The beast lunged towards me.
Its massive jaws split wide, rows of jagged teeth sparked as spit filled the arcs of its gumline. For a split second, time slowed and the villagers froze mid-scream. The elder gripped his staff as if it could shield him as the terrified child stood alone in the square.
My lungs burned with the aftershock of what I'd just unleashed.
"Move!" I shouted, my voice cracked higher than I wanted. My legs responded before my mind could catch up, and the wind seemed to carry me as my legs propelled forward, settling me between the beast and the child.
The wolf's claws came down, its paw weaponed with sharp metal-tipped claws. I flung my arms up instinctively.
The quickly air thickened and dirt pulled up from the ground, shielding us. Fire eroded from the flint sediments, changing its form from sand into a layer of transparent glass.
It was like I was commanding the creation of a thick glass wall for protection. The molecules themselves hardened at my desperate will, slamming into the beast's strike with a deafening crack. The shock reverberated through my bones. The creature snarled, stumbling back, its eyes narrowing in confusion.
My heart pounded. "That… that wasn't just air."
The villagers gasped. Some dropped to their knees and others screamed, "Witch! Cursed witch!"
The child behind me sobbed, clutching my tunic. I shoved her toward her mother, who snatched her up with wide fearful eyes. There was no thanks, just fear
Always fear.
The wolf shook its head and roared, the sound rattling my teeth. Quills along its back vibrated and then shot outward like arrows, aiming directly at me.
"Shit!"
I ducked, but some instinct tugged at me… no, not instinct. Knowledge. The glittering barbs weren't just sharpened bones. I felt them. Iron. Calcium. Traces of nickel. Atoms collided together in its molecular form, screaming their composition in my mind like a formula.
I didn't have time to question it. My lungs filled again. My voice tore out raw:
"Disperse!"
The air snapped and the volley of quills dissolved mid-flight. Dust particles rained harmlessly to the ground, nothing left but faint metallic flakes fluttering like confetti.
I staggered back. My chest heaved, not from weakness but from shock. I had just willed molecules into atoms and broken elements apart.
The villagers stared in horror. The elder whispered, "By the Saints… she unmade the beast's quills."
The beast roared again, angrier this time. It barreled forward, faster than before.
"Not good enough," I hissed at myself. My hands trembled. "I need… something stronger."
Science combined with panic in my head. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Carbon. Hydrogen. The building blocks of everything. I could feel them in the creature's blood, in the very air around us. If I could separate them… could I also fuse them?
The beast lunged, claws aimed for my throat. I screamed, not in fear, but in command.
"Combust!"
The air before me ignited and an eruption of raw flame seared the wolf's fur. The explosion threw both of us back. I hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from me. But the beast howled in agony, rolling around to smother its smoldering hide.
Smoke curled skyward. The villagers shrieked, shielding their eyes from the blaze.
The elder's voice boomed. "She is cursed, wielding more than one element is an abomination!"
I coughed, dragging myself upright. My body trembled, but my lungs felt alive, surging with currents of power I barely understood. My scientist's mind reeled, this wasn't magic. This was chemistry… physics… on a scale no human should wield.
The wolf staggered, fur charred, eyes still glowing red. It wasn't done. It limped toward me, fury etched into every line of its monstrous form.
I closed my eyes. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen may be too unstable. I needed something heavier. Something that could bind it.
"Iron," I whispered.
The ground beneath my feet rumbled. In the soil, in the blood still seeping from the fallen villager, iron from their blood and in the ground answered my call. Threads of gleaming red hemes of metal snaked upward, shimmering like liquid mercury before hardening into jagged spikes.
The beast leapt.
I thrust my hand forward and the spikes shot upward, piercing the creature mid-air. Its momentum carried it forward onto the skewers and impaled it with a sickening crunch. Blood sprayed, hissing and combining into the iron spikes as blood mixed in with blood.
The wolf let out one final, ragged howl before collapsing in a twitching heap.
Silence fell.
My chest rose and fell in rapid bursts, every inhale was electric as every exhale trembled. Around me, the villagers slowly emerged from their cowering. Their eyes were wide and their lips trembling. Their fears of the beast now eclipsed by fear of me.
The elder's cane struck the ground. "The cursed one commands the elements themselves."
Murmurs rippled like wildfire.
"The cursed one… a wielder of elements…"
"Dangerous… unnatural…"
"An abomination…"
I swayed on my feet. Elements? That's what they saw? But I knew better. These weren't just elements, they were the entire periodic table from Earth.
But there had been something else… other elements that were drawn to me that I've never known before.
The wolf's crimson eyes still burned in my mind, unnatural and wrong. Its body had not only been matter as I understood it; the resonance in its blood, the shimmer in its quills, it was more. This world carried compounds, isotopes, elements beyond Earth's table. I could feel them humming faintly at the edge of my senses, foreign and vibrant. Sylphi hadn't bothered to explain them, and I wasn't sure if that was by design or sadistic whim.
Something I'd need to learn, if I wanted to survive here.
The villagers began to close in. Not with weapons raised, not yet. But with a wary circle forming around me. Mothers clutched children tighter. Men muttered about omens and ruin. Some spat onto the dirt, as if to ward off a curse.
"She should be destroyed before she destroys us."
"But she saved the child…"
"She'll bring calamities."
"Saints protect us all."
The elder's eyes, sharp beneath their clouded surface, never left me. He looked not only afraid, but calculating.
My knees buckled. I hit the dirt, the villagers' whispers crashing over me like waves.
I closed my eyes, tasting smoke and iron on my tongue.
"What the hell," I whispered, "did Sylphi shove into me?"
The words vanished into the smoke, but the answer pressed against my lungs all the same. Every element of the world, waiting to be commanded.
And the terrifying truth that maybe I was the only one who could wield it all.
"Eriden," the elder announced, "will stay! The Saint has blessed her new life and the Goddess Sylphi blessed us all with Eriden's presence."
I look up at the old man, and he winks at. A familiar shock jolted through me as the image of Sylphi flashed through my memories.