บท 1613: Summoner by SomeoneYouWontRemember ( Worm Parahuman)
The doctor spoke.
She couldn't focus on him.
An otherworldly experience occupied all the space in her mind, and would likely do so for a long time. A twisting vision and sensation beyond anything she could have ever imagined.
Even after weeks, she couldn't find the words to describe it to someone. Not in a way that could truly imprint how intense the feelings were, how real it was, how it was burned into her mind with a sizzling brand of iron.
How it changed her.
How could she describe and make someone understand what it was like, to see a planet that felt like home, even if it wasn't, rot purple? To watch the skies be wreathed in monstrosities that looked more like kinetic sculptures than real creatures, melting the sky like wax, blotting out the sun and moon?
How could she describe and imprint how horrifying it was, to see moving mountains of teeth and mixed shapes all bashed together, like insects and fortresses and spines wriggling as if broken centipedes? To see storms of purple that moved over cities and pulled them off the ground, devouring them like black holes covered in pink eyes?
How could she describe and explain the weight of seeing another world end, through the eyes of more than a hundred living legends? Through a hundred different heroes, big and small, demigods and mages and beasts and inventors? How could she describe that sudden connection she felt to each of them, to know them in a way she could not really describe? Like long lost friends she'd known her whole life?
It felt too hollow, even if described that way.
How could she make someone understand that she'd died more than a hundred times in those few seconds of catatonic seizing? That she'd lived a hundred lives?
She died as an interstellar bard. She died as a half-dragon, she died as a prince in the crumbling remnants of his father's palace, she died as a lone wanderer whose only companion was the wind and his sword, she died as a creature born of that same void that consumed that oh-so-distant world, she died as a general bound to a demon, she died as a demigod, she died as a celestial creature wreathed in sixteen wings, and dozens and dozens more.
She lived the lives of people that were demi-gods, demons, beasts and monsters, men and women, mages and people that were simply masters of their craft, a selection and scope so wide that she scarcely believed they all existed at the same time, in the same world.
Each with a name.
Each familiar.
Each whose lives she had observed through their own eyes.
She had another map in her mind these days, fighting for space with the one she was familiar with. Earth Bet's.
It was one not all that different, one with cities and towns and villages she could recite by name, bizarre sights and traditions and cultures that each felt like hers, even if only for a few seconds.
A catalog of more than a hundred dead and faded legends rested in her mind, each an option, each resting and waiting for her, the stripped essence of their souls ready to conjoin with her own.
All of them so powerful to boggle the mind, yet-
Yet, all forgotten. Dead.
The only evidence any of them ever existed was in her own mind. The only evidence that their world, a beautiful, mesmerizing land of magics and spirits and technology and more, ever existed, is what she could remember.
That world was no more.
And she was not a parahuman. She was something else. More and less.
All because an old sorcerer in a dark blue robe prowled the broken remnants of his world to gather the souls of legends, to make some kind of final solution that would save his home. All because he gathered the runes that made his world come to creation, gathered the spells of the great star dragon, and embedded them all within something both material and immaterial.
A crystal heart, he fondly called it, much too large to be a heart.
A soul summon core, his fellow summoners called it.
Everything began and ended with that unnamed man in a dark blue robe.
All because he was too late to give the artifact to someone more worthy, his institute crumbling before he could gather a real force.
All because when he was the last man standing in his entire universe, his body and mind tearing at the seams from the something he created but could not yield for much longer, he formed a rift into reality, and tried to drag her through it, tried to give her his role.
Not because she was special. Not because she was compatible.
By sheer chance, by sheer dint of something otherworldly being connected to her at that very moment, before he tore it away from her, and replaced it with his gift, his curse.
She remembered, in the inter-dimensional fold of reality that she was pulled through, his crazed, desperate eyes. She remembered the wailing, shrieking purple beam that broke through a hundred barriers, through mountains of flesh and crystal, and struck true, killing him before he could complete the transfer, before he could pull her into his doomed reality.
Despite it all, she admired his resolve. She admired his unconquerable soul, his tenacity to fight to the end and beyond it, despite the hopeless odds he faced.
It still did not change what he did to her.
A crystal heart, he had fondly called it, a hard to look at thing of magic and folding space, of a billion tiny runes and essences forming a strobe light of rainbow colors and some that didn't exist and she couldn't even perceive.
A crystal heart, he had fondly called it, one that had replaced her own.
A well of mind-boggling power sat at her fingertips, at the edges of her soul, a thing she didn't ever believe was anything more than a fleetful wish for an afterlife, a fairy tale.
And it felt like the weight was crushing her, endlessly.
Stomping the words out of her throat.
She felt like she had inherited the remnants of an entire world. An entire reality.
She felt like she'd lived a hundred lives, died a hundred times.
Because of that, nothing felt right anymore. It felt like she'd grown a foot taller overnight, and nothing looked right anymore, but she could never place her finger on why. Everything looked too small, then if she squinted, too big, then if she squinted further, it was the same, but it still felt completely different and wrong. As if someone had gone into her room and replaced everything with a near-perfect replica, yet her subconscious chained her eyes to imperfections and differences she couldn't actively spot, fighting against her active mind because everything looked normal but it looked wrong.
Was there a word to describe a dissonance as deep as the one she felt? Dysphoria was not a strong enough word. She doubted a word existed that could accurately describe how nothing looked, tasted, smelled or moved right.
The doctor spoke. She briefly glanced at him, eyes as empty as ever. It felt like staring at a jerking mannequin. A bizarre, uncanny imitation of life that just a hair too wrong to not be disturbing to look at, just at the verge of looking right but not quite there yet.
She realized that she had no idea what 'right' and 'wrong' even was anymore. She was just fifteen years old. Yet she had in mere seconds, lived through centuries.
She was not the woman that had fought and stabbed a man to death in a chemical sump, feeling her skin melt off her fingers by the frothing acids as she fought for her life.
She was not the woman that had nine tails and bore the guilt of a dozen dead souls on her mind.
She was not the woman that had killed hundreds in the name of her country, only to see the truth when it was too late, broken herself and her sword in grief and guilt.
She was not the feline predator that pounced from branch to branch in a jungle that was its own little world, gathering the skulls of greater and greater challenges.
But she had gone through all of that and more with them, reliving those memories as if they were her own, a passenger taken for a ride in a horrid, wondrous lucid dream.
She would drag food into her mouth, feeling far too old for her own flesh, far too strong and perfect to be herself, and wondered who she really was sometimes.
She was Taylor Hebert.
And that was where the similarities slid off course.
She thought of things that would usually concern Taylor Hebert.
School.
It felt so… juvenile. So small and insignificant.
She thought of the locker, and felt her lips twitch into an unimpressed smile, because she had died a hundred times in manners far worse, by proxy perhaps, but she'd been there all the same, felt the same things, even if they were muted a thousandfold.
Her old worries had no punch .
She thought of her father, how he must feel, where he must be, what he might be thinking, and it was just…
Muted.
She had watched millions die. It was difficult to value life the same way after something like that. Even if it was her father's, who she loved.
If he died tomorrow, she wondered what she would feel, and had a feeling it would only prompt a vague feeling of sadness, something that would barely squeeze a tear out of her eyes.
The scale of everything was different. Shifted.
And she was trapped in the yarn that was her mind, picking at each string and slowly, slowly unraveling it, into something a little more cohesive and whole.
' Picking at each string' was more akin to traversing a tree with countless branching thought patterns, all twisting and labyrinthian, spirals that dragged her further down and down until she was forced to cut the path and start over. Thoughts that met other stray thoughts and got lost into smaller and smaller ones, more and more insignificant, endlessly.
Over, and over, and over again.
She didn't know if she'd come out the same person when she was done. She didn't know when, if ever, she would be done.
She didn't know what conclusions and realizations she'd reach, what new worldviews she might end up on, what new goals, what would await her on the other end of her stay here, wherever "here" was.
But she hoped that by the end of it, she would feel a little more… herself.
She stared at the gray armband on her arm.
The doctor wouldn't stop talking. It was distracting.
The desire to kill him was not insignificant.
The lack of moral alarm or hesitation she felt as she hypothetically considered it made her feel ever so slightly more disconnected than before.
She wouldn't ever react like that before the locker and her… not exactly trigger event.
So, she let her eyes glaze over as she dove back into her own thought process, and tried to restructure the pillars of what made Taylor Hebert, Taylor Hebert.
She just hoped she could remember them all.
Like a parent teaching its child right and wrong, she did the same to herself, from the ground up, trying to convince herself of things that used to be natural to her, in the privacy of her own mind, no matter how much spells and souls and runic powers itched to be used.
Outside the door, Dr. Jeremy Foster took off his helmet, sighed, and walked off back into Asylum East's hallways to try his luck with his next patient.
Whatever Changer power the girl had used to bust out of her locker and the hallway itself, she didn't seem inclined to use it. Or talk to him about it. Or talk in general.
His next report to the suited woman would likely be as dull as the past dozen, excluding Elle.
As long as they kept paying, he didn't much care.
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