World Fire Prism
All creation was fashioned from the assemblage of cosmic energies—aether. Humanity’s sun was one such energy, and with it, Earthen life had flourished. Yet like the sun, the life-giving aether could be channeled through a prism to cause cataclysmic levels of destruction. And humanity had a knack for creating such prisms.
In this age, the prism was the experimentation on World Fire. But all who drew too near were tainted. Twisted. Corrupted. Their dormant chaos radicalized and rebelled against its host. Their skin shunted as blackened muscle fibers twisted and grew in grotesque proportions, many of the figures assuming a forward lean as elongated arms lent them a gorilla’s silhouette.
You were the cosmic correction—the guardian that awoke in each new age, assuming a new form to combat whatever the threat. You were destruction incarnate, and you would see the current chaos rebellion quelled. Soon, this new calamity—the Forsaken—would become just another footnote in humanity’s history—a detail that would one day become just another cautionary tale used to scare children away from repeating the sins of their parents. In other words—a fairytale.
This time, your form was a quadrupedal dragon of midnight blue. You soared across the sky. Below you, was a suburban sprawl of two and three-story homes. You didn’t know the full extent of your powers as you had just awakened, but whatever they were, they would scale to oppose the present danger.
As a force for cosmic change, threats drew you towards them like magnetism. A cul-de-sac captured your attention and you oriented on it, your wings tucking against your back as you plummeted like a comet descending to earth.
“Hey, don’t forget I’m back here,” a voice announced in your thoughts.
You had forgotten—the rider clinging to your back and seeming so frail...so insignificant. For a mortal to ride Destruction... That was nearly a fairytale even to you. “Just hold on,” you replied.
You knew of Divine Twins—the intermediaries that the cosmos appointed and bound to cosmic forces. But never had you known one to exist. And never did you imagine that you’d be the force they were bound to.
The ground arrived and you planted your feet in the street, the asphalt mounding up like sand as you skidded to a stop. You announced your arrival with a roar, but once it had begun, you could arrest it no more than you could a yawn. The ground rent. Trees and light poles doubled over. A car was sent tumbling between houses, breaking through a back fence, and disappearing beyond.
A house absorbed most of your announcement. Shingles fled, immediately followed by the rest of the roof which peeled off as one. Bricks became projectiles, leveling a hind tree line before passing into a neighborhood beyond. The brick swarm passed through like a plague of locust devastating a field of crops.
Your power was absolute. You were chaos tamed—channeled in a direction of your choosing. The future was merely an opposite end, a thing tethered to your will and a thing that was inevitable.
Your head suddenly veered—your right ear pulled and your roar turning to assault another house. You became incensed. This brazen child, who you barely remembered existed, had the audacity to not only ride you but to steer you as well? Never has such an atrocity occurred on your—
Three twisted figures leaped from the forward wall of the new house, the Forsaken’s emergence startling you like a rat that had just ran into a horse stall. You reared up on your hind legs as they approached through your roar unphased. You felt a shiver scramble up your back as your roar ceased, but then realized it wasn’t a shiver at all.
The rider, a girl of seventeen, ran up your neck, over your head, and across your brow as you glanced up to look her direction. She ran the bridge of your nose, then planted her foot to crest and pass over you, an arc of electricity curling into your nostril as she leaped off.
The arc made you go cross-eyed and you flexed your nose as you fought back the urge to sneeze. Then, you forgot yourself.
The air became electric as the girl sailed through the open space before you, her over-sized green-flannel shirt billowing. It all happened too fast to register in mortal awareness. Electricity crawled out of downed power lines. It crept upward, bridging water vapor to converge in the air. She settled into the electric webbing like a celestial body in a gravity well, the electricity following her down where she punched the shattered pavement.
Boom!
Several fields of force swelled away from her collision, the ground concaving as the immediate surroundings were laid away from her epicenter. The three Forsaken had been right next to her, but something happened that was nearly too fast for even you to perceive.
She had stood after landing, arcs of lightning peeling away from her like writhing tendrils. They had burned away her clothing, revealing her to be clothed in the intense blue of World Fire, which she wore like a skin suit. Stray arcs passed through the Forsaken, who immediately became ash thrust into an unseen wind.
The whole sequence had elapsed within a second’s fraction, the girl’s intense glow winking out to leave her collapsed and vulnerable in the crater of her making. You were the lone survivor, a storm’s eye having just passed over you, and you were at a bit of a loss. Even you were reluctant to contact World Fire directly, but after some consideration, you scooped her into your forepaws.
During her leap, her single thought had seared itself into your awareness, ‘I’ll never forgive you!’ What had they done to her? As her twin, you were supposed to have a mental connection that would allow you to peruse her memories and apprise yourself of her circumstances. But those memories had been walled off, now existing somewhere beyond your reach and in a place she refused to visit.
“Why you, girl?” you asked, observing her fetal position. She rested in your palm like an injured lightning bug in the palm of a mortal. “How did you come to wield such forces?”
You may be Destruction incarnate, but now that you had a twin, that meant sibling rivalry—that meant competition.
This sequence follows Cosmic Correction.
