Chapter 17: The First Taste of Power
The silence in the bathroom was absolute, heavy, and wrong. It pressed in on Yuna’s eardrums after the chaos of Lia’s departure, after the distant, gut-churning roar that had shaken dust from the ceiling. Lewis was a still life on the cold tile floor, his breathing shallow, a bruise flowering on his temple where the doorframe had caught him.
“Just watch him,” Lia had said. “Don’t let Yeji find him.”
Yuna hovered, wringing her hands. Her knuckles were white. The red sweater felt stifling, the tan pants too tight. Every cell in her body was screaming to run. But where? Into the night where that… other roar had just come from?
She caught her reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. Pale, wide-eyed, strands of black hair stuck to her clammy forehead. A scared girl playing at being a guard.
Not just a girl, the thought came, but it wasn’t her own. It was a velvet murmur at the base of her skull.
Yuna flinched. “No.”
She said it aloud, to the empty room, to her reflection. The reflection smiled. It wasn’t her smile. It was a slow, knowing curl of lips that were suddenly, impossibly, a deeper shade.
“You feel it, don’t you?” The voice was Ana’s, but it didn’t come from the mirror this time. It vibrated inside her own head, a foreign resonance in her mental space. “The panic. The uselessness. He’s just meat on the floor, and you’re a trembling leaf.”
“Shut up,” Yuna whispered, digging her fingers into her scalp. She tugged at her hair, a sharp, familiar pain to ground herself. “You’re not real. You’re the mirror. You’re not in me.”
A low laugh echoed in the confines of her mind. “Where does the mirror end and you begin, little one? I am the door you locked. And she… the one who is coming… she has just kicked it off its hinges.”
A wave of heat crashed through Yuna. It was different from fear-sweat. It was deep, cellular, a furnace being stoked in her marrow. Her skin prickled, not with goosebumps, but with a terrifying awareness. She could feel every thread of her clothing, every seam a prison.
“It doesn’t have to be a cage,” Ana’s voice purred. “That fear. That wanting-to-hide. You could turn it inside out. See what it becomes.”
“I don’t want to!” Yuna’s voice was a choked sob. She backed against the sink, her body trembling not with cold, but with a surging, internal pressure. Her joints ached. Her bones felt like they were buzzing.
“It’s not about want,” Ana corrected, her tone shifting to one of chilling practicality. “It’s about what is. She is coming. The dark one. The betrayed one. She will tear this place apart to find him. What will you be when she arrives? A snack? Or something with teeth?”
Another spasm, sharper this time. A pop in her shoulder. Yuna cried out, looking down. The fabric of her white tank top strained across her chest. Not from breathing. The knit was stretching, the cotton threads screeching a silent protest. She watched, horrified, as the smooth plane of her slender forearm began to ripple, as if something thick and corded was moving beneath the skin.
“No, no, no, no…”
She clawed at her sweater, yanking it over her head in a panic. It was too hot. She couldn’t breathe. The sweater hit the floor. Her tank top was next, the hem tearing as she pulled it, not out of desire, but out of the sheer, terrifying need for her skin to be free. It was moving. Changing.
The tan pants were the worst. As her hips flared, the sturdy fabric groaned, then split with a sound like a gunshot in the quiet room. A long seam ripped open from thigh to calf.
Yuna stared at her naked reflection. But it wasn’t hers. Not anymore. Her brown eyes were bleeding into a luminous, piercing green, like sunlight through jungle leaves. Her hair wasn’t just dark; it was a wild, curling mass of emerald, streaked with deeper mossy shadows. The slender frame was filling out, not with soft curves, but with the hard, defined planes of a predator. Sinew wrapped bone. Power settled into a new architecture.
“Good,” Ana’s voice said, and now it wasn’t inside her head. It was her own voice, emerging from her own throat, but lower, richer, resonant. “Now feel it. The fear is still there. But look what it’s made.”
Yuna—or what was left of her—tried to grip the sink. Her hands, now large and powerful, with skin the vibrant green of a serpent’s belly, crushed the porcelain. Cracks spider-webbed out from her fingers. The last of her conscious mind was a shrinking island in a rising sea of green. She saw the world through a haze of new colors, could smell the stale water in the pipes, the mold in the grout, the coppery scent of blood from Lewis’s small cut.
And him. He was the strongest smell of all. Sweat, fear, soap. Weakness.
She turned from the mirror. The movement was fluid, powerful, utterly alien in her own body. She took a step, and the floorboard creaked under a weight it had never borne. She stood over Lewis.
A part of her, the Yuna-part, was screaming. This was Lewis. Her friend’s… whatever he was. He was hurt. He needed help.
The Ana-part looked down and saw opportunity. Territory. A catalyst.
She knelt. The action was not gentle. One large, green hand reached out and shook his shoulder.
“Wake up.”
Lewis stirred, a groan escaping his lips. His eyelids fluttered open. Confusion, then dawning, absolute terror. He scrambled back, his shoes slipping on the tile, until his back hit the bathtub. He stared up at the towering green woman, at the wild hair and savage eyes.
“Y-Yuna…?”
The name meant nothing to the creature looking down at him. It was a sound from a drowned world. She tilted her head, studying the rapid pulse in his throat, the dilation of his pupils. The fear on him was a palpable aroma, sweet and electrifying.
“Not Yuna,” she said, and the voice was a low thrum that vibrated in his ribs. “She is… resting.”
“What do you want?” Lewis’s voice cracked. He tried to get his legs under him.
Ana’s hand shot out, not to strike, but to press him flat against the tile floor by his chest. The pressure was immense, undeniable. He gasped, the air forced from his lungs.
“I want not to be weak,” she said, as if explaining something very simple. “I want not to be a leaf in the storm that is coming. You feel it. The shaking in the air.”
Another roar echoed in the distance, closer this time. It was answer enough. Lewis’s face went ashen.
Ana leaned down, her emerald hair forming a curtain around them. The heat from her body was intense, biological. “You made the others strong. Your fear. Your lies. Your… attention.” She inhaled the scent of him. “You are a key. A trigger.”
“Please,” Lewis whispered, true understanding dawning with a nauseating horror. This wasn’t Lia’s chaotic anger or Yeji’s betrayed fury. This was something colder. A calculation.
“Please?” Ana repeated, the word foreign on her tongue. She shifted her weight, one powerful knee coming down to bracket his hip, pinning him utterly. The tile cracked beneath them. “That is what the other one said. The small one. Inside me. She is saying it now.”
She looked into his eyes, and for a second, he saw a flicker of the Yuna he knew—a flash of brown, a well of terrified apology. It was swallowed instantly by the consuming green.
“It doesn’t work,” Ana said flatly.
She moved. It was not passion. It was possession. An assertion. A violent, clinical erasure of the helplessness that had defined Yuna’s entire existence, using the only tool Lewis had ever really represented.
He cried out, a sound of shock and pain, but the roar that split the night outside was closer, louder, shaking the very walls of the house. It swallowed his voice whole.
Ana didn’t roar. She worked in silence, her green eyes fixed on a point beyond the walls, listening to the approaching devastation, while beneath her, Lewis’s world dissolved into a blur of pain and crushing green. She was building a fortress out of his violation, and the bricks were her own nascent, terrifying power.
The window in the hallway exploded inward.