bones, to flay the bulk of her mass in an attempt to diminish some of the oppressive tension on her lungs.

The eyes didn’t bother offering her time to collect herself. Space dust thickened and curdled, clotting together into crude, unrefined, interstellar hands that reached towards her. Fingers the size of the Pillars of Creation, comprised of elephant trunks of cosmic dust and gas, splayed outward like the fibers of a net slowly encroaching into her proximity, falling down onto her like lattice spun from celestial particles.  

A scream pierced the universe—equal parts human and a god—and she fell. She tumbled past the nebula, through the cluster of stars, zipped around a black hole, and tore into the tapestry of creation. The specks of light flickered and puffed out of existence from where her body made impact, and she prayed she hadn’t snuffed out too many lives with her maladroit landing. She found a small amount of consolation in the fact that she hadn’t extinguished any of her cherished sparks—wait, no! All lives had equal value and worth!

Her jab at appealing to her moral compass fell short when her back collided with a plane of glass, which held for a scant couple of seconds before it fractured and shattered into a thousand polychromatic fragments. Her thunderstruck expression was reflected back unto her tenfold, mirrored in dozens of glass shards with photocopy-worthy resolution. She didn’t have much time to appreciate the supernatural phenomenon before she was descending again, caterwauling through outer space without a means to reorient herself. The sheer purity of the tree very near blinded her even with the briefest of ganders directed at its splendor. She was still blinking away blotches when she realized she wasn’t actually leaving the tree in the rear window. Much the opposite, actually.

She hollered as she dove towards the tree. For the first time, she ascertained the true scope of the tree when relative to a human. She’d had a healthy admiration tinged with deference for the tree when she was several light-years away and of a considerable volume herself. As a human, her mind fought to grasp the tree’s incomprehensible dimensions, tried and failed to debase the tree into more amiable allotments, and practically cracked her concept of space. The leaves housed entire galaxies within their veins, and upon closer inspection, she spotted wilting buds the size of planets. She zoomed alongside the tree’s limbs, dodging and swerving and ducking and zigzagging like the world’s most spontaneous racecar driver, making impossibly tight turns through the baroque briar of heterogeneous branches and leaves. 

By now, she was absolutely miserable. She didn’t think it was possible to hurl in outer space, but her stomach seemed ready to test that theory. Nausea tickled the back of her throat until she would rather be dropped off at the nearest black hole than suffer this vomit-inducing indignancy. Her limpid toes skimmed a branch seemingly selected at random—it didn’t possess any aberrations marking it as an outlier when stacked next to the dozens of previous branches that had been rejected—but she was just happy that this acid trip seemed to be reaching its conclusion.

A tender warmth was diffused from the branch into her muscles like she’d just gulped down a demitasse of hot chocolate, reaching into every nook and cranny of her body and making her melt. It was an euphoric, heady rush that deadened any resistance that she may have put up. The parts of her body submerged into the golden current underwent a drastic metamorphosis—one that she felt nestled deep into her molecular makeup, the cosmic flaxen substance subtly unfettering her atomic bonds, unraveling strands of her DNA, and dissolving every particle of her body to become one with the branch. She was getting broken down at an atomic level and reconstructed into the same ocherous essence, and far from being terrified, it felt…right.

As if she’d wandered a little too far from home and had been progressively deteriorating without even noticing, and now she was where she belonged. And with this newfound amity, the dichotomy of her parallel memories was resolved. Immortal and mortal became two once more. 

I am Eris Hayes. I have two younger sisters: Alice and Amelia. My former best friend is Zoe Watson. My home planet is Earth, and I am a human.

Eris felt herself near the end of her journey: the proper place in the time stream where she belonged. She accelerated, determined to finish the last stretch strong, allowing the radiant rays of light to bathe her in it’s heartening glow, wondering if she would remember anything but still at peace—

—and she was back on solid ground, the brumous warehouse air irritating her sinuses. After spending time in the vacuum of space surrounded by dazzling celestial bodies that had a surplus of light, the warehouse’ dim lightning that flickered on and off eerily was a colossal letdown. The musty scent, coupled with the effluvia of items her uncle had found suboptimal and the objectionable amount of dust hanging in the air like a gloomy pall, was a rude shock to her system. she wasted a couple of seconds trying to equate the vastly different environments, and failing massively. Then it struck her all at once. 

Eris' breath caught. Her hands were clammy and her knees knocked into each other. The fuzz on the back of her neck prickled up and an epidemic of goosebumps erupted across her arms. Something—perhaps the last of her nerves—rattled inside her rib-cage like the effete tinkling of bells. It felt as if she’d gulped down a boulder which got stuck halfway through her esophagus. Her throat worked furiously to dislodge the obstruction to no avail; her body simply refused to intake oxygen properly, not relenting even as the fringes of her vision started to fade to black. Subconsciously, Eris began rocking from side to side, hands bunching her skirt until the plaid fabric was crumpled up. Perspiration gathered on her forehead, trickling down her temple and stinging her eyes. Dimly, she recognized the symptoms of a panic attack and that there were protocols to maintain decorum, but they were as distant from her as Mars was to Earth. Her sanity was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and something was going to have to give.

So Eris bolted.

The irresistible urge to escape this confined space, to feel the Sun’s rays on her skin and the grass beneath her toes and the breeze to slap her across the face and sweet aroma of dandelions, jolted her legs into action before her mind could catch up. Eris sprinted out of the warehouse, jockeyed a convulsive route through the graveyard of heavy equipment vehicles, and broke out into a full-blown gallop the instant the path forward wasn’t littered with obstacles and her feet met solid concrete. She pushed herself further and faster than she’d ever done before, more so than she thought her run-of-the-mill body could handle, but it didn’t disappoint.

No wheezing, no overwhelming queasiness, no burning in her legs, no lightheadedness, no bleary eyesight, no heart palpitations. It was just her and her legs in constant, fluid motion. The rest of the world faded into the background as each impact her feet made with the ground echoed through her mind, the steady thumping of leather against asphalt drowning out the pithy flashes of out-of-context reenactments of her space ordeal. A low thrumming filled her senses and her heartbeat settled into a consistent rhythm, keeping tempo with her feet and swinging arms. 

Eventually though, Eris had to decelerate to avoid ramming into pedestrians as she entered the crowded urban centers. Thousands of people roaming the streets posed an insurmountable hurdle, especially  with the iconic systematic chaos that you could only find in a city. She tried to maintain her velocity but her steps inevitably stalled, and then were arrested completely as she periodically had to side-step someone whose face was buried in their phone, or veer around a bundle of teenagers and consequently bump into another person. Acutely aware of the shifty-eyed glances that were directed her way and the multiple glares from scorned citizens boring into the back of her head, her cheeks burned. Eris fiddled with the hem of her grungy skirt, willing her runaway heartbeat to ease up on the pedals now that she wasn’t in any danger, and turned the corner.

Right into Zoe.

She shrieked, springing backward into the ready cradle of her clique. Several girls fought to cling onto Zoe’s arms and pin her to their bosoms when one would have sufficed, while the unlucky few settled for scowling spitefully at her. Eris mentally took note that the girls she’d graded as the ‘higher tier’ were absent, other than Zoe herself. Normally, she would have eagerly taken advantage of this unwonted occasion to try and appeal to her best friend that she knew was still present, just buried and suppressed under a misguided notion that the arbitrary validations of underdeveloped children was important. Maybe she could even successfully rescue her from the slimy purchase of those vile temptresses who’d enticed her best friend away from her with inordinate praises and lauded promises. Eris used to be certain that if she could just ramify Zoe from the corrupting influences, she would be able to break through to her.

Now? Staring at the girl who she used to call a sister, she just felt a cold fury brewing in her stomach, and her face spasmed into a moue of distaste before she could establish a veneer of detached indifference. The longer she stared at Zoe in her modified uniform though, the more the image of her standing in the streets surrounded by her ensemble became overlapped with the memory of an identical girl, looming over her on an upswept stage as the entire world lavished innumerable accolades and laurels upon her shoulders. The falsely deferential facade she’d superimposed over her customary proud expression made her stomach twist. It wasn’t enough that she’d betrayed her, now she had to make a fool out of the entire world with her honeyed words and demure mask?

If Zoe was aware of the emotionally charged state Eris was rapidly entering, she didn’t show it as she disentangled herself from her needy fangirls. She took one look at her and laughed, a shrill mockery of the girl Eris once knew that grated on her ears. It wasn’t a kind sound. Her coterie was quick to trip over themselves trying to emulate her, masking their wicked smiles with the palm of their hands like a stereotypical villainess and chortling an absolutely horrendous rendition that sounded more like a choking male limpkin. 

Zoe paid her mindless acolytes no heed as she stepped forward, arms crossed over her chest and her chin sticking up superciliously. Her perfunctory gaze traveled the length of Eris' body empirically, the corner of her eyes pinching when she took in her disheveled appearance. No doubt, Eris' hair looked like a community of rats had forged a living for themselves within its confines, and she didn’t even want to think about the state of her uniform. Zoe's nose scrunched and her emerald orbs sharpened when she reached the top of her head, as expected.

When she opened her mouth though, instead of the venomous vitriol Eris was expecting her to spit out, she asked, “Why’d you dye your hair? she know you hate that chemical shit. And what's with your face? You look like you were hiding out in a dust storm. Did you forget to wipe your face when you left home? ” A bleeding edge of sympathy leaked into her voice. To further compound her point, she flicked a stray strand of hair out of her face, meticulously tucking it behind her ear.

The restless dragon dwelling inside reared its reptilian head, smoke spewing from its flaring nostrils and arched talons digging into Eris' flesh as the dragon clawed its way up her throat. Cold fire swelled up along with it, begging to be released from her mouth. Eris had no doubt that if she loosened her lips, a slew of malignant barbs would spring forth. 

The rush of lividness came quick and without warning, splicing through her body like a white-hot dagger. Eris didn’t necessarily want to initiate a brawl in the middle of the streets like a hooligan, but increasingly, she felt like she no longer had a choice. Her body was gearing towards battle, and she was content with letting it happen. 

Zoe was still waiting for a response. Given her lackluster stance and how inattentive she was, she clearly wasn’t taking her seriously. Her clique were already mumbling among themselves, no doubt wondering why they were entertaining a poor girl’s delusions, and a few had already fished out their phones to scroll through their social media. Eris bit her lips hard enough for a copper tang to assault her tongue, and then she made her move.

“Where the hell—!”

An alarm split the orange-and-pink-streaked sky, obliterating the drowsy peace and ushering in an ambience of dread so heavy that it bore down on every living being, like the sky itself was on fire and falling. Which wasn’t far off from what was happening; after all, the alarm only signaled one thing: 

An Animus Incursion.

ParadoxPendulum

As promised, a new chapter so soon! And I know what you must be thinking: "Finally, some action!" I know it may seem like I'm dragging out the introduction but I assure you, it's all very important set-up for later arcs and to flesh out Eris. In the meanwhile, I can confidently say that it's almost time for action!