The Alter

 

 

The earliest memory Caelan had was, at 15, of them waking up on a summer morning to the sound of their mother’s voice. She was screaming the same sentence over and over again- asking who they were and what happened to her daughter. Definitely strung up on at least five different drugs or panic, she ran out and didn’t return. Spending days looking after themselves every time their mother ran out wasn’t new to Caelan, but this time after 2 days they woke up feeling different. Looking different. Only hours later a man named Tatum Chaser took them in. Tatum was taking in children he called “special.” Caelan, he believed, was one of them. 

Caelan was a formless soul bound to no body. They could alter the material features of any object until about a mile from them and was soon called The Alter. No one knows how this came about, Tatum believed that they were born with this power and only started to show recently. But with this gift also came a curse. They would wake up every once in a while, in a different body than the night before. Never the same age, gender or color. Always changing, always different. There was no knowing when or how this would happen, sometimes a day sometimes a week. They would wake up on one day and have to introduce themselves to people all over again. The only way they could keep track of their age was the tattoo on their chest that got smaller and smaller with passing years.

  

The Alter turned out to be way more powerful than imagined, so they had to learn to sanction their powers carefully. Tatum designed a siphon for this purpose, a network of silver linings that ran up their arms into the main powerhouse of this system in the center of their chest, a symbol made of silver plates resembling the letter ‘A’.

  

They could barely ever keep friends except Faye (Also called the Memory Bender for her powers of reading and changing memories) and Kian (Called the shadow singer for the whispering shadows that rippled off of him, no one knows what they whisper, no one dares to ask). Caelan trained with their two friends and many other for years under Tatum, always blindly working towards a goal they knew little about, they were just happy to have warm food and comfort. 

 

Tatum, born in an abusive and homophobic household, craved order, equality and justice all his life. He said the only way to save this world would be take control of the chaos and the only way, he believed, was by taking out anyone that would stand in his way. He said if people would just do as he told them to, everything would settle into a peaceful calm.

  

Caelan and Faye after trying to reason with him for months finally left Tatum and his specials behind. The worst hit by this departure was Kian who wasn’t willing to leave a man he knew most his life but would also never forgive his friends for abandoning him.  

 

Caelan and Faye are the only people now daring to form a front against Tatum and they were the only ones capable and daring enough to go against him and so they would all fight for the same peace but in different ways.