Hurricane #44: The Hurricane (Patreon)

Storage tanks exploded against Serrano’s rough paw pads, the force enough to lift them back up, rocking her backward, almost off-balance. That was okay. She hoped. Each explosion was a flash of lightning and a rolling thunderclap, a gush of water, a tiny waterspout.

On the fourth trampling, a chain reaction started, the detonations setting off other detonations. She backed up hurriedly, feeling less explosive things crumple under her steps. Cars, definitely. Humans too slow to get out of the way, almost certainly. The front of a more office-like building. She glanced back down at it, seeing revealed crowds retreating deeper inside in a panic. From the other direction, she could see what looked like a literal army—okay, a squadron, maybe, and probably a private military force—heading toward her.

It took her three steps to close the distance with the army, already in disarray as they found themselves in the midst of a flood. They were totally unprepared for her to sweep up several dozen between her fingers. As the others got enough wits about them to open fire, she reared up on her hind legs, tilting her head back and pouring the handful of soldiers into her mouth. Then she let her forepaws crash back down to the ground on top of the rest. The force didn’t just crack the pavement, it brought down a nearby building.

As more and more tanks burst, the campus became less a lake than as a furious ground-level storm, water flooding through the buildings, tiny tornados merging into one. For a moment the ground blazed a brilliant fiery white, then went pitch black, punctuated by fireworks. The river of lightning was falling apart.

She stopped a moment, watching, and grinned. That should sure as shit stop the draining. It’d be critical to make sure Sark and friends couldn’t rebuild, but—

Her ears folded back as ball lightning raced across the city in all directions. Wind and rain and floodwater quickly followed.

Dammit. She knew she would have to corral the energy, gather it up, get it back to the worlds it had been stolen from, but she’d hoped she’d have a little more time.

Thinking about it wasted that time, though. She broke into a run, gathering energy, trying to direct the lightning and wind and water back on itself, up rather than out. She was dimly aware she’d left Sark’s campus, that her paws—bigger with each step—crashed down on buildings in his faux city, but she didn’t have the time to worry about it. And, hell, she wouldn’t worry about it even if she had time.

The storm power began to form a ferocious tornado, whipping buildings into kindling as it shot skyward rather than descending. Then it blew outward, pulling clouds into a pinwheel swirl.

Serrano stopped for a moment, one forepaw raised, gaping up, then grinned. You couldn’t get a larger storm than a hurricane, could you? But the billion-dollar question was whether she had any idea how to make one. She had the start, maybe, but…

Grow.

She paused to look down. Holy shit, she didn’t know how big she was now, but the tallest skyscrapers in the distance—and they weren’t very distant—didn’t come up to her shoulder. Lower shoulder. Front hips. Whatever. Abruptly, vertigo hit her. What the hell was she doing? She wasn’t a goddess. She was still mortal. She was—

You are not, the voices came, sounding amused/irritated. You are more than any of us. You are all of us.

Her eyes widened. Taking a deep breath, filled with the scents of rain and the city, she nodded.

The world blurred for a moment, pressure all around her. She wasn’t growing as much as exploding outward. As her senses came back, her eyes widened, her mouth open.

She could see the curvature of the planet.

The first thing she noticed—after that—was the river Innovation City had been built on, cresting over its banks as storm surges coursed down it at the speed of mountain rapids. The second thing was that at least a third of Innovation City had vanished under a single one of her forepaws, including all of Sark’s corporate/industrial campus.

Sark. Somehow she had a sense he’d made it out, that he hadn’t ended up a tiny splotch in a giant paw print. She bared her immense teeth.

Not yet.

No. All right. She knew what she had to do. She hoped.

Tensing, Serrano trotted off, then broke into a run.

Each print left when her paws slammed into the ground formed a deep depression, a canyon, a lake. But she barely noticed as forests and fields and towns disappeared. She couldn’t afford to. She was the storm goddesses, the storm goddesses were her, and her job was saving literal worlds, not tending the flickering lives of mortals and their short-lived hubristic monuments.

Yet she was also, still, her. She couldn’t imagine what her destruction looked like to mortals; she couldn’t honestly imagine what she looked like to mortals. But she didn’t have time for that, either. Her focus had to be on the sky, on the energy still racing across the ground.

Now, now, she was big enough to do something about it, to reach out and twist that energy together, channel it up into the storm. The pinwheel became spiral bands; the center became an eye.

She tightened her circle, pulling the eye toward her, reaching out, reaching up. Dancing, swaying. Spinning. Any of the goddesses could have created a storm, but only she could make this storm, weaving all their power together into something even greater.

The hurricane swelled outward, the eye growing over Innovation City, returning it to relative calm as other cities fell under abrupt, torrential rain and gale force wind. Serrano sucked in her breath, rhythm faltering for just a moment as she realized she could feel the storm just as if she were the storm. She was the wind, pushing rain ahead of her and down. She felt each building swept away, each dam overflowing.

And it was staggering. She wanted more. More rain, more wind, more damage. It literally fed her. She’d told Courtney she’d try not to destroy her world—but she never promised not to be a mythic, all-devouring storm.

“No,” she breathed, clenching her fists. She wrenched the storm’s power even harder, up more, out more. Surely, she could shield a city or two from—from herself.

(you cannot be what you are not)

No, dammit, she could. But the metro area she’d started in—Courtney’s—was already crumbling under the storm’s force. She could save most cities, but not those ones.

Courtney’s metro area was far too close, too fragile. But she could feel Courtney still there, feel the human looking across the landscape toward the monumental taur.

Let me protect her.

The newly re-empowered human goddess, more powerful than she had been in centuries, and a mere fraction of Serrano. Yet a fraction might be enough. Serrano let her goddess go, and turned her attention back to the storm above, the storm she had become.

Compared to a city, she was huge; compared to her storm-self, she was tiny. All hurricanes were tiny compared to this one. She shuddered, finding herself drooling. If the storm kept going, it would overtake the entire planet, and she wanted that with every fiber of her being.

(let us loose)

But she wouldn’t betray her tiny human friend, and she damn well wouldn’t betray her goddesses. She had to find a way to break the hurricane up, to send the energy back to all the realities it belonged to. Including her own. How? And how did she do that without destroying Faerie in the process?

—Mistress. Let. Us. Loose!—

Her ears folded down, and Serrano grinned lopsidedly. One more paradox to add to the mix: she eclipsed the goddesses, yet she remained a neophyte handmaiden, learning at their paws. The answer, of course, was that she didn’t send the energy back. She trusted them to.

She let them go, let them take up their tasks. The entire night sky, thousands of miles of clouds, lit up in a furious display of lightning. Shielding her eyes, she steeled herself for an abrupt return to normal size, to be lost as a mortal in the storm and flood she’d invoked. So be it: she doubted any other being across any other reality had been a goddess to goddesses, and probably no being should.

But neither her size nor her power diminished. The dazzling show became shooting stars running in reverse, points of light shooting up into the heavens, clouds starting to break up.

She stared up, feeling wonder despite it all, then looked back down toward what was left of Innovation City. The downtown core remained remarkably intact. She narrowed her eyes. Just as she’d felt Courtney simply by trying to, she could feel Sark, too, feel him still alive, under the city. A bunker. Naturally.

He wasn’t alone, either. She could feel other executives and company officers, dozens of multimillionaires and billionaires who worshipped Sark who’d moved to Innovation City to be rulers of his new world—and had now fled to his apocalypse-proof safe house so they could, at least, rule the ruins.

Snorting, Serrano lifted her paw high over the city, then let it lazily fall to earth. Those skyscrapers must have been incredibly well-built to withstand both the force of her storm and the quakes of her steps. Now they collapsed like spun glass, what was left of Sark’s grand dream crumbled under a single citywide paw print.

Then she curled her toes and dug, battlecruiser claws exposing the bunker in three sweeps. By human standards, it was an immense concrete structure, almost the size of one of those claws. Almost.

She reached down, carefully picking the bunker up between her thumb and forefinger and holding it in front of one of her vast eyes. “Do you believe in gods now, Brendan?”

Serrano waited several seconds, until she could sense not just Brendan but all of them starting to realize that none of their money or power mattered now, then squeezed her fingers together, grinding the bunker to dust.

Taking another deep breath, she looked up at the clearing sky. “So how do I get home?” she murmured.

Take my hand, child.

Startled, she turned to find herself face-to-face with Ulohne once again, now the same size.

She opened her mouth, then closed it, unsure what to say. In some sense, she remained vastly more powerful than this Ulohne, her Ulohne. Yet she still felt like bowing before her.

Instead, she took her goddess’s hand. The world blurred into brightness.