Where the Ground Gives Way

Posted on Wed Dec 3rd, 2025 @ 5:22am by Maeve MacKenna

2,129 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 7: Pathogens and Contagions
Location: Xavier's School - Girl's Dorm
Timeline: Day After Coney Island

Maeve hit the ground hard.

At least, that was how it felt — her body jerking in the bed, breath catching like she’d actually fallen. The dream-world didn’t settle around her so much as snap into place, cold and wet and too familiar, until the air tasted like rotting wood and sea spray.

Coney Island.
Under the Cyclone.
Again.

The shadows stretched the wrong way, long and thin like fingers reaching for her ankles. Every creak overhead echoed inside her ribs. She tried to move, but her limbs felt heavy, syrup-thick, as if the air itself was pushing back.

Her hand went to her throat before she even realised she was doing it.

Warm.
Wet.
Fresh.

Her fingertips came away red.

“No,” she whispered — but even her voice sounded wrong, breathless and younger, like she was back on the ramp with her cheek pressed to the wood.

Footsteps scraped behind her.

Slow.
Savouring.
Delighted.

Maeve turned — or tried to — but her body felt caught in molasses, too slow to be real, too slow for someone who’d run faster than she ever had in her life.

The shadows parted just enough for her to see him.

Damian.
Smile lazy, eyes hungry, blood glistening on his chin.

But the worst part wasn’t him.

It was the feeling.

That awful pull inside her chest — heat curling low in her stomach, strength humming where her power used to be. The phantom echo of pleasure she didn’t want, didn’t choose, didn’t understand.

“You tasted perfect,” Damian murmured, stepping closer without moving his feet, the dream bending to his will. “And look what it made you.”

Her pulse kicked hard — not fear, not entirely. The shame of that made her stomach lurch.

“Get… get away,” she managed, shoving backwards even though there was no ground, no exit, just darkness swallowing the edges of the world.

But her legs wouldn’t listen.
Her arms wouldn’t lift.
And the whisper — the one that had followed her from waking life — curled, warm and intimate, at the base of her skull:

"It wasn’t him changing you, little one.
It’s what you were always meant to feel."

Maeve choked on a breath that wasn’t air.

Her heartbeat thundered, too strong, too fast.
Her skin prickled with that same unnatural awareness.
It felt like her own body was betraying her.

Her voice cracked as she tried again—

“Stop. Please… just stop.”

The shadows tightened around her ankles.

Damian leaned in, fangs sliding into view.

And Maeve felt the ground vanish beneath her feet.

The shadows yanked hard.

Maeve’s feet slid out from under her, her body dragged backward across the splintered boards though nothing actually touched her. She clawed for purchase, for solidity, for anything, but her fingers only scraped uselessly over darkened wood that flexed like muscle beneath her palms.

“No— no, stop—”

A cold hand snapped around her wrist.

Not the dream-shadow this time.
Him.

Damian hauled her upright like she weighed nothing at all. Her boots dangled above the ground, toes searching for earth that wasn’t there, legs kicking on instinct. His grip was hard enough to bruise, to break.

“Don’t fight,” he murmured — but his voice sounded doubled, layered underneath with the whisper that had been haunting her since the bite.
One voice cruel.
One coaxing.
Both hers to fear.

She twisted, desperate, but he only drew her closer, his fingers sliding up to her jaw with a mockery of tenderness.

“Feel it again.”

Maeve tried to scream—but the sound snagged in her chest as his mouth pressed to her throat.

The bite wasn’t the bright stab she remembered.

It was worse.

It bloomed hot and slow, sinking into her skin like molten metal poured straight into her blood. The heat spiralled downward, seeping into her bones, her muscles, her pulse. Her head fell back despite herself, her breath shuddering out in a broken sound that skated the edge of a sob.

Her nails dug into his arm. She pulled.

He didn’t budge.

Her heart hammered—harder, faster, until it didn’t even feel like beating anymore, just crashing against her ribs in frantic waves. Every pulse sent another rush through her, a dizzying, spiralling warmth that made her stomach turn and her limbs tremble.

It felt wrong.
It felt terrifying.
It felt—

A small, shameful noise caught in her throat.

“Don’t,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Don’t make me feel this—”

But the whisper in her head curled sweetly around the edges of her panic:

"You weren’t made to fear power, Maeve.
You were made to enjoy it."

Her vision pulsed.
The world flickered.

Suddenly she wasn’t under the Cyclone anymore.

The roller coaster beams twisted, bending like ribs around her, turning into the roots of a massive oak. Earth rose beneath her, split by cracks glowing faintly gold — her power, trapped beneath the surface, unreachable.

Above her, Damian’s face flickered.

Once.
Twice.
And then—

Jennifer’s eyes stared back at her.

Not angry.
Not afraid.
Hungry.

“Let go,” the Jennifer-shadow whispered, voice syrup-thick. “You want this. You feel it too. Just like I did.”

Maeve’s breath snapped in her lungs.

“Jen…?” she choked, trying to pull away, but the hands at her throat tightened — no longer Damian’s, not quite Jennifer’s, something in-between, something made of her own fear and desire and guilt.

The bite deepened.

Her knees buckled.
Her vision blurred.
And the awful, shivering truth surged through her—

Part of her didn’t want it to stop.

“No,” she gasped, trembling. “No— this isn’t me. This isn’t—”

But her pulse only thundered louder.

The dream closed in around her, warm and suffocating.

And the whisper — the one that was never quite gone — moved to her ear:

"Oh, little one.
You have no idea who you are becoming."

The bite replayed itself again — sharper this time, teeth sinking in, the hot pull of her blood rushing out of her in a way no waking memory could match.
But the world around her wasn’t Coney Island anymore.

The ground dropped away beneath her feet.

Not a cliff.
Not a building.
Just… nothing.

She fell for a heartbeat—
then landed on something soft, cold, and shifting.

Mist.

A pale, endless sea of it.
No sky, no ground, no beams of the Cyclone — only a horizonless fog that breathed, expanding and shrinking like a living thing.

Maeve staggered upright, hand clutching her throat where the dream-wound still burned. “What— where—?”

Her voice went nowhere. The mist swallowed sound whole.

Shapes moved inside it.
Not seen — just suggested, like shadows walking behind curtains.
One moment close, one moment far away.

And beneath her bare feet, the mist rippled softly, as though something vast was turning over in its sleep beneath her.

Maeve backed up, breath coming too fast. “No. No, this isn’t real—”

A hand grabbed her.

Cold fingers knotted in her hair, yanking her head back in the exact same angle Damian had held her — and she cried out, knees buckling. The pain was too perfect, too familiar. She swung her arm blindly, but her fist hit only vapor.

The figure holding her wasn’t Damian now.

In fact… it wasn’t anything she could fully see.

Just an outline in the mist — tall, robed, lacking edges.
As she blinked, the mist folded around it like cloth.

Maeve’s heart pounded so violently she tasted copper. “Let go— let go of me—!”

The silhouette leaned closer.

No face.
No features.
Only a faint shimmer where eyes might have been — green-gold and pulsing, like candlelight seen through fogged glass.

A whisper curled into her ear:

“You feel it, don’t you?”

Maeve froze, breath trapped in her throat.

“The hunger.
The strength.
The hollow where your old power used to live.”

Maeve’s hands shook as she grabbed at her scalp, trying to pry the cold fingers loose — but the grip was unbreakable, not physical so much as inevitable.

“Stop,” she gasped. “Stop talking— get out of my head—”

The mist behind the figure thickened, coming alive like a tide rising.

“Why fight what’s already inside you?”

The whisper was softer now, coaxing, almost gentle — the way someone might speak to a frightened animal. The faceless silhouette lowered its head toward her, and the mist wrapped tighter around Maeve’s legs, pulling her down inch by inch.

“You were never only what you thought.”

Maeve shook her head violently, tears hot on her cheeks. “No— I’m not— I don’t want—”

The figure’s hand, still buried cruelly in her hair, tilted her chin upward.

Green-gold light pulsed again — a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

“You will be more.”

The mist surged.

Maeve’s body dropped another inch, then another, sinking like quicksand swallowing her whole. Panic tore through her — raw, frantic, a trapped fox slamming itself against the walls of its cage.

“HELP—”
Her voice broke as the fog crawled up her ribs.
“Someone— please—”

The silhouette didn’t move.

It only whispered, a final murmur slipping right behind her ear as the mist swallowed her up to the chin:

“Awaken when you’re ready, little one.”
“I will be waiting.”

And then she was dragged under.

Completely.
Silenced.
Gone.

The fog slammed shut above her like water closing over a drowning girl.

The mist swallowed her whole—

—then stopped.

She wasn’t sinking anymore.

Maeve floated in a weightless dark, suspended as though the world had paused to hold its breath. For a moment, all she heard was her own pulse, frantic and uneven.

Then another pulse joined it.

Stronger.
Deeper.
Not human.

It beat in perfect rhythm with her heart until she couldn’t tell where hers ended and the other began.

A whisper thread through the dark:

“You think you’ve lost your power…”

The darkness cracked open like glass under pressure.

Light spilled through — green-gold, blinding, alive. Maeve threw an arm up to shield her eyes, but the nightmare forced her to see.

The light shaped itself into a mirror.
Tall, cracked, ancient.
Her own reflection stared back at her.

Except—

It wasn’t her.

Not as she was.

This Maeve stood barefoot on broken earth, hair wild and floating like it was underwater. Her skin glowed from beneath, fissures tracing up her arms and throat like molten lines. Green-gold light bled through every crack like sunlight pressing through stone.

Her eyes—
God, her eyes—

They burned the colour of deep forests set aflame.

And the ground beneath her was moving.

Chunks of stone heaved upward, suspended in the air around her like a shattered planet orbiting a sun. The cracked earth split wider with every breath the reflection took, rumbling with something ancient, something furious.

Maeve watched, frozen in her own body, as the other version of herself slowly lifted her hand.

The world obeyed.

The ground rose in jagged spires.
The stones circled her like obedient hounds.
The very air trembled around her.

A being of earth and wrath and impossible power.

Maeve’s breathing quickened. “No— that’s not— that’s not me—”

The whisper curled around the words.

“It will be.”

Her reflection tilted its head.

And then it smiled.

Not cruel.
Not kind.
Just… knowing.

The cracks in her glowing skin widened, the light swelling brighter and brighter until the mirror itself began to shake, threatening to shatter.

Maeve staggered back, hands over her ears as the heartbeat thundered, the earth cracked, the reflection’s light flared—

“Your power will return.”
“Stronger than before.”
“Stronger than you fear.”

SHATTER—

The mirror burst apart.

The shockwave slammed into her like a fist to the chest.

Maeve screamed—
wrenching, raw, animal—
and lunged backward—

———

She woke choking on her own breath, drenched in sweat, fingers digging into her bedsheets as if to keep from falling through them. Her throat throbbed violently where Damian had bitten her, phantom heat pulsing in time with the fading echo of that impossible heartbeat.

Her hands shook uncontrollably.
Something inside her chest still hummed — faint, dangerous, alive.

And the whisper, soft as a fingertip brushing along the back of her mind, lingered one last time:

“Soon.”

The room was dark.
Still.
Silent.

But Maeve wasn’t.

She was trembling from the inside out.

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