faeapoclive

Begin: The Psychic Wakes
Previously: Praise Me


"What comes next?" Greta Broadleaf sat on the floor of the room they pretended wasn’t a cell. Her hand was on the psychic's knee, and she was very slowly offering the girl fresh apricots.

The girl nibbled slowly on the apricot. "More gods." She flaps her free hand. "First the pretty lady, and then some angry men. They all say something like the first one. It's tall people after tall people saying praise me, worship me." She closes her eyes, and the tone of her voice shifts, lower, ritual-like. "They come, the gods, to stand on hill. They come, demand, you love me still. They come, the gods, to stand on high, to claim their land from soil to sky."

Greta's lips tightened. "Thank you."

They come. The rest she would deal with; the rest the Council would deal with. But now they had confirmation: the gods were coming home.

Next: Safe

Begin: The Psychic Wakes
Previously: Coming

The girl sobbed.

She couldn’t do anything but sob. She had no energy left for anything else, not even speech. She could not shut off the visions.

Her jailers, Peri and Aury had been doing their best for her, cuddling her, bringing her food and, when she could not eat, bringing her drinks. Nothing stopped the visions. Nothing stopped the horror echoing through her brain.

“Kill me,” she whimpered. “Please. Or lobotomize me. Maybe that will stop it.”

“You know we can’t.” Peri rubbed her back in slow, gentle circles. “You know we have to know.”

“I don’t want to know!”

“Unfortunately, knowing what you see is the best way to survive it.” The voice came from the doorway, causing both psychic and jailer to look up.

The door was filled with a woman, tall and broad-shouldered, her wings wide and demonic red. “And from the sounds of it, survive is going to be the best we can do.”

Peri and the psychic stared at the woman. It was Peri who first remembered words and manners. "Ah. Ah, dearheart, this is Greta Broadleaf. She works for the Council."

"The Council? Are they the ones who..." The psychic gestured around the room. "Are they? Can I go home now?"

"Not yet, I'm afraid." Greta hunkered down into a squat in front of the girl, her wings folding in until they pressed against her back. "I'm afraid we need you very, very badly. Because we need to save as much of the world as possible."

"Oh." She shrank against Peri, who might be a jailer but was at least a known quantity. "Oh. You need the visions."

"Yes. And we're going to need to make sense of the visions, which means we will bring you a teacher." The large woman spoke very softly, her words small and carefully placed.

"A teacher?" The girl perked. "I'd like that."

"I thought you might. Now... before that, dear, I need a little bit of information."

Next: Praise Me

Begin: The Psychic Wakes
Previously: Drawing Circles


In a booth nearby, a small alarm woke both Peri and the night-shift, Aury, from their stolen naps. “That’s the seventh time in a row she’s woken at 2:37 a.m.” Peri stared at the screen. “And she’s not moving, but the heart rate monitor is off the scale.”

“If she were human, she’d be killing herself with that.” Aury leaned forward to run a finger over the numbers. “That should be impossible.”

“Aury... for all intents and purposes, the girl is human.”


Next: Coming

Deep underground, in a Cold-War era bunker built by the US government and owned by the Shenera Endraae High Council, the psychic woke in the middle of the night.

She was younger than even the bunker around her, barely old enough to drink legally, and she was considered, at the moment, the most valuable person to the High Council - a Council made up of elders, many of them over a millennium old.

She did not know that; she didn't know where she was, or why she was there, or how she had come there. She knew that she was to say everything she Saw into a recorder, and she did this with quiet precision, even as her heart pounded as if trying to escape her chest.

"The sky opened," she told her recorder, not knowing that her entire suite was a recorder. "The moon was full, and the moonlight itself opened up into a doorway. I saw a foot - no, not a foot. It was a hoof."

She swallowed. This had been clearer than any of the other visions. "The hoof was big enough that it crushed the car. My car. I did not like that." She found her knees pulling up to her chest. "I would like to go home now."

Next: Drawing Circles