The Brief and Tumultuous Existence of Chloe Castillo

Despite the predicament she found herself engrossed in, 'Chloe' made no attempts to transform into her superpowered alter ego.

While this would have seemed foolish to those aware of her secret identity, it was also worthy of note, in all fairness, that that the girl had never watched, read, or even heard of Hypergirl.

As she and so many others were unaware, one Chloe Castillo had been but a character in said series. 'Had been' functioned as a key and somewhat tricky operator here, in that the proprietress of the labyrinth had, not even ten minutes prior, introduced said character into their reality, creating with trivial effort a comic heroine in the flesh.

All this came at the allegedly trivial expense of some hapless bystander's body: Whoever, man or woman, happened to be handy and deemed apt for volunteering. Their form had been captured, twisted and resculpted as she saw fit, all before being spirited away and trapped in her domain, rendered the newest unwitting entrant in whatever demented game the woman was running. The new contestant by no means walked or talked like Chloe, but she sounded—and of more chief importance, looked—like her, and that was sufficient for her captor.

Whatever the Chloe-apparent had witnessed in her first few minutes within the maze, she had evidently seen enough. Claustrophobia had closed in to such an extreme that escape from this silent warren became her paramount priority, eclipsing even the desire to return to normalcy—to stop being this clumsy, fragile, unfamiliar, dark-skinned and stuffy-uniform-clad girl.

And so Chloe huffed and puffed, sprinting on unsteady and unfamiliar legs down an unassuming corridor. Innumerable flagstones and columns flew past her in a tunneled, traumatic blur, with pained intensity sprawled across her face as she pumped her decidedly unathletic arms and legs, interrupting this rhythm solely to tug uncomfortably at her top and skirt.

That moment she stepped on the tile, only the faintest hint of a single ounce of palpable surprise or stress or, really, anything managed to register upon her expression. In the blink of an eye, the corridor exploded with a deafening cacophony as the would-be comic girl was supplanted instantaneously by a massive column of rock, the very hallway tremoring in acknowledgement of its sudden existence. Thunderous resonations reverberated throughout the passage, the deafening wave swiftly dropping off in favor of the slight and filthy jostle of tiny rock fragments, bouncing and tumbling off the abrupt obelisk.

Of course, this all had occurred with her completely oblivious. As her brain was piecing together that something was amiss about the last tile she'd stepped on, her vision had since gone black in an instant, every awkward inch of her having been embraced by a tremendous something. She was held completely still and immobile and encased, this prison depriving her of even the instinctive gasp or flinch or anything her unwieldly form would have tried.

She stood absolutely motionless—completely against her will, of course—for a stagnant several seconds before curious pins and needles pierced into her from the bottom upward. It shot through the sole of her right foot, which had been planted firmly on the tile, and the tingle ascended steadily up her shin, also effecting itself upon her other, raised leg, filling the knee and branching off in both directions from there. Whatever unknown force was at play continued climbing up her anatomy; her pelvis, hips, and torso. The lower of her two locomoting arms, a clenched fist that led to the elbow. Then the other elbow, and the other arm. The sensation swallowed her shoulders, and in no time at all the magic had filled her from toe to head, as if she were nothing more than a hollow vessel and this horrid feeling were chilling, unimaginable, impossibly heavy waters flooding into her. As it had, she felt every facet of her physical stimuli—the strict, controlling and frigid grip of the rock, her pained and flustered heartbeat, her equally panicked and burning desperation to breathe—extinguish inch by inch.

A seeming eternity later, vibrations wracked her very soul, breaking the silence just as the pillar spontaneously began to crack, then crumble apart of its own accord. A thousand invisible mattocks chipped away at it with swarming diligence, catching and somehow unmaking each individual chunk of rock as it dislodged. Yet as the monolith broke away, its original occupant came revealed, unmolested and unharmed and unmoved, albeit also adopted by—composed entirely of—the same stony substance that had engulfed her not even a minute prior.

The trauma of complete encasement and darkness lifted from whatever disheveled mind occupied Chloe, only to be succeeded by another, more self-evident and reasonable anguish. Her vision lay fixed ahead precisely as she had been, staring unmoving, unblinking, at the remaining distance before the next corner, field of view now more crisp and clear yet also distorted, toned over with a peculiar granite grey. Chloe's blunt bangs also draped stiffly and slightly into her vision, set in the same ashen hue.

She could feel her arms mid-pump, back leg raised in a stride. Somehow, also, she could feel every wrinkle and fold and wave of her clothing, wrested chaotically around her as it was, in addition to her odd braided twin ponytails, full of paradoxical motion flapping and flowing rigidly behind her. Up and down her figure, an affliction reminiscent of a terrible itch peppered itself throughout: Small, thin gaps that felt not unlike dry, deep and solid cracks in her skin. She perceived all of these things, all over her body, all at once, and all unendingly. Yet the strangest anomaly to her amidst this constant suite of sensation was her lower right foot, which communicated to her as if it now simply no longer was—gone were her foot, sneaker, sock, and shin, supplanted by a strange, shapeless mass splayed across the smooth floor and tapering up into her right knee, almost a miniature stalagmite.

Still, that was but the mere cherry on top of the overwhelming distress the girl was now mired in. She could not move. Her thoughts were scrambled, tough to gather, as if her brain had been substituted with something else altogether. She was cold; heavy; helpless, and only more-so with each passing second, as the last vestiges of her human warmth slowly radiated into the labyrinthine air. She railed with every last ounce of her resolve, utterly unable to comprehend at all why she couldn't run or call out or wake from whatever nightmare she was trapped within.

The proprietress would eventually arrive to come collect her prize, both literally and figuratively. In the meantime, the new sculpture would be left alone in the quiet, dead corridor with nothing but the static shape of the walls, her spiraling thoughts, and the trappings of her new, wholly altered state of being to accompany her.

Chloe lasted less than 15 minutes in the flesh. Again, she had been demoted to the rank of pure fiction, the only distinguishing factor now being that one more statue dedicated to the character existed in the world.

And, not that it was worthy of note in the slightest, said statue had no idea who Chloe Castillo was.

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Piece submitted to (and written specifically for) Medusa Tales Magazine.

They decided they didn't want it (while tonedeafly recommending I submit it elsewhere, because when the people you fucking wrote the story for don't even want it that means just send it elsewhere until someone magically picks it up) and I don't know what to do with it, so here it is.

Still kinda processing what to do with my writing now and moving forward. At the end of the day, I put my heart and soul into this and wasn't good enough, so this piece is likely done and dead.