For flofx‘s prompt.

After Creation Story. Thanks to @Anke and @inventrix for help coming up with the idea.

“And when I came to, well, I was kind of part of the machine…”

Cobalt Deus, who called herself Eve at home, listened to the young members of her team talk about their so-called origins, how they had gotten the “sparks” that kept them going.

Silently, from the corner where she watched most things, she shot blue sparks between her fingers, the sparks that gave her both her “superhero name” and her power, and thought about the storm that wouldn’t end.

She had been young, barely past her menses, and mankind had likewise been in its early teenaged years, struggling with the concepts of reality, morality, permanence and transcendence. The storm had been, she had later learned, the product of sorcerers in the next town over, working not out of malice, but in a desire to bring water to their own valley’s fields.

Weather magic was then, and continued even into the modern age to be, the most dangerous and most volatile of the high arts. Cobalt Deus had spent millenia quietly eliminating those who refused to learn this.

There had been nothing left of the next town over except one scared child, and very little more left of “Eve’s” village, when the storm passed. It had rained for weeks, thundered, and shot lightning at every raised thing, poured until the rivers flooded, until the buildings burned, until “Eve” and her few surviving family could no longer count the time, because there was no light through the clouds to tell the day from night. It had rained until they had given up the thought of life altogether… and then the lightning had touched them.

There had been five of them holed up in a cave high on the hillside. Of them, only “Eve” had survived the lightning, making her and four who had been on another hill the only members of their town alive. And Eve had been marked by the storm.

Cobalt Deus stared at the lightning between her fingers. The children spoke of their creation stories, embarrassed that they weren’t dramatic enough. Cobalt, who had been living under the storm that would not end for longer than mankind kept records, wished, herself, for an origin and a life that had been less marked, and less dramatic. She hoped the children never reached the point where they, too, wished that.

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