The Rebirth

At first they landed on something, and Elena was sure it was a dead body.
And then they were being sucked in.
To where, she didn’t know, until she managed to concentrate and find a whirl of magic swirling around a hole in the corner, going down, down, down, taking them both with it.
“Use your magic!” she tried to shout to Benji. “Your magic!
His eyes were dazed, and he accidentally burned Elena’s hand through his confusion. She yelled, but kept holding. She had a feeling if she didn’t, she’d never get him back.
“Your magic!” She tried to scream again, but it was no use. They were already gone.
They fell, and fell, through the hole, tumbling over and over among themselves, and the air was smacking them in the face, whipping them from both sides… until she felt her back crack, and they were on the floor, groaning and whimpering. For the second time in five days, Elena broke a bone. Somehow, Benji hadn’t, even though she fell halfway on top of him, and he rolled out with a large, pained sigh.
“I was wondering where you all were,” a voice fuzzed into her ear. Elena tried to concentrate, but… her spine…
“Whether you would leave your little friend stuck with me forever.”
“Wyn,” Elena couldn’t stop the words that came out. There was something… stabbing into her back…
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” She had a feeling that message wasn’t directed to her. Her brain was so slow, the pain was eating her back raw, and she could just barely start to see again.
She heard a whoosh of air, and a yell from Benji, and there was another large, pained sigh. She could another voice, faint, away from them, and she could hear a tumors trembling through the ground.
Elena forced herself up, feeling some sort of knife lodge itself in her back and stay there.
Permanently.
She was screaming, but she didn’t care anymore. She staggered to the side and placed her hand on something.
It wasn’t the wall. She jerked her hand back as something pointy scraped it, drawing a long gash of blood.
And that was relief, forgetting the pain on her back for a second so she could focus on the stab on her hand. If she could trade the pain she was feeling in her back fro the pain she was feeling on her hand, she’d probably cry in relief.
Elena blinked, trying to concentrate on Sight, the only thing she COULD do. She saw the swirling gold Egyptian magic in the air, funneling around them. She saw Benji, dazed, on the floor, trapped in some weird shifting, moving, glowing cage. She saw Wyn, conscious but bloody, surrounded by…. By….
“And this is only a fraction,” Setti came into view, over near the spot where they both fell, watching Benji struggle within his cage. He was cold. Held no emotion. The picture of calm.
“Of what is to come.”
Elena stepped backward, pain arcing and dancing in front of her. What she wanted, most in the world, was to pass out, to take it all away. To die. And if she could, Elena didn’t know if she’d be able to have the strength to resist the offer. But instead, she gasped and heaved, glancing at what was in front of her.
There were thousands of them.
Thousands.
Maybe even a hundred thousand.
The “room” she thought she was in was more like a stadium, stretching on for a mile or so. And about two fifths of this stadium was filled with people.
Not people.
Monsters.
Truly. They were beasts. Beasts- most of them were some variation of a scorpion, pigs, and donkeys, all mixed together, but some had baby’s heads, like the Sphinx, and some had bulls horns, and some had lion bodies, and they were all these different animals, formed and mismatched together and mushed up, like a crazy barrel of genetics gone wrong.
And Wyn was in the middle of it, lost in her own world, clearly thinking wildly up a storm.
How can you defeat an entire army?
“You can’t,” Setti said. Pain exploded in her body, as well as fear, and there was no way Elena could shut them down if she wasn’t in action, if she couldn’t move, if she was just standing there, drowning in it all. “You can’t escape. I can see you trying to think of ways, but you? What magic do you have?”
His face was so smooth, clean, calm. He’d recently shaved, the pale skin shining and luminescent in this room’s light. His sandy blonde hair was gelled and combed to one side, and he almost looked… bored with them. Bored, but anticipating, impatiently looking at his clock.
He arced a perfect eyebrow. “Chaos is moving closer.”
Elena gasped, in pain, and Wyn looked up. Elena managed the weakest, most pathetic of waves, and Wyn couldn’t help but choke out a very sad, very horrified laugh. She seemed to be fighting down panic as she put her hand on her chin and continued thinking, furiously.
Something was slithering into Benji’s cage, now that Elena could see it out of the corner of her eye.
“Oh. I thought that was fitting. The magician of Bast fighting a new snake, freshly carved from the energy of Chaos itself! Like Apophis, but a new creation entirely. Just like the olden days, when Ra commands his cat to fight the snake till the death. But instead, I am the Ra, and I’m afraid your cat has no chance.”
Benji was on his feet, narrowed eyes, claws out. The snake grew, and grew, and grew, until it filled the cage, collapsing and suffocating Benji. He slashed at it with a claw, and blood leaked onto the floor, shriveling the snake to a dead skin. Benji breathed heavily, catching his breath, about to stand up, when suddenly, a new snake emerged from the skin, with pink, naked flesh, growing again, Benji having to slash it again.
“And so the cycle begins,” Setti said calmly. “As it should.”
"What-“ Elena gasped. She tried to walk and fell, hard, onto the ground. “What… shrgk…. What…. Cycle…?”
“The old dying. The new rising from the old. Kind of like a metaphor, for what is about to come.” He checked his watch again, his eyes flashing.
He was insane.
The worst kind of insane there could be- calm, comfortable, content.
Uncaring.
“It should be time soon,” he furrowed his brow. “Why is it not time?”
“Wyn,” Elena said loudly, trying to coax anything, something out of this Setti guy. “Was... this... a-trap?”
Setti looked at her sharply. He seemed to be stunned into a shocked silence. “What?”
“Wyyyn-“ Elena whined, trying to get up. She actually succeeded, and started to wobble around, although the burning flames of agony exploded in front of her eyes. She had Setti’s attention. Now she needed to keep it. “Is this-“
“Yes,” Setti said, interrupting, baffled. “It was a trap. I lead the magic tracking trail to here. I didn’t expect you to be able to see the trail, but even if you hadn’t, they could have traced me through those… Bah, what is the name? GPM? Global positioning magic? I must remember to look that up later… I didn’t expect you to get here so fast, but all the better. If you came any later, you’d miss it! Chaos comes closer.”
“I… thoughtitwas…. already.. .close,” Elena shuddered as she walked, her legs not functioning properly, her chest barely holding itself up. She managed to pinpoint her broken bones- a ribcage. She definitely broke a ribcage, and one of the bones seemed to be sticking itself into her back.
“Yes,” Setti said, patiently. “But it comes closer.”
“But… why… dyou… needit… closer?”
“Speak up next time you talk. I can barely hear a darn thing you’re saying. Why do I need Chaos? You might as well ask why we need the Earth, mortal. Without Chaos, there would be nothing! No world! No gods. No light. No dark. Does that answer your questions?”
Elena heaved, her mind racing for other things to keep him busy. “Army…”
“These were just experiments. To make sure that I was headed in the right direction. As you can see, it is a tremendous success. My fellow magicians are spreading my new culture all around the world, as we speak, so that I will have a loyal community when I fully rise to power. I’m afraid I might have to destroy the Egyptian gods while I’m at it. Greek and Roman, also, for that matter.”
“But… how…”
“You don’t need much. Just to take a dip in Chaos. And once the Egyptian and Roman and Greek magic begin to… influence… on each other, I will take the dip.”
“But…”
“How? Ah. That I can not tell you.” He patted a box next to him. “It’s all in here.”
“Goingto… die-an-y-ways-“
“Yes, but you might not. Risks and possibilities must all be considered. We shouldn’t get too cocky, here. Knowledge is power, you know.”
“What if... I...“ Elena raised her fists pitifully. She had never felt so useless. But… maybe that was her advantage. Everyone thought she was useless.
But she still had her Sight, at least.
How can she prove them wrong?
Some of the army laughed. Apparently her patheticness was funny to mutated mythological creatures. Setti didn’t, however. He just stared at her, and her shaking fists, taking it all in. And he whistled.
Her advantage flew in.
For a second, it barreled towards her, and she was afraid it didn’t recognize her, or it didn’t care that Elena just fed it 3 days worth of meals for 3 people, or that it had a sense of duty over heart.
But, no.
No.
The Baby Sphinx landed at her feet, cocking its (kind of creepy, not going to lie) human head to the side like “More food?”
It was very weird to see a human doing a catlike, birdlike thing, but Elena shook it off. She began to sing, gasping, reaching out to pat its head. It bowed down to let her, patiently waiting for her to stagger forwards.
“Attack,” Setti stated, realizing just now what was happening. His misfit army surged.
The Sphinx turned and snarled, Elena desperately clinging onto his back as he shot up, up, up while they threw their swords and spears.
Serri watched all of this calmly, checking the time. Elena heaved, each bump ripping her back apart, checking the room for the magic. She flipped through layer, by layer, by layer. She couldn’t get to the box- Setti has it too well protected by its own magic- but was there anything else that she could-
She gasped, the walls falling around her as she slipped away into something greater.
She saw… a sea. It was a sea of complete confusion, craziness, distortion, explosions, destruction. Things floated in dark red steam, as it bubbled and churned and boiled and swirled, like it was equally solid, liquid, and gas. She could see it inching closer.
When she turned, she saw a throne, slowly forming, bit by bit out of the whirling chaos. And she saw a box next to it.
A glowing box.
What… What was in it?
She took a slow step forward and almost fell off of baby Sphinx. The scene with the bloody sea fell away. She was still flying in the air. What had just happened? Did Elena just get transported somewhere else?
Or maybe...
She took a deep breath, shaky and spasming from her broken ribcage poking through her flesh, and concentrated, layer, by layer, by layer…
The images slipped away once more.
And she was suddenly inside that same area, with the bubbling red steam and the glowing box and the surfacing throne.
What did Setti say, again?
Chaos moves closer?
Was this…?
Yes.
Yes, it was.
And it wanted something.
It needed to feed.
Suddenly… Elena knew…
She knew…
Her shock caused it to slip away again, and she was still on the back of Baby Sphinx, and almost got killed by a flying sphere. Somehow, about twenty dead animal soldiers lay on the ground already, leaving only about 99,980 more to go.
So she hadn’t been transported.
She was just seeing a different reality.
“There,” she pointed shakily to where Wyn was, staring, wide eyed. The Sphinx was crying, but it stopped, startled, to give Elena an incredulous look, like, “Are you kidding?”
“Yes,” she barely whispered, and it roared, plummeting down with intense speed to pick up the heavily thinking girl with its paws.
They swooped around, in a loop, a spear lodging itself into Wyn’s arm, and she cried out with a scream of bloody pain. They landed next to Benji, who was continuously suffocating and slashing the thing in the cage with him.
“Help… him…” Elena pleaded to Wyn. She nodded, her eyes hazing over with tears as she pulled the spear out of her arm, letting her scream fill the room. And then she went to work on the cage.
Benji had resorted to strangling the serpent instead, slowly, to death. It didn’t seem to be working any more effectively than before.
“Elena,” he yelled out. “What are you doing? How are you going to stop him?”
Elena closed her eyes. She couldn’t even bring herself to give a sad smile. Benji let out a scream.
“No!” he shouted. “No! You promised to know your limits. You said you’d know your limits! You promised Bree! And Wyn! And me!”
“I do,” Elena said slowly, carefully, eyes still closed.
Someone had to, or they all would. It wasn’t a matter of knowing your limits. It was a matter of who was going to be willing to surpass them.
“What about us?! Your new home, remember? You were going to go there during the school year? What about your parents?! Your city?! “
A muffled sound from Wyn- “Wait. What? What’s happening?”
Elena had to open her eyes. If she closed them any longer, she might pass out, and she needed herself to live, just some moments longer. “Set. In box. Have… to go.”
Tears. She allowed herself tears now. She kissed her fingers, and pressed them as close to the cage as possible.
Benji shouted at her, something unintelligible, pressing his fingers to the cage where hers were.
“Parents. London. Other gods.” each syllable was hard, enunciated, clear, slow. She made sure of it. And after that, she locked eyes with terrifyingly angry cat eyes, and she looked pointedly towards Wyn, raising her eyebrows. Her look was clear.
She knew Benji understood, and he screamed. She whispered something to the Sphinx, and pointed at Wyn and Benji. Wyn stepped forwards, her mouth forming an O.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, bringing her hands up to pray to God for strength.
Elena disappeared from the room.

Notes

THE END IS NEAR SHOUTOUT TO THE BRIGHT ONE READ HER STORIES