Chapter Text
At first, everything was quiet, eerily quiet. It wasn’t a peaceful silence, it was dread, teetering on the edge of catatonic mind. The first sign was the ringing, small but growing exponentially louder as Bae regained consciousness. Soon the auto-sensory sound filled her brain and rolled over her like a wave, crashing through and breaking clear, finally allowing her to perceive what was really around her.
The screams filled her ears, either begging to be saved from damnation or wishing to be given it to relieve this pain and take their chances in the next life. Horrible grotesque wails and cries, she wanted to shut it out but her body was too weak still.
She struggled to breath but only inhaled smoke, normally fatal to any normal person, but Hakos Baelz was no ordinary person. It couldn’t actually hurt her, but it still burned and filled her throat with blackened soot.
Bits of gravel from the rubble dug into her right arm, she attempted to raise her other arm to brush it off, only to find that it wouldn’t move. She hazily looked down at it, struggling to get her eyes to focus, and found that a thick piece of rebar had punctured completely through, leaving her arm immobile and bleeding profusely.
“Agh, fuck me.”
She didn’t have many options, she knew she physically couldn’t die here, but she also knew that waiting around for help was out of the question. She couldn't allow them to find her here.
The easy solution would be to snap her fingers, adjust some probabilities with a little chaos magic and bend the universe into rolling the dice in her favour, whisking her to safety and health.
Not an option.
She used her powers to cause this, the rest of them had to have their eyes on it now, if she did anything they would surely detect her magic use and then the jig would be up.
So, the hard way.
The rebar was still embedded in the massive concrete block under her prone form, there was no way to pull it out with her meager strength. The only option would be to lift her arm up until she had pulled it free.
So that's what she did. With her functional right arm she grabbed onto her pierced left arm. Her forceful grasp sent a spike of pain shooting through her. “Ah! Agh! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
Tears stung at her eyes, the pain was already horrible enough, but she had to do this. There was no turning back now.
She began to lift her other arm up, the monumental effort caused her to see white, and her screech joined the chorus surrounding her.
Maybe it took a second, maybe it took years, she wasn’t sure how long she forced herself to lift her arm for and for how long she screamed, but eventually she pulled it clear and collapsed back down.
Her body and mind had had enough torment, and slowly, her vision began to fade. Inky blackness seeped into the edges of her mind, until darkness was all that remained.
…
Can’t…
…not here… …need to move…
…
…Move…
…
MOVE!
Her eyes flashed open and she roused her mind back to consciousness. She couldn’t stay here any longer, time was running out.
“Hnnng…” She forced herself to sit up and survey her surroundings.
She was somewhere amidst the smoke and rubble of the mega-building she had collapsed.
That detail was coming back to her now, fully and clearly, she did this, intentionally. She made this happen, she killed all of these people. The screams she was hearing, the sobbing and the begging to some kind of higher power, it was a cruel twist of fate for them that one of the beings they unknowingly sent their prayers to was the cause of all this death and destruction.
Save the self-pity for later.
Now was time for action. She looked back down at her punctured arm, it was still bleeding, but within the wound she could see the tell-tale red-sparks of magical energy, a gift bestowed upon the council by the gods for their physical forms, regenerative powers. They wanted them to appear human, and mortal, like the rest of the cattle who walked the Earth, but not so human that they’d die from dropping an entire building on themselves.
Already, she could feel the pain all over her body beginning to dull as her immortal soul worked its magic. With her good arm she propped herself up and steadied her legs enough to rise to a stand.
The horrors of her reality surrounded her, but she blocked them all out, beginning an arduous limp away from the calamity.