The Earth Remembers

Posted on Thu Jun 4th, 2026 @ 2:40pm by Maeve MacKenna

788 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Episode 7: Pathogens and Contagions
Location: Xavier’s School – Infirmary
Timeline: March 12, 1992

Maeve had been asleep for nearly two days.

Not peacefully.

The infirmary lights were low, leaving the room in a soft, tired glow. Someone had cleaned the blood from her skin. Someone had picked the glass from her arms and scalp. The deep slash along her side had been stitched and dressed, the bandage neat enough to look almost wrong against the memory of how she’d got it.

She looked smaller like this.

Too still.

The monitor beside her bed kept its steady rhythm, but every so often the room gave a faint little shiver. A tray rattled. A bottle clicked softly against another bottle. The floor creaked beneath the bed, low and uneasy, as if the house itself couldn’t quite settle.

Maeve’s fingers twitched against the sheet.

Then the dream took her under again.

It was raining blood.

Not water turned red by club lights. Not theatre. Blood. Thick and warm, falling through the broken dark of Club Blood, soaking her hair, her face, her hands. The music still pounded somewhere below her feet, but there was no crowd anymore. No X-Men. No Blade. Just the empty club stretching too wide, all black walls and red strobes and mirrors that showed her from places she wasn’t standing.

She looked down.

Her hands were covered.

Blood. Black ichor. Something worse packed beneath her nails.

Maeve tried to wipe it off on her jeans, but it only smeared deeper, sinking into her skin.

“No,” she whispered.

A laugh scraped out of the dark.

Mina stood near the ruined bar.

She was dead. Maeve knew she was dead. She’d seen what was left of her. But there she was, split open and smiling, beautiful in pieces, her mouth slick with black-red rot.

“Your violence will haunt you,” Mina rasped.

Maeve stumbled back.

The floor changed under her boots.

The slick dance floor became mud. Then stone. Then a narrow cliff path with grey sky above and sea wind cutting cold against her face.

Achill.

Her breath caught so hard it hurt.

“No.”

The blood on her hands turned to earth.

Dark soil. Rich and damp. Alive.

It should have felt like coming home.

It didn’t.

Something moved in the mist ahead of her. Not Mina. Not Xarus. Something older, half-hidden in green-gold haze, more shape than woman. Maeve could see the turn of a head, the suggestion of a smile, but never enough to name her.

Then the voice came.

You think the hunger made you cruel. No, little earth-heart. It only showed you what your mercy has been holding back.

Maeve closed her fists around the soil.

“That wasn’t me.”

Wasn’t it?

The mist tore sideways.

Xarus was beneath her again, pinned and snarling. Her hand was in his chest. She felt bone crack. Felt something cold and pulsing close around her fingers. Felt the pull as she ripped it free.

She gagged and tried to let go.

Her hands wouldn’t open.

“That was him,” she said, voice breaking. “That was what he did.”

He gave you teeth. I gave you truth.

The ground split.

Stone rose around her in jagged points. Roots crawled from the cracks and wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, her ribs. Not tight enough to hurt. Just enough to hold her there.

The mirrors came back.

Maeve saw herself in all of them.

Red eyes. Blood on her mouth. Stone at her feet. Something almost like a crown behind her head.

Then the earth answered.

Not as a whisper.

As a roar.

In the infirmary, the room jolted.

A metal tray rattled hard enough to spill instruments across the table. One of the monitors flickered. Beneath the bed, a thin crack split across a floor tile with a quiet, sharp sound.

Maeve’s back arched.

Her breath caught.

Then she woke with a broken gasp.

Her eyes flew open.

Blue.

For a second she didn’t know where she was. Her hands clawed at the sheet, searching for blood, dirt, glass, anything that made sense. The room trembled again, softer this time, like an aftershock.

Pain found her next.

Her side. Her ribs. Her head. All of it rushing back at once now that there was no borrowed strength left to hold it away.

Maeve went very still.

The floor was there beneath her.

The stone. The foundations. The old earth under the mansion.

Waiting.

Her lips parted, but it took a moment for sound to come.

“I can feel it,” she whispered.

Her eyes filled before she could stop them.

“All of it.”

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