Fic: Into the Chihuahuan

[splinteredstar]

Due to listening to Welcome to Night Vale...almost constantly... at work, plus having a Lot of Feelings about the current arc, what writing I have gotten done has been about those things.

Plus, Tamika Flynn is amazing.

Into the Chihuahuan
Tamika Flynn speaks with her God.
Features: Mix-and-match mythology, one incredibly badass teenaged girl.

When she finds it useful, Tamika walks into the desert alone and speaks with her god.

She walks into the sand wastes, following an invisible path. The sand crunches under her feet and slowly, the sounds of vultures and choppers die off. She reaches an otherwise unremarkable stretch of desert, and waits.

A sandstorm kicks up, but it is not that sandstorm, the sandstorm which set everything in motion – or perhaps it is. Her god is a capricious god. She waits, unflinching, as the storm rips through her hair and her skin, until the sands swirl and solidify into a shape that might, loosely, be called human.

He stands 8 or 9 feet tall and his head is shaped almost, but not quite like a hunting dog. The god’s hair is red and his grin is wide.

“Offering your mind to me at last, mortal?” He growls with a voice like gravel and wind.

She raises her eyebrows. “Are you offering yours?”

The god laughs, the noise indistinguishable from the sandstorm. “Very well, child.” He will not give her power and allow her to retain her identity; she will not give him her body without gaining his in return. The exchange is routine, by now. “Then why are you here?”

She meets the god’s stare without fear. She has no fear. “I need a sandstorm. Tomorrow, at 3pm until 3:30pm.”

“Planning to take down some copters?” She nods. The god of the desert smirks. “And I should aid you because…?”

Tamika stares back at him, unafraid. “Because you are the god of the desert and the outsider, of the chaos and the storm.” She crawled the halls of World Mythology for what might have been days or might have been years. She traded blood for blood and knowledge for knowledge in order to survive, but it was always the smell of desert sand that led her out. “Because this is your city and my city and we will not let them have it.”

The god Seth narrows his eyes and then laughs again, echoing like thunder and landslides across the wastes. “Very well. But the first death is mine.” She nods. All gods demand payment, be it a sacrifice of sanity or blood. “Go, before I change my mind.”

He will not. This has been his city far longer than it has been hers, and he hates Strexcorp almost as much as she does. Nevertheless, she nods, and walks back to her camp with the taste of lightning and blood in her mouth.

 The Chihuahuan Desert is close to one of the places I grew up.