Heaven, Earth, and Below: Luia

I remember the day like I remember what color the sky was. 

Blue. 

The sky used to be blue. It’s just a fact everybody knows: the sky used to be blue, before the Demons ruined it. Thanks a lot, Demons. We all know what it looked like, a pretty dome above our heads, sometimes streaked with white and gray, or dyed with storm clouds, back when they were a sign of rough weather and not the Angels charging the Below. 

Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t care about the flipping sky. The sky could crumble and it wouldn’t matter to me. What I’ve been trying to say is that I remember that day like I remember the sky. 

I remember the day my old life ended.

The day my whole world was burned away before my eyes.

The day I swore I would hunt down and kill every single Being that killed the ones I loved.

But the’s a long story. And I have to start at the beginning.

Back when I was an ordinary girl in the town of Treflew. 

***

It was an ordinary day, the women of the town out doing their shopping along the sandy cobblestone streets, shawls pulled over their wild hair, hoods of gold and red and orange and maroon around smooth, white, freckled faces, sapphire-blue eyes glimmering above wide, flat noses and painted lips. Small, sandy-haired children ran and played, too young for school, while the older boys, apprenticed to the butcher or the blacksmith or the shop-keeper, did their daily chores and winked at the pretty girls who dashed around, helping their households, high, black boots clacking on the ground. 

I, being only twelve at the time, was in school, a three-room wooden building, crisp and clean inside, nestled a little ways from the town. It was surrounded by trees, a little path leading to the town square, from which five different streets reached, creating a spiderweb-like design. It was a good town, and I loved my teacher, Elle Fyre. She was tall and blond, with shiny green eyes and a sweet voice, and she would explain things as many times as you needed. That morning, she was explaining Angels and Mortals, a subject we’d been questioning for ages. It was almost as big of a question as where babies came from. 

“Alright!” Miss Fyre said. “What can you tell me about Mortals? Luia! Can I call on you?”

Oh, I’m Luia, by the way. 

“Well, Mortals are what we are. Normal people. We’re born, we can die, and we get hurt a lot. We aren’t fully good or fully evil. We’re just people.”

“Very good.” I beamed, brushing a lock of brown hair out of my face. Next to me, short, scrawny Beth Leo rocked in her seat, a sign she had something on her mind. She sat to my left. 

“Beth! Can you tell me about Mortal powers?”

“Yes!” She squealed. “Mortals are not completely powerless, despite being weaker than Angels and Demons. Because we come from the Earth, and were formed from Earth by the Lord Angel, we can be equipped with powers of the Earth! These powers include releasing pulses of Earth strength, channeling its Core for extreme agility and balance, using meditation to channel the energy of the world around us, and—”

“Darla, could you speak up?” Miss Fyre asked. Darla, Lee, the shyest girl in class, mumbled “there’s Earth Shifting, which is using the Earth as a weapon and also to heal people…”

“Very good! You’d know that, because your family is Enabled, yes?”

“Yeah, Tom is a Corer, Ma’s a Handler, and Pa’s a Shifter.”

These unfamiliar words rung in my ears. Enabled folk were those blessed with a special control of Earth, but I’d only met a few, and they were usually traveling and fighting evil, or helping people. What was a Handler? Or a Corer? A Shifter?

“Now, let’s take a look at what these mean,” Miss Fyre said, tapping the blackboard. 

“Every Mortal has a Glyph, a symbol etched onto their skin, in the shape of a triangular mountain peak. You’ve all seen these labels before, on your friends or family, or on yourself. The darker the Glyph, the more likely you are to become Enabled. The closer to your heart, the stronger you will become, if you happen to be Enabled.”

I pressed my own Glyph, a dirty-brown triangle on my right cheek. It didn’t feel like a sign of future power. 

“Now, angels and Demons also have Glyphs, but theirs look very different.” Miss Fyre pointed to two symbol, white chalk stark against the board. “Angels bear this tiny pair of wings, to symbolize their goodness. And Demons—” she pointed to a circular ball of fire “—have this flame Glyph. Sometimes Angels and Demons walk among us, hiding their auras of light and pointed horns, but you’ll always be able to recognize them by their Glyphs. Angel Glyphs ar white, while Demons bear a reddish-orange.”

These symbols looked so pretty, compared to my dull brown triangle.

I raised my hand to ask a question. 

“Yess, Luia?”

I opened my mouth to speak.

And I heard the sound that started it all.

It wasn’t like you’d imagine it— it was loud enough to startle me, but it didn’t sound like the end of the world. It didn’t sound that scary.

“What was that?” Miss Fyre asked. Another sound rung out, louder, closer, and accompanied by a bright flash. 

We crowded around the window, looking for the source of the sound.

Then

Bang.

One minute, there was a tree a few feet from the school building. 

The next, there was a column of white fire, accompanied by a cracking sound.

“Students,” Miss Fyre said, face pale, “get under the trapdoor by my desk. Now.”

We obeyed her, an energy panic vibrating our bones. I felt my Glyph tingle. I remember thinking whatever’s going on, it isn’t— 

BOOM.

I didn’t even see the blast. All I know was that one minute, I was standing there, just fine, waiting for shaky Coryinne to descend the ladder and get into the room below the school.

The next, there was something— I didn’t even know what it was. I think I forgot it out of sheer shock. I’ll try to explain as best as possible:

I heard it before I saw it, somehow, because it was so bright I was blinded for a second. This loud rumble shook the entire building, and not just the building, it shook my very heart, inside my chest. It only lasted for a second but it felt like it lasted for days, and there were thousands of pops of light in my eyelids,. Like a firework, too bright to not burn through my eyelids.

Then, everything was quiet.

And there was a smoking crater where the wall had been.

Half the schoolroom was gone, the window, the wall, the trees all around, gone, blown apart to mere atoms, smoking gently.

It was like something out of a dream.

I remember throwing myself down the ladder, hitting the bottom, and another loud blast exploding across the terrain. 

I remember the world shaking, vibrating, destroying everything that it used to be.

Then,

peace.

Everything else was a blur. 

I remember crouching with all my classmates, waiting for Miss Frye to tell us to come up. Realizing she wasn’t coming. 

Slowly opening the trapdoor and creeping out into a world like a dream. 

A scattered land.

The place I’d been born in, the place I’f been raised in, transformed into a nearly-unrecognizable wasteland.

I stared in shock at the place where the roof and walls of my classroom used to be. Dazzling white flames still flickered along the edges of the floor, and only one wall and a few chairs remained. Everything else was blasted to dust or consumed by fire. I suppose the other girls were talking amongst themselves, maybe even crying, but it was like I’d gone deaf as the explosions tore around. I realized the wall of trees was gone. Most of the forest had been uprooted or blown to shreds. Through the smoking stumps I could see the town square, its signature fountain shattered by an invisible force, deep, blooded fires burning in the pit where the butcher’s shop used to be, the shopkeeper’s roof flung into his neighbor’s house, a gigantic crater topping it all, pulverizing the cobblestones that I’d loved to play hopscotch on when I was young. Smoke rose from still-burning buildings, the fire shades of white and crimson. That was not normal fire. The buildings blown apart, the weird flames, the craters… Something had happened here. Something beyond Mortal. 

As I stepped through the place where the door would be, when the door wasn’t burned to a crisp, I saw something that made my blood run cold. 

Miss Fyre, perfect dress scorched, freckled face bleeding. I gasped and dropped to my knees. I felt like I might faint. Of course, I had assumed something and had happened, but not this. “Please-don’t-be-dead-please-don’t-be-dead” I chanted, pressing my hand to her chest.

It was cold.

Still.

I felt no heartbeat 

I leaned back, shocked. 

My hometown was destroyed. My senses were fading. And my beloved teacher was…gone. 

No. I wouldn’t accept it. She couldn’t be dead. 

But she was. 

My favorite teacher, gone forever. 

I let the grayness sink into my skin. I didn’t know if the other girls had seen her body yet—it was like they’d evaporated, and it was sheltered by a blown-over tree. I had been an ordinary girl. Now I was kneeling over the body of my teacher. 

Numbly, I got up and walked along the path to the town square. Babies cried. People ran back and forth with buckets of water, trying to douse the flames, and a few men tried to move rubble away form pushed bodies to see if they were still alive. It was a living nightmare, and I was barely even aware of it. When I reached the blasted-up fountain, I looked up.

At the smoke rising into the sky.

From my street.

My family.

I knew exactly how many steps it was from the fountain to my house. I don’t remember running, but I do remember counting each step.

Ten, eleven, twelve…

All around me—chaos. The ground below me—stained with ash. 

I kept running.

Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…

I slipped in a crater, but kept counting my paces. 

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty…

I had reached two hundred and eight paces before I saw the barrier, a wooden blocker to keep people from running into the wreckage that was my street. “I have to—my family,” I choked out. Somewhere along the lines, I’d lost my voice. 

“You can’t come through,” the town sheriff, Mr. Lewson said. “It’s far too dangerous. We’re sending people in now to round up who they can. If they’re okay, you’ll know soon.”

I confess, this was the first time in my life I denied. Figure of authority.

“No.”

I ran.

I vaulted over the barrier—through the smoke—broken buildings—my street, my friends—destroyed, white fire glimmering among piles of rubble. People shouted out to me, but I was deaf. I tripped and fell, b ut kept on counting—hundreds of footsteps. Thousands.

Then.

Where our garden was: a crater. 

Where out house was: merely the frame, consumed by red fire. 

And on the ground, further from the ash, surrounded by sad-faces doctors,

Were the three people who raised me.

I think I died in that moment.

The old Luia was asides as those charred corpses, barely recognizable.

I fell to my knees but I didn’t feel the pain.

Someone came over to see if I was okay.

I wasn’t

The last bit of color drained from my body

And

Luia Everglean

Died.

I screamed, a painful, never-ending scream, the primal cry of a girl gone mad, of an unleashed goddess. Soot-streaked tears burned my cheeks. Everyone I loved was dead. And I was dead, too. From this scream, everything that was Luia was burned from my body. I pounded on the ground—everything, me, my friends, my family, my home,—gone. There was nothing left to live for.

Except—

On the ground lay another charred, twisted body, hair as red as blood, skin a shade of orangey-brown no human had. A bit of exposed flesh showed a familiar fireball shape. The Demon lay in a. Circle of white, angelic fire.

The Angels and Demons had destroyed my home.

Maybe I had something to live for now.

Revenge. 

As I rose to my feet, the cobblestones broke around me, spikes of stone reaching for the sky. My Glyph burned.

I’d been Enabled.

“You took everything from me,” I spat. “You filthy Demons, you stupid Angels. You made my home burn. And now, you’re going to burn.”

“Luia?” A man I knew asked. “Are you—“

I cut him off with a wave of my hand.

“Please,” I said.

“Call me Vengeance.”