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Creative Works Creative Writing Worm Ignis et Furor Thread startermarackomarac33 Start date6/1/2025 Tags worm (parahumans) taylor hebert alternate power alternate universeFirst Prev58 of 61Next LastJump to newIgnoreWatchThread toolsThreadmarksSidestoryApocryphaInformationalReader modeRuss Kaunelainen18/8/2025NewAdd bookmark#1,426Black_Nova said:Yeah, once Leviathan is dead (after a suitably epic battle) I can expect alot of people to start flocking towards Sol Invicta's banner.
Especially those who were dissatisfied with the previous status quo.Click to expand...Forget individual people. What would foreign states be willing to do for a security guarantee from someone that just killed an Endbringer?
Also, the US government is cracking down on coverage, huh... sort of interesting to imagine the damage that a foreign journalist might be able to do, if they're in the right place to observe the right things...Last edited: 18/8/2025 Award Quote Reply3 Remove this ad spaceThreadmarks 44 - Leviathan New Threadmarks marackomarac3318/8/2025NewAdd bookmark#1,427And we have finally reached the ultimate murderer of all Worm fics! The Leviathan battle!
May 5th 2011, 7:01 AM
The Docks, Brockton Bay, Solar Dominion of Brockton Bay
Sol Invicta stood on the cracked, rain-slick pavement as if planted there, the storm clawing at her form, the gale dragging sheets of water sideways hard enough to sting. The broken buildings of the waterfront rose around her: snapped pilings, hunched warehouses with their backs torn open, streets turned to churning gutters. Where the barrier had flashed a momentary honeycomb of salvation, there was only emptiness now, a ghostly afterimage in the eyes and the memory of the city holding its breath before it drowned.
Leviathan moved forward.
Its gait was all wrong, too smooth for something that big, all sliding ligaments and coiled hydraulics, a nightmare of angles that resolved differently every time she blinked.
Four red eyes, three to the left, one to the right, burned with no heat and no expression at all. Rain gravitated toward it, the storm organizing around its will; gutters overflowed in sudden surges when it idled, and the downpour thickened when it shifted its weight, as if the weather itself were attached to its tendons by invisible cables.
Her pupils thinned, burning amethyst narrowing to draconic slits. She bared her teeth.
First the government scum shell my city, murder my people, send their precious Triumvirate to die on my streets…then they carpet-bomb the ruins to salt the earth.
And now you.
A growl coiled in her chest and broke loose as a snarl. She ran.
The storm shoved against her; she shoved back harder. Golden light crawled along the seams of her armor like sunrise refracted in metal. The ground shuddered under another distant collapse as a building surrendered to water and weight, but her stride didn't hitch. The city was a roar in her bones. Hatred was the knife she breathed around.
Leviathan turned its head.
The motion was a suggestion more than a movement, a tilt that looked like a question in a language no human wrote. It raised one not-hand and stroked the air.
The wave that answered wasn't surf. It was judgement.
Compressed water shaped into a blade the size of a truck, cleaving toward her with the speed and certainty of falling.
She didn't meet it.
She wasn't there to meet it.
Space buckled with a sharp crack and cold pressure, and she stepped out of nothing at the monster's shoulder, rain instantly hammering her again. Her fist was already in motion when the world reassembled around it, a golden comet in miniature. She drove it into the side of the abomination's skull where flesh suggested a temple.
Impact detonated outward.
A rippling shockwave punched rain flat in a ring and turned windows that had somehow survived the night into jagged confetti. Leviathan's head snapped sideways with a wet, seismic thud that traveled up her arm and sat in her shoulder like a lodged stone. The thing rocked, overbalanced for a breath, clawed one foot-long talon into asphalt, and nearly toppled.
Down, she thought, savage satisfaction flashing bright and brief. Bleed for me, animal.
It didn't bleed.
It did something worse.
The air to her left darkened, then cleaved. An echo of water, a mirrored afterimage of the strike she'd just thrown, arrived out of sequence with the world. It hit her in the ribs with the force of a truck wearing the ocean for armor.
There was no bracing.
There was only gone.
The blow lifted her and erased the distance between her body and the nearest warehouse. Brick and steel meant nothing; she went through the corner in a screaming spray of masonry, tore a trench through stacked pallets of mildewed fertilizer and a snarl of conveyor belts, and blasted out the far wall in a new door the size of a subway car. The street caught her and made a sound like a sword being drawn across concrete as her armor scraped along broken aggregate, sparks spitting and dying in the rain.
She didn't tumble. She skidded, a thrown star losing heat, until a low office block decided to stop being a wall and became a crumple zone instead. The world hiccuped to stillness around the ringing in her ears.
For a breath, all she could hear was the storm. Wind in the rebar like a choir of dull knives, rain hammering sheet metal, the deep, ugly conversation of floodwater bullying its way down a staircase.
She tasted copper.
She pushed up. Her gauntlets bit into the half-collapsed facade, fingers leaving molten crescents in wet concrete. Armor plates shifted and settled. Golden light guttered and flared again against the rain.
She spat, a red thread vanishing into the flood curling past her boots.
Wretched beast. The thought came cold and clean through the ache, steadied by anger. This might be more difficult than I thought…
Sol Invicta rose from the crater, concrete sloughing off her shoulders in wet slabs. The street around her had become a sluice of brown water, a moving skin that tugged at her boots as if the city itself wanted to pull her down and keep her. The office block she'd used as a brake had sagged into a lopsided triangle, windows sporting shattered glass, rebar ribs bared to the rain.
She turned east.
Through the veils of downpour and the leaning silhouettes of warehouses, she could still see him – it – cantering through the drowned grid with that same obscene smoothness, all tendon and glide where there should have been weight. The flood curled around Leviathan's calves.
Run while you can, animal. I will tear your spine out and lash the storm with it.
Space folded on the intake of a breath.
She stepped out of absence into the world again, thirty feet from the Endbringer's flank, the storm's roar cutting back in with a slap against her eardrums. The ground shuddered. Not a shell this time, something deeper, like a drum struck beneath the skin of the city. Water leapt out of manholes and broke into fans that immediately collapsed into more rain.
He's doing something, Invicta concluded.
The pressure in the air changed, ears popped and then refused to clear. A fine mist lifted from the street and hung there, motionless for a heartbeat as if held on invisible pins, before it sluiced sideways and down with sudden violence. Her armor's seals protested. The taste of pennies spread across her tongue.
The rain intensified from brutal to biblical.
Her pupils thinned further. Heat climbed her spine like a lit fuse. Fangs slid past her lower lip, testing the air with a metallic scrape.
You drown my city to reach me? Then drown with it!
She vanished again, reappeared behind the Endbringer's spine where ridges of not‑bone rose and fell beneath skin that wasn't skin. Rain skittered off its surface in patterns that made her eyes want to slide away.
Her hand lifted, and stopped an inch short of contact.
Invisible force clenched.
Her will reached like a fist around a throat that refused to be a throat. The world around her tightened. The flood flattened, the rain dimmed, the very air hummed as if a wire had been strung through it. She gripped.
For the first time since January, the first time since the Sun woke in her blood, something pushed back.
The Endbringer's body resisted. The grip held, but only barely. Leviathan's stride shortened by a fraction; its torso hitched as if walking into an unseen turnstile. Muscles that were not muscles coiled against the pressure and began to pull in slow, inexorable clicks. The force she poured in came back as heat under her skin. Golden light crawled along the seams of her gauntlets and blew sideways in streamers in the gale.
She bore down.
The street cracked in a spiderweb around her boots. Water leapt up and slapped back down. The air buzzed hard enough to set her teeth on edge.
Yield. Yield to me!
A spear of light slashed down from the clouds and struck the Endbringer across the shoulders. Legend's arrival was a single straight line through the rain, crisp as a chalk mark on slate. His lasers carved gouges into the creature's not‑flesh that filled with water faster than they could bleed anything like blood. The wounds closed wrong and right at once, the edges knitting with an efficiency that mocked anatomy.
Behind him, others came, government capes in tight formation, power signatures hitting the monster's flanks like hammer blows from different gods. The air filled with staccato concussions and the high, thin scream of energy weapons. A sonic burst flattened rain for a hundred feet. A kinetic lance snapped a segment of Leviathan's ribbing and sent it spinning end over end into the flood.
It was spectacular.
It was useless.
Leviathan flexed. Her telekinetic hold slipped a fraction, then another, as if she were trying to put a river into a cup. The monster's arm – hand – claw – flickered. A flying cape in dark blue didn't have time to scream. One moment a man; the next, a red vapor threaded instantly to nothing by the flood.
No! Rage pulsed so hard she tasted bile. This is my city! I am the Sun Arisen!
She moved with the thought. Space folded and put her at the Endbringer's heel, her fist already blurring in an arc meant to snap the back of its neck. The strike never landed.
An absence opened and a presence arrived. The water echo found her in the instant before she belonged in the place she had just chosen. It was like being tackled by a train that had decided to be the ocean for a joke. It hit her hip and ribs and tore the breath out of her with surgical contempt.
Then there was just down.
She crunched into the drowned street hard enough to rattle the streetlights. Asphalt and stone bulged in a wide ring, the flood rearing back and collapsing into her crater with a fat, ugly splash. The world blearily snapped into new angles; her ears filled with cotton and alarms.
Her earpiece crackled and spat Aurora's voice through static and water, thin with distance and strain. "Mistress– *kzzt* –you need to disengage– *kzzt* –attempting to leverage the aquifer beneath the–"
She tore the line out of her head with a thought, flattening the channel to a hiss.
Later. Her anger sharpened. There will be time for plans when the corpse is cooling.
She came up in one violent motion, rain sluicing from the plates of her armor. Light detonated along her shoulders like dawn breaking in a series of flares. Wings of radiance unfurled from her back, each blade of light a vector pointing at murder. The whites of her eyes drowned to ink and her amethyst eyes shone with pure hatred and unquenchable fury.
"Raaagh!" The sound ripped itself out of her throat and shook the rain into mist. Come then! Come and die!
She kicked off the crater lip and launched back into the storm.
——————————————————————————————————————————
Legend tracked the Endbringer through the bands of rain.
The monster cut across the Docks in that wrong, frictionless gait of its, water steepening under each step as if the ocean itself leaned in to help. Every trick they threw at it, every angle, every cape thrown at it… it watched, it learned, it adapted. He had seen this movie before. Everyone had.
No one liked the ending.
Invicta streaked down like a thrown sun and hit Leviathan square in the side of the skull. The shockwave flattened rain. For a heartbeat he allowed himself the smallest ember of hope.
Maybe raw power would do what strategy never could.
Then the water echo arrived out of order and erased her from the air.
She scythed through a warehouse and ploughed the street until a building made her stop. Legend winced despite himself, then corrected for a lateral gust and dropped, flaring light at the last instant to turn a kill‑impact into an arrival. He planted on skidding boots beside the crater and held a hand out she didn't take.
"We need to work together, Invicta," he said, fighting to make his voice carry clean over the storm. "Leviathan doesn't care about–"
"Out of my way, worm!" she spat, pushing up out of her own wreckage, and was gone before the syllable stopped echoing. Teleport bloom, golden afterglow, nothing left but heat and a ringing in his teeth.
She's going to get herself killed at this rate. The thought formed uninvited and ugly. He batted it away like a gnat. And would that be such a bad– No. Not today. You don't think like that on Endbringer days. Not if you want to walk out with anything soft in you left intact.
He took the air again and the battlefield breathed around him, a ballet collapsing toward entropy. Of the fifty‑seven capes who'd followed him into the Endbringer's maw, forty‑one were still in the sky or on their feet. Five minutes, less. He could feel the subtraction like a cold wind at his back.
The ground shook in long, patient pulses. Not the random punctuation of artillery, they'd called that off, or the coincidental rhythm of collapsing buildings. Deeper. Intentional. As if the city had turned slick under their boots and begun to slide on a layer of something oily, inch by inch toward the lip of the world.
He's using the aquifer, Legend thought, remembering a thousand briefings and a hundred autopsies of ruined towns. Trying to pull the whole plate into the sea. He tasted metal, rain and fear and ozone and the hum of his own power.
He found Invicta again because finding the brightest thing in the world wasn't hard. She had taken the monster from behind, her palm upraised, invisible force cutting lines in the rain around her where it pressed the world into a shape she wanted. For the first time since she'd put a boot on this road, the thing checked – not stopped, not even slowed by half, but a hitch, a stutter in that obscene glide.
Legend cut a line across Leviathan's shoulder with a laser hot enough to vaporize modern armor, felt it bite, saw it not bite enough. The wound filled with water and something that wasn't water and smoothed itself as if the injury had never been more than a rumor.
Behind him, the line he'd led arrived in a staggered wave.
Beams, pulses, sonic compressions, kinetic blasts, a blizzard of angle and approach. Cinereal's ash bloomed in a black flower and immediately sagged under the weight of humidity; her chokehold on oxygen lasted seconds before the rain strangled it. A heavy hitter in granite armor hit Leviathan like a siege ram and bounced like a rubber ball, caroming through a glass curtain wall and out the other side in a hail of safety pebbles.
Leviathan flexed and the world flexed with him. Invicta's invisible hold slipped. The Endbringer's claw flicked. A flyer one rank over vaporized into a red ghost that the rain annihilated as if embarrassed by it. No scream.
Not again, Legend thought, stomach twisting, and drove a spear of light into the thing's flank hard enough to carve a tunnel out the other side of a destroyer. He didn't wait to see the result; you never waited. He juked as the tail came round, a scissoring blur that would have made pulp of him if he'd been a fraction slower. Spray turned into knives around his face; his visor boiled dry and fogged again in the same second.
Where the hell are you, David? The thought rang the way a struck bell does when you already know no answer is coming. You don't get to sulk because she bloodied your nose. Not for this. He forced his eyes back where they belonged, on vectors, on friendly positions, on what he could still influence. I'm here, despite Becky. The name snagged like a fish hook in meat.
He turned the pain into motion.
Cinereal peeled off, ash clumping to nothing in the lash of rain. Leviathan turned toward her with the dispassionate attention of a man swatting a fly and unspooled a tendril of water that wasn't water, a rope thrown by a god. Legend angled to intercept, too far, too slow…
The tendril shattered inches from Cinereal as if it had hit a pane of glass nobody else could see. Telekinetic counterforce skittered through the downpour, leaving ripples he could feel and not see.
Invicta hovered between Cinereal and the Endbringer for a heartbeat, head cocked, eyes like knives in a face that had decided it didn't owe anyone softness anymore.
Maybe she sees it now, Legend thought, a ridiculous, reflexive hope flashing up like a match in rain. Maybe she–
Then he caught the shape of her mouth and the angle of her gaze. It wasn't protection. It was spite. She hadn't saved Cinereal for Cinereal. She'd done it because Leviathan wanted her and Invicta couldn't bear to let him have anything, not even that.
"Damn it," he said, aloud and entirely to himself, and turned back into the teeth of it.
Invicta extended both hands. Her shoulders squared in a way that had become shorthand in two dozen hard briefings. Legend's eyes widened. He knew the signatures of a dozen careers and fifty hundred bad ideas, and this was a worst‑case wrapped in gold.
"All units," he snapped over the open channel, voice dropping to command pitch out of long habit, "disengage. Disengage now. Clear the target. Clear the–"
Twin stars ignited in Invicta's palms.
He could have sworn the rain hesitated, uncertain of its loyalties.
She fired.
The lances weren't beams; beams have a start and an end and these were assertions. They wrote a line from her hands to Leviathan at a speed the world didn't have time to argue with. Impact wasn't impact but arrival, two points of impossible brightness appearing inside the Endbringer's mass and deciding that everything near them would prefer to be elsewhere fast.
For a single instant, the storm became daylight.
Sound arrived as pressure, a hand bigger than the city clapping once.
The shockwave knocked him sideways and turned the sky into a kaleidoscope of tumbling capes and debris. Buildings already broken sighed and tipped, and the ground took their weight and shuddered under it. Rain flashed to steam in a curtain that rose in a wall and was ripped apart by wind as soon as it existed.
Under him, the constant low grumble of the sliding city jacked up into a throatier, angrier tremor. A fissure leapt down a side street in a jagged line and gulped a parked car that had somehow survived everything else until now.
Legend burned power into lift and held himself where he was by force of will and a familiarity with ballistic math that bordered on friendship. He lost track of Invicta in the whiteout of steam and dust. He didn't lose track of the part of his brain that did calculations even when he begged it not to: energy in, material out, the kinds of numbers that would have broken any map if the Endbringer had been a building and not a rule with a body.
She didn't wait for the world to finish reacting to what she'd done. Of course she didn't. She threw herself into the furnace she'd made, wings of light flared wide, screaming a wordless challenge that cut straight across all the radios and the weather and set his teeth on edge.
Two seconds later – before the ash curtain had finished thinking about being a cloud – something inside the blast shrugged and said no.
Invicta came out of it like a marble kicked by a giant.
She punched through the sound barrier so close to him the pressure made his ears complain in a dozen unforgiving ways and then drilled into the street half a mile away with the kind of impact that looked like a special effect until you remembered it wasn't.
He heard the skidding more than saw it, armor scraping wet concrete in a scream that the rain immediately tried and failed to smother.
Legend barely tracked Invicta's arc across the map before the battlefield shifted again beneath his feet. Leviathan turned, and the ocean answered. Another wall of water shouldered up behind the Endbringer, broader, angrier, a verdict coming due.
"All units, high ground, now, now, now!" Legend snapped, and didn't wait to see who argued. You didn't argue with water.
You survived it or you didn't.
The wave didn't break on the shore.
It broke before it reached it – shattered as if some invisible fist had punched a hole in its heart. The front collapsed into a thousand lesser fists that went looking for streets to own. Legend's head snapped up.
A green shape cut down through the thick rain, familiar as the ache in his jaw.
Eidolon.
Legend smiled, a quick, involuntary thing that hurt as it happened. "About time," he breathed, and then louder into his earpiece: "Eidolon arrived!"
The Endbringer noticed, the way a cat notices a mouse that finally stops preening and runs. Its attention pivoted. The city's slide slowed by imperceptible degrees as Leviathan's focus bled from geologic murder to personal sport.
David didn't bother with entrances.
He arrived already emptying a quiver that refilled itself as fast as he thought of new arrows – forking lightning that split and re-split around the Endbringer's mass; tight beams of violet that cut with a surgeon's contempt; micro-singularities that chewed edges out of the thing's flanks and spat them back as slurry; something else, nameless and ugly, that hammered at joints and made the monster's gait hitch and then fail. Leviathan crashed to one knee; then to both; then to the street, a fallen idol scouring furrows in the flooded asphalt.
Legend dove to harry the head while David worked the legs, the old dance clicking into a pattern his body had learned long before his mind was ready to trust it. For six glorious seconds, the world made sense.
Then Leviathan's tail or hand or the part of him that was always where you didn't expect it to be whipped out in a blur faster than prediction, and David vanished laterally into a midrise like a bullet deciding to be a man again.
Legend swore and juked under a scything wall of water that would have planed his skin off if he'd been half a second slower. He arrowed for the impact plume, burned a hole through a collapsing facade, and found Eidolon already shrugging concrete off with a snarl that belonged more to a street fighter than a myth.
"Eidolon," Legend said, pulling at his arm. "He isn't playing around today. He's going for the foundations. The aquifer–"
"Then we don't have time to talk about it," David snapped, shaking free. His eyes were wrong in a way Legend had seen before and chosen to ignore. "Move."
They moved, punching back into the storm just in time to see a golden missile with a woman's shape slam into the Endbringer's torso and drive him three body lengths backward. Invicta howled in a voice that beat on eardrums like fists and hammered blows into the creature's skull until its water echoes were a continuous storm of counterpunches.
She danced between them. There was no other word.
Teleports snapped like synapses firing: here, there, there, her fists arriving from impossible angles, her body slipping between slicing tendrils with a grace that would have looked like arrogance if it hadn't been so obviously murderous. For a heartbeat she looked like the Simurgh inverted and set on fire.
David's jaw locked. "We help her," Legend said, and didn't leave room for argument. David snapped his eyes to his friend, eyes burning with spite and hatred and anger.
Keith spoke before David could. "I know." He risked the words that cut both ways. "She killed Becky. We'll answer that. But not now."
Something in it reached whatever part of David still catalogued priorities.
He gave one sharp nod and began to gather a darkness in his palm that ate rain as it fell. He waited, timed it, then fired at Leviathan's planted knee just as the Endbringer raised a foot to stomp the golden comet pinned below. The blast hit with a sucking thunk, the way a vacuum hits a seal; it tore mass out of a joint that had never been a joint and left it lighter where it needed weight most.
Off-balance, Leviathan crashed, the fall knocking spray into halos and splitting asphalt like clay.
Legend didn't waste the opening. Lasers lanced in tight, surgical lines, carving at the other knee, at the hip, at the places where anatomy might have been if design had cared about biology. Around them, the surviving capes read the moment and poured everything they had into it, a strobing fusillade of human invention and borrowed miracles.
Invicta didn't sit idle.
Pressure rolled out from her in a wave that hit his bones with a sense of being pushed gently by an elevator with malicious intent. The street around Leviathan crushed. Not cracked, not broke, but powdered, concrete and rebar and roadbed reduced to a slurry that bled into the flood. The Endbringer's awkwardly positioned right leg, already half‑chewed by David's gravity trick and Legend's cuts, met that rolling force and came apart like bad scaffolding.
It tore free with a sound they had not heard come from an Endbringer before, wet and metallic at once. The severed limb tumbled, skittered, and slammed into a warehouse that folded under the impact like a paper model.
Legend felt the hope like a misfire in his chest.
He let it happen anyway.
Are we… he didn't say it aloud, didn't jinx it, didn't let the word winning cross the air where the storm could hear it and take offense. He only glanced at David and saw the same raw, incredulous edge reflected back.
For the first time since the nightmare began, for the first time since Behemoth's debut nearly 20 years ago… the future twitched and pointed at something other than a crater.
——————————————————————————————————————————
Chaos had a sound: overlapping radios, boots squelching through wet canvas aisles, the clatter of hard cases snapped open and slammed shut, a dozen voices trying to share the same air. The command tent thrummed with it. Fluorescents buzzed under rain‑bowed tarps. Generator exhaust added a sweetness to the wet, metallic stink of storm and sweat.
Director Tagg's headache had graduated from complaint to principle. It pulsed behind his eyes, in time with the radios.
"-Second Battalion, fall back to Anvil. Repeat, Anvil. Do not wait on stragglers–"
"-all motorized elements shifting south on Route 40. Priority evac for wounded, go, go, go–"
"-do NOT fire on Dawnguard markers. Truce protocols in effect. Verify IFF before engagement–"
"-heavy contact between Leviathan and parahuman units in the Docks. All conventional forces avoid, repeat, avoid, the Docks grid–"
The ground under Tagg's boots shivered with a patience that felt personal. Not the sporadic thumps of artillery, those were gone now, pulled by order and by necessity. This was a low, continuous persuasion, as if the soil were reconsidering its loyalties.
They'd figured out the game.
Leviathan was using the aquifer like a pry bar, greasing the city's foundations, coaxing Brockton Bay into the ocean one sliding inch at a time. Newfoundland had been a lesson no one had wanted to learn.
This was the exam.
Ten miles south, sheltered by distance and plywood, the retreat still felt like drowning. Drone feeds on the main wall showed suburbs they'd bled for becoming braided rivers of brown water and loose shingles. National Weather Service and FEMA updates crawled the bottom of a secondary screen in officious blue: coastal flood advisories extending down past Boston; ten‑foot waves overtopping breakwaters; "harbor inundation in progress."
Tagg almost laughed.
The sound would have come out wrong.
They were relying on her now. On the terrorist, the traitor, the woman he had intended to put in cuffs or a bag. Sol Invicta would hold the coastline or the coastline wouldn't be held at all.
Colonel Patrick Brown looked as if the night had come to live in the meat of his face. His eyes were red‑rimmed, his jaw shadowed, his uniform damp to the bone. He stared at the tactical overlay as if willing its icons to make more sense.
Major Anton Willard, Brown's adjutant, cleared his throat and edged into the small piece of space the two senior men had carved from the storm.
"Sir. Director." He kept his voice low and practical. "We should consider moving the CP further inland. Just a contingency. If the Triumvirate–" he dropped his voice further, "-reduced as they are… can't hold it, we're in the floodplain. Ten miles isn't far with that thing pulling."
Tagg didn't let the thought get traction. "No. Major, you know as well as I do that we're the only thing keeping this from collapsing into a rout. We move now, we shatter comms. We lose units in place we could have gotten out. We're last out."
Brown didn't bother couching it. "We are not abandoning our boys," he said, and the tent seemed to hear him. "We're last out. Got it?"
"Yes, sir." Willard flushed, nodded, and vanished back into the eddies of the room.
Tagg didn't blame him for asking.
None of this was in any manual any of them had read.
The Endbringers sat above doctrine as cleanly as chess sits above checkers.
The tent shuddered hard enough that coffee jumped in paper cups. Heads snapped up. The noise dipped.
"What was that?" Brown barked, looking for an answer he could put a hand on.
"Sir… look." A radio tech pointed. Camera Three, the Docks, bloomed white, then orange, then settled into the particular incandescent wrongness of a city‑block‑sized detonation. A mushroom cap lifted above the rain like a joke God had told at their expense.
"Christ," someone said, close enough to be overheard and too tired to be ashamed of it.
Another feed caught the aftermath: a golden speck punched out of the boil as if spat by a titan. Invicta's body line was clean even when it was being treated like trash; she ripped a line of vapor out of the air as she broke the sound barrier and cratered into a street that knew her too well by now.
On the next monitor over, a green streak knifed down through the stacked weather like an arrow finding a seam. Eidolon. The word moved through the room in a whisper, and backs straightened a fraction you could measure.
No one cheered. You didn't cheer when an Endbringer came. But the frantic edge dulled to something harder, more durable.
"Keep the corridors clear," Brown snapped, already riding the surge. "If you've got units in the north cul‑de‑sacs, get them out. No heroics. Air stays grounded unless you want to donate pilots. Anyone still in the Docks, and I don't care whose uniform, mark their coordinates for pickup and pray."
Tagg pressed fingers into his brow hard enough to see stars and went back to work. The storm had a timetable. So did they. Between them was the thin, stupid instinct not to let go of a rope just because your hands were bleeding.
The tent's false ceiling thrummed like a drumhead. Radios talked over one another. The floor had become a patchwork of damp footprints and maps gone soft at the folds. Tagg rubbed two fingers into the hinge of his jaw until the pulse there felt like someone else's.
"Director," Dragon said, voice clean as a scalpel through the noise. "Strider has begun cycling West Coast Protectorate assets. First lift is en route. We expect to make landfall in three minutes."
For the first time in two days, Tagg felt a seam give in the pressure behind his eyes. "Finally. Good. Dragon, patch your net to our withdrawal grid and help me–"
A different monitor roared to life, overriding half the wall. The Situation Room filled the frame like a stage set. President Sorensen stood at the head of the table, hair pinned like a weapon, eyes hot.
"Belay that," she snapped without preamble, gaze knifing sideways toward Dragon's window. "You will not send additional forces until we confirm that Invicta is dead."
The tent went still in the way a battlefield sometimes does when both sides see the same flash and can't yet tell who owns it.
"Madam President…" Tagg began.
"I did not authorize any ceasefire with terrorists," Sorensen barreled on. "The Truce does not apply to kill‑order capes, and Invicta and her gang are precisely that. This is gross insubordination!"
"Madam President–" Colonel Brown tried, and got a look that could have frozen rain.
"And don't think I've forgotten you," she bit out. "Retreat?! In our moment of victory?!"
"Madam President!" Dragon's voice rose, not loud, but with an edge that demanded room. "Field conditions are extreme. If Leviathan is not stopped, it will not be Brockton Bay alone. My predictive modeling is already showing coastal failures as far south as Boston." She paused for effect, hoping to reach the enraged official. "Gillan is the President who lost the Bay. Are you prepared to be the President who lost New England? Because that is exactly what happens if we fail to repel Leviathan."
Silence swallowed the tent.
Even the radios seemed to hold their breath.
Sorensen's mouth tightened. Then, with visible effort, the angle of her shoulders shifted; some of the anger left her face, leaving exhaustion and bone. "I apologize," she said. "That was… unbecoming. But the fact remains: we cannot let Invicta leverage this into a propaganda victory. I will authorize a limited ceasefire with rebel forces." Her eyes cut back to Tagg. "But you will make absolutely certain that a Protectorate cape lands the finishing blow. Not the–"
The screen went to snow.
Every head in the tent swung toward the comms pit. Tagg's bark came out sharper than he liked. "What just happened? Did the relay take a hit?"
"Negative, sir," the senior operator said, already juggling three handsets. "We're green to all field units. Boston, Hanscom, Norfolk – links steady. It's… just D.C."
A weight settled into Tagg's gut like a dropped tool. "Of course it is."
Dragon's window flickered and stabilized. "I can confirm a cascade failure across the greater Washington, D.C. area," she said, listing out the litany of more bad news. "Pentagon is dark. So is PRT HQ. Agency nodes dark. Phone, internet, secure nets, all down."
Brown's face went hard. "EMP?" He glanced at Tagg. "Dawnguard can't be that crazy. To violate the Truce on an Endbringer day–"
Tagg was already shaking his head. "They've been bubbled up under their damn shield before today and nobody left the city since the shield dropped. This isn't them." He stared past the screens for a beat, feeling the shape of the hole where the capital should be. "Someone's taking advantage of the chaos."
He didn't say the word China, but it hung there anyway.
The world had teeth.
They'd just gotten a reminder.
The room absorbed it the way soldiers do, by adding it to the stack of things to deal with later and not letting go of the rope in their hands. Tagg dragged his eyes back to the map and found the only decision that mattered right now.
"Focus on what we can control," he said, voice flat. "We survive the Endbringer, or none of this matters." He pointed with two fingers at the evac grid. "Keep the corridors open. Get our people out. Dragon, bring the reinforcements. I don't care about optics at thirty thousand dead. We do not let Leviathan make a repeat of Kyushu out of the East Coast."
"Understood," Dragon said, already smaller on the wall as her attention fanned out across a dozen new tasks. "Strider's first wave on approach in one minute, forty seconds. I'll coordinate with Legend and Eidolon."
Brown snapped new orders down the line, voice regaining some of the gravel Tagg trusted.
The tent's noise came back, not frantic this time, but linked, a sound like a machine remembering what it was for.
Tagg let out a breath, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried not to think about the dark spot on the map where the country's brain should be. He didn't have room for that. Not yet.
He would deal with one disaster at a time.
——————————————————————————————————————————
The bunker trembled in slow, patient intervals, as if the city above were breathing water.
Dust sifted from a seam in the concrete like gray snow.
Screens threw stormlight across steel and tired faces.
Colonel Aurora Videntia tucked a stray strand of blonde hair back into the tight coil at her nape and smoothed her collar flat. Two seconds. Not wasted. Her uniform was immaculate, pressed lines, polished pins, because the world was coming apart and something had to remember not to.
"Lady Invicta removed her earpiece," Captain Jack Morrison reported at her shoulder, voice hoarse but level. "We're dark."
Aurora's eyes, glacial green and very still, tracked the harbor cams. The wave had come and broken. The barrier arc had held and died. Rain had thickened into ropes. On another screen, a gold flare tore a trench of daylight in the storm and vanished in a churn of steam. The earthquake-that-wasn't rattled a pen across the map table and left it trembling at the edge.
"Mistress knows," Aurora said. Of course She knows. Knowing is not planning. She breathed once, clean and measured. "We adjust."
Jack waited for orders as if they were a rope and he was done drowning for the morning.
"Captain, you have the bunker," she said. "Begin phased evacuation of all non‑essential personnel to Captain's Hill. Priority echelons one and two. Clear the corridors inside of ten."
He blinked once. "Understood."
"Re‑task Major Dallon's SRS to Dawnguard asset extraction, then vector them to Captain's Hill staging. Use parahuman mobility corridors. No entanglements with Protectorate or Army unless fired upon. The Truce stands."
"Affirmative." A beat, then the question he couldn't not ask: "Ma'am… are you going out there?"
She turned from the wall of storm and looked at him. Bunker light sheened across her irises, made them glass. "Yes."
He nodded, a movement that tried not to be permission. "Godspeed."
God has nothing to do with it.
She shifted command authentication to Jack and stepped back. The timings between tremors were wrong, the long waves nesting inside shorter ones like teeth. Her power whispered what it meant in her ears. Aquifer leverage. Macroscale displacement. Newfoundland rewritten on their streets. Leviathan wasn't merely breaking the city; he intends to drown it.
The next thought was Aurora's own. Unacceptable.
She needed to warn her Mistress – no, not warn; move her. Words wouldn't reach through that sky. Radios wouldn't. She needed a line the storm couldn't cut. She needed Missy Biron.
"Lieutenant Biron," she said into her lapel. "Report."
Static, then a voice that sounded older than yesterday: "Biron. Copy."
"I need you at City Hall," Aurora said, already walking. "Immediate. Then you'll take me to our Mistress. We do not have time to drive."
A breath, the shape of a nod. "Affirmative, ma'am. Folding space. Ninety seconds."
Aurora cut the line, transferred her sidearm to a better angle on her hip because ritual demanded it, and left the bunker for the first time since the shelling began.
The world hit her like a slap.
Downtown had been stripped to its skeleton, facades peeled back to ribs, streets slumping where water found purchase. Solar standards hung in tatters from light poles, sunbursts sodden and dark. A generator coughed and caught.
Aurora stood under the broken cornice and looked past ruin to the horizon. Through veils of rain, Leviathan moved with that wrong grace, his interest carving itself into the city's bones. To the south, a blue‑white line wrote itself into a cloud and stabbed down. Legend. Closer, a gold comet tore itself out of a crater and went hunting. Her Mistress.
The storm swallowed both and spat both back.
They will break each other if I do nothing. Mistress has to know!
A Dawnguard runner skidded to a halt three meters away, saluted with a hand that shook, and nearly collided with a medic hustling a stretcher the other direction. Aurora stepped between them and both parties passed as if she were a pillar they had not yet noticed was holding up a ceiling.
As Tattletale, she thought, turning the old name over with clinical curiosity, I would be elsewhere already. Counting exits, calculating odds, selling this to whoever looked least doomed. My Mistress found me, refined me, peeled the cowardice out with the rot. The fear is… smaller now.
She smirked slightly. How things change.
The air flexed in front of her with a soft, pressure‑popping crack.
Missy Biron stepped out of a folded seam in reality, boots kissing wet pavement without a splash. She looked like someone who had been aging by hours instead of years – soot‑streaked, shaking at the edges, eyes bright and hard.
Aurora kept her voice level as the world tried to come apart.
"Lieutenant," she said, eyes on the storm's horizon, "do you have any of Major Alice's… special ordnance left?"
Missy's jaw tightened. "No, Colonel."
Damn it. A long shot, and still worth the ask. Very well.
"Fold us closer," Aurora said. "To the Docks. No hesitation."
"To the Docks," Missy echoed. She didn't flinch. Her hands moved in small, precise arcs, as if pinning a map at invisible corners, and space obliged. The rain blurred, stretched; the street bent like warmed glass and snapped into a new angle.
They stepped through the first corridor and the city changed shape beneath them.
Blocks that should have been parallel met at wrong angles. Alleys lengthened, then compressed to a breath. The storm smeared across windows as if someone had dragged a thumb through wet paint. Every fold brought a new scene, and each was its own small crime: a roof peeled like a can lid; a bus jackknifed into a pharmacy; a cul‑de‑sac drowned in a ring where tidy lawns had been.
"Rebuilding is going to be a nightmare," Missy muttered, almost to herself, as they slipped from one skewed perspective into the next. "Months to clear. Years to fix. If we get power back to the east grid before…" She cut herself off, biting the thought.
Aurora allowed a small, sideways smile. "I thought training had beaten the optimism out of you."
Missy gave a breath of a laugh that had more iron than joy. "I guess I'm incorrigible, ma'am."
"Indeed," Aurora said. Survive first, Lieutenant. Then we can worry about the mosaic. "Eyes up. Another fold."
Space tightened, then let go. The corridor opened onto a mid‑rise with its face torn off, rooms displayed like a dollhouse to the rain. Inside, a family huddled behind an upended table as a torrent slashed through the hallway, eating plaster, gnawing at studs. The building had a lean to it that meant minutes, not hours.
Aurora's mouth was already opening to say ignore them – not because she didn't care, but because priority was a blade you had to choose how to turn. We go to our Mistress. We move the battle three degrees left. We save a thousand by letting ten drown.
She hesitated. The thought struck and stuck like a burr. Would my Mistress want me to step over her people to reach her? Is the Solar Dominion only better uniforms and cleaner lines… or better choices?
"Liuetenant. Halt."
The girl's head snapped toward the exposed floors. She saw what Aurora saw, and her face changed, something uncoiled that had been wound too tight since yesterday.
"We're going to help them," Aurora said.
Missy nodded, sharp and immediate. "Aye, ma'am." She reached, and the corridor stretched like fabric toward the ruined mid‑rise. Distance remembered itself into something manageable. On the far side, gravity felt confused for a heartbeat; the river down the hallway stuttered as the angle of fall lied to it.
Aurora went first. The torrent grabbed for her boots and slid off polished leather as if snubbed. She vaulted the gap into the open living room and found a child's wide eyes under a table leg, a mother with a bleeding scalp, a grandfather braced against a door that refused to stay shut.
"Dawnguard," Aurora said, as if introductions mattered and therefore they did. "Come." She lifted the table and turned it into a shield against the water with a practiced shove; Missy knotted the space between door and frame so it fit for the first time in an hour; the torrent's bite dulled to a hard push.
The mother sobbed once when she saw the corridor that was not a corridor, light bending where hallway should have been, and then gathered the child without question. The grandfather tried to argue about shoes, about a photograph, about the way of things, and Aurora took his elbow and gave him the look she reserved for men who were very certain and very wrong, and he came.
They crossed in two steps and the building groaned behind them. On the far side, Missy laid the space back down like a lid and the world became ordinary distance again. Aurora steered them to a neighboring roof whose joists still sang true when you put your weight on them.
"Here," she said. "Stay low. Dawnguard will sweep you to shelter." The mother kept saying thank you as if repetition could be a second language. The child clung and stared. The grandfather looked away so no one would see his eyes.
This detour had better not cost us the day, Aurora thought, and surprised herself with the lack of acid in it. And if it does… She glanced at Missy, whose shoulders had dropped half an inch, whose color had come back by a shade. No. This was correct. Mistress would approve.
Aurora tipped her chin to the rain‑shined horizon where gold and slate wrestled. "Come, Lieutenant," she said. "We have work to do…"
——————————————————————————————————————————
Rain sheeted off the broken rooftops in gray veils as Sol Invicta dragged herself from the gouged street. The world rang inside her bones like a struck bell, vibrations crawling through marrow and sinew with each labored breath. Water coursed around her golden greaves, tugging at shattered asphalt, dragging nails and glass along with it like a pocketful of teeth grinding against stone.
The beast was wounded now.
She had felt the give – that terrible, satisfying shear as her will made manifest met something that pretended to be tendon. A right leg torn free at the knee and flung down the avenue in a churning wake of displaced water and debris.
Yet Leviathan rose regardless, balanced grotesquely on the remaining limb as if the loss meant nothing at all.
It did not bleed.
It did not sway.
Below the ruin, the absent limb was already writing itself back into being, first as a stump of articulated water, then as a more convincing mimicry of flesh, the line between the two crawling forward with each heartbeat.
All that, and you keep coming?! Her jaw clenched until her fangs nicked her lip, drawing copper warmth that mixed with rain. What survives a beheading and learns from it? She lifted her hands, power gathering like heat under iron, golden light crawling across her knuckles. Burn!
Leviathan moved.
The slap was a continent's length of water shaped into a palm, and it arrived with no warning besides the way the rain itself seemed to lean forward in anticipation. One moment she stood braced, gold crawling along her knuckles like living fire; the next the skyline jumped sideways and she was airborne, skimming the city on her spine, turning sheets of rain to steam where her aura flared and guttered against the storm's fury.
She hit.
Pavement buckled beneath her impact, throwing her into a long slide that plowed a trough through flooded grit and left her armor screaming sparks against broken stone. She fetched up against the flank of a courier depot that had already been half-eaten by the night's bombardment and put a new crater in its wounded facade. Water spilled in around her like a tide determined to claim every inch of dry ground.
She stood.
Across the drowning blocks, Leviathan stopped playing.
Where its water echo had been a delayed punchline, a memory of motion arriving out of order, it became chorus, call and response in the same breath.
Compressed blades of floodwater scissored the air with impossible cadence, each one sharp enough to part steel. Protectorate capes who had swung in hunting formations mere minutes earlier found their rhythm unmade beneath them, their coordinated assault dissolving into desperate survival. One died so quickly the rain cleaned the red between heartbeats, his form simply ceasing to exist where the water touched. Another reeled as a tendril of compressed liquid uncoiled and became a club the size of a city bus.
Legend and Eidolon cut and wove through the chaos, both of them forced into seconds they usually owned without question. Legend's beam knifed through the storm, bright enough to carve shadows into the grey dawn; Eidolon sketched a shield of force that sang when the tide hit it like a tuning fork struck by a hammer.
Leviathan rolled on the new limb like he'd never lacked it – a prosthetic of seawater that wasn't a replacement so much as an improvement writ in the element he owned. Its tail came up with the indifference of a clock hand and swatted Eidolon across the sky; he hit two blocks away hard enough to scoop the street and went out of sight in a cloud of pulverized concrete.
Behind her, somewhere in the rain, there were the sharp, metallic cracks of teleportation, new players stepping onto a board that devoured them on arrival. Reinforcements.
Brave, late, doomed.
She did not look back.
Looking back wasted seconds and cost lives she could not afford to lose.
He was never this agitated before, a small, cold voice noted, the one she'd kept when the rest of her fear had been burned out in the forge of her transformation. She had not heard that voice since she was only Taylor. What did I take from him that matters?! What does he want from me that makes the storm sing like this?!
A small kernel of fear lodged into her chest. She recognized it with clinical precision, catalogued it like a symptom to be diagnosed.
She hated it immediately.
No. The word burned the inside of her mouth like molten copper. No! I am the Sun Arisen! I am a goddess! I do not fear overgrown lizards!
Space flexed around her will. She was elsewhere.
She cracked into existence at the beast's left flank, fist already driving forward, golden light hard and clean around her forearm like captured sunfire. The punch struck where ribs should live and found instead a flexing plane of not-skin that tried to slide out from under the impact. The shock of contact went up her arm like a bell struck too hard, vibrations racing through bone and muscle. Leviathan rolled with it, head tilting in that abstracted, contemplative way, and brought a clawed hand back around like a pendulum weighted with death.
She met it with a pulse of telekinesis that wrote itself into the air as pressure and reluctance. The claws slowed, stuttered, pushed through anyway in a lurch that shaved a sliver of armor from her pauldron and sent it spinning away like a golden petal on the wind.
They traded blows.
Tit for tat. Punch for punch.
Her blows landed with supreme weight, each strike carrying the force to reshape geography; his replies came with oceanic indifference, vast and inexorable as the tide. She cut through space, reality snapping shut, opening, and struck from behind, from above, from angles that had no names in any geometry textbook, each hit buoyed by a shove of invisible force.
Water whips answered, arriving before she finished stepping, learning the cadence of her spatial fold and writing counters into the storm's fury.
She spat blood into rain and it came back as pink threads that vanished in the flood.
She chained teleports tighter, closer, buzzing him like a hornet that believed it was a star. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel with four red lights at the end of it, the creature's alien gaze becoming the entire focus of her universe. The world became decision and correction, step, strike, slide; slide, catch, burn. Her telekinesis kept slipping, catching, slipping again as if his mass had secrets he rationed out to her reluctantly.
Adapt to this! she thought, and put her weight behind a blow that would have cratered a battleship.
He adapted.
He began to be where she meant to be.
With each fold of space, a tendril of compressed water waited like a sprung trap at the coordinates she'd chosen a breath ago. She bled speed sideways, and still the storm wrote his answer above hers with contemptuous ease. For every strike that landed, two came back, clever and cruel in ways that had nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with inevitability.
No. No. The edges of her sight fuzzed with the static of fatigue. An insult, an offense, a betrayal by muscle and breath that should have been beyond such mortal limitations. She fanned the flames of her own rage as if she were her own bellows, drew heat from the memory of shells walking across her city, drew it from a thousand small deaths with names she hadn't learned yet because there were too many names and too little time.
She screamed.
Light answered.
The storm turned day-bright in a ragged circumference around her as her aura detonated from simmer to solar flare. The wings on her back snapped wide, not feather or film but pure sunlight, fell back in sheets, then came again. The very air around her began to shimmer with displaced heat, creating mirages in the midst of the deluge.
At the corner of her eye, Legend's beam raked the Endbringer's faceplate and left a gouge that closed as she watched; Eidolon returned as a streak of force and wrote some new physics into the air that made the flood pause and forget how to fall for the span of a breath. Other capes hammered their best and their last into the thing's flanks and found themselves ignored with the casual dismissal reserved for gnats.
Leviathan had turned. Four red eyes fixed on her and did not blink.
He had her measure now. He wanted her.
He escalated.
It shouldn't have had room to do so, but the beast seemed to find a way. The rain thickened to ropes, the wind to a constant hand on the back of the neck, pushing down with the weight of inevitability. The Endbringer's movements, already wrong, sharpened until they were simply too fast, faster than the eye could draw a line between positions, faster than the Protectorate's worst charts had ever dared to sketch.
He was on her.
Claws like articulated guillotines came from three directions at once, each one capable of parting steel like tissue paper. Sol Invicta met the first with a palm of force, slipped inside the second with a crack of bent space, and took the third across the ribs before she could finish deciding not to.
The blow turned the world sideways; the pavement and sky swapped places twice; water hammered her like thrown gravel as she skidded across the flooded debris field. She tried to fold away from the hurt–
–and arrived in the jaws of a waiting trap. The destination bloomed with a tendril of compressed flood that wrapped her midsection and flung her back along the same trajectory she'd meant to escape. She hit the ground with enough speed to bury her shoulder to the pauldron and tore herself free with a snarl of frustrated rage.
Legend and Eidolon lanced the storm in intersecting strokes, one writing clean blue-white through rain, the other sketching force that made the flood forget how to fall for a heartbeat. The beams burned trenches through the air; the atmosphere shook with displaced energy; the edges of buildings went soft with heat.
Leviathan ignored them.
All four red eyes stayed on her with the focus of a predator that had found its prey.
Come, then, she thought, teeth bared, fangs pricking her lip. Come to the fire!
She threw a volley of plasma that stitched the space between them in brief, furious suns, each bolt hot enough to glass sand. Telekinetic blasts followed, invisible hammer blows that made the air bruise around his joints. She folded to the left, to the right, behind…
…and he refused to let distance happen.
The Endbringer stepped into her like an answer to a question she hadn't asked well enough. His left foot came down, and the pavement learned what weight truly meant. The shock pinned her while claws described a cage and then closed it with inexorable precision. Darkness freighted the corners of her vision.
She reached for the world to move it.
Water got there first.
Another echo hit from the wrong time, striking from an angle that shouldn't have existed. Pain lanced through her arm; she heard the snap as much as felt it, an obscene, bright note beneath the roar of combat. Her right forearm folded in a way bone was never meant to bend. The limb went hot, then cold, then distant.
My arm... broke. The thought arrived disbelieving, almost abstract. It broke. Rage surged up, big enough to stand on, hot enough to melt steel. I will cauterize you from reality! But rage hit the simple fact of mass and fell back, panting, because inevitability wore a face today and its claws were on her.
Blood bubbled in her mouth.
She spat; the rain took it apart into component droplets. Heat that had set her hair alight moments ago guttered; black curls fell heavy and wet against the back of her neck. No…
The wave came sideways this time, a slab thrust like a shield wall. It caught her full in the chest and drove her into a half-fallen wall with the force of a freight train. The wall did its best and lost, collapsing around her in a gout of wet dust and broken timber. She pulled herself out of it by stubbornness and habit alone, lungs heaving, ribs complaining under armor that had stopped being pretty and started being necessary twelve hours ago.
He decided to end it.
Four tendrils rose from nothing and became ropes, one for each limb. They were water in the way a garrote is string – flexible, inexorable, and utterly without mercy. They found her wrists and ankles with a predator's certainty and pulled.
She stretched taut.
Shoulder joints protested; her broken arm screamed a thin, mean scream she didn't have breath to answer. She reached for the place in the world where the fold lives, that secret space between dimensions…
…and found nothing. No purchase. No hook. Exhaustion had turned the fabric smooth and left her fingers dumb. The storm pressed a thumb to her brow and held with the weight of oceans.
No. No no no–
A fifth tendril reared from the flood and considered her with alien intelligence. It narrowed, lengthened, the front of it blooming into a familiar geometry: an open mouth, a serpent's jawline written in water. The edges wavered in the rain and then decided to be sharp.
Her eyes widened despite herself.
She knew that shape.
She had used that shape yesterday, when she had made an example and a promise and a myth out of a woman named Rebecca. Her serpent had been fire and sun and certainty, divine judgment made manifest. This was cold and exact and mocking: a mirror held up to show her own methods turned against her.
Leviathan sent it.
The serpent plunged. It met her lips and did not stop. It forced past her teeth, past the hurt of her bitten lip; it rammed her tongue and the back of her throat and then was in her windpipe, in her lungs, flooding chambers built for air with the thing he owned. Reflex bowed her body; the ropes didn't give a millimeter. She tried to turn her head and got inches.
She tried to cough and got a drowning sound she would have been mortified to call a whimper if she had time to care.
She clawed at the binds with telekinesis and found only slickness and contempt.
The tendrils tightened like nooses. The serpent kept coming, filling her with the cold certainty of drowning. Her chest burned until burning was a memory and then a demand. The edges of the world fuzzed gray to black, rain turning to static in her failing vision.
Live. Her mind threw the word like a rope she couldn't catch. Live. Move. Fold!
Nothing answered but the dark.
Mom...
Dad...
Please…
The world narrowed to a pinpoint of failing light. The storm's sound went away, replaced by the rushing silence of drowning. The red eyes were the last things left in her dimming vision, four points of alien judgment that watched her divine authority crumble like sand.
Then even they went.
The darkness took Taylor.
The Sun had finally set.