I was one potato away from a perfect day—until a celestial jackass drop-kicked my mountain and turned it into modern art. Now I’m homeless. Again.

  A few hours before detonation, I was out picking a new batch of fresh herbs. It was a cold October day. Dead leaves suicided onto the cracked road, slapping against my boots like nature’s last middle finger. The slope led up to the hilltop where my humble hut hid. Clouds covered the late morning sun. No one to disturb me. Or so I thought.

  A few hours to sunset I would return to my solitary abode and bathe. Perhaps water my fresh patch of potatoes and enjoy a pie. Instead I was welcomed with the shock wave of something hitting against my vegetable patch. I lost all my tasty potatoes, it took me three summers to perfect…

  Shutters slammed against the walls bursting into tiny tooth picks. Pottery imploded like my will to live. Dust clouds and smashed stew-pots exploded across my floor like shrapnel. The impact came in waves. It huffed and puffed and blew my two-decade old hut as if it weren’t built of cobblestone or my blood and tears.

  Oh-ho-ho-ho! Whoever was the source of this madness is going to have more than just a piece of my mind! I picked up my broom (or whatsoever was left of it) and stomped out the skeleton frames of my house. Only to come across one of the blessings of life. An angel.

  And the shocking revelation that it god-damn blew off half my mountain leaving nothing but a gaping comet. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t captivated by its angelic presence.

  He bore fine silky hair, milky skin, glittering eyes and wore the finest of robes. He stood before me under the rays of sunlight, floating like a mystic dream. What the hell am I witnessing? Me, a mere human, face-to-face with an entity of such sorts? What luck!

  “Ah, apologies, insignificant being. I took a wrong turn.” The angel gave me a smile warm and wide like the gentle sunrises. A shiver coursed through my stony heart. I felt a hotpot bubbling in my chest. My body moved before I could have had a thought about it.

  “You-you!” I began, my eyes gleaming with emotions long forgotten. I grabbed the heavenly squawk by the collar.

  “You absolute moron!” I barked, red in the face.

  Colour jumped faster than the baffled look on his face. “You utterly destroyed my mountain. you moronic klutz! Watch where you’re practising perfection, dumb-witted bird.”

  “Moronic klutz?!”

  His state was rather funny when I think about it now. He was more stunned than I, but I must admit I was rather furious to see my mountain blown to smithereens. The autumn woodland replaced with a deep, dark abyssal butt-hole.

  “Dim-witted bird?!”The angelic being trembled with shock, he swatted my hand away and boasted above me like a titan of flamboyance. “Put that foul mouth of yours away! Do you not see who is before you! I am an Angel! Hailed for my mercy and beauty!”

  Foul? Me! I’ll show him foul!

  “Better than having stinking pigeon wings, you defiled egotistical harpy!” I barked back.

  He let out an exaggerated gasp. “You dare insult me? Me? The celestial embodiment of divine allure? Mortals should grovel just to bask in my reflection! You must flutter around me like vulgar would to a piece of rotten flesh!”

  Okay, what? Did he just say he is rotten flesh? Talk about a serious inferiority complex. But the nerve of him! Not only does he dare to insult me right to my face after obliterating my home. But to blabber his profound beauty like such! I will massacre him with my two hands pleasantly.

  “Perhaps you require divine compensation?”

  He twirled a glowing orb the size of a plum from his palm and launched it at a cracked mug.

  The mug exploded.

  “A… slight miscalculation,” he muttered.

  He clears his throat, standing upright. As if I insulted the dude. “If you really liked that trash heap as a house, I can provide you a replacement in a town.” The angel brushes back his hair and posed like he’d just solved world famine.

  I exhale, long and tired. “Listen here you rascal. My home is gone. I spent years searching for this shelter. It took me nights to rebuild the roof. This hideout protected me from the terrors of the world beyond. From people like you. I have nowhere else to go. If I am exposed to others my life will not be spared. I will be hunted and killed faster than the reflex against roaches. Do you understand you buffoon!”

  He just messed with the wrong human. That’s right. I am not an angel like the idiot before me nor am I a devil, his nemesis. Neither am I of their distant relatives a nymph, elf, fairy or any of the factual sorts.

  I grabbed the beautiful terrorist by the face (talk about derma-care). I almost second-guessed my bubbling anger. Almost! And how I wish I did.

  My gen tasered the poor angel like static rage bursting through a live wire under my skin. (Ouch).

  His scream started high, angelic even—then ruptured into something feral. His halo shattered like glass against concrete. Skin blistered and bubbled like charred magma. Feathers curled and turned tar-black, molting midair. The scent hit me— Gawh. Like burnt sulfur and wet dog had a one-night stand.

  “Well congratulations, Bird Boy. You’re officially too ugly for heaven and too pretty for hell.” I pull hand back.

  Angel? Nah. We’ve crossed into demon territory now.

  And me? I'm what the world fears. Human.

  Mic drop. Curtain falls. Screams in the background.

  “What have you done!” the once gentle voice replaced with an ear-shattering cello. “My flabbergasting beauty! My- my beauty!” He grabbed his face with terror, his claws for nails dug into the thick skin. Black blood poured as he screamed harder than a banshee giving birth to a chainsaw.

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  I stood there for a long minute until I realized what I just did.

  Just great. The idiot made me do it. The one thing a human was not supposed to do. I did it. I used gen. Out in the open. Like a moron. Not that it was going to save my skin if I didn’t use it.

  But he started it! Not my fault! It’s not like I can clobber the idiot. I couldn’t help it. My boxed emotions got the better of me (goddamn second-rate temper of mine).

  At first I thought, “Hey, I screwed up. So what? It’s not like I won’t be on the run again. So why not enjoy his headless panic for ruining my life?”

  But my senses kicked out any pent up emotions and I was Ol’ Cautious Heres once again. The coward who’d rather hide than face reality. I better undo the spell. And if someone else saw this it’ll be harder for me to whack two witnesses in one day in the head. Too messy and too much work. I’m too lazy for that. The faster I get over this the better.

  “Hold still, I can reverse it—”

  But fate, that shady cow, kicked me in the ribs. The demon flapped into the sky, howling like a hyena in a blender.

  He’s gone and so are my chances to remove traces of my existence.

  Oh well.

  I better pack up and run the hell outta here.

  Or else the Judicators will get here and I will be caught. “And if that happens, I am F-

  A loud blaring horn blasts through the horizon sending electrocuted shots through my rattling bones.

  Oh no. That war cry.

  It’s them.

  “Run.” As I mumbled those words I grabbed my favourite shawl and sprinted like a cat on ice downhill. This marks my tenth demolished home. And thus begins my gypsy life.

  How long will it be till I find another shelter? I can’t believe my luck. Years, so many years of enduring a hatred directed at something I can’t change.

  If only I wasn’t human—what the hell am I saying? What is this? A redemption arc? Did that angel sneak a confession spell into my bloodstream?

  I kick the dirt and almost yeet myself into a maple tree.

  “Oh titanic crap waffles.”

  I just realized something. I look back at the dark sky, at where the angel had descended. That was not a normal occurrence. Angels don’t fly so far out here. Especially not alone.

  “It can’t be.” I whispered almost choking on my own words.

  Could he have been a messenger angel? He had a rather exaggerated insecurity and powerful landing. And from the looks of it he was headed East. The Scales are there. If he was a messenger angel, if he was headed east then there is no doubt about it.

  Humans.

  There must have been sightings of humans somewhere. This means the hunt had already begun again. Damn this cursed luck. Right when I was starting to have a genuinely peaceful life. Just for being gifted we must be treated as cancer. Why me? Why-why-

  “Why?!”

  My gen erupts in lightning—raw, reckless, angry. Like my soul sneezed fury.

  The blast hurls me backward into a log, cracking ribs and what remained of my sense of caution.

  “Dammit, Heres,” I mutter to the sky. You dramatic dumpster fire of unresolved issues.

  The skies are darkening faster, I will not be able to get away on time. The Judicators must be aware of this scale of destruction by now. A mountain disappearing won’t go unrecorded in their patrol unit. Neither will be the demon-turned angel or my confession of being a human.

  They are probably half way here. I have to leave before they get here. Before they see me. Move, Heres, move.

  “Or they’ll kill you.”

  The Judicators —our holy executioners. Keepers of peace, peddlers of selective justice. You either bow, vanish, or burn.

  Guess who gave them the matches?

  Us.

  Long ago, when humans weren’t yet extinct, we backed their rise. Helped them form alliances, draw treaties, quell riots. We were na?ve. We thought unity meant safety. Turns out, it just made it easier for them to label us the threat.

  And now they hunt us like vermin. Side mission. Not even worth a headline.

  Now they are the most strongest force on this planet. One could say, they are the most dangerous force. More so than humans.

  I let the memories of the past seep in and start jogging downhill. Sure they are strong. But they are strong as a force and not as individuals so technically I am the stronger than them. I pick up the pace.

  So why do I still fear them?

  Because death is a mercy. And mercy is extinct.

  Who do you think helped the Judicators rise? Who handed them power on a silver spine?

  Us. Again.

  Yeah, you’d think the first lesson would help but no, we had to be glitter-vomiting gurus. Trust me when I say there’s nothing like being hunted by your own species to make living like a cryptid seem cozy.

  And when you try to survive? Twenty years in hiding—poof, gone. Back to square one. Worst part is I would love to pin it on my race but it’s my emotions.

  Last time it was a dwarf. Before that? A fairy.

  And now, angel-boy makes victim #... what? Hundred-something?

  With this power burning in my veins, I could melt cities, raise kingdoms, rewrite the laws of magic with a sneeze.

  But that sounds like effort. And effort sounds like hell. And trust me when I say I’ve been there before.

  Not fun.

  So Onward! To a safe-hold before the soul-sucking Judicators catapult fire-brigades at me. And feed my ashes and bones to the death grinder, Cerberus, in Hell.

  Maybe I should travel West, away from the Scale. As far from the reaches of the Judicators. Perhaps I can find an abode there again.

  It’s a good start. To the land of heat and hatred.

  As I left behind the silent winds of my autumn woodland I noticed a grotesque creature doing a german-suplex on a boulder. Big-headed bird bastard with spaghetti arms and Hulk hands. And what do humans, the rarest of races, do at the sight of such surreal? Answer;

  Walk right by.

  I couldn’t care less about the incongruous of this world. My younger self would but not the twenty-four years old Heres. Not the Heres that would probably end up mincer than her stew by sunrise.

  His huge goggle eyes stared at me as I left down the steep knoll. As I disappeared into the thick fog of the dark night.

  Screw it. West it is. If the next idiot drops a planet on my next hut, I’m learning necromancy.