There was no more time to process. The Banshee had formed, and it was aware of us. It took one long look at us, scanned the group, and its eyes seemingly locked in, and I felt terror flood my system. Its eyes were pointing straight at our cluster of first valences, viscously ravenous charge pulling at my very Soul. The resonance of our field increased several fold with our emotions spiking so severely.

  The space around us flickered and wavered in the Akashic Field, as dread, existential fear, creeped from each of us immediately, the first valence unable to even hold as much charge as her eyes pulled on.

  We could feel the gaze, and knew it was looking at us specifically. I tightened the bond between our orbits, keeping her stable, grounded in charge. I focused, and began directing the movement of both of our fields.

  A more advanced skill we had barely started practicing, but Alura could no longer focus, could no longer maintain her own field, and in the Akashic Field, that was dangerous. A mere moment of mindlessness could bring in terrors beyond your wildest comprehension, and we already had one of those to deal with.

  My field flickered and formed into a very solid, stable state, mixing in with hers, directing it to match.

  Sharp angles and surfaces surrounded us, our fields taking on the texture of a faceted gemstone. Each panel pulsed with energy, a bounce within between the positive and negative charges fueled by both of us, reflecting and causing energy to coast along its surface and flood off, redirecting it.

  I did it just in time. A wail left the Banshee's mouth as it opened its cavernous jaw. Ragged teeth framed a rotted tongue. You could see holes stretch open in her cheeks as her jaw nearly unhinged. Her hair flared into the air, burst apart by the force from her lungs.

  A wail, a scream, a sound so awful, so wrong, so terrifying, that it nearly reversed the charge in the vicinity. The energy her gaze had contracted into a tight ball ravaged through the Akashic field.

  Maintaining neutral balance was almost impossible. Several of the first valence thaumatologists lost focus, their fields collapsing. Immediately they began experiencing different effects.

  Some of them began to look very confused, as mists gathered around their head, seeping into their systems. Others began to distort, twist, not grounded enough to exist in the Akashic Field. One poor soul directly shattered, the force of the wave striking him as his defenses and field fell out of sync. He simply dispersed.

  My jaw dropped, but I maintained my focus and my stability. The very air around me shuddered in response as my focus intensified, holding the energy in steady streams and making sure it floated along the surface that I had made for it. I looked to Agent Torque. What was he doing?

  Well, currently Agent Torque was flying through the air, being carried by the wave. His own field around him was very stable, holding still and keeping him safe, but it could not stop the momentum from carrying him through the Akashic Field, his charge clearly not high enough, not prepared to withstand such a blow.

  I shook my head. This was going to be messy.

  Even once the sound of the scream was gone, the shuddering vibrations in the air, the distortion and push and pull on every single bit of energy in the Akashic field nearby, was incredibly disorienting. It was like having a headache, being seasick, and punched in the circadian rhythm all at once. It was almost like worlds folded inwards. But I rooted myself in the charged fields of my sister and I. I balanced it, and I grabbed Alura by the shoulder.

  My desperation leaked into every ounce of my charge, every firing reaction from within, coded with my will and intent to not only survive, to not only win, but to make sure I brought one back with me. It flickered through the very Akashic field around me, and I felt something call back.

  A faint echo, a slight correction in the wrongness that was gone before I could grasp it, but gave me hope. I took that hope, and I flooded it straight into Alura's system, shocking her back into step.

  She gasped and grabbed onto my arm, steadying herself. “Thank,” she gasped, “ you.” She got out through ragged, shuddering tones. I just nodded and looked back to the Banshee. Its eyes were still fixed on us.

  But now, Agent Torque was back up. He reoriented himself, hovering in the air in the Akashic field, a few feet away from the Banshee, around eye level with it. He raised a hand, charge building visibly in brilliant blue arcs flaring and gathering around his fingertips, pulsing against each other, forming five orbs.

  Their blue luminescence grew in intensity every few nanoseconds. The energy of the Akashic field was pulled in towards them, collapsing, sinking deeper and deeper and deeper, filling it up, but never completely emptying, never completely satisfying its appetite.

  “Well, let's see how you like this, then.” He struck out. The energy swirled away, five points of dark blue, shining with a brilliance that they should not have with their shade, formed a spiraling vortex through the air, trailing spacetime behind them, pulling it in, crushing it.

  The orbs slammed into the Banshee's center mass, piercing through her chest in a slight diagonal towards the ground. They barely fazed her.

  Energy was carried away, and she flickered briefly. Some of the blue mist separated from her form, collapsed into the orbs, and dissipated back into the Akashic field. But it didn't seem to do much, except grab her attention.

  The Banshee's eyes slid from us to Agent Torque. I nodded. That was better. Much better. I grabbed Alura and moved towards the other first valence thaumatologists that had come with us.

  Agent Torque continued throwing orbs of collapsing forces at her. Each time one approached, she would simply whisper, blow a little, and it would bounce back.

  Agent Torque would have to coat his hands in an equal negative charge to smack it away safely. It was like watching a toddler go up against the world champion of ping pong. I sighed a little.

  She would wave her hands at times, waves of blue force charging towards Agent Torque, who would fly away or reflect the devastating kinetic surge.

  “Quickly! Get together! There's no way we can handle these distortions individually! We need to be working in synchronization. We need groups handling each wave that's coming.” I immediately set into motion, directing my peers.

  Maybe they didn't respect my family, but they did respect my capability. They knew damn well that not only was I stronger than them, I had worked endlessly harder. Not because I was better, not because I was different. But because there was no other option.

  Alura brought her hands together over her chest, before spreading them out in a sharp push. Our merged bioelectric fields expanded out, taking a claim over a section of the Akashic field around us.

  She spoke quickly. “Everybody, follow our charge movements. We need to start stabilizing the space to reduce the violence of the distortions-”

  Before we could get everyone together, another scream rippled through the air. Half-formed charges instantly dissipated, pushed down. Some were saved by their half-formed efforts, spitting up a bit of blood, falling to their knees, holding their heads. But not dead, not out of the fight.

  My spine was struck with something that felt like the opposite of lightning, briefly interrupting my defensive fields.

  Three more of us simply puffed away, broken down into different frequencies, streams of light and movement that simply vanished into the Akashic field, unwoven by the pure force shredding through them, carrying an incomprehensible meaning, agony, rage, force, simply shredding apart consciousness.

  “Terrifying.” I heard someone mutter. “Get it together!” I yelled out scathingly. “Or you'll die too. Follow our charge movements.Claim a field. The quicker we stabilize this, the better the chance Agent Torque has of winning.”

  Those who were remaining, around nine of us, began forming molding charge. They shaped them against the movement and rotations that Alura formed before splitting off, and claiming different sections in a net over the field around us.

  I sighed. “Begin funneling charge towards Agent Torque. Channels in the Akashic field! Stabilize a resonance point. He needs a higher state so that the Banshee can't dispel it!”

  Alura quickly began shaping funnel designs, stretching 4D shapes through the Akashic field designed to transfer charge to reach Agent Torque. Each time the energy transferred into a node, it would reach a resonance and a bounce, increasing in thaum with each layer, each of the units of charge increasing in frequency.

  She was quite the gifted child. In fact, she was just ahead of me in the progression of full-body synchronization; one line ahead, despite being two years younger.

  She took point, and I began controlling the energy flow itself, carefully distributing how much charge was going where, carefully dancing it through the nexus points she had wove, until it finally all funneled down into the very middle, the bottom of Agent Torque's field, his outer negative pole.

  The energy erupted upwards into him. He grinned savagely, “Finally, a use for you first valences!” His hand clawed out, and this time red bloody hues arced out in claws, scratching through the air, expanding with every centimeter they passed until they were taller than the Banshee herself. The pulsing light was so severe that I could have sworn it would be in my eyes for days.

  The waves passed into the Banshee. She screamed, this time letting us feel the pain, sharp waves of sound bouncing along the field. The marks clearly left damage, shredding the misty veil on her face, tearing rents in her dress and her form.

  She flickered and shuddered for a moment, before screaming once more, this time reconnecting with the Akashic field she had been born from, re-stabilizing, weaker, but still solid.

  Her eyes turned back onto Agent Torque, fury, rage, absolute desire for destruction cast through the air, emanating in waves, tangible, visible almost. I shuddered, but I kept my focus on the flows of energy.

  I began to speak, “Around me, forces rise and fall.” The others began muttering with me, their focus intensifying, the frequency between all of us beginning to synchronize.

  “I do not move. I balance. I am the shape between push and pull.”

  The air that was distorting under the force of the Banshee began to smoothen out, ripples opposing her own, forcing them back, the clash resulting in an odd sort of sphere emanating, the two forces canceling the other out.

  I grinned, and Alura smiled beautifully, “It's working-”

  The air thickened, as if everything had suddenly frozen, every movement of charge paused.

  I almost couldn't even think, each moment stretched on into the other. If I could shudder, I would, if I could feel fear, I would, but even my emotions were frozen, all that was left was my logical processing, and then the shudder passed, but the danger was not gone.

  Another scream followed, but this one, this one was different. This one didn't just carry force, rage, and destruction.

  It carried something hungry, something deeper than starvation, an endlessness, a singularity more pitch than a black hole. Something that should not be allowed, something that should at all costs be stopped, resisted, forcefully repressed, shattered, gone.Something that should be sent into itself, to never be seen by another, to never be experienced by an unfortunate soul.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  The Banshee turned, its eyes locked on Agent Torque, slowly sliding between him and Alura. Fear managed to creep in then, the flood hit my system, adrenaline came next, and I felt it.

  The charge she was stopping, it wasn't halted, it was stuck in its current vibrational phase, but its amplitude was increasing with every moment, it would bob up higher and lower in frequency, charge building, building, building. If I could catch it, if I could do it just right, if I could nail it,-

  The Banshee screamed. The air surrendered, the Akashic Field bowed to the waves of energy, the clouds and nexuses that I had begun orienting on dispersed, fleeing from the force, from the hunger.

  Before it could get away, it was swallowed into the silence, the silence hidden within the scream; it tore through the air, destabilizing the careful net we had made to stabilize that field around us, and devouring the nodes into its wave.

  Quaking static and undulating swathes of black blitzed and slinked through the frequencies and possibility clouds of Akasha, eating them, swallowing them, dispersing them. Information was reduced to its bare minimum, energy spread along wavelengths so stretched and stagnant that no shape could be born from them.

  It shuddered through me, destroying my focus. The field fully collapsed, barely even registering in my scans as having a single thaum of charge, no negative or positive orientation.

  Agent Torque's form visibly shuddered, briefly collapsing before expanding out again. As he re-established himself, he coughed blood, his arms split, twisted, cracked, deformed in a way that human arms should not be. His left hand was gone, shattered off his jagged bone stump of a forearm.

  I shuddered at the sight, before regaining myself. The opening mantras once more flowed from my lips. The tone of my words was endlessly deep. A determination and a passion that couldn't be quenched. I glared at the Banshee.

  My words, calm, deep, echoing through the space, did not match my eyes, which were filled in equal amounts of fury, determination, fear, and tears.

  Agent Torque spread his one hand, twists of red waves forming walls. Blue slashes and darts clashed against them, sending indigo sprays into the air. Black flashes occasionally struck from a blue orb, sucking in massive amounts of charge.

  I clenched my hands into mudras. My charge surged. “I am the shape between push and pull.” The destabilizing first valence thaumatologists around me began to reaffirm.

  One of them still faded away, his charge not stable enough, even with me desperately grabbing on, using the remnants of our weaved energies to latch together what I could of our frequencies.

  I held steady, and Alura quickly joined me, her voice twisting into mine as we spoke, our voices no longer two, but overlapping, becoming one in the same spacetime.

  “From my center, energy flows outward. My head hums. My hands catch the Pulse. My feet hold the echo of my orbit; I feel my field Awaken.”

  The Akashic field stabilized once more. It flickered, and then kicked in like someone slamming their hand against one of those old TVs I had seen in history books.

  The field was reestablished. Chaos was allowed, but not this, not this emptiness, this hunger that was worse than anything I had ever felt, that removed movement and collapse.

  The net that had been formed by us echoed, a slight pulse, a mist, still barely there, still half remembered by the Akashic field. I could feel something reaching out to me, to Alura, desperately guiding our hands to this little fragment, this filament of energy, of hope.

  Alura and I grabbed the extended hand from existence itself. The only possible chance of survival. Infinitely slim, but still offered within the infinite expanse of existence. It was .000001% chance. But it existed, because it had to. That was all I needed.

  My charge wrapped into it. Alura stabilized the connection. Together, we shifted our Akashic Prisms in fractal designs. The negative pole swayed around, grabbing and jerking it back into existence.

  The net crashed into being again. The same one that had been disturbed, dispelled, destroyed, unmade, was now called back, even from whatever Void had taken it.

  I clawed through the array, the matrix of nodes arranged by those who had fallen and those still remaining. And by myself, I held it in place while Alura channeled the flow. My frequency rose higher, and I could feel something new begin to spark. A feeble connection that had been waiting.

  Alura's frequency sharply spiked, matching it. I had broken through, the last line of the fifth stanza suddenly comprehensible to me. She no longer had to hold back that last bit of energy. The resonance between us emitted a force more powerful than we had ever generated before.

  The rising wave of frequency washed over our bioelectric fields and Akashic Prisms, filling each node, sending waves cascading through the charge lattice, each one a resonance, each one a bounce, now powered and formed and directed solely by the teamwork Alura and I had developed since our very first days.

  The Akashic field around us thrummed. Songs of harmony blended from each node, each one vibrating, shivering against the field, the friction like a bow drawing on a violin. The notes played a music of serenity, of peace, of calmness to quell the rage, of creation, of life, of growth to replace what had been unmade. To fill the emptiness with shape and color once again.

  Colors bloomed along our lines, spreading amongst the waves, flickering into existence. Black Void hunger pressed against silver lines formed through our matrix, hovering in the space around us.

  A dome of recursive lines spread over us, the Banshee, the other first valence thaumatologists and Agent Torque, the top of the torus coming down to meet him, the bottom extending below us beneath the odd blue ground to his bottom pole.

  The silver and black clashed, pressing against each other. Our bioelectric field rotated in harmony, each node flashing together, clashing. Not in a way that results in force on them, but in a way that combined their momentum and sent it out in waves, percolating throughout the space, bouncing away pockets of Void, creating stable pockets of silver blooming into many colors. They shifted, taking on fragmented shapes before spreading out again, restoring the Akashic field around us.

  The energy swirled, floated and funneled down an Agent Torque. He gathered it all. It bloomed beautifully in his hands, a multicolored spectrum framed with silver and black spiraling. He looked at it in awe and he spoke quietly,”Meminisse.”. The wave echoed out, washing over everything.

  The chaotic energies poured from his hands. His unskilled use of the energy doomed us. A shudder rippled through the field me and Alura had made, destabilizing it.

  Purple, black and silver flared everywhere, like lightning had suddenly emerged from each strand, each part of the web, each crack in the Akashic field fragments around us, before they stabilized again, Alura and I doing our best to keep the ratio perfect.

  Somehow, this silver energy was combating the black, and the reaction was giving us more fuel to work with. I desperately clawed forward, an unholy desperation and determination filling me, filling Alura, our intents merging. Agent Torque felt it and pulled it together.

  His own energy field stabilized. He gripped the orb within his hand, its masses rotating furiously. Three spiraling hyperspheres, one Silver, one Black, one dark Purple. Reality, Void, and Spacetime. Positive, negative, neutral. Meminisse. If I wasn’t about to die, I would be in awe.

  A translucent barrier flickered around them, a balance of their charges creating a separate system, its own Meminisse Engine. Unstable, weak compared to a real Engine, but undeniably Meminisse. The world pulsed as he held it aloft again towards the Banshee.

  Her mouth opened, agape, not air being sucked in as she took a deep breath, but everything. Charge, idea, complexity, everything contracting into her chasmic energy.

  I could feel my very being, everything I was, every thaum within my field, sway slightly towards her, as if a new vector had been added and tugged on. I balanced it out, rotating the poles around my Akashic Prism at speeds I never hit before.

  It bounced, and I carefully balanced it, making sure that the engine in Agent Torque's hands didn't destabilize. Alura held the structure, keeping it in tune, keeping the count, the beat, the rhythm.

  She was the anchor of the operation, I was the engine, and Agent Torque the transmitter.

  Agent Torque melded the energy in his hands, spreading it into a wave across his bioelectric field, resonating higher and higher, building its thaum density and count.

  He grinned, blood leaking from his eyes, his ears, and his nose. “Well, maybe I'll die, maybe I'll live, but either way, you're gonna have a really bad day.”

  He slashed out, his arms crossing, clashing, moving through the air violently. Despite having been cracked, destroyed, torn into fleshy strips, and broken into stubs of bone. His mangled right hand fingers crossed into a gesture, a mudra, despite their near-impossibility functional state.

  The Meminisse energy flooded out. It was decoherent, it was unstable. I could not keep it balanced.

  With Alura’s help, the Engine reaction barely held, generating more Spacetime as fuel for the Void to absorb, giving Reality more energy to expand into and add complexity to. Our resonance, somehow provoking Reality when exposed to this Void entity, thrummed powerfully, filling the air like the chorus of Phoenixes and elves.

  The Banshee finally stopped breathing in, and screamed in retaliation. The hunger flooded towards Meminisse, but the hunger could not compare with Meminisse itself, for the hunger was part of Meminisse, I understood. The comprehension felt vile, foreign, yet necessary. I shuddered as the energies collided.

  The entire Akashic field seemed to vanish. Black, silver, and purple dominated everything. I could see nothing else, but I could feel the charge of everyone else. The eight other first valence thaumatologists still alive desperately aligned as well as they could with the field Allura and I had crafted.

  Alura stood firm beside me, doing her best to keep in the nodes as I handled the energy flux. We grit our teeth, blood leaking from our own eyes as our hands clenched and gripped eachother’s, clawing into our own palms.

  The blood formed puddles beneath us, but our gazes did not waver. We did not blink.

  We stared on, our eyes locked on the center of the toroid, onto Agent Torque, onto the collision. Even though we could not see it, we could feel it. The energies, in what felt like slow motion, collided, overlapped.

  First, hunger met hunger. An ouroboros of darkness washed out, a ring expanding across the Akashic field.

  Then, silver flooded in, bursting through, cutting across in star-like patterns and shapes.

  In the gaps between them, in the hollow spaces of the silver, purple erupted out, like volcanoes built for thousands and thousands of years, finally releasing their pressure.

  The explosion shuddered through the field me and Alura had created. The spike did not destroy the field. It wavered it so violently, spiked its amplitude so harshly, that I felt my very field begin to disappear, become too pulled and pushed apart, slamming back together in chaotic cycles that had no sequence, no rhythm, no beat.

  I felt Alura and myself spin, our energy fields barely remaining in contact. I could no longer sense the others, their charge too vague, too indistinct in the noise. I could feel, however, sudden pops in the explosion, collapsed points unfolding into waves, then vanishing in the chaos as raw thaums.

  Alura and I held on desperately, our energy synchronizing, weaving together desperately at the edges. We'd extend an arm of our field, barely managing to keep control, and wrap them together, the nodes locking.

  Fields would start to form resonation bonds, like two magnets becoming locked together, but not quick enough, not strong enough. Every time we just started, they were pulled apart, while we formed another just in time.

  The dance continued, and I felt her pain. I felt her fear, and it overrode mine. I lost myself, and all I could feel was her. And then, whatever it was that had reached out before, came again, but this time, it did not reach out. It originated.

  I felt it, something change in Alura's field, some cognizant thought, some idea she desperately held onto. Her charge and mine funneled into it, latching on to the bare form of order left inside this chaotic storm, and idea building in energy and complexity.

  The other first valence thaumatologists waveforms stuttering back, their energy contracting towards Alura’s field. Their energy was quickly stacked into this forming structure that Alura was creating.

  I could not understand it, could not comprehend the shape she was weaving, what she was creating. Silver, black, purple, all funneled together, flowing intricately, becoming more than it was, until finally, it crystallized.

  Something different happened in her field.

  It was unstable, immature. She was unprepared for it, but it crystallized and manifested through her. I glimpsed it, the legendary Kaleidoscope, and it flushed through her and back into me.

  The energy she had built from both of us, from the thaumatologists that had died, flooded into me. The momentum pushed towards me, pulled on the energy around us. The chaotic black, purple, and silver funneling along the Kaleidoscope trails of Prismatic silver, purple and black bombing into me.

  I looked at Alura. She smiled at me, skin starting to flake into Prismatic Ash. Her thaums burst from her, causing her form to cave in like collapsing sands. I reached for her, indigo nets flying from my fingers as they twitched.

  The nets passed around her, between here, through endless refractions of space that suddenly pulsed. Shimmering lights burst from her eyes and lit up her veins. The Prismatic Ash swirled away in streams, her form vanishing into motes of gathering indigo and purple, flaring into Kaleidoscope at times.

  She whispered, but there were no words. Just the impression of her laugh, a swat to the back of my head, and a gentle lean against my side. Tears fell down her face as her legs and torso dissipated. The tips of her fingers began dissolving, her chest and shoulders following soon after. My eyes couldn’t track the thaums fast enough, my nets simply not high enough in frequency to attract such accelerated thaums.

  Her neck evaporated. She smiled one more time to me.

  I felt my Akashic Prism shift, crack, fragment, rebuild, and twist into something completely new and different. Everything shuddered, and the world broke, as suddenly, from somewhere far, far away, an echo of a laugh pierced through everything. The Akashic field shuddered.

  The maniacal laugh cut through everything. The purple, black, and silver began to push away like a cloud, being blown back by a steady gale.

  The laugh was cut by a scream, like a jet screeching in my ear, shattering my sound barriers. “Elia-!”

  The Kaleidoscope Seal settled within me. I felt the field that was once my sister collapse into it, occupying a section of my Akashic Prism.

  I felt her leave the material realm, fade away, leaving only energy and information, only my memories, only my last few whispers of synchronized energy still locked in the shape of her bioelectric field and internal meridians.

  I felt the collapse of her field, a cry of agony so thick I felt my heart crack.

  Her last breath left a glimmer of infinite colors in the air, misting into my lungs through my nose.

  I gasped, but not from the energy.

  I sank.

  The matrix settled into my Akashic Prism, and I felt myself snap into place. “Alura…?” My voice came out in drips, little ripples in Akasha. I looked up.

  She wasn’t there. No smirk. No kick to my side rolling me over, no sudden jerk pulling me into the air to “help get on your feet!”

  Something so fundamental in me felt like it was ripped in half, torn from my organs, sewn back together with the fragments of my bone and sinew. An amalgamation of loathing, wretchedness, and utter confusion welled up, the remnants of the Akashic field fluctuating wildly as my nails gouged chunks into the platform under us.

  Torque was dead. Everything from his waist up was gone, the bottom of his torso looking like twisted and ripped plastic wrap. I gazed blankly at it. I looked around. “Alura?” I murmured, eyes unfocused as they swept in the space around me.

  The part of me denying what had happened crumbled. A string within me was struck, never played before, but now burning the air with fury. Stars collapsed into being around me from purple energy, indigo flooding around it to form prismatic event horizons.

  Charge swirled chaotically within me, bound by the new Akashic Prism at my center. The energy twisted, a chiming sound carrying through the Akashic frequencies, her bell-like laugh.

  Suddenly, my hands were supporting me, legs folded behind me, head inches from the vague blue floor, tears falling, concentric circles spreading from each collision.

  I was filled with emptiness. Yet, my body, mind, and soul felt far too full. Charge danced within, without. Arcs of violent, flaring violet and indigo splashed off of my field. Slowly, my head tilted up, pulled by some force. As my eyes traveled upwards, I found myself scanning the Banshee.

  Its form was tattered with rents, nearly split in twain from its left shoulder to waist, gaseous black ink energy wafting out. Tension saturated my every cell, energy condensing rapidly into flowing streams within my system.

  The charge tore through me, each atom invigorated, muscle density jumping. Flexibility, speed, durability, computation and processing speed, charge flow, charge frequency, everything began leaping upwards as the violet and indigo energy convalesce into my bioelectric field.

  Its form took a new shape, the frequency shifting, wavelengths reaching new levels of potential complexity. The energy in my field fully melded into me, its new shape resonating with the matrix left by Alura.

  My breath caught again. Alura. My sister. My sweet, fifteen year old sister. A genius, a talent so rare she could have taken our family farther than ever. She could have done it. She, as a mere Charge valence Quantum thaumatologist, had done what the head think tanks, companies, and nations couldn’t. She stabilized a Kaleidoscope matrix- and my chest tightened painfully as I realized- she had left it with me.

  She sent hope and the net through time, creating a loop using the Kaleidoscope. But she couldn’t survive its use. So instead, she used the last bit of charge she had, the last chance before full entropic collapse, to bounce the structure back to me. To carry the charge of the others connected to the nodes she had stabilized.

  Indigo flared from eyes, sometimes splitting into blue and red, sometimes clashing into violet hues of lightning. My eyes met the Banshee’s. The matrix settled- painfully, impossibly- into my Akashic Prism, forever altering the way I would process the world.