It all whipped through me as I pulled from deep within me. From deep in the ocean right before me. Power. Force. Might. Total domination of the energy around me. It coursed between my tendrils, creating wings of lightning to echo my father’s fleshy ones. I was the third of my father’s daughters and I would not be denied in my fury. I would take the lives I wanted to take, terrorize those I didn’t and woe to any that stood before me in defiance. I was in truth the Elder God’s Daughter and it was high time I acted like it.

First things first, the annoyances that were my little “sisters,” unworthy of the title as they were. They had challenged me. Hurt me. Taken my child from me. Threatened a being worthy of my love. For that, they were now mine, their lives and souls now at my mercy. Silly little fools didn’t seem to realize that I had none. Not for them. Not anymore.

I sent that power, that contempt, that sheer superiority down the metal line in my hand and into #44A’s shoulder. It coursed like lightning down the line, slamming first into #44A and then through her hand into her sister’s body. I let go of the line, leaving it smoking in the sand, glass forming around it from sheer heat. I was distantly aware of the human female beside me leaping away from me with a curse.

The lightning flowed from the two into the earth, melting the sand and returning from whence it came. I laughged as they hissed and howled at me. “It was you that made me become that which I am,” I said, voice harsh and guttural as I spoke in the language of our father. The galaxy wolf howled in agony as the sound of it lashed at his ears. “It is only just that you be the first to suffer my wrath, little sisters. Little failures in Father’s eyes, and in mine.”

They summoned another wave onto the shore and I batted it away, air solidifying around the galaxy wolf, Veronica and I. That wedge of hardened air kept it away from us and bled the force up and down the beach. I was distantly aware of Peter’s voice coming from the galaxy wolf muttering about the loss of his clothing but at the time, I didn’t much care. The dog could wear his fur or run around naked for all I cared. It wouldn’t be a bad sight either way, part of me mused before I forced myself to focus on the task at hand.

No, my prey was before me. They stood shivering in pain and futile fury on the beach as I walked to them. I spoke in the language of our father, headless of the pain it caused the galaxy wolf. “They told you this would be easy, didn’t they?”

“You were supposed to be alone,” #44A hissed at me.

“You could not defeat us alone,” her sister growled.

“Oh, little sisters, little failures,” I crooned as I reached them. A tendril on each side tipped their faces up to meet mine. “They’re here not to help me, but to help you. Their humanity is supposed to inspire mine, though I find that failing. Humanity is a weak thing, don’t you think? Your sow of a mother gave you far too much apparently.”

Lightning flashed from the wings held by my tendrils to score their bodies again, opening bloody furrows across each torso. “Were your little waves supposed to stop me? Did you think you could take from me without paying the price? Did that bitch that whelped me offer you freedom in exchange for my body, dead or alive?”

“Doctor MacLeod said you were weaker than us,” #44A said through clenched teeth. Her tendrils were weaving in the air, the ones that weren’t curled into smoking clumps on her head. The waves beyond them were stirring. “Together, we are the strongest ones.”

“Well, then let’s fix that,” I said and used my tendrils to slam #44B into the sand at my feet while her sister threw herself backward into the surf. She was up to something but it was of little consequence. It wouldn’t matter in the long run.

The sky screamed above me as I leaned down to grab the tendrils that encircled #44B’s maw. I gave her a rough shake, watching the hatred war with fear in those nearly black eyes. “Good, you’re awake. I wouldn’t want you to die so soon. We have games to play, little failure.”

Standing, I used my grip on her tendrils to throw her back into the surf, some of the snake-like appendages remaining in my hand after the throw. I shook them off in disgust and followed my bleeding sister into the water. The female shouted at me before I sank under the water but she was just a human, a pet, nothing to be taken seriously when battle was at hand. My voice was just as loud under the crashing surf as it had been on land, and just as full of hurtful scorn. The water was eerily still as I swam up to the twin where they floated about twenty yards from shore.

“Do you still think you’re the strongest ones?”

Something sank into the flesh of my right thigh as I finished speaking, the sisters on either side of me faster than I thought they could have moved after being so battered. Good, it would make the game more fun, I mused as I looked down at the wickedly curved blade in my flesh. “Too weak to fight with your own body, you have to use human toys?”

The blade was wrenched away but not before my tendrils found the twins’ throats. Clawed hands raked furrows into my arms and shoulders but it wasn’t enough. I slammed their heads together hard enough I heard the cracking of bone. “You were born inferior, little #44. Split in twain and weak. Unable to stand alone, as our father demands. Too stupid to not challenge one above your pay grade.”

I could feel the ocean stirring at my words, feel my blood singing in kind as I tore into the flesh of my sisters. I tasted salt and iron across my tongue and gills as I breathed but to be honest, I cannot recall if I bit them or not. I remember the taste, blood and iron and madness, joyous across the palette and feeding all those things within me. The water swirled around the three of us in an ever-quickening vortex as I ripped pieces and limbs from my weak little sisters. If I could defeat them so easily, why bother trying to subdue them and make peace? What use could such weaker beings be to me?

The song of my father poured through me as the vortex turned into a waterspout, pulling me and the twins to the surface of the ocean. We burst clear of the water and it stilled like wavy glass beneath me, the jagged waves frozen into scythe-like edges. Blood poured away from me, gore dripping from my still breathing sisters in the full moon that was now the only light in the sky. Even the stars would not witness the failure of the two at my feet, hiding behind the clouds that roiled above us all.

I pulled their torsos closer to me, leaning to whisper in their remaining ears, “You were fools to challenge me in the sea. Father loves me more than you two worthless rags.”

Like the rags they were, I tossed them down, their bodies shredding upon the waves’ edges. Gasping cries came from them as they reached for one another with the thin tendrils of head and a remaining hand. Both were lifted into the air a final time as I called the lightning to my body, the sky above sliced open like the belly of a shark. Crimson lightning flashed from that opening to burn and tear the bodies apart in a final chorus of blood, thicker things and agony.

I let the sea slip back into its eternal dance of wind and wave, the corpses hissing as they sank beneath the surface in nearly unrecognizable chunks. I laughed over them as I walked back to the small island this had started on, hands and tendrils flung to the sky. My voice was a screaming thing, full of lethal joy and power. “I am Shub-Gwethalu!”

I shook my hair as the wind settled, the tendrils in it curling to pull it from my face as I… I reached a hand up to my hair, the ebony locks damp and…

And I felt something that hadn’t been there before. Tiny tendrils wove through my hair as my lightning laced wings flared behind me in surprise almost lifting me from the sand I stood on. Words in raspy English erupted from me. “Well this is new.”

Unsurprising, the voices in me snarled in a growling contentment. They were weak and you took from them what they could not defend. At least it was in open battle and not hiding in the shadows. Sneaking fools, they were.

Something grabbed onto to the hand that wasn’t exploring my hair, pulled at me and shouting, “GWEN! Can you- ouch-damn-ouch- stop!”

I shook my arm, flinging the grabbing being away. It was a human woman, her own hair as black as my own, her skin a paler brown than the twins’ had been before I scorched it cinder black. She had been crying, tears streaming down a face that struck me as beautiful. Was she more beautiful than I? That would be tolerated as long as she was subservient, I decided. Her body was limp on the rocky beach where I’d tossed it.

Another hand grabbed me from behind and pulled me into arms that lashed tight as steel bands around me. I screamed at the male that held me as I felt the Elder powers stir within in. He snarled into my face, “Gwen, wake the fuck up! What is wrong with you?”

“How dare you use such a derivative form of my name,” I snarled back, lighting streaking across my skin to be absorbed into his. I’m not sure who was more surprised, him or me, by the fact that it did nothing but course through him and into the ground with no harm done. “I am-“

“Not today, Satan,” he said and forced my lips to his. Power poured through me from that kiss, the sky between the stars cooling the rage, their glimmer soothing the jagged edges of the grief and fear that drove me to calling my own abilities. He pulled back, breathing raggedly to whisper, “Gwen, come back. We need you.”

Gwen… who… me? We?

Sound returned in a thunderous crash as the clouds shattered overhead, blown away on winds far above us. The light of the moon bathed the beach in soft light, letting me see what I had done. Glass, formed from melting sand, ran around us like the aftermath of a thermal explosion. The air stank of burning flesh, though the sea breeze was quickly pushing it away.

And the human female… no. Veronica, she was collapsed on the ground where I had tossed her as if she meant nothing.

“No,” I whispered, pushing against Peter’s arms. “NO! Let me go, Peter. Veronica!”

I used the tendrils on my back to pry loose and throw myself to the sand beside her. My hands trembled as I reached for her, her name on my lips like a prayer, “Veronica?”

She moaned, the sweetest of sounds, and rolled over before flinching away from me. Tears cascaded down my face as I drew back. She was afraid of me. How could she not be, I was a monster. I began to stand, to pull away from her when she grabbed at my hand, her own burned and bloody. Her voice was smoke scorched instead of velvet smooth but it was hers. “Gwen? My Gwen?”

“Yes,” I said, grasping her hand and falling to my knees in the sand beside her. “I’m so sorry. So sorry, so sorry, so sorry…”

She cut me off with a finger laid against my lips that tasted of blood and ozone. “You were gone but you’re back now. Don’t leave me again.”

“Never, V, never.”

She launched herself into my arms then and I wrapped them around her. Peter had moved close enough for me to use my tendrils to pull his nude form in to the circle of our hug. He seemed surprised when I said, “You saved me.”

“You saved us by killing them,” he said in return, sinking into our arms with an exhausted sigh. “She told me that I would have to bring you back, you know, for, um… reasons.”

“You pour your magic through me and it’s for ‘reasons?’”

He chuckled, wincing as if it hurt. We were all a bit sore throated and his voice reflected that as he spoke. “No, Gwen, your eldest sister, #40 told me that I would have to pour the galaxy through you to bring you back so you could…”

“Could what,” Veronica asked after he trailed off into silence.

“Become my pack,” he said and paused a moment. Looking into my eyes, his own still lit with stars he finished, “And bear my child.”

Say what?