A Banshee's Scream

They thought magic was dead, and it led to the death of millions. Humans got used to the idea that they were the only beings in this reality. Anything else was subject to skepticism and categorized as superstition.

But apparently there were enough people daydreaming and children prone to wild imagination. It must have packed a punch strong enough to thin some sort of boundary. Nobody really knows what happened. However, I’ve read enough abandoned diaries and written speculation to develop a theory.

You see, out of all my readings one thing has been consistent. What all of them refer to as ‘The Beginning’. A worldwide event that many described as an earthquake. Though the most elaborate I’ve read was, “Like the skin of the Earth rippled in a disgusted shudder”.

I guess during that time people believed in many different things. Millions of people would believe in different versions of the same entities all through out human history. Gods and Goddesses given dominion over a specific aspect of life. Each version given their own personality traits. The world was ill prepared when all of them began to walk the Earth.

Especially when it turned out that they didn’t like each other. From what I could find I think the beginning was much sooner and way quieter than they thought. There are so many old videos and accounts of odd experiences.

People going missing without a trace in the wilderness. Only to turn up an improbable distance away, no worse for ware, and with no memory. Humans with rarely documented meta-abilities and witches with unexplained power they called magic.

Sightings of strange creatures engaging in equally strange behavior. Spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, and demons, all separated by a veil between the living and dead. There was no shortage of evidence pointing to that thinning veil having popped causing the ripple. I don’t think the veil was between the living and the dead. But rather belief and reality.

Maybe one too many children believed in the closet monster. Perhaps too many people believed in the impossible. Whatever it was it changed the world as they knew it. And for the most part it started slowly, until suddenly it wasn’t.

There wasn’t much of a change at first after the ripple. The number of what they called paranormal sightings gradually increased. They had enough information to know something was going on. They had to face what they thought to be superstition as being a new reality, and they tried to prepare for the worst. But they were too late.

They had several months from the ripple to the chaos, but they had no way to know what was coming, or how dire the situation really was. The more powerful and intelligent beings had come through first. It turned out that the materialization points were in random obscure areas. The middle of forests, jungles, deserts, and generally unpopulated areas. Making it nearly impossible to monitor them all.

So, the gods and goddesses came through and realized how many of them there were. Each declared themselves the original and the rest imposers. Each pantheon and single deities thought themselves the rightful ruler of the human world. And before the humans had the chance to notice, the gods infiltrated their day to day lives to bide their time and amass their armies.

Which they gathered from materialization points by posing as humans and joining the government agencies set up to capture them. The agencies ended up as nothing more than search and rescue teams for evacuation when the War of the Gods began.

They expected uncorrelated attacks on small towns or individual people. It turned out they were only collateral damage. The armies attacked each other, and any human deaths were a case of wrong place wrong time. These gods wanted to rule over the humans, and understood that if the humans died out, they couldn’t be ruled over.

But it was real hit or miss for the first few years. Human casualties still climbed into the millions. And these deities were not the only powerful beings to walk the Earth. They just waited for the opportune time to throw their hats into the ring.

For humans, survival began to mean something entirely different. Those in war zones ran hoping to escape the carnage. Only to run into another god’s territory, and ultimately captured and enslaved. The human military bases were used as strongholds for protection but fell easily enough when the gods declared dominion over them.

That was over a hundred years ago. Since then, certain sects of deities have banned together to maintain their control. At some point they realized in this reality, while they have immense power, and do not age, they can be killed. And some creatures born from the imaginations of humans, though not deities, were powerful enough to match them.

Humans now live in four forms. Slaves and nomads are the most common. Then there are those who wander onto the wrong territory and become food. Lastly, are the hidden villages. I’ve only ever heard of them through eavesdropping from the shadows. But they are intermixed villages of human and creature. If the rumors are true there’s lots of interbreeding going on.

But it is said they are kept hidden, even from the gods, by spell casters and various powerful beings. Personally, it sounds too good to be true. Like a trap for those of us still roaming free.

I am a fifth-generation nomad. My family has never been enslaved. As far as the world is concerned my bloodline disappeared before The War of the Gods even began. All thanks to a great, great, great grandfather who was often considered a paranoid doomsday survivalist. At least that’s what was said in his wife’s diaries.

Every woman in my family line kept journals telling their life’s stories. Starting with that grandmother, they shared their firsthand account of how life changed.

How they went from going to places called department stores and supermarkets to get everything they needed. To foraging in hopefully abandoned buildings for paper and ink to write their experiences and thoughts. Or braving the dark market with the risk of being caught by an agent of the gods or stumbling into a slave runner. Those that sell any unmarked human to the highest bidder.

That paranoid grandfather set up our family’s best chance at maintaining our survival and freedom. And he did it by doing something others thought insane. While the majority of the masses ran to the military bases and cities for protection. He gathered his wife and daughter and went into hiding in a forest known to have a materialization point.

His logic was fairly straight forward. First, he tracked the location of all of the known materialization points. Then he listed out what creatures had been sighted in each area. It just so happened that the closest point statistically pushed out fewer and weaker creatures. I guess he spent several weeks scouting out the area, and then several more prepping an advantageous cave.

It was deep enough to provide adequate shelter and temperature control. There was a spring fed pool at the bottom that flowed out in an underground stream that went a few miles before breaking above ground. A good escape route in an emergency, but the entrance was easily hidden by trees, bushes, and vines.

When the chaos started that’s where they went. They hunted and gathered to survive and hid from any creatures roaming around. When the war began all human surveillance of the point ceased almost immediately. That grandmother mentioned how surprisingly easy they were able to hide and survive.

Then the statistic broke. A particularly strong, animalistic beast materialized. It rampaged through the forest, catching that grandfather by surprise while he was out hunting. He didn’t return to the cave that night. That grandmother and her daughter heard the roars and breaking trees and hid in the very back by the pool. When her husband didn’t come back, she knew the worst had happened.

They continued where he left off, foraging, hunting, and hiding. But it would only be two years before our curse was set. When her daughter was only twelve years old, she and her mother were out foraging. They tried to hide from the willowy, white hared woman that seemed to float above the foliage. But her eyes found them, and an ear-piercing scream shattered the peace of the forest.

She didn’t attack them but within a month that grandmother was gravely ill. Her journal mentions an aggressive cancer coming out of remission. By the end of the following month her entries stop and her daughter’s begin.

In the following years she would hear banshees screaming with regularity. Thus began our curse of ‘A Banshee’s Scream’. That’s what my ancestors called it anyway.

After that there is no record of any male ancestor. Only the women descended from the daughter. None of them either wrote about who impregnated them or ripped out the pages with that information. But they were each with child at the age of twenty-five, only ever had one daughter, and were dead before that daughter reached thirteen years. And each one would hear many banshee screams throughout their lives.

My own mother passed in a similar manner as that first grandmother. Suddenly becoming ill and progressing quickly to death. We thought that maybe the death part of the curse had skipped her. I had made it so far into my twelfth year. But she only made it to the night before my thirteenth birthday.

We were both hopeful, but my mother was no fool. She marked an old, abandoned library on our map. She said that it sat in what used to be called a suburb of a close by city. Nature had taken back much of the land which allowed for hunting and gathering.

It was close enough to the city that slave runners and the god’s agents didn’t bother to raid it often. The family cave wore out its safety assets a few years after the first daughter had a daughter of her own. Since then, we treasured the family map. Generations of women marked the map with safe places to hide and where the best game migrated.

I guess when I was little my mother found the library and we stayed there for a while. She told me that if or when something happened to her, I was to go there. After I had read my fill, I was to go back to the cave and open the chest that always sat hidden in the back.

It took three years at the library before I went back to the cave. Really, it was a rare raid of slave runners, with an especially powerful tracker, that made my decision. But I found the journals of my ancestors and dropped several of mine into the mix.

I had always known what they were but was only then able to read them. Thanks to the large number of fiction and nonfiction the library held, I was able to understand the older writings. The context and history of their lives was clearer to me than if I had gone straight there.

But now I face a different problem. I’m not sure if the curse has evolved or if we never really understood the guidelines. I am twenty-nine and childless. I don’t think I’m barren, but I’ve never entertained a man enough to find out. If I remain childless my bloodline ends. If I do, will I perish before they are thirteen? Should I even bother bringing life into this world?

As I sit here in this hopefully abandoned warehouse, having just acquired an empty book of paper from the dark market, I wonder about this predicament. Perhaps its time to go back to the family home. I have journals to drop off anyway.

Maybe I missed something in the old journals. Or maybe I can finally open that much smaller chest, my mother didn’t realize I had seen her with. Its hidden much better than the bigger one, and I watched her drop some papers into a slit in the top.

I’ve never been able to get it open and I’d never seen her with an extra key. I don’t think she knew how to open it either, but she never spoke of it. Maybe it holds the secret of our curse. At the very least I ought to be able find out who my father was.

With the echo of a banshee’s scream ringing in my ears, my decision is made for me. And I slip out into the night to start the two-hundred-mile journey.