Chapter 3: The Pastor's Vigil
Lilly fell into a sleep that was not sleep but a thick, black tar. The euphoria of growth had burned off, leaving a chemical fatigue that pressed her deep into the mattress. Her body was a strange landscape of new aches—dull pulls across her shoulders, a persistent tension in the lengthened tendons behind her knees. She dreamed of vast, empty spaces and a horizon that kept retreating.
She awoke to pressure.
Not the internal pressure of desire, but an external, harsh confinement. A biting tightness around her wrists and ankles. Her mind, sludge-filled and slow, tried to dismiss it as a dream-sensation, a phantom of her changing form. She tried to turn onto her side, to curl the way she always had.
She couldn’t move.
Panic, cold and immediate, hosed the sleep from her brain. Her eyes snapped open to the familiar darkness of her room, the faint moonlight from the blinds painting silver stripes across her ceiling—a ceiling that seemed closer than it had when she’d lain down. She strained her neck, looking down the length of her body.
Dark shapes bound her wrists to the bedposts. Her ankles were secured to the footboard. Coarse rope, the kind from the garage for tying down the tarp on the firewood pile, cut into her skin. A frantic tug confirmed it: solid, knotted, unyielding.
A shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom beside her dresser.
“Be still, child.” The voice was a strained whisper, trembling with a terrible conviction. Pastor Miller. He stepped into a slat of moonlight. His cardigan was gone. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms slick with sweat. In one hand he held his leather-bound Bible, pressed to his chest like a shield. In the other, a simple wooden cross. His face was a ghastly study in contrasts—zealous light in the eyes, a mouth twisted with fear and resolve.
“What are you doing?” Lilly’s voice was a dry rasp, still thick with sleep but rising. “Get these off me.”
“This is for your salvation, Lilly.” He didn’t look at her face; his gaze was fixed on her body, trussed up on the bed as if for some profane ritual. “The unnatural growth must be reversed. The demon of expansion must be cast out. Your mother… she is broken. She cannot do what must be done. So I must.”
“My mother is downstairs?” Rage, hotter and cleaner than fear, ignited in her chest. “Did she let you in here?”
“She sleeps. A peace I gave her. A tincture in her tea. She will wake, please God, to find her daughter restored.” He moved closer to the bed, his eyes now scanning her up and down with clinical disgust. “Look at you. Straining against God’s natural order. A parody of a woman.”
Lilly pulled against the ropes with all her new strength. The old bedframe, a relic from her childhood, groaned in protest. The rope burned, but the knots held. He’d tied them well. “You tied me up. You drugged my mother. You’re not a pastor, you’re a criminal.”
“I am a soldier in a war you are too infected to perceive!” he hissed, his whisper sharpening. He raised the cross, holding it out toward her. “I command you, spirit of elongation, spirit of distortion! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I compel you to recede! Let this vessel return to its intended form!”
He began to pray, not in the gentle, cadenced tones of Sunday service, but in a frantic, rushing stream of Latin and English, verses of binding and exorcism tumbling over one another. His voice gained volume, losing its whisper, filling the small room with a dissonant chant.
The words washed over Lilly. They meant nothing. They were just sounds. But the intent behind them—the utter denial of her will, the violent imposition of his own—was a violation more profound than the ropes. This was him trying to shove her back into the box she’d shattered.
The metallic taste flooded her mouth, not as a summons, but as a reflex. A defense.
The want surged, not a siren call this time, but a war cry.
“Stop praying,” she gritted out, her teeth clenched.
He ignored her, his eyes squeezed shut in fervent concentration, spittle forming at the corner of his lips. “Libera eam, Domine! Ab omni deformatione!”
The phrase Ayla Eyliar was a drumbeat in her skull, synchronizing with her hammering heart. It was no longer just words for height. It was words for freedom. For breaking every knot. For shattering every cross held in a trembling hand.
She opened her mouth.
“Ayla Eyliar.”
She didn’t whisper it. She declared it into the torrent of his prayer, a stark, flat statement of fact.
The change did not wait.
It erupted.
There was no golden warmth, no pleasurable unfurling. This was a violent, explosive assertion. A seismic shock traveled from her core to her extremities. Her bones didn’t pop—they cracked, loud as gunshots in the tiny room. A white-hot lance of pain shot up her spine, so acute she screamed, a raw, ragged sound that tore through the pastor’s Latin.
The ropes snapped taut. The bedframe shrieked. She felt her body pushing, expanding, filling the space as if inflating with furious pressure. The cheap metal footboard gave first, with a sickening metallic twang. The ropes around her ankles went slack for an instant before biting into flesh made suddenly thicker, harder.
Pastor Miller’s eyes flew open. His prayer died on his lips. He watched, mesmerized by horror, as the girl on the bed grew before him.
Her shoulders broadened, deltoids swelling against the flannel of her pajama top. The seams under the arms shrieked and parted with a sound like ripping cardboard. Her legs lengthened, pushing against the footboard until the wood, not designed for such leverage, splintered with a wet crunch. The ropes at her wrists groaned, fibers straining individually before parting with sudden, violent pings.
Lilly arched her back, a involuntary convulsion of the transformation. Her head drove into the headboard, and the old pine cracked down the middle.
Seven feet.
The number wasn’t a thought; it was a physical reality. The bed was a child’s toy beneath her. She was a giantess in a dollhouse. She rolled onto her side, the remains of the ropes falling away like dead vines, and pushed herself up to a sitting position. The motion was clumsy, unpracticed for this new scale. Her head brushed the ceiling. The room seemed to have shrunk, the walls bowing inward. She looked down at Pastor Miller.
He had stumbled back, colliding with her dresser. The dolls rattled in their drawer. His Bible had fallen to the floor. He held only the cross now, thrust out before him like a tiny sword. His face was the color of spoiled milk. All the zealous certainty had drained away, leaving only the primal, unadorned terror.
“In nomine Dei…” he whimpered.
Lilly swung her legs over the side of the ruined bed. The mattress, compressed and torn, sighed as her weight left it. Her feet, long and pale in the moonlight, found the floor. She stood up.
The sensation was utterly new. She had to stoop immediately, the slope of the ceiling pressing down on her crown. The room was a cage. She was the captive no longer. She was the entity that made the cage irrelevant. She took a step toward him. The floorboard shuddered under a weight it had never been asked to bear.
He scrambled backward, his heels slipping on a discarded magazine. He hit the wall beside the window, trapped. He held the cross up, his arm shaking so violently the symbol danced in the air.
“Leave me be, demon!”
“I’m not a demon,” Lilly said. Her voice was different. Lower, resonant, a vibration that seemed to come from the floor and up through her feet. It held a timbre that was neither child’s nor woman’s, but something else entirely. “I’m Lilly. You tied me to my bed.”
“That is not Lilly! Lilly is a child of God! You are a… a growth! A malignancy!”
She took another step, reducing the space between them to nothing. She loomed over him, her bent head bringing her face within a foot of his. In the striped light, she could see every pore on his nose, the capillary bursts in his frightened eyes, the tremor in his lower lip. He smelled of sour sweat and breath mints. He was so small. A frantic, chattering thing.
“You wanted to see it reverse,” she rumbled. “It doesn’t reverse.”
She reached out a hand. Not to strike him. Just a movement, to gesture, to emphasize the truth of her words. It was a hand that could have palmed his entire head.
He saw only the approach of the monstrous. With a strangled cry, he swung the wooden cross at her, not as a spiritual symbol, but as a club. It struck the back of her knuckles.
A trivial impact. A sting.
But it was an attack. The last thread of any restraint, any semblance of the girl who might have reasoned, snapped.
Her hand, open a moment before, curled into a fist. It was not a conscious decision. It was a reflex of a body that now understood its own power, a body that had just been assaulted. She didn’t punch him. She backhanded him, a swatting motion, the way one might dismiss a buzzing insect.
The force was catastrophic.
The connection was a dull, wet thock. His head snapped to the side. The cross flew from his grip, clattering against the rocking chair. He crumpled, a boneless heap, sliding down the wall to land in a seated position, his head lolling grotesquely on his neck. A thin line of blood trickled from his temple where the edge of her knuckle had caught him.
Silence.
The kind of silence that roars.
Lilly stared at the unmoving form. The fury evaporated, leaving a cavernous hollow in her chest. She watched his chest. It rose.Fell. Rose again. He was alive. Unconscious.
She had hit a man. A pastor. She had hit him so hard the sound was still echoing in the room.
The taste in her mouth was no longer metallic. It was coppery. Like blood.
A creak from the hallway.
Lilly’s head, slowly, stiffly, turned toward her bedroom door. It was open a crack—the way it always was, a habit from childhood. In the dark slit, she saw a sliver of a face. An eye, wide and unblinking.
Her mother.
How long had she been standing there? Had she seen the prayer? The transformation? The strike?
The eye in the darkness stared. It did not blink. It held no scream, no tears. It was a void of perception, absorbing the scene: the shattered bed, the snapped ropes, the seven-foot-tall daughter stooped beneath the ceiling, the man bleeding against the wall.
Then, without a sound, the slit of darkness vanished. The faint shadow of feet under the door disappeared. Quiet footsteps, impossibly careful, retreated down the hall. A door closed softly. The master bedroom. A lock clicked.
The sound was tiny. Final.
Lilly was alone with the ruin and the unconscious man.
She looked at her hand. The knuckles were reddened. They throbbed with a distant, unimportant ache. She flexed the fingers. They were long, graceful, powerful. They were the hands that had just changed everything, again.
She had to get out.
The concept was physical, urgent. The house was a trap. The walls were closing in. The ceiling was a palm pressing down on her skull. She couldn’t stand straight. She was a sapling in a pot that had split.
She moved to her closet, her movements stiff and alien in the cramped space. Her clothes were pointless. The jeans from the mall were already capris. Nothing would fit. She saw her winter coat, a long, puffy thing. She yanked it off the hanger. It was meant to go to her knees. Now it would be a cropped jacket, but it would have to do. She found a pair of her mother’s stretchy leggings, abandoned in a laundry basket. They were too short, but they were elastic. She pulled them on; they ended mid-calf. She wrestled the coat over her shoulders. The sleeves stopped several inches above her wrists.
She looked like a refugee from a absurdist play.
Pastor Miller groaned softly, his head rolling.
Lilly’s gaze fell on him, then on the cross lying near the rocker. She walked over, the floor complaining, and picked it up. It was just wood. Smooth, polished, lightweight. It meant nothing. It had no power. She dropped it onto his lap.
She had to leave through the window. The front door felt like a threshold she could no longer cross. She went to her bedroom window, unlocked the latch, and pushed it up. The cool night air washed in, smelling of damp grass and freedom. She looked out. The roof of the porch stretched below. It was a drop of about ten feet.
For her new body, it was nothing.
She swung one long leg over the sill, then the other, her body contorting to fit through the frame. She sat on the windowsill, her feet dangling. For a moment, she was poised between the broken world inside and the vast, unknown one outside. She glanced back once. At the ruined bed. At the fallen man. At the closed door of her mother’s room.
Then she pushed off.
The drop was a swift, weightless moment, then a jarring impact that traveled up her calves and thighs. The porch shingles cracked under her feet. She straightened up as much as she could, her head now level with her own second-story window. The neighborhood was asleep, bathed in the blue-grey light of pre-dawn. The silence was immense.
She jumped from the porch roof to the lawn, landing with a soft, deep thud that she felt in the earth.
And she walked.
She had no destination. She just moved, putting distance between herself and the house with every ground-eating stride. Her walk was still unsteady, a blend of awe and awkwardness. She felt like a newborn foal, but one built of steel cable and relentless intent. Streetlights cast her long, distorted shadow ahead of her, a giantess leading herself into the gloom.
She reached the edge of her subdivision, where the sidewalks ended and a two-lane country road began. A few cars passed, their headlights slicing through the dark. She saw one slow, then speed up violently. She kept to the shoulder, the gravel crunching under her inadequate shoes.
The physical reality of her size began to impress itself upon her with brutal clarity. A low-hanging branch from an oak tree required her to duck. Passing under a streetlight, she realized her head passed through the circle of its light a full second before her shoulders did. Her thirst was immense. Her hunger was a hollow, grinding void. The coat was a joke against the chill.
She was a spectacle. An impossibility. And she was utterly alone.
As the first dirty pink of dawn smudged the eastern sky, she found herself at the outskirts of the next town, standing before a closed truck stop. Its big rig parking lot was mostly empty, a few hulking shapes sleeping in the mist. The neon sign was off. One of the exterior lights was flickering, buzzing like a dying insect.
Exhaustion hit her then, a tidal wave that had nothing to do with sleep. It was the fatigue of relentless transformation, of shattered realities, of violence offered and received. She slumped against the cold brick wall of the truck stop, near a metal service door, and slid down to sit on the damp asphalt. She drew her knees up. Even folded, they were like twin mountains.
She sat there as the world lightened from black to grey. A bird began to sing, a ridiculously cheerful sound. A truck engine rumbled to life in the distance.
The phrase was in her, quiet now, a sleeping serpent. She knew she could call it again. Six inches.A foot. She could grow until her head cleared the roof of the truck stop. She could grow until she could step over the highway. The power was there, waiting.
But for the first time, the thought brought no thrill, no warmth. It brought only a cold, echoing question: Then what?
She thought of Maya’s terror-stricken face behind the counter. She thought of the pastor’s body sliding down the wall. She thought of the single, unblinking eye in the crack of her bedroom door, and the soft, definitive click of a lock.
She had outgrown her home. Her clothes. Her bed. She was outgrowing the very world that contained her.
A crunch of gravel.
Lilly’s head, which had been resting against the brick, lifted. Her new senses, hyper-aware of proximity, had registered the approach before her ears did.
A man stood about twenty feet away, having just rounded the corner of the building. He was tall himself, over six feet, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, a trucker’s cap pulled low. He held a steaming travel mug. He had frozen mid-stride, staring at her. His eyes traveled the impossible length of her, from the exposed ankles in the too-short leggings, up the coated torso, to the face that was nearly level with his despite her being seated.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t run. He just stared, his mouth slightly open, steam curling idly from his mug.
Lilly stared back. She had no energy for fear, for explanation, for anything.
The man blinked slowly. He took a deliberate sip from his mug. He swallowed. His eyes never left her.
“Rough night?” he asked, his voice a low, gravelly baritone. It was utterly neutral. Not friendly, not hostile. It was the voice of a man who had seen many strange things on the road, and had decided, for the moment, not to classify this one.
The absurdity of the question, the sheer, breathtaking normalcy of its tone, broke something inside Lilly. A sound escaped her—not a laugh, not a sob, but a choked, shaky exhalation that was both.
“You could say that,” she said, her deep voice raspy.
He nodded, as if she’d confirmed a minor suspicion. He glanced up at the lightening sky, then back at her. “Sun’s coming up. Gets harder to hide in the light when you’re… noticeable.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was an observation. A piece of road wisdom.
“I don’t know where to go,” she said. The confession left her lips before she could stop it. She was too tired to lie, too alien to pretend.
The trucker considered this. He took another