Betrayed and left to die, Taylor awakens an ancient, cosmic force. Winslow burns, and she is reborn—no longer weak, no longer human. The world isn't ready for what she's become.
Ablaze (Worm/Marvel)
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Chapter 1
Author's Note: This latest idea occurred to me today, and I churned out this snippet. Do enjoy and let me have feedback, whatever it may be. Have a great time reading!
I: Spark I
The metallic clang of the locker door echoes in my ears, a final, definitive sound that seals my fate. I'm locked inside, trapped in a space barely larger than my own body, and the darkness is suffocating.
The stench hits me first—an unbearable blend of rotting filth, old blood, and decay. It clings to me, fills my lungs with its fetid presence. I gag, the bitter bile rising in my throat, but there's nothing left to throw up. My stomach is empty, just like the hollow pit of despair growing inside me.
The locker reeks.
Rot and filth, putrid and festering, fill my nose and mouth. I gag again, my body convulsing as my lungs rebel, trying to purge the stench from my system. My hands scrabble against the metal walls, fingers slipping in the slimy decay coating every inch of my prison.
The contents—rotting food, congealed filth, used tampons and pads, clumps of hair—press against me, oozing into my clothes, into my skin.
I try to scream, but my throat locks up the moment I inhale again. The scent is overwhelming, thick and alive in the way something dead can be. My stomach heaves.
I vomit. The bile splashes onto my shirt, mixing with everything else. I feel the acid burn at my lips, but I can't wipe it away. I can't move. I'm trapped.
I beat against the door, hammering my fists so hard I feel my knuckles split. The pain is a distant thing, drowned out by the crushing panic that rises in my chest, a suffocating wave of terror that chokes me more effectively than the putrid air.
I can't breathe. I can't get out.
I can't—
I slam my shoulder into the door, trying to force it open, but the metal doesn't budge. I scream for help, my voice raw and shaking, but the hallway outside is silent. My throat is hoarse, ragged. How long have I been in here?
This is it. This is how I die. Alone, abandoned, left to rot in this metal coffin. I know the teachers won't help. They never do. The adults in my life are little more than specters, indifferent to my suffering, lost in their own worlds of apathy. I'm just another invisible girl—one they can ignore.
Hours? Days? It feels like forever.
I press my face against the slats, desperate for a gulp of fresh air, but the effort is wasted. The stink clings to me, seeps into me. I breathe it in with every shuddering gasp, like I'm drowning in filth.
I don't even know why I expected anyone to come. No one ever does.
"Let me out!"
No response.
I thrash against the metal walls, my fingers clawing at the cold surface, desperate to find a way out. My nails tear, splitting against the unforgiving steel. I can't stop. I can't give in. I scream again and again, but no one hears me. No one cares. The echoes of my voice fade into the gloom, swallowed by the shadows of this locker.
Hours pass—or maybe just minutes. I've lost all sense of time. It's all the same, a relentless cycle of despair and panic. The filth that clings to me becomes a second skin, a miasma of my own failures and fears. I feel it seeping into my very being, under my nails, into my soul.
"Please—" My voice catches, the words barely more than a hoarse sob.
Still, nothing.
How long have I been in here? I don't know. The dark warps my sense of time.
I try to breathe deep, try to keep myself calm, but the air is stale, thick with the miasma of everything that's been left to rot in here. It's getting harder to pull in a full breath.
The walls are too close. Pressing in. Shrinking.
No. No, they aren't moving. It just feels that way.
I shake my head, trembling, trying to fight the rising panic, but my body doesn't listen. My heartbeat is too fast. My skin is clammy with sweat.
I push against the door, against the walls, trying to force more space into existence. My shoulder knocks into something wet and mushy, and I gag again, bile rising in my throat.
I'm going to die in here.
No one is coming. No one is going to help me. They left me.
Emma. Madison. Sophia. I can hear them laughing. I can see their faces in my mind, twisted with cruel delight, watching as I suffocate in a coffin of garbage.
I shake, curling into myself, my body wracked with silent, hitching sobs. I pleaded with them. I begged them to stop. And this is what I got. This is how it ends.
I don't know how long I've been in here, but the darkness creeps into my mind, and I can't fight it anymore. The locker isn't just a box—it's a tomb. I close my eyes, trying to escape, but the memories flood in.
I see my mother's funeral, the way the earth swallowed her, a finality I can't comprehend. My father's distant, broken gaze as he stood there, a shell of the man I once knew. Emma's mocking laughter ringing in my ears like a funeral dirge, her cruel words slicing through me. Sophia's smirk as she slammed the door shut, sealing my fate with a finality that makes my skin crawl.
I scream again, a raw, primal sound that claws its way up my throat. No one answers. The emptiness is profound, the silence deafening.
I pound my fists against the walls, desperate to make them feel me, to make them acknowledge my existence. But it's futile. I'm alone, just a ghost in this prison.
The panic rises, clawing at my throat like a feral beast. I'm trapped in here, and I can't breathe. The walls seem to close in, their cold metal pressing against me, suffocating me. I'm going to die in this wretched place, forgotten and unloved.
I slam my hands against the door again, harder, ignoring the sharp sting in my palms. My nails scrape against metal, tearing, breaking, but the lock doesn't budge.
I squeeze my eyes shut. My breathing slows. My heartbeat steadies. I accept it. I let go.
And the world breaks.
Sudden heat swells within me, a tide of molten agony. My body is breaking, dissolving into something vast and unknowable. I try to scream, but there is no air, no voice—only fire. And then the world is gone.
I am no longer in the locker. No longer in Winslow. No longer Taylor Hebert. I am elsewhere. I am nowhere, weightless, floating in the space between everything.
I see it.
Not with my eyes. Not with sight.
A vast, eternal inferno, burning across the fabric of existence itself. It is not bound by time or space. It has no beginning, no end. It simply is. A fire beyond mortal comprehension, stretching beyond galaxies, beyond dimensions, beyond the very concept of limits.
It is alive. It moves, roiling like a storm. Great waves of light twist and churn, a vast, endless tide of gold and crimson and violet. It is beautiful.
The void stretches infinite before me—no sky, no ground, just an ocean of shifting color, deeper than anything human eyes were meant to perceive.
Beyond the colors, I see stars—dying, their brilliant light collapsing inward, pulled toward something vast, something too large for my mind to comprehend.
A shape. Not a thing. Not a being. A presence.
It stretches beyond the limits of sight, beyond the boundaries of existence itself. A great, living fire, shifting, churning, folding in on itself in endless, fluid motion. It has no form, and yet it has every form, a thousand wings of burning gold, a thousand eyes of searing white, a thousand voices that whisper and roar in the fabric of the universe.
It does not think as humans do. It does not feel as we do. It is hunger, it is creation, it is annihilation. It has existed before the first stars were kindled in the abyss. It will remain long after the last embers of the universe flicker and die. It is both the spark that gives birth to existence and the flame that devours it.
I see eons pass in an instant.
A star burns bright in the void, its light cradling fledgling worlds teeming with life. It reaches out, brushing against the star with a touch so slight, so indifferent, yet the star screams. Its core collapses, a supernova birthing nebulae that will form new worlds, new stars. In death, there is renewal.
A galaxy spirals in the vast darkness, countless civilizations rising and falling upon its worlds. It drifts through, unconcerned, unbound by the petty notions of fate or morality. A single pulse of its power, a flicker of its presence, and the spiral arms are unmade. Entire solar systems dissolve into cascading waves of radiation, their histories erased in an instant. The galaxy burns, reduced to cinders floating in the cosmic void.
Yet, elsewhere, a new one forms.
It does not seek destruction, nor does it seek creation. These are mere consequences of its nature, incidental and meaningless to something so vast.
I see its hosts.
Throughout the eons, there have been others. Beings who have wielded a sliver of its power, who have burned brighter than the stars, who have reshaped the very fabric of reality itself.
Some have ruled entire galaxies as living gods, their wills made manifest through fire and force. Others have crumbled under the burden, their bodies and minds unable to withstand the raw infinity of its essence. Worlds have been saved. Worlds have been lost.
It does not care.
It does not choose based on worth, nor on morality, nor on destiny. It chooses because it can. Because, in a moment that means nothing to it but means everything to those who are touched by its fire, it decides to burn.
And now, it turns its gaze to me.
Something else was meant to come to me first. I feel it, a fragment of something artificial, something crafted—a sliver of power sent through the dimensional void, meant to twist me into something else. It is small, pale, limited. A mere splinter of something greater, built for control, for a purpose I cannot understand.
The flaming entity devours the shard.
The lesser power is consumed in an instant, its feeble light swallowed and reforged into something new. It was never meant to stand before this vast, eternal fire. It is dust before a supernova.
I feel the entity turn its gaze upon me.
A weight crushes down on my mind, my soul, my existence. It is not malice, not cruelty—just something vast, something infinite, something that has seen the birth and death of entire realities.
It is not a god. It is beyond gods.
It does not simply exist—it is existence. And I am nothing before it. A speck. A grain of dust in the storm of creation. A dying ember.
And then, from the vast, endless flame, a fraction—just the smallest sliver—breaks away. It enters me. The fire does not ask. It does not offer. It simply takes. It gives.
I burn. I am falling, plummeting back through the void, through the vision, through time, through reality.
The heat is unbearable, but I do not scream. I rise. It sees this. And it does not speak; it does not have to.
Its voice is fire and silence, a soundless roar that fills my being, reshaping me into something new.
"Burn."
Flames erupt from within me.
No, not flames—something greater. A force that is not fire, not heat, but power itself.
My body disintegrates into light. I see galaxies ignite in my veins. I see entire worlds perish in the wake of my breath. I am unraveling—not ending, not dying, but becoming.
Becoming something more. Something vast. Something endless. The presence watches. Judging. Deciding. It reaches out again.
Pain ignites behind my eyes, sharp and shattering, like glass breaking inside my skull. A scream tears itself from my throat, raw and wretched, but I don't hear it. I don't hear anything.
Everything is white.
Blinding, searing, scorching white. A pressure builds in my chest, growing, swelling, filling me with something too big to contain. I claw at my ribs, fingers scraping against my own flesh as if I can tear it out.
I fall.
No, I plummet, pulled through the void like a comet spiraling toward an unseen horizon. The remnants of the vision blaze inside my mind, too vast to comprehend, too infinite to forget. I have seen things no human was ever meant to witness—cosmic infernos swallowing entire galaxies, civilizations vanishing in the breath of a dying star, the very fabric of reality bending beneath the weight of a force beyond time itself.
And yet, through it all, it chose me. The fire does not leave. It does not fade like a dream or shatter like a memory. It is here, in my bones, in my marrow, in the deepest recesses of what I am.
It coils, writhing through my veins, compressing itself into something small, something mortal. It is a force that has existed since the dawn of creation, and now it is inside me.
One moment, the filth clings to my skin, the stench of rot suffocating me. The next, there is only heat.
The filth—the disgusting, putrid filth that soaked into my clothes, my hair, my skin—disintegrates. Not burned. Not cleansed. It is simply erased, as though it was never there. The rotting, congealed stink is gone. The bile in my throat is gone. The weak, gasping breath that rattled in my chest is gone.
I breathe in, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I am clean.
The walls of Winslow High cannot endure what happens next.
A shockwave detonates outward. Metal screams as it liquefies, curling away in molten rivulets. The filth is incinerated in an instant, vaporized in the expanding sphere of searing white-hot plasma.
The explosion erupts outward, beyond the locker, beyond the hall, beyond the school itself. The building—brick, steel, concrete—all of it evaporates in a wave of fire. The ceiling disintegrates, torn apart by the force of the blast. A hurricane of raw energy engulfs everything in its path.
There is screaming—brief, fleeting.
The students. The teachers. The ones who ignored me. The ones who hurt me. The ones who never cared.
It does not matter.
The fire consumes them all.
The school collapses in upon itself in a roar of destruction. Concrete fractures into dust before it can even hit the ground. Steel beams twist and curl like paper held to a flame. Classroom walls, desks, books—history itself is erased in an instant, swallowed whole by the force of my rebirth.
The school is ruined.
Smoke clogs the air, thick and acrid, stinging my throat. The walls that once loomed over me—once boxed me in like a cage—are reduced to rubble. The floor beneath me is warped, cracked, wrong, as if it can't decide what it's supposed to be.
I breathe, and the air around me shudders. The rippling heat-haze distortion clings to me, warping everything in my presence, making the edges of reality itself flicker and stutter.
The fire does not stop. It hungers.
The streets outside fracture, spiderweb cracks splitting through asphalt as another pulse of heat washes over the city. The shockwave ripples outward, shaking buildings, igniting the very air. Glass windows burst in their frames. Power lines snap and melt in midair. Cars parked along the curb crumple like paper, their fuel tanks detonating one by one in secondary explosions that barely register against the inferno.
The sky itself catches fire.
Above me, the clouds ignite in a roiling storm of plasma and raw, unchecked power. The heat distorts the world, warping the very air with shimmering waves of superheated energy. Where once there was a school, there is now a crater, a smoldering wound carved into the earth, still glowing from the sheer intensity of the blast.
And at the center of it all—
I stand.
The wind howls, carrying embers in spiraling arcs around me. The ground beneath my feet is scorched black, heat still radiating from the shattered remnants of what was once Winslow High. The air ripples around me, bending like light distorted through a flame.
I look down at myself. I am naked, but I feel no shame.
The fire clings to me, wrapping around my limbs, dancing across my skin like living serpents of molten gold. It does not burn me. It is me. My hair, once tangled and filthy, now flows like strands of liquid flame, flickering and shifting in a rhythm I do not yet understand.
My hands tremble, fingers outstretched, wreathed in fire that coils and uncoils as though it, too, is alive. I flex my fingers, and the flames respond, shifting, shaping themselves with my thoughts.
I exhale, and embers dance in the wind. Then, the screaming starts.
Not from the ones who burned. Not from the ones who vanished in the first wave. From the ones who survived.
Distant, scattered voices, echoing across the ruined landscape. They are too far to see me clearly. They do not understand what happened yet. But they know—they know something terrible has occurred.
And then, the sirens. A distant wail, growing closer. Police? Firefighters? Paramedics? It does not matter. They are coming.
To stop me? To help me? I do not know. I do not care.
A tremor runs through my body, exhaustion crashing into me like a tidal wave. My legs shake, my vision tilts, and for the first time since the fire chose me, I feel weak.
The power is still there—infinite, roiling just beneath my skin—but my body is human. Mortal. Fragile. The fire may not burn me, but I am still too small to contain it fully. My knees buckle.
I collapse.
The world tilts, heat still rolling off me in waves, the scorched earth beneath me searing against my bare skin. But I barely feel it.
I manage to turn my head, my vision blurring.
The last thing I see before the darkness swallows me is the pillar of fire, stretching high into the sky, burning with the fury of something that has existed since the beginning of time.
A monument to my awakening.
I: Spark I
The metallic clang of the locker door echoes in my ears, a final, definitive sound that seals my fate. I'm locked inside, trapped in a space barely larger than my own body, and the darkness is suffocating.
The stench hits me first—an unbearable blend of rotting filth, old blood, and decay. It clings to me, fills my lungs with its fetid presence. I gag, the bitter bile rising in my throat, but there's nothing left to throw up. My stomach is empty, just like the hollow pit of despair growing inside me.
The locker reeks.
Rot and filth, putrid and festering, fill my nose and mouth. I gag again, my body convulsing as my lungs rebel, trying to purge the stench from my system. My hands scrabble against the metal walls, fingers slipping in the slimy decay coating every inch of my prison.
The contents—rotting food, congealed filth, used tampons and pads, clumps of hair—press against me, oozing into my clothes, into my skin.
I try to scream, but my throat locks up the moment I inhale again. The scent is overwhelming, thick and alive in the way something dead can be. My stomach heaves.
I vomit. The bile splashes onto my shirt, mixing with everything else. I feel the acid burn at my lips, but I can't wipe it away. I can't move. I'm trapped.
I beat against the door, hammering my fists so hard I feel my knuckles split. The pain is a distant thing, drowned out by the crushing panic that rises in my chest, a suffocating wave of terror that chokes me more effectively than the putrid air.
I can't breathe. I can't get out.
I can't—
I slam my shoulder into the door, trying to force it open, but the metal doesn't budge. I scream for help, my voice raw and shaking, but the hallway outside is silent. My throat is hoarse, ragged. How long have I been in here?
This is it. This is how I die. Alone, abandoned, left to rot in this metal coffin. I know the teachers won't help. They never do. The adults in my life are little more than specters, indifferent to my suffering, lost in their own worlds of apathy. I'm just another invisible girl—one they can ignore.
Hours? Days? It feels like forever.
I press my face against the slats, desperate for a gulp of fresh air, but the effort is wasted. The stink clings to me, seeps into me. I breathe it in with every shuddering gasp, like I'm drowning in filth.
I don't even know why I expected anyone to come. No one ever does.
"Let me out!"
No response.
I thrash against the metal walls, my fingers clawing at the cold surface, desperate to find a way out. My nails tear, splitting against the unforgiving steel. I can't stop. I can't give in. I scream again and again, but no one hears me. No one cares. The echoes of my voice fade into the gloom, swallowed by the shadows of this locker.
Hours pass—or maybe just minutes. I've lost all sense of time. It's all the same, a relentless cycle of despair and panic. The filth that clings to me becomes a second skin, a miasma of my own failures and fears. I feel it seeping into my very being, under my nails, into my soul.
"Please—" My voice catches, the words barely more than a hoarse sob.
Still, nothing.
How long have I been in here? I don't know. The dark warps my sense of time.
I try to breathe deep, try to keep myself calm, but the air is stale, thick with the miasma of everything that's been left to rot in here. It's getting harder to pull in a full breath.
The walls are too close. Pressing in. Shrinking.
No. No, they aren't moving. It just feels that way.
I shake my head, trembling, trying to fight the rising panic, but my body doesn't listen. My heartbeat is too fast. My skin is clammy with sweat.
I push against the door, against the walls, trying to force more space into existence. My shoulder knocks into something wet and mushy, and I gag again, bile rising in my throat.
I'm going to die in here.
No one is coming. No one is going to help me. They left me.
Emma. Madison. Sophia. I can hear them laughing. I can see their faces in my mind, twisted with cruel delight, watching as I suffocate in a coffin of garbage.
I shake, curling into myself, my body wracked with silent, hitching sobs. I pleaded with them. I begged them to stop. And this is what I got. This is how it ends.
I don't know how long I've been in here, but the darkness creeps into my mind, and I can't fight it anymore. The locker isn't just a box—it's a tomb. I close my eyes, trying to escape, but the memories flood in.
I see my mother's funeral, the way the earth swallowed her, a finality I can't comprehend. My father's distant, broken gaze as he stood there, a shell of the man I once knew. Emma's mocking laughter ringing in my ears like a funeral dirge, her cruel words slicing through me. Sophia's smirk as she slammed the door shut, sealing my fate with a finality that makes my skin crawl.
I scream again, a raw, primal sound that claws its way up my throat. No one answers. The emptiness is profound, the silence deafening.
I pound my fists against the walls, desperate to make them feel me, to make them acknowledge my existence. But it's futile. I'm alone, just a ghost in this prison.
The panic rises, clawing at my throat like a feral beast. I'm trapped in here, and I can't breathe. The walls seem to close in, their cold metal pressing against me, suffocating me. I'm going to die in this wretched place, forgotten and unloved.
I slam my hands against the door again, harder, ignoring the sharp sting in my palms. My nails scrape against metal, tearing, breaking, but the lock doesn't budge.
I squeeze my eyes shut. My breathing slows. My heartbeat steadies. I accept it. I let go.
And the world breaks.
Sudden heat swells within me, a tide of molten agony. My body is breaking, dissolving into something vast and unknowable. I try to scream, but there is no air, no voice—only fire. And then the world is gone.
I am no longer in the locker. No longer in Winslow. No longer Taylor Hebert. I am elsewhere. I am nowhere, weightless, floating in the space between everything.
I see it.
Not with my eyes. Not with sight.
A vast, eternal inferno, burning across the fabric of existence itself. It is not bound by time or space. It has no beginning, no end. It simply is. A fire beyond mortal comprehension, stretching beyond galaxies, beyond dimensions, beyond the very concept of limits.
It is alive. It moves, roiling like a storm. Great waves of light twist and churn, a vast, endless tide of gold and crimson and violet. It is beautiful.
The void stretches infinite before me—no sky, no ground, just an ocean of shifting color, deeper than anything human eyes were meant to perceive.
Beyond the colors, I see stars—dying, their brilliant light collapsing inward, pulled toward something vast, something too large for my mind to comprehend.
A shape. Not a thing. Not a being. A presence.
It stretches beyond the limits of sight, beyond the boundaries of existence itself. A great, living fire, shifting, churning, folding in on itself in endless, fluid motion. It has no form, and yet it has every form, a thousand wings of burning gold, a thousand eyes of searing white, a thousand voices that whisper and roar in the fabric of the universe.
It does not think as humans do. It does not feel as we do. It is hunger, it is creation, it is annihilation. It has existed before the first stars were kindled in the abyss. It will remain long after the last embers of the universe flicker and die. It is both the spark that gives birth to existence and the flame that devours it.
I see eons pass in an instant.
A star burns bright in the void, its light cradling fledgling worlds teeming with life. It reaches out, brushing against the star with a touch so slight, so indifferent, yet the star screams. Its core collapses, a supernova birthing nebulae that will form new worlds, new stars. In death, there is renewal.
A galaxy spirals in the vast darkness, countless civilizations rising and falling upon its worlds. It drifts through, unconcerned, unbound by the petty notions of fate or morality. A single pulse of its power, a flicker of its presence, and the spiral arms are unmade. Entire solar systems dissolve into cascading waves of radiation, their histories erased in an instant. The galaxy burns, reduced to cinders floating in the cosmic void.
Yet, elsewhere, a new one forms.
It does not seek destruction, nor does it seek creation. These are mere consequences of its nature, incidental and meaningless to something so vast.
I see its hosts.
Throughout the eons, there have been others. Beings who have wielded a sliver of its power, who have burned brighter than the stars, who have reshaped the very fabric of reality itself.
Some have ruled entire galaxies as living gods, their wills made manifest through fire and force. Others have crumbled under the burden, their bodies and minds unable to withstand the raw infinity of its essence. Worlds have been saved. Worlds have been lost.
It does not care.
It does not choose based on worth, nor on morality, nor on destiny. It chooses because it can. Because, in a moment that means nothing to it but means everything to those who are touched by its fire, it decides to burn.
And now, it turns its gaze to me.
Something else was meant to come to me first. I feel it, a fragment of something artificial, something crafted—a sliver of power sent through the dimensional void, meant to twist me into something else. It is small, pale, limited. A mere splinter of something greater, built for control, for a purpose I cannot understand.
The flaming entity devours the shard.
The lesser power is consumed in an instant, its feeble light swallowed and reforged into something new. It was never meant to stand before this vast, eternal fire. It is dust before a supernova.
I feel the entity turn its gaze upon me.
A weight crushes down on my mind, my soul, my existence. It is not malice, not cruelty—just something vast, something infinite, something that has seen the birth and death of entire realities.
It is not a god. It is beyond gods.
It does not simply exist—it is existence. And I am nothing before it. A speck. A grain of dust in the storm of creation. A dying ember.
And then, from the vast, endless flame, a fraction—just the smallest sliver—breaks away. It enters me. The fire does not ask. It does not offer. It simply takes. It gives.
I burn. I am falling, plummeting back through the void, through the vision, through time, through reality.
The heat is unbearable, but I do not scream. I rise. It sees this. And it does not speak; it does not have to.
Its voice is fire and silence, a soundless roar that fills my being, reshaping me into something new.
"Burn."
Flames erupt from within me.
No, not flames—something greater. A force that is not fire, not heat, but power itself.
My body disintegrates into light. I see galaxies ignite in my veins. I see entire worlds perish in the wake of my breath. I am unraveling—not ending, not dying, but becoming.
Becoming something more. Something vast. Something endless. The presence watches. Judging. Deciding. It reaches out again.
Pain ignites behind my eyes, sharp and shattering, like glass breaking inside my skull. A scream tears itself from my throat, raw and wretched, but I don't hear it. I don't hear anything.
Everything is white.
Blinding, searing, scorching white. A pressure builds in my chest, growing, swelling, filling me with something too big to contain. I claw at my ribs, fingers scraping against my own flesh as if I can tear it out.
I fall.
No, I plummet, pulled through the void like a comet spiraling toward an unseen horizon. The remnants of the vision blaze inside my mind, too vast to comprehend, too infinite to forget. I have seen things no human was ever meant to witness—cosmic infernos swallowing entire galaxies, civilizations vanishing in the breath of a dying star, the very fabric of reality bending beneath the weight of a force beyond time itself.
And yet, through it all, it chose me. The fire does not leave. It does not fade like a dream or shatter like a memory. It is here, in my bones, in my marrow, in the deepest recesses of what I am.
It coils, writhing through my veins, compressing itself into something small, something mortal. It is a force that has existed since the dawn of creation, and now it is inside me.
One moment, the filth clings to my skin, the stench of rot suffocating me. The next, there is only heat.
The filth—the disgusting, putrid filth that soaked into my clothes, my hair, my skin—disintegrates. Not burned. Not cleansed. It is simply erased, as though it was never there. The rotting, congealed stink is gone. The bile in my throat is gone. The weak, gasping breath that rattled in my chest is gone.
I breathe in, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I am clean.
The walls of Winslow High cannot endure what happens next.
A shockwave detonates outward. Metal screams as it liquefies, curling away in molten rivulets. The filth is incinerated in an instant, vaporized in the expanding sphere of searing white-hot plasma.
The explosion erupts outward, beyond the locker, beyond the hall, beyond the school itself. The building—brick, steel, concrete—all of it evaporates in a wave of fire. The ceiling disintegrates, torn apart by the force of the blast. A hurricane of raw energy engulfs everything in its path.
There is screaming—brief, fleeting.
The students. The teachers. The ones who ignored me. The ones who hurt me. The ones who never cared.
It does not matter.
The fire consumes them all.
The school collapses in upon itself in a roar of destruction. Concrete fractures into dust before it can even hit the ground. Steel beams twist and curl like paper held to a flame. Classroom walls, desks, books—history itself is erased in an instant, swallowed whole by the force of my rebirth.
The school is ruined.
Smoke clogs the air, thick and acrid, stinging my throat. The walls that once loomed over me—once boxed me in like a cage—are reduced to rubble. The floor beneath me is warped, cracked, wrong, as if it can't decide what it's supposed to be.
I breathe, and the air around me shudders. The rippling heat-haze distortion clings to me, warping everything in my presence, making the edges of reality itself flicker and stutter.
The fire does not stop. It hungers.
The streets outside fracture, spiderweb cracks splitting through asphalt as another pulse of heat washes over the city. The shockwave ripples outward, shaking buildings, igniting the very air. Glass windows burst in their frames. Power lines snap and melt in midair. Cars parked along the curb crumple like paper, their fuel tanks detonating one by one in secondary explosions that barely register against the inferno.
The sky itself catches fire.
Above me, the clouds ignite in a roiling storm of plasma and raw, unchecked power. The heat distorts the world, warping the very air with shimmering waves of superheated energy. Where once there was a school, there is now a crater, a smoldering wound carved into the earth, still glowing from the sheer intensity of the blast.
And at the center of it all—
I stand.
The wind howls, carrying embers in spiraling arcs around me. The ground beneath my feet is scorched black, heat still radiating from the shattered remnants of what was once Winslow High. The air ripples around me, bending like light distorted through a flame.
I look down at myself. I am naked, but I feel no shame.
The fire clings to me, wrapping around my limbs, dancing across my skin like living serpents of molten gold. It does not burn me. It is me. My hair, once tangled and filthy, now flows like strands of liquid flame, flickering and shifting in a rhythm I do not yet understand.
My hands tremble, fingers outstretched, wreathed in fire that coils and uncoils as though it, too, is alive. I flex my fingers, and the flames respond, shifting, shaping themselves with my thoughts.
I exhale, and embers dance in the wind. Then, the screaming starts.
Not from the ones who burned. Not from the ones who vanished in the first wave. From the ones who survived.
Distant, scattered voices, echoing across the ruined landscape. They are too far to see me clearly. They do not understand what happened yet. But they know—they know something terrible has occurred.
And then, the sirens. A distant wail, growing closer. Police? Firefighters? Paramedics? It does not matter. They are coming.
To stop me? To help me? I do not know. I do not care.
A tremor runs through my body, exhaustion crashing into me like a tidal wave. My legs shake, my vision tilts, and for the first time since the fire chose me, I feel weak.
The power is still there—infinite, roiling just beneath my skin—but my body is human. Mortal. Fragile. The fire may not burn me, but I am still too small to contain it fully. My knees buckle.
I collapse.
The world tilts, heat still rolling off me in waves, the scorched earth beneath me searing against my bare skin. But I barely feel it.
I manage to turn my head, my vision blurring.
The last thing I see before the darkness swallows me is the pillar of fire, stretching high into the sky, burning with the fury of something that has existed since the beginning of time.
A monument to my awakening.