"Few people can say of themselves that they are free of the belief that this world which they see around them is in reality the work of their own imagination. Are we pleased with it, proud of it, then?"

To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)

by P.H Wise

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.

I dreamed I was descending a great spiral stairway fit for a palace, its every step a work of beauty, the visible side of each one carved with intricate designs. Above me was darkness; below me was darkness interrupted by a lantern's glow every forty feet. There was no guard rail, and the wall showed that the place was a natural cavern despite the artistry of the stair. The only sound was the sound of my own footsteps and the beating of my heart; the air was cool, crisp, and clean, and I don't know how long it took to reach the bottom, but it felt like hours.

Lanterns and torches. Fire that burned and did not consume. Pools of light between shadows, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs down into infinity.

I don't know what made me choose one tunnel over the other when I got to the bottom, but it seemed the proper way. After a few minutes of walking I turned into the seventh side passage and walked until I faced a great, dark, metal-bound door that stood ajar, and a faint light glimmered in the darkness beyond it.

I crossed the threshold and entered into a vast cavern with a floor black as pitch and smooth as glass, and when I set my foot to it, I kept traction without difficulty. And within that cavern, I found the light's source, for upon the floor was carved what seemed at first to be a single intertwined curve, luminescent and glowing and shimmering like cold fire, but even as I looked the image of the thing upon the floor expanded, rippling outward in every direction until it covered almost the whole of the black cavern floor, at least a hundred and fifty yards from one side to the other. But though it might deceive the eye, the pattern never changed. New aspects I had not seen before might make themselves known, but they had been there all the while.

I walked to the far side and images flashed in my mind: I saw a city at a mountain's peak unlike any city I had ever seen and like every city I had ever seen; I saw a deep blue, almost nighttime sky with golden sun that stood at high noon; I saw an ocean so deeply blue it was nearly purple and an enormous grey tower that rose up from the water some miles out to sea; I saw a black road that stretched from the mountain to a black citadel with every universe between.

I set foot on the edge of the Pattern, and a shower of blue-white sparks rose up beneath my foot. There was an almost electric shock and a thrumming in the air, and it took an effort of will to take a second step. As I took that second step forward, I awoke.

I was lying in my bed at home. It was hot, and I had been sweating, and even the thin sheets I slept beneath seemed suffocating. I kicked them off and sat up, and when I blinked I could almost still see that strange pattern in the darkness behind my eyelids.

The dreams were coming more often, now, and I don't know what they meant, or even if they meant anything at all. I had the dreams before things had gotten really bad at school, but they'd always been more vague, more tentative. The dreams have been coming more often since the locker: Since I woke up in the hospital.

There are other worlds: parallel realities. That's something every child on Earth Bet knows, but this felt different. It wasn't something I could explain in words; the best I could put it was to call it a certainty of fact, an absolute knowledge of truth that gave that strange intertwined curve a solidity that even the waking world seemed to lack, but that was too definite. I didn't know. It wasn't knowledge. It was like trying to describe the the reflection of an absolute truth, or comparing an impression left in the mud to the thing that made it.

Something dark was stirring in the Shadows. I could almost see them out of the corner of my eye: a pair of vast living things, each one larger than an entire planet, moving and shifting and intertwining across a thousand Shadows as they glided their way through the universe, innumerable shards falling off them like seeds cast to the wind, like a vast cloud of cosmic dust that could choke whole galaxies, but when I turned my head to look they were gone, and I scolded myself for daydreaming and watching too many horror movies.

Someone was looking for me. I don't know how I knew that, but I knew. I saw footsteps on the pattern, and I heard images forged from alien sounds, and by morning I'd almost convinced myself that it was all in my head.

It was all in my head.

My clock told me that it was still half an hour before my normal wakeup time, but I didn't feel tired anymore.

I needed some water.

I went downstairs to the kitchen, filled a glass and drank my fill, and as I set the glass back down I squeezed it, taking some small comfort in its solidity, its reality.

The glass shattered in my hand, and I jumped.

It wasn't bad. I only had a few small scratches and one long shallow cut across my palm. After I'd cleaned up the mess and bandaged my hand, the pain faded, and by the time I left for my run, I'd almost forgotten about it entirely. By the time I got back home and took my shower, the scab looked old, and the tissue around it was slightly swollen and tender, like days-old wound.

I stared at my hand for a long moment as I made the connections in my head. Was it possible…? I ended the thought before it could finish, but I couldn't quite suppress the stirring in my heart that accompanied it.

I finished my shower, dried my hair and dressed, and I barely heard my Dad's sleepy good morning from out in the hall as he shuffled down the stairs to make breakfast. "...morning, Taylor," he mumbled.

I didn't answer him. Instead, I went to the heaviest thing I could think of in my room - my desk - bent down, took hold of it with both hands, and lifted.

The desk came up easily, like it was made of cheap particle board and not solid wood. It was awkward and hard to keep my balance while I was holding it, but I could do it.

That same hope from earlier came back ten times as strong, and for the first time in years, a thrill of joy went through me, and I grinned so wide that it hurt.

My name is Taylor Hebert, and I have super powers. That was how it started.

I spent weeks making a costume, I ran to get in shape, and I threw myself into training and learning how to fight. Dad seemed relieved and concerned both to see me taking classes at the local dojo, but I learned quickly. I had a natural talent for it. And if Emma, Sophia, and Madison continued to make my life a living hell at school, it only made me want to train twice as hard, it only to prove that they were wrong, that I really was worth something.

I was going to be a hero.

It went wrong.

You've probably heard some variation of the story before. My life is reflected through a thousand Shadows, like two mirrors facing each other, and I honestly couldn't tell you if I'm the reflected or just another reflection.

One cool April night, I overheard something I couldn't ignore, uttered by an opponent I couldn't match. I challenged the dragon.

I lost.

There was fire, and pain, and then darkness.

Darkness.

...darkness.

The darkness was everywhere and everything, like the starless night at the end of the universe, and a low thrumming slowly rose up in me that I became aware of only by degrees. Presently the darkness lightened into something like the darkness behind closed eyelids, and I became aware of myself in agony; then awareness took a back-seat to sensation, and a pain far more real than me became my world.

It started to end after what felt like most of eternity. The ocean of pain receded slowly, like an outgoing tide, still cresting in waves but each wave a little less than the last.

I opened my eyes.

Nothing made sense. The world I saw was a misshapen place of giants and impossible angles and colors that didn't exist, and I blinked. The world seemed to distort, and all was insubstantial as a shadow, and I blinked, and I blinked and I blinked until the world made sense and my surroundings were explicable again, and I became aware of myself lying in a hospital bed covered in bandages.

For a moment I couldn't remember who I was or why I was here. My name was on the tip of my tongue, but it didn't want to come.

Then the door opened, and the light was almost blinding, and a man came through. He was tall and gangling, dark haired but balding, his green eyes showing through his thick glasses. He looked tired and careworn, his clothes were rumpled, and something about him seemed familiar.

He took in a sharp breath when he saw me. "Taylor," he breathed.

Taylor. That was my name. That was who I was. I remembered Taylor. I didn't remember the man yet, but my voice seemed to speak without me, an awful, wet, cracked thing, more a husk of a voice than a voice itself: "Hi, Dad," I said.

He smiled, and it hurt to see, and a hundred memories came with it. He moved as if to hug me, but he drew up short, maybe when he remembered my bandages. "Do you remember what happened?" he asked.

I stared down at my bandage-covered hands, felt the throb of pain beneath. It hurt every time my heart beat, and it hurt everywhere. What had happened?

Fire. A tattooed man in a metal mask. Pain. Burning. A look of utter contempt. A cruel smile to go with cruel mercy.

"Lung," I whispered.

Dad shuddered and nodded. "They found you in ABB territory, Taylor," he said.

"They?" I asked.

"Armsmaster," Dad amended. "He said you'd been in a fight." He swallowed, and once again his expression hurt to see. "Taylor, why didn't you tell me?"

Guilt welled up first, and then not-tears, and it hurt to even try to cry, even though no tears came. "I'm sorry, Dad," I told him with my broken voice.

He smiled sadly. "The important thing is that you're alive," he said, and sat down next to my bed. I took his hand and squeezed, and it hurt, but so did everything.

For a little while, neither of us spoke. Then Dad asked, "What's your power?"

"I'm a Brute," I said. My whole body itched beneath the bandages, but I didn't scratch. "I'm strong, fast, tough, and I've always healed fast."

He nodded. "True," he agreed. "... can you heal from this?"

I didn't know, and I said so.

"I'm trying to get you on the list for Panacea," Dad said.

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. Then a nurse came in and saw that I was awake, and things got complicated. First the nurse had questions, and then the doctor, and then the Protectorate, and as I lay there feeling the pain throbbing through my body, I thought of Lung and his fire, of the cruelty in his eyes when he told me that my ruined body was going to serve as an example to anyone who dared to stand against him who proved not worth his time, and something hard and bitter rose within my heart. I didn't know how exactly, but I swore then and there that I would find a way to kill him.

Panacea did not come that night, nor the next day, but in the morning I hurt a little less. I didn't know if I was recovering or if I was just getting used to the pain, but I could sit up. I looked for a mirror and didn't find one, and maybe it was just as well. Dad came in smelling faintly of soap; he had showered but hadn't slept, and the dark circles beneath his eyes were worse.

I didn't like the pity I saw in his expression when he looked at me. What I could see of my skin was a burned ruin; I didn't have any hair, nor eyelashes, probably not eyebrows either. My imagination treated me to an image of the skin of my face melting like wax in Lung's fire, and I shuddered.

Dad fell asleep some time after noon. I tried to watch television for a while, and I learned that I was at Brockton Bay General Hospital.

I'd been naked when they brought me in, my costume burned to ashes, but there wasn't anything to see. I wouldn't have to worry about being plain anymore. Emma didn't have to tell me how ugly I was now, and even if I got into the best shape of my life, no boy would call me even a backhanded word like 'butterface.'

I was a burn victim.

I was very thirsty, but they wouldn't let me drink anything yet. After my third unit of saline and a course of antibiotics, I fell asleep.

Panacea still did not come.

I tried to be understanding. I told myself that she had a lot of people to get to, that she couldn't drop everything to prioritize a burn victim who wasn't in danger of dying if the doctors could stave off infection.

The third day, the pain was less, and I got up and walked to the bathroom to look myself in the mirror.

It was bad. My flesh was raw and red beneath the bandages everywhere it wasn't covered in blisters, and one eye looked cloudy, and the tip of my nose was gone. I looked like a burned corpse that hadn't had the decency to stop moving, and I couldn't cry: my tear ducts had been damaged.

The fourth day dawned, and the pain was still less. Dad went to work, and when he came back to the hospital that evening he told me that everyone was pulling for me.

I didn't answer him.

The doctors and nurses started talking in hushed whispers that night, and on the morning of the fifth day, Armsmaster came through the door into my hospital room, his armor bright and gleaming, and a sense of unreality came over me.

Was this real? Was he? Was I? In my sterile, brightly lit hospital room, I felt I was surrounded by shadows, as though the walls of existence night at any moment for apart and leave me to spiral into the empty nothing at the end of time: a perfected principle of consumption, gnawing and empty.

Armsmaster was saying something, concern visible on the part of his face that showed beneath the visor. "... you all right, Ms. Hebert?"

I decided that it didn't matter at the moment if the whole universe was imaginary, and I could save my existential crisis for another time. "I'm fine," I said.

"You look better," he said, and for a moment I thought he was joking.

"What?"

"Your burns are healing quickly," he clarified, and things clicked into place. The Protectorate thought I was parahuman. He was giving me the chance to tell him about it if I wanted to, or we could both pretend that neither of us knew what was obviously going on.

"I've always healed fast," I said.

He nodded. "Ordinarily, I'd tell you how dangerous it is to do what you've been doing alone, but I think you understand that now. If you need help, support, assistance, training, the Wards are here for you."

I didn't answer for a long moment.

Help sounded good. Support, assistance, training. I didn't much like the thought of joining a group of teen superheroes, since that sounded like highschool but worse, but the rest…

It came to one thing: even if it was stupid, even if it was hopeless, I was going to make that dragon answer for what he'd done to me. And if I was going to kill Lung, I doubted I could do it as a Ward.

"I'll think about it," I told him.

We both knew I was lying.

Panacea never came, and I never learned why. Maybe she didn't care. Maybe she was busy. Maybe she never even heard that Dad had tried to get me on the list for healing during her volunteer hours. Whatever the reason, she never came, but by the end of the eighth day, I was far enough along towards recovery that I was starting to think maybe I could get better without her, and the pity in Dad's eyes when he looked at me had been replaced with hope.

Dad took me home on April 18th, and when I took off the bandages, I was startled to realize that I recognized the face in the mirror: it was mine. Blistered still and still burned in places, but healthy pink flesh showed through, and all the flaws somehow weren't so flawed anymore.

I stared, trying to see exactly what had changed. My thin lips and wide mouth were still there, but they fit my face now in a way they hadn't before. I was still tall and skinny, but the awkward coltishness was gone, and now I was simply myself. My hair was a thick stubble on my otherwise bald head. My nose, my jaw, my cheekbones, all of it fit and seemed altogether right and natural, and there were no scars. Had the fire transfigured me somehow? Yet if it had, it had not remade me into some ethereal beauty nor haunting vision. I was me, but somehow moreso.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror, and I burst into tears.