Chapter Six: An Unexpected Puberty

The first time the mysterious Voice had spoken to her was as she slept, the night of her sixteenth birthday. She later dismissed it as delusion, stress, or possibly something she imagined whilst trying to come to terms with the momentous changes puberty wrought in her body and life. The second time it had spoken to her was the night she saved DI Donald from Robbie Staunton. It was harder to dismiss that night, but she managed to convince herself it wasn’t real.

When she woke up on her bedroom floor, the scent of smoke lingering in her clothes and hair, and the taste of ash in her mouth, having heard the Voice a third time, she had to admit it was real. She didn’t want to, she didn’t want to acknowledge what that meant, but her mother had trained her to be practical and adaptive. Now she just needed to practice adapting.

She’d adapt later. Right now, she was lying on her bedroom floor, remembering her birthday. It had been the most wonderful day. She closed her eyes as the memory came back, perfectly clear.

“My word, this view of the city and the river winding so serenely is most extraordinary. I daresay it’s the finest one in all London,” Stella said, gazing out over the city and miles of river she could see. “Truly it must be, I think, quite without rival.”

Her mother smiled as she unpacked the two baskets she had brought. “There is no better place for a rooftop luncheon, my little varra. Only St. Paul’s is higher, of course, but one could not perch for a picnic there without tumbling down the dome.”

“God might strike us dead if we donkeyed about up there,” her bibi-daj added. “Though I’m not sure this is much of an improvement.”

Stella watched a boat coming up the river. It was so far away it looked like a toy. Closer boats were like larger toys, with little dolls on the deck that moved around as if they were people, except they were people, just far enough away they seemed tiny.

“Come,” her mother commanded. “Sit and have lunch with us, then we shall give you your gifts.”

Stella moved over to the woollen blanket her bibi-daj had spread across the roof and looked at the food her mother had bought from Fortnum & Mason. There were hard boiled eggs, watercress sandwiches, pickled onions, apples, tinned salmon, raw carrots, and… Stella grabbed the small block of cheddar like it was a nugget of gold, and bit hard into it. The flavour exploded in her mouth, and she had devoured three more bites before she realised her mother and bibi-daj were staring at her.

“Umm,” she said. “Well… the cheese… it is most delightful, mama.” She took a fifth bite defiantly, though it was more lady-like.

Her mother seemed amused. Her bibi-daj just cleared her throat, staring pointedly at the cheese in Stella’s hand. Stella glanced at the cheese, too, and saw there was only a half-mouthful left. Reluctantly, she handed it over to her bibi-daj.

It wasn’t even like her bibi-daj could speak about hogging food. The tinned salmon had already disappeared into the folds of her skirt like she was Houdini with one of his delightful tricks. Her mother had most of the raw carrots pulled towards her: with a shared glance and no words, Stella and her bibi-daj decided she could keep them.

After they had eaten, her mother handed Stella a small tin.

“Peaches?” Stella asked.

Her mother set two more tins on the blanket. “For you to enjoy whenever you please and without any obligation to share.”

“Peaches!” Stella’s sudden-tackle hug was so unexpected it bowled her mother over, and her bibi-daj collapsed in guffaws on the other side of the blanket.

“Yarck,” her mother yelled as she fell, then composed herself beneath her over-excited daughter. “Quiet, you fools; the guards will hear us.”

Her bibi-daj’s guffaws died down to chuckles. “As if I’d ever alert the guards, Selene.”

Stella clambered off her mother and sat formally as Selene rose. “Mama, forgive me. I was overcome, though that is no excuse for behaving like a barbarian.”

“Ah, my varra, it is quite natural to be excited about your birthday gifts. Now, please, do not trouble yourself over your barbarism; it is such a fixed feature of your character that I doubt even electrotherapy would rid you of it.”

Stella considered this. “Would electrotherapy be good training, mama?”

“I hardly see the need, though experiencing shocks to see how the electricity hampers your body might prove some small benefit.”

“What is wrong with you two?” her bibi-daj asked.

Stella and Selene ignored the question as Selene provided her second gift, a small lump of iron. Stella took it reverently. “What is it, mama?”

“A knife. It will be a knife, at least. You have done well with small forgings, and you have made knives for the household. Now, it is time for you to begin smithing your own weapons.”

“Mama, thank you. I love it.”

Her bibi-daj’s gift was a telescope. It was a glorious thing, all shiny and brass, with knobs and screws, and she puzzled over it in delight for nearly ten minutes, before turning earnestly to Selene. “May we stay until the stars come out, mama?”

Selene glanced towards the edge of the roof. “We may, provided the guards do not observe us. They will chase us off, for certain.”

“They’re more like to just shoot us,” her bibi-daj grumbled. “This is the most damn fool idea either the two of you ever had, and you just discussed electroshocking your daughter, miri phabaj.”

“Oh, hush you,” her mother had replied, but she was smiling. “Come, Stella; I shall teach you how to breathe.”

“I do know how to breathe, mama. I assure you I’ve achieved competence over the last sixteen years,”

Her mother’s smile was gentle. “Not like this. This is how I was taught to breathe by my mother, when I was only a little younger than you are now.” She spent the rest of the evening teaching Stella how to breathe, and then they watched the stars through the telescope, far above the lights of London. Her bibi-daj had teacups and flasks of hot chocolate with full milk and real cocoa, though it had cooled significantly before she served it. The stars above them were beautiful, and her bibi-daj identified the constellations as she knew them, and tried to describe the stars only she could see.

As the memory faded, the taste of ash returned. She lay on the floor of her bedroom, breathing as her mother had taught her. It was meant to be calming, it was meant to ground oneself, but it wasn’t working. She had only ever tried on a rooftop before, so the roof must have been a key component.

She lay there and continued remembering her birthday, and the first time the Voice had spoken to her. It was easier to think of that than to deal with today. If all that had happened on her birthday had been the rooftop picnic, it would have been a wonderful night, but her bibi-daj had fallen the last few feet when they climbed down from the tower, and her short scream and loud swearing had drawn the guards. Then they were, as her bibi-daj put it, on the lam, though Stella hadn’t seen any farm animals anywhere.

They ran across the city with the police at their back, and more pulled in for a manhunt, even though none of them were men.

“Concentrate on your running and leave the witticisms for afterwards,” her mother had cautioned her when she pointed that out.

It took over an hour for the pursuers to give up, and days for the extended police hunt and newspapers to stop. The king even released a short statement that hit the front page of every paper and made them all stay at home for the next week, just in case. The authorities really didn’t like people picnicking on top of the palace of Westminster, but Victoria Tower was the highest point in the city where someone could picnic.

It was the perfect birthday.

And it ended with a strange dream she didn’t really remember, and a voice that intoned with the strength of a church bell words she didn’t understand. Level one. Ability: heroic form. Ability: octoweave limbs.

The morning after her sixteenth birthday she’d woken tangled in silk sheets she couldn’t shake off, then fallen out of bed. Then stood up and fallen again. The floor seemed so far away, her legs were too long, and everything about her body just seemed off. She could barely stand, and walking was impossible. She tried to get back on the bed, but the sheets stuck to her like magnets, and she ended up on the floor, wrapped in silk.

“Stella,” her mother called from the hallway. “Are you alright?”

“No. I hate being sixteen.”

Selene opened the door and sighed at her daughter. “There is absolutely no reason to hate being sixteen. You are just being dramatic, Stella.”

“I’ve forgotten how to walk.”

“Dramatic and lazy, Stella.”

Stella got to her feet, somehow shrugging off the blankets, took a single step, then stumbled forward. Selene caught her and lowered her to the ground. “It seems I was mistaken,” her mother said. “You have gained five inches and two stone overnight. You shall have to relearn your body before you can move as you did.”

“Very well,” Stella said, lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. “I shall add puberty to my tally of things I hate. You may fetch me my peaches and a blanket.”

It had taken her bibi-daj an hour to catalogue the differences in Stella’s body. She’d gone from 5 feet 7 inches to six feet overnight. She’d always been fit, her mother’s training regime saw to that, but now her limbs were corded with well-defined muscle, her shoulders broader, her stomach taut. Not huge, but bigger and more pronounced than a decade of unarmed combat had made her.

It had taken her mother five minutes to come up with a plan and a new training regime. It had taken Stella the rest of the day to learn how to walk. A week to be running and jumping and climbing, as she had been.

It took much longer before any of them wondered why it had happened.

A few days after that, she’d discovered she had magic. Or, no, not magic, but no other word seemed to fit. After her mother’s extensive testing and her bibi-daj’s rigorous scientific method, they found she had the ability to control silk she was physically in contact with. Silkinesis, although her bibi-daj had said it was wrong to combine Latin and English. Since silkinesis was not scientifically possible, Stella started calling it magic. Her bibi-daj objected, of course, because magic was the control of natural energies, and both this and magic were scientifically possible, they just didn’t know the science to understand it yet.

Selene stayed out of the argument, opining only that it was another area of training for Stella to master. She’d rather find its limits and utility than waste time trying to understand what it was or how it had happened. Which was probably why Stella just dismissed it as magic and got on with trying to use it.

She told her mum and her bibi-daj about the magic right away, but she didn’t tell them about the Voice. At first, she hadn’t been sure it was real. It had been a dream, or right as she had woken, on the cusp of sleep and wakefulness. It felt like the Voice of God, or an angel; something experienced, not heard. It wasn’t sound so much as it was thought, but it wasn’t her thought. It came from inside and outside her, Voice without sound, intention without meaning, in a language she had never heard but understood intuitively.

There was no way it wasn’t some weird dream or attempt to rationalise the changes her body had went through, or delusion, she decided, and that was that for two months.

Level two. Ability: octomind. Ability: chromoweave.

The Voice came in her sleep the night she saved DI Donald from Ronnie Staunton and brought with it changes to her body and her power. It woke her from a dream she couldn’t remember and left her trembling in her bed like an abused dog offered comfort. Her sheets were slick with sweat and her blonde hair stuck to her clammy face. The Voice was terrifying, the changes wrought, less so. Before Robbie Staunton, her octoweave limbs gave her the ability to make eight tentacles from the silk she wore, but it was a limited control. She could instinctively move them all together, or in two groups, or she could concentrate on one and have greater control over it. After that night, she had full, independent control over them at all times. The chromoweave meant she could change the colour of any silk that was touching her.

She told herself it was a coincidence, but she didn’t really believe that. What else was there to think? God had given her magic, and then upgraded the magic she had been given? It was something other than God? An angel, a demon, a rogue sorcerer, some leftover from the Millennium Grace Congregation?

Level Three. Ability: Heroic Presence. Ability: Pyroguard Flameslow.

The newest level came as she woke on her floor, tasting ash, and with every muscle aching. The Voice was as maddening and terrifying as ever, as inscrutable and mysterious as God was said to be. Stella had even done research into it: she’d checked in the library to see if others had heard the Voice of God, and she’d read the story of Joan of Arc. Well, England wasn’t threatened by invasion, and burning alive sounded horrible, so her research had moved on. St Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish nun, had formed seventeen convents of nuns too poor to have shoes. Going shoeless was fine, she quite enjoyed the feeling of grass between her toes, but Stella didn’t think her life should be about founding convents, and if she tried to claim a Spanish nun as a role model, her mother would kill her.

Bernadette Soubirous had seen the Virgin Mary, ordered a church built, and died in the nunnery where she had spent most of her life. St. Francis of Assisi had rebuilt churches with his own hands, and stones he had begged for, survived a shipwreck, founded a religious order, and been blinded.

None of that sounded like anything Stella wanted to do, so if the Voice started demanding she found religious orders, she was going to… she hadn’t actually come up with a plan, yet, but she knew it would involve blasphemy. And knives.

Why did this Voice, of God or whatever, have to be inscrutable anyway? Why couldn’t it just explain things to her? She wished the skills came with instructions. Her mother had taught her Latin, so she knew pyro was fire, and the rest of the skill seemed to suggest her silk would burn slow or take longer to set alight. The other one was meaningless to her. What was a heroic presence? The chromoweave had been easily understood, but the heroic form had dramatically increased her breast size, and she didn’t understand why it would. What was heroic about a large chest? Alright, they weren’t ridiculously oversized, but they were larger than was necessary for her new build.

There was no understanding the Voice on her own.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Five

Next Chapter: Chapter Seven

Author’s Note

There’s a context post on the queerguide today. It isn’t about craft, it’s not how do I do this but why did I do this. Context.

It’s about breasts. No titillation, just tit. Speaking of, please remember to check frequently for lumps and things. If cancer kills you, you won’t find out how the story ends. Also dying would totally be bad for you.

Yeah, I’m making jokes, but it’s a serious thing, too.