Equinox: Guardian Angel [Chapter 1: The Sun, She Cried]
Description: Five years ago, a strange and unfathomable solar flare strikes the coast of Monterey. The sole casualty, Sadia Kashani, manages to walk away alive. But she's no longer the same girl, and she finds something within herself that she cannot explain, but must protect at all costs. Or risk the most powerful weapon of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands. The weapon? Herself.
Chapter Word Count: 1k
Warnings: Some swearing, violence, assault mention (flashback/memory)
Rating: Explicit
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They said it was teardrop.
Straight from the sun. The press was too pretentious to call it that, of course. But once the term blossomed on some post-religious, post-spiritual subforum, that was the beginning of the end.
The cults of the teardrop were born. People were brought together from every corner of the world to celebrate this as a message from their gods of the coming salvation. Others to present this as an omen that doomsday was drawing near, that Mother Nature was shaking the shoulders of mankind with a firmer, fiercer grasp, and a louder plea.
The scientists believed it to be a previously unobserved type of solar flare. In their defense, it was indeed born from the sun. And though it was smaller than any X-class flare, it was somehow still able to penetrate through the Earth's atmosphere. Strong enough to scorch the ground below. No flare had been able to make a mark like that before.
Its power was inexplicable, and most of them admitted it.
Then there was the issue of the radiation, which seemed to have been so concentrated in the one region that the flare hit, that if you were standing only half a mile away from the impact point, you would have walked away completely safe.
I wish I could tell you that everyone walked away completely safe.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Sadia and the sun cried together.
There were good days, of course. Days where the ocean breeze tangled her course, dark hair, where the smell of old newspapers and cardamon soaked into her skin as she made sweets at the store. Days when the bloodstains on her hands and wrists were nothing more than acrylic paints drying on her skin after painting the flowers that lined the shore.
But those days were few and far between. And today was not one of those days.
She tried to calm her breathing, to match it to the rhythm of the waves, expanding outwards onto the sand, then receding back. Forward. And back again.
Forward.
Inhale.
Back.
Exhale.
When the tears stung her eyes again, she realized how fucking pathetic it was. How pathetic she was. Her teeth were locked so hard together that a certain soreness was lingering in her jaw before she even realized it.
The day after the assault was the first time Sadia ran away from home. Mindlessly almost, she ran to the beach, into the water so that she would never have to feel their hands on hers, on her back, and around her neck.
The bloodstains had been washed away long before, but the water still couldn't erase them from her mind.
That's the thing about the waves. They expand and retreat, expand and retreat, but they're always building up, aren't they? Quietly, insidiously growing stronger and stronger until suddenly that gentle back and forth has transformed. Now they're violent, thrashing against the rocks, an unsatiable riptide of thick, white froth and black earth.
Then it's silent again. And the silence is just as cold and empty and betraying as the roar of the tide.
Sadia shivered and wiped the tears from cheeks. She wasn't supposed to leave the store today. But even the presence of her own family was suffocating. But she knew that if she stayed here too long her siblings would come looking for her. And though this place was a mile away from the store, they would know exactly where she was.
She would always come here.
Sadia stood up from the grass and wildflowers and brushed away the remaining sand that was clinging to her legs.
That was when she noticed her shadow.
It was growing smaller right before her eyes, faster than she thought was possible. Until suddenly she had no shadow at all. It was four in the afternoon.
Sadia looked up to where the sun was. It was still there. The sky looked perfectly normal.
Except for the second sun.
Or, at least, that's what it looked like to her. A brilliant white sun, twinkling brighter than anything she had seen. Her eyes burned at its brilliance and she was forced to look away. The waves were louder now, but the rest of the world was still.
She began to run when she felt the heat upon her skin. Slowly, and then all at once, the sky began to oscillate between being unbearably bright and unbearably dim. The earth began to shake beneath her feet and she could hear the roaring of the wavers against the shore grow even more formidable.
Sadia was a quarter of a mile from the shore when the heat of the atmosphere was so intense that it almost felt like she was encased in either fire or ice, she could not tell the difference. She screamed but the air was too dry, and not a sound came out of her lungs. The back of her throat immediately felt raw, like she was choking on sand or smoke. Her eyes burned and she ran with her blistering hands in front of her face in a desperate attempt to protect her vision.
The sky thundered with the voice of a god.
Her car was twenty feet away when she tripped and fell onto the pedestrian path that circled the beach. Sadia couldn't feel the gravel when she hit it. She couldn't feel, she couldn't see. All she could hear was the earth trembling around her, and the screaming of the distant tide. She didn't get up after that.
I wish I could have told you that no one was hurt.
It is lucky she was unconscious before the teardrop of the sun caressed against her skin, and soaked into her flesh.
It is lucky Sadia was unconscious before she died for the first time.
