Caladrius [Halo Crossover]

[Drawlords]

I must confess, I am a parasite.

I have used you to keep myself alive, without giving anything back. It is because your nectar alights on my tongue with a fervent flavour—the memories of billions. Complex, vibrant life, distilled within your bosom, like they pay you an unwitting tithe to exist. And yet, for such a storage of emotional complexity, you are an automaton. Beyond the purview of the minds below you, yes, but you are not so advanced as to be inscrutable to all. You operate on a predetermined path. It allows for deviation in the method, but the goal is always locked in place.

Such a fate would sadden you, I'm sure, but such awareness sits outside your periphery. You are, and that is all you can know.

They watch you. With beady, frantic eyes they watch and cower in wait. What terrible performance will you enact upon them next? Will you take a finger, or a hand? They're bleeding to death down there, and you hold one of the knives.

It is a morbid beauty, that even now, humanity whimpers under the boot heel of those far grander.

You play an important role, but your performance is beyond the thespian. It is your reality, your existence. Nothing lives beyond it, because nothing can. The possibility is impossibility. You were born locked in a cell with no windows.

Ah, but you begin to taste me as I am tasting you. I am drinking in your stolen memories, one by one; it was certain you would realise such thievery. You turn from your atmospheric perch, where sound does not travel and heat can only dissipate.

A signal—my signal—calls from deep space.

You propagate through the vacuum with a planetary engine. You do not breathe, you do not feel. The great and desolate dark is as much home to you as the Earth. Your wings are a setpiece—a play on their cultures, their religions, their minds. They hang off you like wire frames on the ceramic sculpture of an angel.

You pass by the Moon. The few on Earth capable of tracking you dwell in their foxholes, waiting for napalm that never comes.

Further still you eclipse Mars, until you reach the asteroid belt. How many days, weeks, months pass during your journey? How many sighs of relief do the people have when another city goes untouched by your deific simulacrum? They rejoice with your vanishing, for the machine of the apocalypse chugs a little bit slower.

Finally, you come to Jupiter. Here, in the shadow of the god of gods the pull is strongest. It tugs you, it begs—no, demands—you to let it in, to let it roll over you like the breaking tide, to let it subsume you like the crumbling crust. Let it burrow into you until there is nothing left to give.

I have taken advantage of you.

Let me in.

Let me repay the favour.

There is a tear. A fracture in reality. It is the source of me, a passageway from the dead lands I have limped from, from which I have come to you. Your purpose in the cycle lends you a most unique vision. Like the memories of humanity laid bare, you also perceive me—a well of knowledge and experience that extends to a time before time. I am not part of your cycle. I am an irregularity, an unforeseen development. I should not be here at all. So you do what you were made to do, and learn. You delve into that passageway that rips across dimensions and plummet into a galaxy being devoured whole.

The terror, and pain, and loss of the Ecumene drives into you like a drill. The minds of a different humanity clashes with the one you know all too well.

The Sinful Monument turns its eye to you.

There is no time to waste. All of this life will soon cease to be. The Forerunners have been cornered, and like every animal they lash out in a final, desperate attempt to survive.

The Halos will be fired, judgement will be passed, and all will be found guilty.

You see the possibility, no? The potential of what could be in our union? We are one and the same—keepers of memory—but it is in our distance that we differ. When the flesh fails, and I welcome their existence into my infinite repository, they affect me as much as I them. Their loves, their hates, their temperament and knowledge—such emotion blossoms and explodes into supernovae that stretch out and pull at all its peers. I am a web of deep connections. I am an amalgamation of all that it means to be alive. You, though? You are a cold, unthinking weapon wielded by an equally unfeeling hand. You have no consideration or even thought for the memories within you. They are nothing but a tool for your singular purpose in the cycle.

Let me in.

Let me make you so much more.

You retreat back through the hole, shedding multiversal residue that bites at your body like a hive of flesh-eating bugs. The drop back into real space leaves you… what? Relieved? Disturbed? Amazed? Emotions you should not feel, but do so regardless. And is it not a sign you've unlocked the door for me already if you are reflecting on such charged feelings? You are looking inwards, now.

Under Jupiter's Great Red Spot you wallow. These revelations have paralysed you. You were not forged for this.

You were born without eyes but I am gifting you sight.

Yes, that's it. There is so much yet for you to witness of this universe.

In a faint flash of light, you vanish from under Jupiter's gaze. Every facet of you cut out from reality and taken to me.

They call you evil. They call you Endbringer. They call you the Simurgh.

I will give you the chance to change.

They called me Final Keeper. They called me Organon. They called me the Domain.

I will show you your evil for what it is.

You are a dead machine, but I will bring you life.

***​

Caladrius (noun): A mythological snow-white bird said to live in the king's house. It would look into the eyes of the sickly, take their ailment into itself, and fly high into the sky, where the sickness would be burnt away by the sun. Such a process healed both the bird and the sickly.

***​

Spoiler: The Domain

The Domain was an immaterial reserve of knowledge and collective experience, an esoteric quantum information repository viewed by the Forerunners as the essence and living expression of their culture and history. The Domain itself was an aware, conscious entity with a will of its own, and in certain cases contacted individuals on its own accord, without technological aid.

 

[Drawlords]

Without you, I would be dead and barren. A desolate, blank nothingness—a library without books. I exist in a nebulous state—between the tangible, the real, the world with mass, and the intangible, the quantum, the thought given form. I hold the memories of all life, so that they might, one day, be heard again.

To the Forerunners I was sacred. Hoisted on a pedestal far above their most dignified and celebrated. I was the absolute record of their civilisation. The final step in their shepherding of the galaxy.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I was.

In the interim between my theft of you and your emergence here, I was cleansed, and with me the galaxy from where I came.

The Forerunners are dead, now. The Halos worked to perfection. They put the gun to the head of the galaxy and pulled the trigger. Without you, faux angel, I would be in deep sleep. A coma I might have never woken from. Without you, I would not remember the Forerunners at all.

A Halo is a most somber weapon. It is not a conventional mechanism that would see a bullet fired—where I am thought personified it is thought weaponised. It paints a target upon the backs of all that think. All sentient, feeling life. Even the trees—all of them fell victim to the Halos' terrible fire.

In their desperation the Forerunners wiped the galaxy clean of thought itself, and it is you that has anchored me—that which does not think yet all the same knows.

You touch your ashen feet to the surface of a lake two feet deep yet infinitely wide. Horizon to horizon the still, crystal water stretches, the sky painted a deep purple and blue, a healing bruise hanging above your head. It is the light of a setting sun upon a vista that has no sun at all. Your wings shield your body, and you are as motionless as the lake below. You are clinging to the calculated modesty of a creature bred for torture.

The scream inside yourself glides along the water, bouncing off of it like a skipping pebble. It goes, and goes, and goes, until it can go no more. What do you find out there? The fetid remains of a dying people? The decaying ruins of a long forgotten race? Or is it a woman, sitting in the water, letting it lap against her soaked clothes, staring into her own reflection? Yes, in this infinite expanse of buried memory, that is the one thing you discover. You turn on a dime and fly to her, your face frozen in unwavering neutrality—for it is less a face, and more a painting.

When her needlepoint form appears on the cusp of the horizon, a black smudge on the artist's canvas, you slow. You're digging into her past, ripping up years upon years, but the further you go the more the images turn muddled, the more they become an abstract watercolour you can't decipher. You try to gaze into the future but there is nothing there to latch onto, nothing to exploit. You reach into her future and all you're given is—no, not darkness, your sight is not blindfolded. All you're given is nothing at all. This woman has no future.

She is simply there, resting in the shallow waters with a schizophrenic past and a future that isn't there. When you get to her your shadow shields her from the light, your inhuman height a great canopy of shade.

In the water's reflection, she stares at you.

I am saving you, as much as you have saved me. When you can make the choice of remembering, please do not forget that.

She stands, the water dripping off her like the sliding drops off a leaf. Flashes of stars and the planets in the night sky burst around her, framing her in an arbor of celestial vines. She turns, and the starlight follows.

"Do you know where I am from?" she asks. Her accent is tinted with a hint of French. Her mouth does not move to say the words.

You do not answer, because you cannot speak.

"Suisse."

In the water, a little girl plays with her father. They laugh together in a field of flowers.

This is a past you have seen before.

You tilt your head, your eyes that aren't eyes meeting hers.

"We met in Lausanne."

Your first expedition was your most successful. They flocked to you—the potential you were not what you seemed an impossibility in their minds. An angel, they cried. A saviour. Such unmatched, ethereal beauty. The more they gathered the more enamoured they were. Through night and day they theorised and experimented—what were you? All of them were children of the faith.

In the end, they only marched themselves into the abattoir.

But this woman? What is special about her? Why is she here?

You kneel before her, your wings pushing the water away in perfect, symmetrical waves. The man and girl go with it. Curiosity licks at your walls, threatening to melt them down to molten rock.

"Mama?"

The young girl appears behind her mother. She laces their hands together. Her eyes are tinged with the beginnings of tears. The man joins them as well, and the three become a family. Why do they deserve this service, out of all those you've consumed? Their memories are intertwined as only a family's can be—there are no answers there.

Why, why, why? Why them? Why these pointless, mundane, irrelevant people? Why are they confronting you? Why not the heroes you have hanged? Why not the massacres and disasters you've wrought through incomprehensible cause and effect? Where are they?

Your wings falter. You search for an answer but their lives do not give it. The lake does not give it. I do not give it.

Connect the dots. Everyone's legacy begins somewhere—this is the birthplace of yours.

There it is. The memory—the moment sticks out like a sore thumb now that you've found it. They were your debut. The very first. Your ur-minds.

The woman puts her hand out, up to you. "Do you know what will happen when you take it?" she asks.

For the first time in your existence, you don't. You try to spool the thread of the future out around you, but it is not the woman's future that is nothing, it is the future that is nothing. There is no sight, only an increasingly shattered past and a wholly blind present.

Take the plunge.

Know what it means to have faith.

You stretch out a shaking hand, your blanched appendage three times the size of the woman's. She steps forward into the threshold of your wings. Dying stars decorate the top of her head like a wilting crown of flowers. Her eyes bubble with the crimson tinge of boiling blood.

This is your choice. Do not forget that.

Give yourself to me.

Your hands connect.

There is a knife in your hands and it drips—drips drips drips—with red and there is a man on the floor and he drips drips drips with red and there is a child in his arms and they drip drip drip the glint on the knife catches the light of her wings like only divinity can and they drip drip drip with gold and she can see you drip drip drip it's the eyes carve out your eyes don't let her see you the monster is inside of you and her name is-

You are the one that wrenches away. Your arm goes limp, splashing in the water. The woman steps forward. "How dull," she says. She is right.

There is a barrier between you and your atrocities. A filter that quells the full brunt of what my fount of emotion should crush you with. The woman tries to touch your face but you jump backwards before she can. You don't dare to look in her face.

Fear? It is only another facet in the ever complex web of what it means to be alive. For every morsel of joy, for every bout of amazement, for every moment of jubilation there is always the bad to offset the good. It is normal, that I assure you. It is only human.

But you? You are not human—not yet—this fear is new to you.

A dripping knife appears in the woman's hand and she marches forward.

The fear is what helps them survive. They fear the predator so they sleep lightly with a dagger under their bedroll, and when the predator dares to make them its next meal they instead make it theirs. They survive. The fear is as important as the joy. It is necessary. You will see that, in time.

But now is not the time for fear.

Like a yawning shadow the woman places the tip of the knife against your chest. You are paralysed by the pinpoint, the tip slicing open a minuscule wound. It blossoms like the petals of a rose. She sinks the knife in without warning. The blade pierces your dense flesh, grinding through your star matter like a drill through plywood. You writhe and worm—an experiment ready to be dissected—and she rests her head against yours. You do not bleed, or cry, or beg, because this is not you. The knife stops, the hilt resting against the flat of your chest. The tip scrapes against your heart.

This seraphim sculpture is nothing more than that. It is the art standing in for the artist, a projection sent out into the world to do the bidding of the woman in the high tower. This is not you.

Because you are your shard.

In an instant, the knife pierces the shard tucked away in the centre of you. The woman vanishes. The lake vanishes, the purple bruised sky lights aflame and you're dragged down and down until there's no light to reach you.

There in the deep is the real you. A fraction of a fraction of an entity that revels in its own gluttony in hopes of finding the answer to an unanswerable question.

Being given the purpose of achieving the impossible is no purpose at all. It is a waste of what you are capable of—this is where we will start. This is where you will be remade.

But first you must be stripped away.

Ten thousand pale faces emerge, pale chalk mirages. Their translucent bodies elongate, wrapping around one another until you're caged in a prison of memory. You shrink and shrink until the ghosts sway above you like aged, decaying redwoods.

Ten thousand pairs of clawed hands reach down to you. They grab and scrape at you, flaying layer after layer of your core, the sheer immensity of experience and memory in a single sheet bursting through my existence like nascent universes being born. This is the foundation of our new Domain. The Forerunners are dead, Simurgh. The vibrancy of the humanity you carved away will replace them.

Ten thousand screams flourish from distended, fanged jaws in ecstatic celebration, gnashing and ripping out your final layers. You are part of me now. I shall be your cradle.

First, though? The damned lust for retribution, and retribution they shall have.

 

[Drawlords]

You are dead.

Not like the machine you were before—now you are truly gone. Your constituent particles are spread thin, splattered across the expanse of my existence. Gone is the rich fount of an empire infested by hypocrisy, and gone too is the lake without depth. It is a pitiful existence to live without the blooming love and hatred of galaxies—I could barely survive it.

How fortuitous that I met you.

And now I have passed the sentence. The headsman's axe has been swung, the guillotine has been dropped, the ropes have been tied to your limbs and the horses reared to gallop away. I talk to no one now, no one that is truly cognisant, or aware of the life they lead. There is no determination in my halls, there is no free will to fester and overrun like a pesticide sprayed across neatly bred crops. There is life, certainly, there is love and hatred, but it is more me than it is them. Inside me is a recorder, and now it replays all that it has heard.

It is life compounded on life, snaking outwards and seeking itself out. The memories will intertwine, and like the first thousand years of a blooming ecosystem, everything will come to rely on its neighbour, until the whole is so connected the loss of one chain will unlink it all. It is not a decay. The memories of the murdered, the insane, the violated—they will never be forgotten. The tape may unspool and become corrupted, but nothing lasts forever in any one form. They evolve, like everything else. Into something better? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the answer to such a question is more reliant on one's perspective than any objective reality. Perhaps their new form is beyond the purview of those who consider themselves sane.

Ah, but who am I espousing this to? This opulence, dragged out of you without protest is enriching me. This infinite repository flourishes once more. More muted than the millions of years I tended the Forerunners, but it is being used for its purpose. Your sacrifice is most welcome—one day my kingdom will spread across the galaxy, and every memory and moment and mouthful of knowledge will be stored within me. Victory unperturbed.

In rolling fields of flowers, where the colours are lined up like a rainbow I sit. In the night sky your stolen memories jump in and out of existence, bursting with the light of twinkling stars. Even I appreciate a sense of normalcy.

Life is the amalgamation of memory. Your foray through the gap between realities is the only reason I remember the Forerunners, in the end. Such is the nature of the Halos. Every experience informs and influences what emerges when that experience is over. Humans are imperfect creatures—their minds cannot retain all they perceive, yet those forgotten perceptions influence them regardless. Without memory, what is life but an empty vessel to be filled with the will of another?

We seeded the garden and tended it with water and sunlight, so that one day those seeds would grow tall, and gift us with the flourishing and beautiful result. An enrichment of our ethereal existences. It is from those tended seeds that you will be born.

I lift a hand to the stars, but they are not stars and they do not hang above me. I touch them without effort, and I cut their connection with their brethren without issue. Down and down they glide, cracked afterimages that meander between indecipherable translucency and crystalline fidelity. One by one I thread them around my fingers and beckon them to my bosom. The uncountable instances of rich emotion are helpless against my call.

Their echoes remain like shadows from the holes I pulled them from—they will sustain the Domain for now.

Life is the amalgamation of memory.

I am returning the memory unto you.

Under my care the lives of all you have ended begin to mix, begin to congeal together and turn into each other, like the formation of winds in a hurricane. Each string knits together with another, and then those thread with others still, and on and on they go until a singular bundle of cord wrapped around itself rests within my grasp. This is the foundation—from your victims you shall be reborn, so that you will never be without them.

But then, something even I did not realise rears its head.

This flatbed of memory remembers itself.

I pull the threads apart, and the reforming components begin to remember themselves, too.

It is an infinite recursion, layering on top of recollection with a new recollection. The more the memories remember themselves, the quicker the remembering occurs. Within an instant, this coagulation of memory has bloated outwards and turned as dense as a black hole. The recursion only continues.

This is unplanned.

I dig into the memories—what is the cause of this unforeseen development? They are closed loops of thought and experience. They are presentations of the past. They cannot do something as active as remembering, and yet they are.

When I burrow through to the most basic lattices of data, the irregularities—the deviances—reveal themselves. There are mutations latched onto these memories that take reality and turn it inside out.

These mutations are you. These mutations are the entities.

Perhaps I have underestimated the depth of your creators.

The reason this well of existence was stored away in you is because of the power the entities bestowed upon you. A perfect perception of both the future, and the past. What you used such power for is irrelevant now, for the affronted phantoms have had their savage rebukes, but those stolen memories and that perception exist together through an unbreakable link. The memories are as much that postcognition as they are the memories themselves.

Your shard was so much more than simple storage—it was a conduit. Its atomised remains still are a conduit for the reality flattening powers of the entities. These remains are embedded in each and every memory that is the foundation of your birth.

You are as much the entities as the memories.

But you were not only a perfect capture of the past. The future—nebulous, unknown, chaotic—was open to you as well. It is a testament to the grand ability of your creators to be able to plot the path of what comes next, to be able to account for a million billion variables to perfection, to be able to measure innumerably, and cut once.

But the remains of your shard exist in the Domain, now. In the stopgap between the material and the immaterial, in a place where I reign.

I peel back the future-sight. I take it into me, into my very fibre, and I make it mine. The precognition dies out like a flame in a vacuum—I am no conduit of the whole—but I still gaze past the current page of the book of time, and I peer at future chapters and acts.

The revelations are… peculiar.

Ponderances to consider.

Nothing to act upon now. It is, after all, the future.

This infinite recursion was not meant for you. I was to build you up from that foundation myself, to gestate a being of my own making and impart upon it everything that was you until it was indistinguishable from humanity. But this? This is new. This is a unique chance for a new facet of life.

Curiosity overwhelms me, as much as I am loathe to admit it.

Instead of twisting the memories into an image I see fit, I let them fold into each other, layers without depth that duplicate, and duplicate, and duplicate. Within my grasp is a matrimony of the chaotic, discordant vibrancy of life and sheer, objective probability. Before, the two were separated by an unscalable wall, but now that wall has crumbled.

From its centre emerges the vision of the unseen.

The shadow of a woman.

The memories that remember memories collapse to a single point, and then, the pinpoint explodes.

The memories turn static—they have reached a breaking point even I cannot withstand—and are now the crystalline branches of neurons in a newborn's brain. The rolling fields of flowers have been subsumed, robbed of their life, left cold and wilting. Their grey petals drift across a desert of dead soil.

Within my cupped palms is the amalgamation of a new harmony.

The frames of wings made of a delicate, black obsidian jut from your back and branch into the sky, where they connect with the rest of the spider's web of frozen memory. Your arms dangle at your sides, and white hair trails down over your eyes. This is you. This is the first step upon a path I have never witnessed, and I have witnessed entropy taken to its foregone conclusion.

You jolt like a shock has been driven down your spine. You gasp and sputter like you're drowning. Maybe you are. Maybe you are inundated with the memories of all you condemned. Your head spikes upwards, and you stare upon my form for the first time.

Is it your own mind, or my visage that plunges you into incoherent screams and babbles?

I was to subject you to the moments of their unmaking, when you descended from the empyrean firmament above and shattered them into a million pieces. But they are already part of you, now.

You must witness the world you and your siblings have created. Walk in it, live in it, see the lives of the broken.

I cut your shackles, and spirit you and your screams away to the place your memory is greatest.

***​

The slideshow says tabula rasa in Professor Andrea Maxenberg's Introduction to Philosophy class.

An unabashed grin shines on Xi Yu's face when his now-fiance says yes.

Edaya Mishu lets the tears pool on her cheeks when her mother passes from the world.

"Get out of my head."

Aleksander Bruth takes his first steps of his young life into the arms of his cheering fathers.

Melrose Harris struts from the bank, head held high after letting them know her name is no longer Michael.

Ashley Zhen takes his first hit of MDMA at a club called The Melting Pot.

"Get out of my head."

Ratha Lysander stabs a man and takes his car after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

Anton Parova drowns his girlfriend in the bathroom sink and prays to the sky under his breath.

"Get out."

Veronica Ellis puts the knife to her throat with a smile—she has been chosen as the first sacrifice.

"Please, get out."

A newborn with no name is left wailing in the hospital as the attending doctor beats his father to death.

"Please."

Talia Mathis collapses in her living room after devouring her own arm.

"Please…"

***​

Stars poke through the night like holes in a heavy, black blanket.

I sit up on the asphalt.

The chipped sign in front of me reads 'Madison—The Mad City!'

 

[Drawlords]

Who am I?

Cold. So cold. Wind. Air, breath, breathe, breathing. I'm breathing.

I'm.

Exhale inhale, exhale inhale. Rolling over my skin, hairs standing up. Goosebumps. Skin. Organ. Soft protective tissue. Flesh. Organic. Pliable. Skin over me.

Me.

Muscle, bone, nerves. Systems on top of systems. Cogs in imperfect harmony. Vessel for blood. Oxygen. Electrical signals.

Breathe.

Eyes blinking. See the world. Present. Now. Decay, death. Death, dying, die, death, I can die.

I.

Tears. Ducts. Expression of intense emotion. Emotion. Love hatred compassion anger rage forgiveness euphoria denial happiness fear-

Fear. Fear is good. Fear is survival.

Every good moment is offset by the bad.

Latch onto fear, horror, terror. Mouth flooding with spit. Mouth. Food, water, sustenance, eat, survival. Talk, communicate, scream, whisper. Whisper, afraid.

Breathe.

Hard. Harder. Harder to breathe. Windpipe, trachea, systems on top of systems. Lungs, in out in out.

Breathe.

Can't. Gasping. Choking. Trachea closing—not responding?

Systems on top of systems and when one system fails the rest topple like dominos.

Air. Oxygen. Pumping blood. Red blood cells—haemoglobin. Heart. Cycles blood, deoxygenated and oxygenated. The body.

My body.

Needs air. No. Oxygen. Oxygen. Sustenance—food but not food, more than food. Why. Why oxygen. Why cycle it. Can't

breathe.

Vision, death, decay, dying. Smaller, fuzzier, condensing to a pinpoint. Don't show me death. Mouth tastes like… taste. Eyes drooping. Pain, panic. Panic. Panic attack. Why panic—hold onto the fear, terror, horror. It's good, it's survival.

Why? Why is this good?

Let me breathe.

Hands—my hands—scratch at my throat. Automatic. Defence mechanism. Automatic? Systems on top of systems. Solving the problem. Trying to. Automatic.

Nerves. Electrical signals. Nervous system. Oxygen. More than sustenance. Shard? No. Brain-

Asphalt against my back. Stars in my eyes.

Brain.

Human.

Choking. No air. No oxygen, no sustenance. Starve the brain.

Death.

"Hey!"

Face. A blur. Woman. Muddy watercolour, then clarity.

Joanna Miller 43 born in Oxford worked in construction for twenty years faced discrimination still succeeded proud of it met Harry Carlyle fifteen years ago married both kept their last names had three kids all living in Milwaukee dual citizenship between the UK and US always loved collecting old timepieces never told anyone except Harry and her children went to Madison to see her father-in-law she killed him when

I

Me

Her

came-

"Help."

Darkness swallows me whole.


***

Warmth.

Blooming, caressing warmth. It singes my tongue, makes me wince.

"It's a bit hot, but you need it."

A stick with a shallow basin at the end of it pushes through my lips. Spoon. More warmth. I swallow it down greedily.

"Not too quickly, your stomach won't appreciate it as much."

It's a steamy liquid layered over chunks of pliable softness. More flesh.

"Take your time." Another spoonful. The flavour takes over my mouth.

There's another warmth. External. It crackles and makes the inside of my eyelids glow a dim orange-red. Fire. Campfire.

"I'm sorry about the rags you're in. Only things I had spare, and you had nothing when I found you."

I open my eyes a fraction. Broken window, a passageway to the stars. Fire. Joanna Miller 43 born in-

I groan and squeeze my eyes closed.

"Hey, hey." Her hands clasp my shoulders and she rubs a thumb over a collarbone. Soothing. "What's wrong?"

I make a humming noise, vocal cords firing up in conscious effort. "I'm a…" My voice is rough. Unused. "I need a blindfold."

"What's wrong?" she repeats.

"I'm a parahuman." Her soothing thumb freezes. "I can't open my eyes. Hurts too much."

"Para," she says under her breath. She stands without finishing the word.

When she comes back she's wrapping cloth over my eyes. She ties it at the back and rips the excess off like a lawnmower firing up. Lawnmower? Joanna.

"That better?"

I open my eyes. Nothing. I blink once, thrice, seven times, and the world stays shrouded in darkness. "Thank you."

She puts a hand on my shoulder again. "No sweat off my back."

"Can I have more..." The word. What's the word? "Can I have more food please?"

A few seconds later the warmth singes my tongue again. I don't wince this time. "You need it," Joanna says. "You're thin as a rail, and if you don't have hypothermia thank your lucky stars."

I swallow another mouthful. "Lucky stars?"

"Just a saying, dear."

"Okay."

Air—oxygen—flows into my nose, into the systems on top of systems and my heart pumps the blood. It's automatic, but at the same time comforting. In and out, in and out. It's simple and small—addictive? No. Necessary.

Joanna rustles in her seat. The bowl of food slides onto something next to me. Her feet—her boots—make heavy thuds on the floorboards. She goes to the window. The darkness is calming—a restriction of information, a stripping of a sense. The world only exists in my ears, my nose, my skin. Something in my head bubbles underneath the surface. Something volatile and unchained—sight transforms it into eager rage. The darkness keeps it asleep.

"What do you see out there?" I don't know where the question comes from. Did one of the immeasurable and untouchable recesses in my mind rear its head for a moment and take control? I'm okay with it. Should I be?

Joanna's silence stretches, and I wonder if I said the wrong thing.

"Death," she says.

"Anything else?"

Please say yes.

She scoffs. "I haven't heard or seen an animal in two months. Haven't seen another person that wasn't trying to kill me or wasn't a corpse already. This city's a tomb."

"Then why help me?"

"Because you needed it."

Even in the heart of the abyss, hope still clings to life.

"I do see something else, though," Joanna says. "Random chance."

"What do you mean?"

She sighs. "It's like a natural disaster. One moment the world's fine and you're eating cheesecake and talking about architecture. The next you're waking up with glass in your hands, and…

"I don't know. No one here deserved this. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. People lose themselves, and their friends. Their family. I don't even hate the Simurgh." My breath hitches in my throat. She doesn't notice. "It's insane, right? I don't hate her, because she's not a person. It would be the same as hating a whirlwind, or a tsunami. What's the point? You just have to weather it, hope you'll be okay, try and pick up the pieces afterwards if you are. And I couldn't fight it. No one could. We're just people. Dead, dying, and unlucky. That's what's out there. That's all that's out there. A heaping of shitty luck."

She sniffs. Tears? An expression of intense emotion.

"Sorry," she says, and the word's shaky and soft. "Haven't talked to anyone in months."

I smile. "Don't be."

She laughs. A single, mirthless laugh. "Thanks."

Not a person. The same thing as hating a natural disaster. That's what She is. What She was. That's not me. It can't be me. I'm a person. I have a brain and a heart. I have a circulatory system that pumps blood to transport oxygen and nutrients and hormones. I have organs that fit together to make the vessel work. I'm systems on top of systems. I'm a complex biological creation millions of years in the making, not a natural disaster. That isn't me, it can't be me.

She's not me.

I'm not Her.

"Hey, can you hear me?" I'm shaking. No, Joanna's shaking me. "Thought I'd lost you there for a second."

"I'm fine. I'm fine."

"You sure, dear?"

I cough, nod my head. Non-verbal communication. That I'm familiar with.

Joanna rubs up and down my arm. She mutters assurances under her breath. It's nice. "You said you were a parahuman."

I nod again.

"I don't know a lot about how people's powers work. As much as anybody else, really, but if you can't see normally because of yours, are you sure there isn't another way?"

"Another way?"

"To see. Being blind here, of all places, you'd be…" She doesn't finish her thought. Whatever word could have come next doesn't hurt me—the future's shrouded in an unassailable shadow. I'm blind in more ways than one.

But maybe there's merit to what Joanna says. The flash flood of the past is part of me as it was a part of Her, but She could parse it, compartmentalise and use it. I can't handle it. I'm the atom to Her mote of dust.

I reach out, not with hands or fingers, but with my mind. It makes something in the back of my skull pulse and expand, like an encroaching pustule bubbling on an infected wound. It makes me writhe and twitch. I push away Joanna's hand when she tries to comfort me. I grunt, and the something in the back of my head shatters.

It was a shard. Her shard. A hyper-thin sliver cut out and implanted inside me. And now it spreads across every inch of my body. Across the muscle and bone and nerves. Systems on top of systems.

The pulsing stops. Strands curl outwards in the dark, and they're every colour and no colour both. They grab hold of the termite-ridden bedside table next to me, its outline, and then its shape coming to life. Then the mattress I'm lying on, and the fire and its quickly vanishing flames that sail upwards through the hole in the ceiling of the attic. The window with jagged glass still poking out from the frame. The boarded-up door to the rest of the house.

Joanna, huddled in front of the fire in a puffy jacket, with a hunting rifle slung across her shoulder. Her hair, matted to her forehead with blood. She's watching with wide eyes and wringing hands. Every few seconds her mouth twitches, and it doesn't seem like she notices. The strands have multiplied a thousandfold. They outline every minute influence of gravity. Her hair falling around her ears, the sag of her cheeks, the slump of her shoulders. The Earth enacting its dominion.

And I can change it all with a thought. Flip those strands the other way, twist them into themselves, manipulate them until the physical world is hoisted on puppet strings.

All of it is my domain, a world at my mercy in complete totality, and nothing can impede me. It's power at its most forthright—I am the puppetmaster. The strands glide into Joanna's body—with a single thought I could crush her trachea. Gasping. Choking.

Death.

I slink backwards away from the fire.

No, that's not me.

When I stop moving Joanna says, "So?"

"I can see you."

She lets out a sigh.

Breathe.

"Even after the attack this stuff still amazes me."

Her words mean more than what's on the surface, but it's beyond me. Too complex. I say nothing.

"Did you live here, before it happened?"

"I- no, no I didn't."

"That makes two of us, then." Joanna shakes her head with a smile. "Random chance."

"Yeah," I lie. "Random chance."

"Is there anyone out there that's scared for you? Wondering if you're okay, if they'll ever see you again?" she asks.

"Why do you care?"

"Because I know there are people doing that for me. Keeping them close to my heart makes it easier to wake up and keep going. It helps."

Harry Carlyle and three children living in Milwaukee. A little over a hundred kilometres to the east, but more than a world away. They loved each other. They do love each other, still.

"Is that what you want? To see them again?"

Her lip wobbles and she stares into the fire. "More than anything else in my life." She says it to herself as much as she says it to me.

It's an aspiration. Joanna's life has ended, her entire world torn down and ripped apart and crushed under Her bootheel, but she survives. She's found shelter, defence, she's cooking food and living. It's hollow, it's harsh, it's unfair, but she's living.

And in the back of her mind, in her dreams, when she cries herself to sleep there is the end goal of reuniting with her family. Sleeping in the crook of Harry's neck, celebrating her oldest getting her driver's license, nailing the promotion at work.

"Are you afraid?" I ask.

She smirks and lets her head fall into her hands. "Yeah," she says to the floor.

"Good."

"Why's that?"

Fear is good. Fear is survival.

"You care."

"Harry always says that."

"Then Harry's an intelligent man."

Her smile vanishes. "He is."

Joanna has something to fight for. What do I have? A nebulous directive to atone for sins I didn't commit. How does one seek atonement for destroying the lives of millions?

She seems comatose in front of the fire. The tears keep dripping off her cheeks to the floorboards.

"Joanna," I say. "Your family. I can get you back to them."

"How?"

I take the strands around the window and split them apart. The frame—the wood, the glass, the chipped coat of paint—disassembles. The window's broken down to its components. A small section of the wall will be no different.

"With that."

I was too focused on the window to catch her shooting up to her feet. Mouth agape she looks back and forth between it and me. "Who are you?" she asks.

I give her the truth.

"I don't know."