CHAPTER TWO

In the previous chapter, Thera escaped her turbulent past, finding her way in to the Web Of Three.

It was one thing to pull a tendril of the Web into sight, it quite was another to pass through it. 

Passing through it was going to mean fighting reality. Say one thing about reality, say that it is hard to argue with. 

Reality is strong.

There was only one battlefield for that fight if Thera had a hope of winning. One space where her own authority was equal to reality’s. The only space she truly owned.

Thera summoned the Web of Three, reached, grasped.

Fell. 

…through the only space she owned completely; her body.

Thera fell through the shape and space her body occupied in that world as she stepped onto a path to a new one. 

It was not without cost.

Before her eyes adjusted the smell struck her. Sugar water and fresh sweat.

In her ears, an oscillating buzz screamed.

Thera was coated in a thin film of something that barely covered her skin one moment and was hundreds of feet deep the next. 

She was swimming through a river of information; had become information.

Intuitively she knew that to be cohesive was to survive. In the speed of thought, she began telling the story of herself. She gave herself definition, substance. She told her mind who she was.

Just like every other person did.

It helped.

Some.

The Web was large enough to lose her - tight enough to smother her. 

As her brain failed to process the information, her vision was stripped from her. Thera’s vision was patted down for contraband, riffled through for anything dangerous and turned inside out before being given back.

Underlying everything now, tiny whorls of dots ran and pulsed. Reflections of reflections splintered around her and in each of them a woman was falling as if through liquid air. 

Everything glinted and reflected pieces of a face, a body back at her. Splinters of vision reflected her splintered mind. This road wasn’t built for a person to traverse unprepared. 

Thera felt the pressure coalesce and hook into her - parts of her were slipping away and to live through this, she knew she would have to pay. 

It made sense. She had been paying to exist as long as she could remember. A Web of Three, a payment of three.

With a scream of frustration, her first payment was made. As the Obscura slipped from Thera’s eyes, a sharp stab of fear hit her; their value was priceless and she would be trapped without them. She grabbed at them, finding only a snapped arm of the glasses left in her hand. 

They were gone.

The second payment cut. The binding ties of a blood bond, her connection, memory of the…person? The person she loved most…gone. 

Who were they? 

Thera screamed again in tones of terror, fear of the third payment building. 

But nothing was taken. Something was created. A connection, replacing one so recently severed. 

Her intuition was always her most powerful tool. 

Now her intuition chimed in her soul and this time… its voice was not wholly her own. 

She had been bound to something… to the Web? 

Her question was knocked away by an array of reflections. Thera saw herself. She knew it was herself. But she also knew she could not be ,all, those women. 

Hair that was onyx, red, white. 

Eyes that were emerald, amber, royal.

Skin that was cream, black, pale, sun-kissed marbled-rainbow. 

She felt her nausea rise as her identity was pummelled. 

The pressure rose and she fought back, as she had done all her life. She knew she was fighting something far more powerful than her, though that had never stopped her before.

Thera flexed muscle; whispered commands in her mind; hissed curses in languages of power. 

The Web of Three was as caring of her as a storm was a child’s scream of defiance. 

Then everything passed… Thera folded out of herself into a world that once more made sense. 

She found herself falling face first through winds of ash before landing on knees and palms. Stone beneath her hands, and within the stones a geometrical pattern made from wire.

Directly between her hands the wire was broken and two pieces stuck up in the air, eyes width apart.

Blinking, the tips of Thera’s eyelashes brushed the wires.

With a sharp breath she pushed away from the protruding wire, staring down at it. She stayed like that for a long while, finding herself scared of looking at her hands and not recognising them. 

The wire seemed odd… Or maybe it was the ash wind that was out of place. Heavy silence and ornate metal patterns did not habitual bedfellows make. 

It was as if the wire were the feet of some enormous statue, alone in the desert but for the memory of an empire; the wire seemed haunted by the desolate ash. As she finally looked up and around, In the corner of her eye she could see her reflection in a polished plate of platinum.

Taking a calming breath she turned to look…

And within her reflection, she saw her new form. 

1) Pink, gold and violet skin, with gold that pooled in her eyes, under ink-black hair that billowed in messy curls behind her.

2) Hard emerald eyes framed by bold white tattoos, a cut of grey streaking her short raven black hair.

3) Amber and violet eyes framed by bone-white hair. Curling lines of black ink stained the muscles of her arms.

4) Fox-red hair that blossomed into dark coral lips, split by a white streak. This was mirrored by the white ink under her lavender eyes.

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