Chapter 5: Primordial Rage
The assigned Kierkegaard text sat unopened on his desk for a week. Lewis went to class, took notes, avoided her eyes. He tried to process the library as a fever dream, a hallucination brought on by stress and weird library lighting. It didn’t work. The memory of her heat was a tactile ghost on his palm.
He knew he had to break the standoff. Normalize it. So, during her posted office hours on Thursday, he walked the familiar hallway, his heart a trapped bird in his ribs. Her door was ajar.
He knocked once and pushed it open.
She wasn’t alone. A university administrator in a cheap suit, a man with a clipboard and a pinched expression, was standing over her desk. Professor Rygell was seated, her posture taut, a pen held too tightly in her fingers.
“...unsubstantiated, of course, but the report mentions unusual noises from this wing after hours. Shattered furniture in a seminar room last month. We have to investigate all claims, Professor,” the administrator was saying, his voice slick with bureaucratic concern.
Lewis froze in the doorway.
Rygell’s eyes snapped to him. They were black and flat, a warning. “Now is not a good time, Lewis.”
“It’s about the mid-term paper,” he mumbled, already stepping back.
The administrator turned, offering a thin smile. “We’re almost done here. Just a few more questions about your… extracurricular activities. A student mentioned seeing you in the library quite late, appearing… distressed.”
Something in the air changed. It became heavier, sharper. Lewis saw the subtle tremor start in Rygell’s wrist. The pen in her hand gave a quiet crack, a hairline fracture splintering the plastic.
“Distressed,” she repeated, her voice dangerously quiet. “I find deadlines distressing. Poorly written theses are distressing. This conversation is becoming distressing.”
“We’re only following procedure,” the man said, turning back to her, oblivious to the ozone beginning to feather the air.
“Procedure.” The word was a curse. She stood up. It was a simple motion, but it carried a sudden, implicit weight. The administrator took an involuntary step back, his clipboard knocking a stack of papers to the floor.
“Get out.” Her voice was low, a vibration in the floorboards.
“Professor Rygell, I must insist—”
“Get. Out.”
It was the last clear sentence she uttered. A deep, inhuman sound tore from her chest, not a moan of transformation but a roar of pure, unfiltered fury. Lewis watched, paralyzed, as the rage took her. This wasn’t the controlled, almost playful shift in the library. This was a violent eruption.
Her skin didn’t just tinge green; it flared, a brilliant, alarming jade. Her shoulders widened, tearing the seams of her blouse with sounds like gunshots. She seemed to swell, not just in muscle but in sheer physical presence, her height forcing her to hunch under the ceiling tiles. Her fingers, thickening and darkening to the color of old moss, gripped the edge of her solid oak desk. The wood splintered with a sickening crunch.
The administrator screamed—a high, thin sound—and scrambled for the door, shoving past Lewis into the hall.
Rygell—or what she was becoming—turned her head. Her eyes were now pure, pupil-less emerald coals. They fixed on Lewis. There was no recognition in them, only a feral, blazing intelligence. A guttural growl rumbled through the room, shaking the books on the shelves.
She took a step towards him. The floor groaned.
He ran.
He didn’t think. He just bolted down the hallway, away from the main stairs, towards the service door at the end that he knew led to the old basement. His blood pounded in his ears, drowning out the sounds of shattering furniture and buckling metal behind him. He hit the door at full speed, stumbled down the concrete steps two at a time, and burst into the abandoned boiler room.
It was a cathedral of industry gone silent. Vast, rusted pipes coiled along the grime-caked brick walls. Dust motes danced in the shafts of pale, sickly light from grime-covered windows high above. It was hot, the ghost heat of decades of steam, and smelled of old oil and damp concrete. Faded safety posters peeled from the walls.
He thought he’d lost her. He leaned against a cold pipe, gasping for breath.
Then the entire metal doorframe at the top of the stairs twisted inwards with a deafening shriek of tortured steel. She had to crouch to fit through it, her green back scraping against the concrete lintel. She descended the steps slowly, each footfall a concussive thud that echoed through the cavernous space. Shreds of her blouse hung from her, comically small against the volcanic swell of her chest and shoulders. Her breath came in hot, steaming gusts.
She wasn’t chasing him. She was hunting him.
“Rygell,” he tried, his voice cracking. “Professor.”
She paused at the base of the stairs. Her head tilted. The growl subsided into a low, continuous hum. The fury in her eyes had banked, replaced by something more intense, more singular. A predatory focus.
“You ran,” she said, the words distorted, pushed through a reshaped larynx.
“You were… you were going to kill that guy.”
She took another step, her massive hand swiping absently at a network of pipes. They bent like cheap solder. “I wanted to. I didn’t.” She was closer now. The heat radiating from her was immense, a physical force. “But you. You saw.”
He had nowhere to go. A wall of machinery, cold and unyielding, was at his back.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he lied.
A semblance of a smile touched her monstrous lips. “Liar.” She closed the final distance. Her hand, easily the size of his torso, came up and pressed against the machinery behind him, caging him in. The other hand gripped his hip. Her touch was searing, even through his jeans. “You should be.”
She yanked him forward and then slammed him back, not against the machine, but against a series of pipes that were still faintly warm. The impact stole his breath. Before he could recover, she drove her body against his. The feeling was overwhelming—a crushing, magnificent weight. Her thighs, each as thick as his waist, encased his legs. He was pinned, utterly immobilized, his feet dangling slightly above the floor.
He groaned, a sound of protest and helpless excitement. The evidence of his arousal pressed against the rough fabric of his jeans, a betrayal he couldn’t hide.
She saw it. Smelled it. Her growl shifted into something else, a deep, approving rumble. “There it is,” she breathed, hot and wet against his throat. “The truth. No philosophy. Just physics.” She ground herself against him, the rough, powerful motion leaving no room for gentleness, no space for thought.
With one hand still pinning him, the other ripped at his clothes. Denim and cotton gave way like tissue paper. The cool, dusty air hit his skin, followed immediately by the unbearable heat of her. Her own remaining clothes were just tatters. She was revealed in terrifying, glorious totality—a landscape of potent green muscle and devastating curves.
When she entered him, it wasn’t with seduction. It was with declaration. A claiming. He cried out, the sound swallowed by the cavernous room and her encompassing presence. It was too much, a punishing, exhilarating stretch that blurred the line between pleasure and agony.
She set a rhythm that was primal and unyielding. Each powerful thrust drove him back into the unyielding pipes, the metal growing uncomfortably hot against his skin. The floor beneath them was old, thick tile. With every surge of her hips, a sharp crack echoed through the boiler room as another tile split under the force.
Her sounds were raw, guttural. Gone was the eloquent professor.