Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hushed whispers floated in the dim corridor. Faint screams echoed off of the stone walls, almost inaudible against the roar of thunder outside the stained glass windows of the convent. The nuns huddled around the door to the locked chamber, pushing against each other for a chance to hear what was going on inside. Every so often something would crash against the door and they would all jump, frantically making the sign of the cross.

Footsteps hurriedly coming from the end of the hall caused the sisters to spin around with a start. A cloaked figure was making its way down the corridor to where they stood eavesdropping.

"I need to be let into that room right away," said the stranger. Their scarlet hood was up, but from the voice, it sounded to be a woman. "Someone in there needs my help, and you are sorely unequipped to give it."

One of the novices stepped forward, blocking the outsider's way to the quivering door. "I apologize, but who are you? It is most dangerous to be near here at the moment. And how dare you insinuate that our priest is not equipped for this job?"

The mysterious visitor let her hood fall back, and the sisters let out an audible gasp as they recognized her. Phaesya, a world renowned psychic and powerful mystic—of course she had heard what had been going on at the convent. The convent sisters preferred not to believe in clairvoyance, and despised the Justice League's so-called psychics. Phaesya knew that she was not welcomed there, or any convent, really, so for her to have come despite that…the situation must be worse than they had expected.

A rather loud thump sounded against the door and Phaesya raised her eyebrows. One would call the look smug if everyone wasn't already high strung—and rightly so. One of their orphan charges had been the source of most disturbing occurrences as of late, and that evening the Mother Superior had agreed to call in a priest for an exorcism. Every cross in the abbey had been inverted to their shock and horror that morning, and odd rust-colored streaks marked the floor in a path leading directly to 13-year-old Rachel Roth's room.

They had questioned all of their wards, to be fair, but every sister knew that the peculiar girl was behind it all. Odd things happened every year on her birthday, and this night was no different. If anything, this night was the most heinous of them all. The sisters had always been certain that there was something seriously wrong with the raven-haired girl since the day she'd arrived on their doorstep eight years ago with only a desperate note and a twenty-dollar bill crushed in her fist. When asked her name, the child had recited solemnly, "My name is Rachel Roth. I am five years old, and I live on 367 Howard Place. It's nice to meet you."

It had been obvious that whoever had brought her there had abandoned her to the care of the convent. Originally the Reverend Mother Theresa Agnes had been against taking in another orphan, but one of the elderly sisters had taken to the stoic, unblinking child and was already showing her to a room. The abbess, of course, would not refuse the elderly nun who'd run the convent before her and had allowed for the child to remain, even though the child's unflinching stare unnerved her.

Their suspicions had first been piqued when one of the sisters found some of Rachel's drawings stuffed between her thin mattress while performing her daily rounds. Nearly all of the drawings were totally black, her crayon had rubbed so vigorously that parts of the paper were worn through. All of them featured an almost perfectly rendered horned man, skin as red as fresh blood and stare so evil it made the nun's heart stutter.

They questioned Rachel about the man in her pictures on several occasions—every time she gave the same answer: "That's my dad." And every time, she gave them a look that seemed to question their sanity, as if it were obvious that she was devil spawn and that they were all ninnies. Sister Mary Lucille defended her, naturally, explaining it away as just a young child's imagination.

When the other orphans began to complain that Rachel had been visiting their bedchambers at the most unholy hours of the night, watching them in their sleep and giving them horrid nightmares, Sister Mary Lucille defended her, rebuking the nuns for allowing their voiced suspicions to startle the children and that Rachel had done no such thing. Again, the abbess of St. Louise did nothing, and allowed the elder to care for Rachel.

Things escalated further, and eventually earlier that year the elderly nun took ill and died. Immediately after learning of her dearest friend's death, Rachel went into a coma and did not awaken for three weeks. All of the strange things happening around the convent came to a dead halt only confirming the nuns' hunch that the child was either possessed or truly fathered by some profane, godless being.

When she finally woke up, however, it was worse than before. Finally, after that evening's debacle, the nuns called a frantic conference with the abbess, and there they were, shaken and at the end of their wits.

"Obviously it is not going well in there. Step aside, Sister. It is more dangerous for your headmistress to remain in there alone with what is truly ailing the child. Please, if you do not want another death tonight."

The novice's eyes widened sharply. "Another death? What do you—?" There was a collective gasp as Phaesya's lack of mentioning the priest sunk in, and the nuns quickly parted like a hot knife slicing through butter.

Phaesya opened the door, and was immediately greeted with a blast of foul-smelling air. She stepped into the chamber, her boots making an odd schlop-ing noise on the wet stones. She was standing in someone's blood, and from the looks of the collared priest who slumped against the wall to her left, neck bent at an impossible angle, it was his.

A relieved gasp from her right reassured her that the Reverend Mother was at least still alive, and she caught a glimpse of her face before she passed out in a dead faint, her habit stained a dark brown from the priest's blood that was seeping under their feet. She shut the door behind her, preventing the other nuns from entering and seeing the crumpled body of the father and their headmistress's indisposed state.

Finally, she looked to the center of the candlelit room, where the cause of all of the chaos stood immobile—too still to possibly be alive. She was but four or four and a half feet, and slight. On first glance no one would believe that such a slight thing could be causing so much terror, but Phaesya knew better. The girl's hair covered her face like a sheet made of black ink, and upon closer inspection she noticed that her bare feet cleared the floor by at least a foot.

Deep shadows, too black to be natural flickered along the walls, pulsating and tentatively reaching their tendrils along the walls towards Phaesya. They licked at her boots, and she could feel a biting cold sear straight through to her bone.

Those fools.. It seemed as if whatever abilities she had, she obviously had no control over them. When they cornered her, threatening her with an exorcism and no doubt terrifying the poor girl with their accusations, she'd lost it, and gave whatever part of herself that harbored these dark powers full control in self-defense.

"Rachel, I know you can hear me. Everything is going to be okay, but I need you to calm down," Phaesya said softly. She approached her, raising her hands and offering her empty palms in the classic I-mean-no-harm gesture. The girl gave no response as she drew near, and continued to hover, unnervingly still.

Phaesya felt something metallic clatter against her boot; a small, crucifix on a broken chain lay abandoned at her feet. She could feel energy radiating from it, and picked it up to get a reading. Fond memories of an older woman flitted across her eyelids at the speed of light, and she concluded that someone very close to the girl had embedded their spirit into the stone. Fittingly so, as well, seeing as lapis lazuli was an excellent spiritual conductor and psychic amplifier.

"Did they take this from you, Rachel?" She asked on a hunch, and her guess was confirmed by the agitation of the almost tangible shadows surrounding the girl's frozen form. "They had no right to take it. You feel better when you wear it right?"

Almost imperceptibly, Rachel's head dipped in an apparent nod. Phaesya dared closer, mistaking the girl's response as a sign that she was calming down. Suddenly, her head whipped up in a movement too fast to consider human, and she grabbed Phaesya by the collar, forcing her to look into her face. Four crimson eyes bored holes into the depths of her being, at odds with the fanged, twisted grin that marred the child's angelic face.

Rachel's inhuman gaze shook Phaesya to her very soul, and she could feel her resolve beginning to falter.

"R-rachel, please, I am here to help you…" she stuttered, hating the weakness in her voice and how her courage seemed to flea in the presence of a child twenty years her junior.

"You cannot help me." She said it sweetly, but the voice that responded to her was not that of a thirteen-year-old girl, but of something far more depraved, and far older than the earth itself. The acrid, too-sweet smell of death and rotting flesh invaded Phaesya's nostrils and she shuddered in Rachel's iron grip.

"I shall be the end of all things mortal." She moved her mouth to the psychic's ear, and her whisper sent chills racing down her spine. "Women and children will be slaughtered like pigs in their beds, and the entire earth will burn with everlasting fire. None will be able to restrain me, and the puny human race will be reduced to ants beneath my feet."

Phaesya struggled against her grip, bringing the lazuli cross into contact with the skin on Rachel's forehead, and chanted a spell of expulsion, the most powerful one she knew. There was a chance that it wouldn't work, as whatever was in this girl was drawing from part of her very soul, a part of her that was symbiotic with her being.

Whatever was possessing Rachel chuckled at her efforts, white fangs flashing with the sporadic lightning. But the spell seemed to be taking hold, and the girl began to shiver. The demon possessing Rachel gave Phaesya one last shake, and as it left her body it whispered a deadly promise psychic's ear: "I vow that in five years time, I will be back to claim what's rightfully mine."

Phaesya sank to the floor just as Rachel slumped to the ground before her and she watched as the crucifix dissolve into the space in her forehead leaving a single, blue, diamond-shaped stone to adorn her Ajna chakra.

The eavesdropping nuns stumbled back when a mentally and physically exhausted Phaesya threw open the door, clutching a limp, but no longer possessed Rachel in her arms. She swept past the sisters, eager to leave the forsaken convent orphanage and get back home to Jump City.

"Your priest is dead. You may want to call an ambulance," she called, almost as an afterthought, over her shoulder to the nuns who hadn't moved an inch and had been staring after her openmouthed. They didn't make any move to stop her from taking Rachel, stunned by the weight of her words and everything that had just transpired.

She would take the girl to Bijoux Academy, where the Justice League had already dispatched a team of healers to receive her. She had five years to figure out the poor kid's parentage, and hopefully circumvent an apocalypse at the same time.

But first, she'd have to be trained.