Literature
Lily's Ascension (Ch. 8)
The Mentor’s Belly
The city shook before Lily saw what caused it.
At first, she thought the tremor came from herself. That had become reasonable. Her steps had been cracking streets and rupturing buried pipes for miles. Every shift of her weight disturbed the geometry beneath her feet. At more than one hundred and twenty feet tall, still digesting, still gaining, Lily had become accustomed to the world answering her movements with structural complaint.
But this tremor had a different rhythm.
It was slower. Heavier. Farther away.
Lily paused at the edge of what had once been a commercial district, her feet planted in the fractured remains of a boulevard. Around her, the city had been peeled open. Restaurants were hollowed shells. Parking structures had been stripped floor by floor. A row of office buildings stood half-consumed, their interiors exposed like cross-sections in an anatomy text. Smoke drifted between them in low, dirty bands.
Her stomach growled beneath her hand.
The
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