'It's been four years since my separation from Riley's humanity. I even find myself saying things like "Riley's humanity," as though it were a keepsake I left behind in another life. Instinct, I suppose. That alone tells me what I already know: I am no longer Riley in any meaningful sense.
I am Yltharae, entirely, utterly, and irrevocably. Mind, soul, and what passes for a body. My children have grown beyond the four who first answered my call. Each reflects an aspect of me I hadn't realized existed until I saw it staring back through their eyes.
First is Danielle al Ghul, twin sister to Damian Wayne—now a phantom who trains my children. When one congregation finishes, she moves to the next.
Second is Aiko, who funds sanctuaries for my kin in plain sight across the world.
Third is Isabela, the unseen warden who keeps governments and the League blind to what we are.
And then there is Evangeline the Reincarnator. She is… different.
Her mind reads like the sum of five prodigies—Richards, Pym, Stark, Möbius, Herta, thinking with all their intellect and none of their limits. She is the craftsman of my first four children, the quiet architect of what I can no longer touch.
Sometimes, when I watch her work, I wonder if this is how Creation once began, a chorus of conflicting brilliance singing the universe into shape. Soon, though… I will have to wake. I can feel the pull, that gentle hum in the threads between worlds. Something is calling me back. Something that remembers my name.'
Light. A soft, domestic light. The room's corners sharpen into being as Maria's eyes open. A ceiling fan ticks lazily above me, its rhythm almost metronomic. Her blanket smells faintly of detergent and cinnamon. Then—
"Come on, Maria. It's time to get up. You forgot there was school today, didn't you?" Michelle's voice from the doorway, warm but weary. Maria blinks, before dragging herself upright, and meets Michelle's gaze. The sunlight through the curtains paints a thin halo behind her, and for a moment I mistake it for something divine before remembering: that's just morning.
"Sis," I yawn, stretching in deliberate imitation of human fatigue. "I turned eighteen yesterday. It's not that I forgot—it's that I stayed up too late with Estelle." I grin, cheeky, practiced. "Speaking of her, where is she?"
Michelle hesitates. A small pitying crease forms between her brows.
"It's been eating me up," she says. "She's a lot like you, you know. When she comes over, I don't think she tells her parents. But lately… they stopped being mean to her. She even left in a hurry to make sure they were okay."
A pause, then a forced laugh. "Honestly? I think she's cheating on you. But I don't have any proof." I sigh disappointed, because that's what I'm supposed to do. "Yeah, maybe..."
(Mini Timeskip)
Cereal softens in milk. The clock ticks too loudly. A radio hums faintly from the counter, voices rising and fading between news and commercials. Michelle moves through the small space like a ritual, coffee, toast, keys, purse. She talks about grocery prices, traffic, a coworker named Jenna who keeps stealing her pens. Maria nods at the right intervals, mimics laughter when required.
Yet each sound feels fractionally displaced, as though she's hearing it through glass. Maria knows what normal looks like, but wearing it still feels like performing a play whose lines I've already forgotten. "Hey," Michelle says suddenly, breaking her reverie. "You okay? You've been spacing out a lot lately." As if rehearsed Maria replies swiftly. "I'm fine," I answer, spoon tapping the bowl. She studies me. "Thinking about Estelle?" Maria feigns false disinterest.
"Maybe. Or about… nothing. The good kind of nothing." She looks at me strangely, then smiles. "That's a new one." Later, she drives Maria to school because the buses are on strike again. The car hums steadily. Outside, Metropolis moves, bright, alive, relentlessly human. People cross streets, shout greetings, spill coffee, chase taxis.
Maria watches them from the passenger seat, cataloguing the motions.
Every face carries its own private gravity: a text to send, a rent to pay, a promise to keep. I envy that groundedness—that small orbit of purpose.
Michelle hums along to the radio. Her fingers drum the steering wheel in time.
For a moment, Maria lets herself imagine she's just a girl being driven to class by her sister, no worlds behind her eyes, no hymns humming beneath her skin. The thought feels fragile, yet also precious, almost holy.
(Timeskip)
Rain starts without warning, soft and cold against the apartment windows. The sound fills the living room like static. Michelle sits grading papers on the couch, glasses perched low on her nose. Maria reads beside her, To Kill a Mockingbird, an assignment she's read four times but pretends not to remember.
Halfway through, she sighs. "Can you take out the trash later? It's starting to smell." Michelle says plugging her nose "Sure." The word comes out too quick, too flat, too devoid of emotion. She glances at me, frowns faintly, but doesn't press.
The world seems to exist in parallel silences for the next hour, the kind humans seem to find comforting but which make Maria acutely aware of every heartbeat, every flicker of the TV screen, every droplet on the window tracing perfect geometric paths downward.
'Maria wonders, for the first time, if she's bending reality even now, simply by existing quietly within it.
When Michelle finally goes to bed, Maria stays by the window. Metropolis sprawls below in its impossible glow, a constellation of human persistence.
Somewhere down there, someone is laughing. Someone else is breaking.
All of it so brief, so earnest.
She presses her hand to the glass and watches the faint imprint fade. 'Perhaps this is what being human truly is... learning to live in the spaces where nothing happens...'
The apartment feels too still, too small for the storm blooming behind my ribs. Out of habit, or boredom, Maria picks up the TV remote turning on the television. Static. Then the anchor's bright, detached voice cuts through the quiet:
> "This just in— a notorious hacker known online as ObsidianForest has been identified as twenty-year-old Isabela Moreira, a resident of São Paulo. Authorities confirm she is being extradited to the United States for trial, where representatives from multiple nations will present charges in Washington, D.C.-"
My hand tightens around the remote until the plastic creaks. Then: click. Silence. The screen dies, leaving my reflection hovering faintly in the glass. My voice, when it comes, trembles with restrained fury.
"They dare lock up one of my children…" A tremor moves through the room, barely perceptible, just enough to make the coffee mug on the table rattle. Perhaps I've been too docile, I think. Perhaps humanity mistook patience for weakness.
My eyes darken, a depthless shade where no light lingers. "I'll need a temporary Abyss Font. Small. Quiet enough not to wake the world, but enough to let a few of my Voidspawn through. They'll find her. Protect her." The television flickers once—without power. Outside, the city lights dim for half a heartbeat.