29. Undone For You
Haera
Unease churned through Haera’s gut. She was still standing before Theos, and he was still holding her cheeks gently in his palms. The words he’d just spoken were immediately jumbled into unintelligible sounds in her mind as her poor effort to remember them fell flat. The spark of unease flared brighter.
“If Alanis tries to hurt you again, my wrath is yours to wield.” He finished.
She nodded. Their previous conversation about what had happened in his absence had been followed by a tender healing session of the wound on her head, through which she’d felt shame choke her. She hated that she injured herself so often whenever the sickening grip of her memories locked her into place. She pulled her lip between her teeth to chew it gently. It was a bad habit, but it brought her comfort – gave her a distraction while she tried to sort through the thoughts in her mind and turn them into coherent words.
“You say that you are a god,” she began. Theos’ expression grew incredulous then quickly darkened into anger. “But I have never seen what you can do.”
“Do you doubt that I am ?”
His question was fast on the heels of her admission. Disbelieving, like it was the most ridiculous utterance that had ever reached his ears. The world around her faded from view in her peripherals and white light swelled around them until she could see nothing else.
Her pupils expanded, a harsh gasp coursing out of her lips as tendrils of pain wrapped themselves around her eyeballs until they tangled together and finally blurred her vision. Her hand shot out to shield her eyes. Theos’ voice cut through her actions.
“ Enough . ”
The power in the command rendered her every muscle rigid, turning her to stone. The only moving thing in her body was fear. The way her body submitted to his commands without any input was...
“It is enough that you would ever even entertain doubting who I am.” His voice was rolling through her body, slamming into every nerve ending like towering waves on the battered sides of raw cliff faces. “When I am done with you, you will never know doubt again.”
His authority enveloped the space around her like a segund presence. Her eyes were still closed, eyelids offering little reprieve from the blistering expanse of light that surrounded them. She felt his attention settle there a split segund before he spoke again.
“Open your eyes, Haera.” The command hissed out of his mouth, backed by aggression.
Her body again snapped to attention without any consent from her. Her back straightened. Her eyes opened. Tears streamed down her cheeks from the burn.
“Behold your god.” He commanded again.
Her heart quivered and trembled, sending painful flutters through her as she stood, unable to move, unable to do anything but look at him. He was swathed in light the way he had been when she had first lain eyes on him in the forest. Everything around them was consumed by him.
There was nothing but her.
Nothing but him.
His eyes were pools of boiling light that reflected no sign of the expressions he usually displayed. She could feel the anger emanating from them all the same. All the brightness parted suddenly, and its sudden departure sent a cold wave of shock through her body. She screamed, falling backwards, but did not plummet into nothingness the way that she should have. They were suspended, midair, somewhere. Somewhere she could not so much as recognize.
Gone was the world around her that she had grown familiar with.
Gone were the sightlines she knew well.
Gone were the walls of her home.
Here, there was nothing.
Nothing except the maker of the universe, and his blazing, powerful light .
Nothing except the quivering mate bond in her chest, flooded with emotions beyond her comprehension.
Her whole being was confounded in his presence. Her heart was pounding in her eyes. Her brain was in her feet, desperately trying to send signals to hold her body together. Her lungs were in her cheeks, struggling to expand. Her hair felt like it had turned into her skin. Her every nerve ending was cursed to rapt attention.
She was frozen.
Beholding.
It was enough to unseat her every capacity to carry the strains of doubt’s emotion inside her being, but Theos spoke again. He stepped backwards, stretching a sweeping hand behind him with a flair. His eyes never left her.
“Behold, the worlds, undone, for you.”
A jolt of electrifying energy speared her as the world around them shifted. The glorious light receded all at once, leaving her pupils raw and struggling to widen to make sense of the darkness that swallowed her. The darkness shattered, falling to nothing around them like shards of glass with a deafening roar.
“Behold, the fabric of reality, melting at my command. Roiling and oozing life, desperate to please you.”
Air whipped around her. The rush of it pushed against her feet as she struggled to get her bearings. Suspended above the Earth as they were, all she could see below her were clouds, and a vast expanse of sea. As soon as her awareness settled on the calm waters, the raging mass of liquid boiled from within its deep. The Earth quaked below them, and though her feet were far removed from its surface, the shaking rocketed through her, unseating her balance so that she fell backwards.
Air rushed, whirring and whirling, to cushion her fall so that her hands pressed into firm support instead of splitting the air and sending her crashing to the water the way a normal fall would have. The world around her. It recognized her. The air beneath her hands pushed upwards, straightening her body back to its position as Theos watched her.
Before she could process what was happening, he turned to look down at a place where the seas were boiling more violently than the rest of the giant body of water.
“Behold the seas, stricken with pain, labouring to create a place just for you.”
Another rumble shook the Earth, rolling through her as it went. Plumes of salty water were forcing themselves upwards, large enough to blot out the sun and blanket the skies. Fine spray wafted up to her cheeks from the rocketing water, and she blinked rapidly, trying to comprehend all that was happening around her. Her heart was starting to surge with pain, her mind bending, expanding as thousands of sensations and events demanded her attention all at once.
Massive, surging waves circled outward from the point of the plume, driving destruction to wherever they crashed into land. Her eyes traced the peaks of the waves, and simultaneously saw through their surfaces to the deadly surges and pillars, walls of water that drove the peaks along. Her chest heaved with each breath. She tried to speak and found herself unable to make any sound but a miserable gasp of more air for her burning lungs.
Theos’ eyes were fixed on her, and as she struggled to settle her fear and tried once more to speak, the bond seemed to cleave itself open, throbbing with an emotion she couldn’t identify.
The rumbling of the Earth was even louder now, more consistent, and each tremor surged through her, ripping a space between her flesh and her skin. She was covered in chills. Something was happening in the water – there, at the point from which all the waves were spiralling outwards.
The fine spray of water from the torrential plume was warm now; getting hotter still. She gasped. The water was hot. It didn’t just look like it was boiling, it was .
Something like smoke filtered up to her nose and face, and then, as she watched, frozen in place by the magnificence, the overwhelming holiness of it all, the first piece of Earth rose to the surface. A new island was formed. She watched, transfixed as the water around the small, freshly conceived Earth darkened and shifted as it expanded into the space that the waters were rushing away from.
The shaking and quaking grew more violent and unstable now, the Earth rending beneath the waves and rising, up, up to break the surface.
Theos’ attention shifted, and when she looked over at him, he was already beginning to speak.
“Behold the universe, quaking with the realization of who you are to me.”
A vortex of air swirled around them, the sea disappearing from view, replaced by a sea of burning stars in a vast expanse of darkness. The gasp that left her lips fell into silence just as quickly as it left her. They were outside the Earth. Planets moved around them, shifting on their axis’ as though they were sleeping soldiers suddenly waking up to rapt attention.
Meteors and comets exploded, the silent empty darkness erupting with new light and fire as each explosion rocked the atmosphere. The darkness seemed to flee to the far reaches of the universe as she watched the planets shift, rolling past them with thundering shaking and deafening roars of effort. Immediately self-conscious, the universe banded itself around her, shifting into new order, a new alignment all because of her.
Their paths almost collided at one moment, and her gasp set the entire universe still. Nothing moved. The sounds of the stars burning, the planets turning, comets exploding – it all seemed to go quiet all at once. In the blink of an eye, all the attention in the universe was on her. Planets, comets, stars, moons, suns – all of their eyes set to her tiniest sound of fear, and along with them, their god.
Haera turned her pleading eyes up to Theos, and his wry smile pulled a half sob from her throat.
“Do you see the way the universe ceases to breathe at the slightest sound of fear from you?”
She nodded. His voice dipped into something quieter. A whisper of breath in the otherwise silent universe.
“Do you understand how everything aches at the recognition that you are afraid?”
She blinked away tears. Silence. He looked down so intensely, for so many moments, that she thought he would never speak to her again. And then, another whisper .
“Behold your god, completely undone and at your mercy.”
His eyes still on her, he raised his right hand, and the universe lurched into eager movement again. The planets nearest her righted themselves and waited until the ways were clear. Then they surged forward excitedly, slotting into a uniform line, each one with its own axis, around the main sun.
In the vast distance, planets and celestial bodies danced dangerously in sweeping arcs around each other, weaving into each other’s paths then away again as they moved in concentric circles of varying diameters. Haera’s heart trembled and shook. She wanted to…she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to die, or to never die. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to cower away from Theos and relieve her mind of the crushing pressure of his full presence, or never look at anything else but the way the universe displayed his power – the way everything around them bent to his every wordless whim.
The universe tremored as the scenery shifted. Her breaths were deeper. The air was colder, moist. They were back in the Earth’s atmosphere, once again suspended over the ocean as it boiled and convulsed. The small patch of newborn Earth had widened into a massive island of rocky cliff faces, wet forests, and raging waterfalls that lost themselves into the air around her in their eagerness to fly .
Her eyes darted between the other islands that were surfacing around the main mass of virgin Earth. Theos’ eyes dragged down over her body like the faintest of touches, and he turned to face her. Her throat closed up at the brilliance of the desire in his eyes.
“Now, little huntress, kill something for me.”
A flash of light, then silence. The time warp cleared, and Haera shook her head, trying to understand where she was now; and what was happening to her. The weightlessness the air offered her was no more. As soon as her body recognized that it was standing on the Earth, she crumpled. A little gasp wormed its way out of her as the wetness of the ground immediately seeped into her dress as she sank into a small puddle.
The earth beneath her seemed to sink and sway as Theos landed beside her. All around her, the water dried up. Something moved in the corner of her vison, and her head whipped around, hair flying everywhere.
Rabbit. The timid creature appeared confused. It was out in the open, in the centre of a small clearing in the distance. It looked this way and that, frantic. She watched its delicate brown nose twitch and shiver as it tried to make sense of its surroundings. Haera turned back to stare out into the forest ahead of her.
“Is that prey not to your liking?” Theos asked curiously .
She didn’t pretend not to understand. The prey drive was opening inside her like a barrelling force she had never encountered before. Hunger. She was hungry.
“My appetite demands something a bit…bigger.”