The Awakening

Part One

The Awakening is a three-part prequel or origin story of an origional character set in the DC universe. Other established DC characters will be introduced in parts two and three. The main story: Goddess is still a work in progress.

Haley M Fox

Disclaimer:

This story is based upon the world and characters created by the imaginative minds behind DC Comics, of which I claim no legal rights. 

I also do not claim any legal rights to the poetry used to inspire each chapter.

The original characters in this work however were created by me and I do claim the rights to them. Any similarities in names or descriptions to people alive or dead is purely coincidental. 

Goddess Prequel:

    Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  

Dylan Thomas

The Awakening:

Part One

  Gotham City, a lifetime ago…

  It was a summer day but it was raining, a dismal day. The steady downpour seemed to wash away the color and the world turned grey. She leaned against the glass of the large living-room window in the small house, head tilted down, resting against the cool surface of the windowpane. Her breath fogged the glass and clouded the child’s face, but she could still see, she could see everything... 

She gazed past her quiet neighborhood, with it’s green lawns, picket fences and colorful flowerbeds: Colorless now, as if the life was being drained away with the rain and flowed unhindered into the gutters. Her eyes swept past all that because the only thing that mattered at that moment was the house across the street. On the surface she seemed normal, like every other child her age; perhaps six or seven years old. She wore blue denim overalls over a pink T-shirt. She had a mop of dark curly hair pulled into two pig-tails just behind her tiny ears. Her large almond eyes, hazel usually but grey today, stared out the window.  The dolls that she had been playing with were left on the living-room floor. Her game had been forgotten when a benign fantasy had given way to an unnatural reality. A terrible feeling of dread overcame her and as if in a trance she had walked to the window and began her silent vigil. Unblinking, never wavering, she could see everything and she wasn’t normal.  

With her grey eyes she watched the house across the street. She knew who lived there, a kind elderly couple with raspberry bushes in their back yard. On brighter days they would give the girl a small basket to collect those berries and smiling they left her to play in their yard. It was one of the few places in the world she was allowed to go on her own: Trees that begged climbing, sheds to explore, nooks and crannies to hide in, all the tools the girl needed to create her own little world of wonder and exploration. A world apart and all her own but now the world turned grey and those days would never come again. Her young mind knew this as she watched the house.    

The girl wasn’t like other children. She had what some called a gift, an ability that made her different and she hated it. The difference isolated her, forced her into a life of seclusion because she knew things about other people, things she shouldn’t be able to know.  Her young mind was a beacon, a magnet for the emotions of those around her. She was an island surrounded by waves of sensation: A relentless and unyielding sea that surrounded her, pummelled her young mind from all sides. Before she understood them, before she had begun to learn how to separate them from her ‘self’, they would envelope her, overpower her, control her. They would leave her in a state of absolute confusion because all the feelings she was experiencing, all that emotional bombardment had no point of reference for her. What she felt in her mind were emotions that were not her own. They were those of every mind around her. They would bring her to tears of utter sadness, uncontrollable fits of giggling, or to lash out in a violent rage and a myriad of other reactions, sometimes one by one and too often, many at once. When it subsided it left the child gasping and exhausted.