It is just as bad as the first.
She rides the burn of her lungs, the eternity of air pulled wrong, of pressure, of panic.
But then just as before it shifts. "F-FUCK." She coughs out. It is just as deranged ripping out of her throat. As before the sound echoes around the room sounding more like "Yuck!"
I have a dick.
And should not.
Her mind recoils as her stomach breaks backwards, against gravity. She rolls to her side and vomits. She opens her eyes to the white marble floor blotched with the yellow bile of her empty stomach.
She pushes her long silver hair back over one shoulder, wipes her mouth of spit and sits up.
The room is as she remembers, a dim-lit grey marbled oval about her. A light rings the room at eye level, but the light comes off the wall, illuminating, but not blinding. It feels like standing under a cloud.
The slab of stone where she has been lying is warmed from within. She pushes it off it, coming to stand, drawing her attention again to the monstrous body she has been put into.
Her hands are huge. Meaty things. Gone is her slight frame, and while she keeps her height, she has become massive and broad, like some drugged-up animals about to be showcased, or put in a race. All her muscles are overly large, overly bunched. Too gross fucking much.
Who you trying to impress Zeus? 'Cause it isn't me.
She frowns, rubbing a finger between her brows. What is my name? How do I know this is the second time he's offed me?
From the outer halls she hears the crunch of steps.
Adrenaline sweeps through this body in a wave of boiling blood. The testosterone fights to charge like a dumb thing and fight whoever it is outside. This body's pure bull-shit. She fights its urges, and swallows down some vomit as she faces again all its maleness.
She glances about, there is little in the room save the slab where she woke. She brings her fists together and pounds upon the rock headrest.
CRACK!
To her surprise it breaks off in one large piece.
THUNK.
She picks it up from the ground with much less effort then she might expect, and crouches, ready to lob it at whatever is outside.
There is a tapping, and cracks appear in the oval, the light ringing the room brightening. The rock ceiling splits open and descends.
She catches sight of the shadow-giant of a man outside. Trains of white-blue threads ripple over him in the wind.
She wants to vomit. Because they remind her too readily of the acrid burnt smell of her own skin and hair. Two deaths down.
'Hercules."
That's not my fucking name.
She can't remember what it is, but that doesn't stop her from throwing the rock as the shadow steps forward. A clear blue sky shifts behind his silhouette, untouched by cloud.
"Insolent shit." The voice roars turning into a crackle of a lightning storm.
She has a flicker of memory, "Irresponsible shit!" Where she'd been dealing with someone else. Someone frustrating, cutting, raw and innocent.
Mina.
She remembers arrogantly kissing those lips and striding up to confront her father.
Death was coming either way.
She owns her name for half-a-second before silver white-hot electrons volt across her skin.
Onto another fucked-up beginning—
YOU ARE READING
Silver Stranded Stars
Science FictionMina has been reduced to her blades, her heart singed to ash. She is shadowed by two giants, each offering their protection. They form a reluctant truce in the face of the god-hunt after Mina; her cursed genetics a blessing, and their undoing. Ka...
