Chapter Text
When they’d first told her the plan, she knew they thought she’d be opposed. Something in the words written in steam on her mirror, about the careful phrasing, tipped her off.
We have an assignment for you.
Delicate.
Large-scale.
Gentle wording, side-stepping. Pussy-footing. It was going to be a big job, one of the largest attacks they’d ever attempted, and they didn’t think she could handle that blunt truth, and that irked her. It irked her that they thought soft words would dull the sharp edge of what had to be done. That they clearly thought she was ready, but were still hesitant to tell her the full extent of what she would be doing: the amount of lives she’d be taking.
As if she wasn’t bathed in blood she had spilled in the name of The Spree. As if she had no idea of the hundreds The Spree had killed in single attacks before. As if she hadn’t had a hand in more than one of those attacks, and had done so willingly, knowing the cost. What had to be done, had to be done. It was war, after all, and she was willing to deliver their message, by any means necessary.
It irked her that they seemed to have forgotten that. Had she not been loyal? Had she not proved herself, over and over and over again, to be prepared to sacrifice whatever it was they asked of her? She had already agreed to join the Army, the one thing she’d sworn she would never do: yet she had followed through on that promise to The Spree. It made sense, really, and they’d explained that to her: she could run, or she could accept the Army’s promise to turn her into a weapon, and then use that weapon to tear it down from the inside. The visceral image had appeased that darkness Scylla held within her.
She’d agreed to risk her neck, life and limb to infiltrate the institution of witch slavery, in the name of liberation. In the name of The Spree. She’d agreed to everything they’d asked of her, and then some. She had sought them out, after all. She had sacrificed so much of herself to them already: to their training, to their lessons and teachings. Blood, sweat, and tears.
So yes, she’d been irked, with those gentle words. There was no point in sugar-coating or omitting the devastation of what they were planning: Scylla was going to do it anyway. Not only was it an honor to be chosen for such a mission, but it felt like it was about time. She’d more than proven herself to them.
“I can do it,” she’d said coolly, keeping her simmering rage in check, hands folded behind her back.
Many will die.
“I am aware.”
This mission cannot be abandoned.
“I don’t want to abandon it,” she allowed some of her annoyance at their doubt to come through, feeling her eyebrow twitch. She wouldn’t allow herself to show more than that, though. Anything could be read as defiance. And The Spree did not do defiance. Some healthy questioning of authority was allowed, but in small doses, and only with certain…balloons. Some had more personality than others.
This mission cannot fail.
“It won’t,” she shook her head almost imperceptibly and allowed her lip to tick up at the corner.
You cannot fail.
She’d held in a scoff. “I won’t,” she said, nearly allowing a scowl to slip.
She was given the full details not long after. It was a simple plan, honestly. Shape-shifting made everything much easier. She was told the location, where she would find her weapon and the best time to set it off. She was told the specific seed, and given free liberty to sing it as she pleased. She did like that, about The Spree. They understood that, like song itself, expression was what the voice was for. So much emotion could be conveyed: so much pain. It was almost poetic.
Poetic justice.
So she stood outside of Tracey’s in the mall, exactly where she’d been told to be. She’d arrived early, perused the linoleum tiled halls, busy with celebration. She’d been handed a flag when she’d walked in and held it loosely in her hand, watching faces walk by her, none the wiser of the snake in their midst. To them, she wasn’t a witch. She wasn’t their reckoning. She was just another face in the crowd, and it felt delicious, to blend so well, knowing her power. She didn’t know how many people were there. She’d not been given a number, just told it was going to be big, and just looking around, she knew it would be.
Sometimes, if she was entirely honest, she had her doubts. Not about The Spree, per se. But about their methods. It was a thought she kept so buried within her, that even Extractors – witches specifically trained to tear a mind apart looking for information – would not have been able to pull it out of her. Sometimes, in the darkest of her doubts, she wondered if her parents would have approved of her joining The Spree. But without them, without her parents around, shielding her (smothering her), she had no one. And she had seen what The Spree could do, and what they stood for. She had never understood her parents’ aversion to aligning with them, and a small part of her wondered what they would think of her: doing that which they had been too cowardly to do.
She shook her head. That wasn’t true. Her parents had been brave, defying an institution that wanted them dead, and that had ultimately succeeded in killing them. But they had also been cowards: running and hiding when they could have been fighting back. In the end, it hardly mattered: they ended up in the ground anyway, and sometimes Scylla could still feel them, well into the night: feel the memory of life as it left them and death, which had become a friend to her, had its way with what remained.
She tightened her jaw, her resolve steeling. It was extreme, yes. The Spree’s methods had always been extreme. Public executions. Recompense, hangings en masse of civilians over the graves of their fore-sisters and mothers, killed in the Burning and Persecution Times. Taking back the lives that so long ago had been taken from witches.
It was extreme, yes, but it made sense. It got the attention of everyone around them. It brought attention to their cause, negative or no. It forced the public to reckon with that which they had reduced the witches among them to become: chattel. Lambs to be raised and slaughtered, on a conveyor belt, from womb to tomb all in the name of The Motherland and the civilians too afraid to try to understand that which was different from them.
Fuck The Motherland. Let it burn until all that remained were the ashes of its power and glory, and let Scylla drink of them from her cupped palms. It lit a fire within her, to think of herself as one of those who had struck the match to finally tear down the entire fucking thing.
Let it burn.
She could taste the ash in her mouth, a sudden shot of adrenaline spiking through her.
The Spree were violent, but so were the military. People who advocated for non-violent solutions to violent oppressors were nothing more than complacent. Pacifists allowed narratives to shift until annihilation of a perceived other was the only option: justified the unjust actions of those in power until their twisted agendas were seen as acceptable, and Scylla?
Scylla was the resistance. The Spree forced those who would look the other way to face the consequences of their decisions. Forced them to acknowledge that even indecision had consequences on thousands of innocent lives. She’d never asked to be born a witch, and she’d certainly never asked to be born into a world where that meant she only had one option: serve and die for an institution that cared about nothing else but its insatiable thirst for continued magical blood.
Fuck the military. Fuck the Army. And fuck each and every person who thanked them for their unwilling and forced service and sacrifice. They had done away with the civilian draft decades before. The witch draft was unjust, conscription was unjust, and if she had to take thousands of lives to show that, she would. The army wanted their pound of flesh so badly?
They would have it.
She stood outside of Tracey’s and spotted the balloon, high up. She called to it imperceptively, tempting it closer and closer and closer until she could hold it in her hand. Raw chaos, was what was inside, and it rang in her ears. Scylla was familiar with the sounds, smells, and tastes of death. The Army had sharpened her awareness of her penchant for sensing it, of knowing it not as a foe but as an elusive friend, and she did have to be thankful for that. Between The Spree and the Army, she was already far more powerful than she was aware that she ever could be, and she would only become more powerful. She could taste the revenge, and it tasted sweet.
She started her seed, hitting the frequency to agitate the destruction inside. Building, building, building.
The sounds of the first bodies didn’t register. She could hear only the quiet whisper of unleashed devastation, and gentle caress of air as the balloon fell. Death was a force, not a being: something that few knew or accepted. Death obeyed no one, but could be persuaded with sweet siren calls, seeds set so deep in the larynx as to represent the sounds of the underworld itself. Sound, weaponized.
As more bodies fell, Scylla couldn’t help but smile. So easy, so simple. She didn’t know what The Spree had been so worried about. The sound of footfalls thundering upstairs and then the squelch of flesh and bone as it hit earth filled the mall, and as more bodies fell, she took her leave, saying her “We are The Spree” like the curse she so wanted it to be. A darkness to be feared, to be admired, to be revered and to be heard.
She would come to find out that, with the sweet sound of a siren song, she had ended the lives of more than sixteen-hundred people. One of the largest attacks in Spree history, and she had carried it out. The blue balloon in her mirror thanked her for her service, and she didn’t bother to hide her smirk as she thanked it for the opportunity to prove herself.
We have another assignment for you. Read the words in her mirror, and she nodded, folding her arms behind her back.
“I’m all ears,” she smiled at her own joke.
She knew a balloon couldn’t roll its eyes, but she knew that whoever was on the other end likely was.
There was no hesitation from them, that time. The plan was far vaguer: an extraction. She wasn’t given more information than a name: Raelle Collar. And she was given the freedom to go about her mission as she saw fit (she had, after all, earned it), the words in steam reading: By any means necessary.
And oh, she could work with that.