It wasn’t the gnawing anxiety inside of her that annoyed. In fact, the insidious pain was almost a reassurance. It soothed her, counter-intuitively, the impending doom, fear and—above all else—the self-doubt worked together to reassure her of what she already knew.

That she wasn’t good enough. That, while it might be possible, it wasn’t possible for her. That she was destined to fail and disappoint, to create a monster and, by doing so, become one herself.

No, what annoyed her wasn’t the pain and suffering. It was the shaking of her hand.

No matter how still she tried to hold it, it still shook, her muscles weak from her sleeplessness and constantly clenching. As she sat at the edge of her bed, staring down at her hand, watching it tremble.

She grabbed her wrist with her other hand, looping her fingers all the way around her skinny wrist, and tightened her grip. She snarled with the pain, her face morphing into something between suffering and contempt. She couldn’t let it shake, couldn’t show just how terrified she was. She couldn’t.

It wasn’t long before the already pale skin begun to go splotchy, the pain increasing the more the discolouration spread and deepened in colour. Soon, the pain became unbearable, and Alena was forced to release the hand, driven by self-preservation.

For a moment, the hand was still as the warmth of blood trickled back into the starved hand. However, not a few seconds after the hand returned to a comfortable pale crème did the trembling return. A mixture of frustration and sadness rushed through her, the traitorous hand shaking despite the girl’s protest.

She slumped forward, pulling the arm into herself, cradling her trembling limb into herself.

It had been weeks. The man in in her father’s surgery room was unrelenting and inexhaustible. Each of her failures only began the next test. How many times had she pleaded with the man to stop? Ten times at least. Preparing for each test took one-and-a-half to two days, letting the Rhy virus natural propagate through his system, before she inevitably failed, only for the man to order her father to begin the process once again.

Initially she had been frustrated, feeling herself be manipulated into the situation of her nightmares, forced to use the very same power she’d sworn to her father that she’d hide.

How many times had she sworn to her father that this was the last time? That it wouldn’t happen again, that he didn’t need to worry? It was a lie, even if she was being honest. It wasn’t so easy. All it took was a touch and a strong will to help for the power lurking inside to jump out, sinking its teeth into her unsuspecting subject.

A small rabbit, a domesticated dog, a horse, a young boy.

Each and every time had risen suspicion, forcing her and her father to make a retreat into the night, fleeing from any possibility of word spreading to the ears of those with power and a healthy fear of the Abomination Makers.

Every time she had cried to her father, the shame and terror instilled within her mind, each and every one of those memories as clear as the day they happened. A constant reminder of the endless repetition of her failure.

Time after time she had clamped down on that thing within her. The writhing being had thrashed against her grip for years, begging to be used, but as the years passed, the writhing thing had grown still and quiet. At moments it would lift its head from the ground, the heavy chains resisting the movement, but it would always lay its head back down, resigned to its fate.

Slowly the being inside of her grew smaller and smaller, its strength atrophying, wasting away, controllable. Just how she liked it. The weak, resentful thing inside her, unable to hurt her or her father anymore.

Never again.

What a fool she was. Thinking that she had won against it, that it was content to never be seen or heard of again.

She could remember it clearly, as she watched her boyfriend cut into the tall man she hated, the flesh of his hand tearing before her eyes, the blood trickling from the already healing wound. The sight was miraculous beyond words, something she had dreamed of as a young girl.

The being inside woke from its submission and roared. The moment of rapture was so intense, so magnificent, that she could barely perceive her voice leaving her chest, revealing her deeply hidden truth, the secret she had held so furiously.

Every moment since, the thing was screaming, snarling… gloating. It had shattered its chains, growing from its small, emaciated form, into the raging being it had been oh so many years ago. The same being that her mother had tried so hard to tame within her, before she had died.

“Mummy, what’s wrong?” She had asked as a little girl. Her mother had tried to smile, her beautiful, sun-kissed features were stuck in a grimace.

“It’s okay, bub,” she had said as she stood over the writhing corpse of a rapidly mutating rabbit, the flesh bubbling into tumours and alternate limbs, “We will just have to go on another adventure, okay?”

“Aww, but I don’t want to! I don’t want to leave Gemma!” She had cried then, unaware of just how much danger she had put her and her family in.

No amount of protesting had stopped her family leaving that little town, the being inside her had reared its head, and her life would be forever changed, despite the efforts of her mother and father.

The moment the cat had leapt out of the bag that day, Alena had realised something was very different about Maximilian Avenforth.

Instead of the disgust, the horror and the fear she had expected, Maximilian had barely flinched. Hardly a thought for the sinister nature of her powers, of the terrifying context the name ‘Abomination Maker’ was steeped in.

And then he had cut into the flesh of his arm and told her to heal it. She had tried to resist against reaching her hand out and touching that arm. She knew what would happen when she did. Even just staring at the wound, the thing inside of her had been screaming, her mind had ached from just how powerful it had been.

From the moment that she had touched Maximilian Avenforth’s flesh, she knew that she had been enthralled. The power within her howled with glee, exalting in manipulating the flesh she touched, making it balloon with excess flesh, the cells multiplying and mutating at a speed far past something her mind could process.

It was then that he had cut his own arm off, her failure falling to the ground and continued to mutate until it was little more than a ball of dead flesh.

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She had failed, yet he told her to try again, over and over. Smaller things at first, then larger and larger, then the brain.

Then the virus.

She sighed, only just preventing the sob she’d been holding from leaving her lips. The virus, the tests, were why she sat at the end of her bed today, shaking with the anxiety and the fear of yet another failure. One was due for tonight.

She had confronted the being inside her so many times now, desperately trying to control it as it ran rampant towards the diseased cells. She tried—

“Alena.”

The clear voice made her jump, her system shocked into a frenzy. Her heartrate flew through the roof, blood coursing through the small veins in her ears like a rushing river. She so desperately wanted to stay seated there, refuse to help the man that laid in that surgery room, even if it came at the cost of her boyfriend’s affection.

But she couldn’t. The thing inside her was too strong. She stood shakily, as if a marionette in the hands of an inexperienced puppeteer. She stumbled out of her room, through the living room, and down the steps to that door.

She swallowed hesitantly as she pried open that door as if it were delicate porcelain. Inside the clean room laid the man himself and her father, his tired eyes peaking from behind his circular glasses, a soft expression of sadness.

She tried to hold her father’s gaze but, as she stood halted in the middle of the room, door swinging closed behind her, she could feel his gaze boring into her very essence. She jolted, turning her eyes to the man who sat there, sick but so very powerful.

Her hand began to shake harder now, but it wasn’t from the nerves, or the anxiety that had plagued her for weeks. No, it was in anticipation. She felt herself practically leap forward, sitting in the chair at his bedside and reached out to touch the man with the villainous hand—without so much as a confirmatory word.

She had pleaded for too long, asking time after time to soothe her own conscious, trying to protect herself from her own mentality. But no longer. No longer will she bow to appease her own mind, forcing herself to live with the anxiety, letting it morph her personality into a bitter, angry shell of a person.

No longer.

The thing inside rushed forwards with undisguised glee, bursting into Maximilian’s body with a power she couldn’t possibly have produced before. She could feel the exaltation as the thing spread over the man’s body, accounting for each and every cell, mapping each vein, comprehending every link in the mind. Her mind exploded with the magnitude of the information she suddenly possessed.

A map of the body that put every literary description, every diagram, every carefully constructed art piece to shame. She saw it in its totality, how one simple electrical signal in the brain created a wonderful tapestry of actions and reactions across the body in such complexity that she would never be able to write it, never be able to express it.

She knew, in that moment, that it was something that would remain forever within her brain, clear and precise.

But, as the thing from within her came to complete its adventure around the Maximilian’s body, she knew what would happen next. She could feel her heart leap into her throat as the power she had restricted for so long came to rest just underneath the skin she touched with that hand of hers.

She felt the power shudder, yet she could only close shy away from the havoc that would be wrought, preparing for the corruption it would seed amongst the body’s delicate machinery…

Yet, the power laid still, underneath her fingertips.

She checked again, finding the energy merely sitting stagnant, its enormous potential for destruction unrealised. Her eyebrows scrunched as she ventured—tentatively—to inspect the power. She found, instead of the rampaging spawn of horrors, a quiet and docile thing.

Flabbergasted, she checked over and over, disbelief filling her before a new emotion took precedence.

Realisation, a pure enlightenment of understanding. In that moment of crystal clarity, her mind took each and every moment that the thing had rebelled inside of her, desperate for a chance to destroy everything that her and her family had built, and recontextualized it.

“Why mummy? Why does it want to hurt me?” Words she had spoken so many years ago sprouted from her mind. She remembered her mother’s face, beautiful and kind, overcome with sadness in an intensity she should barely fathom back then. But now…

“It doesn’t want to hurt you, bub. It just wants to help.”

She understood.

Her mind, and the power, together were two parts of the whole. The understanding, the vision, the clarity partnered with innate instinct itself, a knowledge that surpassed anything that could be analysed, or calculated.

Some small part of her tried to pull back, but it was too late. She understood too much to possibly turn away from it. Not as the truth stared her so boldly in the face. Her mind raced through Maximilian Avenforth’s body, pinpointing each and every diseased cell with unbelievable precision.

Her mind pondered for a moment as she stared at those cells and the virus that they were reproducing. So many times, before she had tried to kill the virus with her own hands, trying to burn it away with her power, yet each time they ran rampant multiplying dramatically.

Now, it was all too clear. With barely a thought, the power she had restrained to severely raced forwards jubilantly, each cell it touched, each vein, every bone, every gland changed. Each place it touched lit up with a brilliance inside of her mind, a correctness so apparent it almost hurt.

The power danced through Maximilian’s body, forcing the body to work how she wanted it to, organising it with the instinct, and commanding it with the vision. Maximilian’s body was suddenly a battlefield, each and every cell controlled through her instinct, every component in his body focussed on simply eradicating the insidious invaders. Time blurred as her mind solely devoted itself to the task.

The battle waged, each second drawn into ten as the invading disease was methodically destroyed, its nature as an unthinking, unfeeling thing being no match Alena.

And then it was over, as quickly as it started. The virus was gone, destroyed by the body it inhabited with the careful guidance of Alena’s instinct and intelligence. Wisdom and Understanding.

Its job completed, the power she had held from herself for so many years bounded across Maximilian’s body once again, setting it back in order, then returning once again to its jailor. Only now, a deep knowledge within her understood that it had never been a being, or a thing. It had always simply been her, another limb that only her and those like her possessed, an aspect of her mind so powerful—so intrinsic—that it could never truly be contained.

All of a sudden, she felt a hand gently cover hers, shocking her back into reality. She stared down at the hand, the fingers long and thin, with a delicateness that you’d expect from an instrumentalist. Even now she could see the veins, nerves and bone shift and fire as it moved. She shook herself of the mental image and followed the arm upwards towards the body it was attached to, then the face of the man she had healed.

The face, strong jaw covered in a light dusting of stubble on smooth, warmly coloured skin. His light brown hair framing his face, slowly growing over the course of testing. But nothing even came close to his eyes.

An ordinary brown, by all means, but it was something else entirely that was so powerfully capturing about them. They burned with a fire so bright that she could feel the heat on her skin as she stared into them. And all in one moment, she truly saw.

In the back of her mind the vaguely remembered Rethi telling her about Maximilian once. He swore to her that, for just a second, he could see what the man truly thought, how he actually felt. He had seen himself in those eyes, any number of future versions of himself, all undeniably successful. She had humoured him, but secretly believed it to be a fiction created by an overenthusiastic boy.

Now she saw just how wrong she was. As she looked into the eyes of the otherwise unremarkably featured man, she could see herself in a painful clarity.

Healer of many, saviour of all who she touched, her hands curing the deadliest of afflictions in a moment. Each life saved benefits another, each life a tree that will grow to shade the others.

Protector of the people, each touch protecting against an unseen threat, one that could cause unknown suffering for millions. Every person protected, a wall between them and a thousand others.

Shaper of futures, a delicate change with a careful hand, changing the fate of a parent’s child, and that child’s child in turn. For every generation, exponentially more are saved from a fate untenable within the brutality of the world.

Educator of the masses, dispersing knowledge hundreds of years more advanced than what is available, creating a foundation of understanding for generations of scientists and doctors to breakdown and utilise, saving a truly uncountable number of people through the passage of time.

She found herself smiling as she saw these versions of herself, an odd emotion welling up from within her that she hadn’t experienced for a long, long time. It took her only a moment to identify it, and when she did, she couldn’t stop the sob from escaping her.

It was pride.