Kendra Saunders is the latest incarnation of the Hawk; a spirit bound to the human world, returning each lifetime to battle the forces of evil. But it wasn’t always this way for Kendra. Once upon a time she believed she was an ordinary woman.

THE HATCHING

By Miranda Sparks

From the patient notes of Dr Poppy Ashemore, PsyD

She woke in a sweat like she did most nights, or was it day? Time didn’t mean much with the blinds perpetually drawn, not to shield herself from the sun, but from the unseen eyes that lingered in corners. Friends called it paranoia, but paranoia is natural when someone’s out to get you. 

When Kendra slept – tried to sleep – it was with every light in the apartment turned on, lamps and all. Her computer monitor was turned to maximum brightness, and the television played muted reruns twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For most people it would be tantamount to torture, but nothing else would give her peace of mind.

Her back stung. Somehow she slept through the thousand tiny cuts. One thousand and one proved too much. Strips from the sheets stuck to her as she rose. They were shredded to ribbons and slick with blood – again. The first time it happened she cried murder, but a person will adjust to anything given enough time, enough exposure.

She pulled another barb from the mattress, like bone but more dense. She’d destroyed a kitchen knife trying to break one open, and declined to have it tested when her insurance refused a co-pay. Medical oddities cost money, it seemed, and a museum assistant had little of that.

A part of her wanted to cry, but she’d spent her tears weeks ago. When or if she’d have them again was anybody’s guess, but until then her only comfort marinated in numbness.

As often as Kendra searched for old bones, old bones came to her when a team for miscellaneous reasons – usually land development – needed to excavate a piece without the luxury of care. That was fine for Kendra, who was content to brush sediment clear of bone in the cool of her office. Her focus was on a bear femur dating back to the Pleistocene era, or would have been if not for other thoughts.

Between the blinks she saw dreams like memories, conveying in a snap lives forgotten by everyone but her. The name but not the taste of Cinnamon pressed into her mind, along with the smell of flowers under a plague doctor’s mask; her vision captured the sun setting on newly-minted pyramids laden with jewels, she felt the wind bristle through her feathers in a world without humans, and heard the silence of the stars from a vantage in space.

She sighed. It was a moment of beauty amidst burgeoning madness. If she could only get a full night’s rest, maybe she could stay on task. Failing that, relief came in the form of coffee, courtesy of a work friend, Pandora Pan.

Kendra smiled, and thanked whatever gods there were for small favors. 

It would have been easier if she were crazy, both for Kendra and the doctors, but no hypochondriac collects the kind of blood-soaked ribbons she’d pulled from her bed time and time over. Co-pay or not, she needed answers. Another ten years of debt were worth another ten years of life, or so her friends would say.

She laid on her stomach and was still, just as the technician instructed. She was naked save for the paper gown and the lower half of her underwear, vulnerable before the man in hospital blues behind the glass. There was nothing sexual in his gaze, and Kendra was the last person on earth to feel ashamed of her body, but the virtue of being on display made her like one of her museum pieces – helpless, confined, a mere remnant of humanity.

Doctor Ashemore’s instructions washed through her thoughts; breathe – inhale, slow count to four, exhale, slow count to four. It did slow the beating in her chest, but did not ease the impact. Next the doctor would tell her to ‘be aware of your body’ whether it be her hands, her feet, or the churning in her stomach. Anything to shrink the room and widen her sphere of control.

The x-ray machine hummed as the camera positioned overhead. She could practically feel it target her back, searching for what no doctor could find, but what she woke to every other day. It was like something out of a horror movie – the hangover of a lycanthrope rampage, and her bed was the serial victim.

Kendra jumped with the surge that ran through her shoulders; a surge that filled the room, causing machines to spark and whine. The x-ray machine moaned in agony. It’s invisible heat bombarded her, driving pokers into Kendra’s spine. She screamed at the top of her lungs, blind to the panic on the other side of the window.

Flares of light seared through her eyelids. The paper gown burned to ash. The skin of her back bubbled and peeled. It was an agony she’d only known in nightmares, from lives that never could have been.

Several hours had passed before Kendra woke. She was in an emergency bed, somehow without injury, though the same couldn’t be said for the x-ray lab. The doctors and nurses gave her a wide berth, rarely looking her in the eye, not saying a word when they checked her vitals.

What the hell was happening to her?

She made a point to be home before dark, but the days grew short as the autumn waned into winter. Kendra fought her way through a sea of commuters, who were both obstacles and refuge against the thing that haunted her. Or maybe it wouldn’t stop for people at all. Who could say what it would do to get to her?

Taking the subway was almost too great a risk. At either end of the platform was yawning blackness. If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn it was inching toward her. Worse still was the creature waiting inside, taking the shape of myriad horrors in her imagination. Over a hundred lifetimes – lifetimes she had to remind herself were fiction – she’d never seen the monster’s true face, unless dark was all it was.

Kendra followed the tide as people boarded the next train. The humming fluorescent lights offered some protection; long enough, she hoped, to reach her stop. Last she saw the sun had nearly vanished behind the skyscrapers. With every minute the oppressor’s hand grew heavier.

She jerked with the train’s abrupt stop. There was chatter amongst the commuters, mostly in frustration. They had places to be, lives to live, families who were waiting for them. Some were desperate to eat a proper meal. Kendra, meanwhile, stiffened in anticipation. Their stakes were mild in comparison to hers.

The carriage went dark, prompting gasps and a squeal. The shadow man was eager. Tunnels were too fertile a hunting ground for him to wait for night, and it was only by happenstance that Kendra had escaped his reach so far.

She wailed like a mad woman. “We need light in here! Somebody, please!”

Nobody listened. Those who didn’t ignore her chided her to ‘keep (her) panties on’, but they couldn’t understand. For her it was life and death, not that they’d ever believe her story. Hell, even she didn’t believe it sometimes; but in a sightless tunnel with dark all around there was no doubt.

Kendra snapped toward the sounds of stumbling as a force pressed through the carriage. She primed herself to run, but where? Somewhere away from people, where she was the only one coming to harm. Even if it killed her, she could die knowing that nobody else followed.

The shadow man ripped her from the carriage, and Kendra hurtled past the steel doors. Her life – all her lives, real or not – flashed before her eyes; some in the past, some in the future, some in the present day, untethered by time and space. She saw her friends and family, people from work, her childhood friends, and more. Everyone and everything condensed into a single moment mingled with adrenaline, terror and relief.

Maybe, a part of her thought, that the torment would finally end. All she had to do was wait for the shadow man to do his dark business.

When the creature spoke it wasn’t with a voice of his own, but echoes collected through time; not just of people, but the crunching of rocks, the screeching of animals, and the drip, drip, drip of condensation.

“You’ve always been a difficult quarry,” he said. 

She could feel the swish of the air as he primed his claws and almost begged them to fall. However there was another part that cried out in a thousand voices – some male, some female, some unbound by gender from across the ages – for her to resist.

Where there was once darkness there was suddenly the intensity of the sun. Apollo, Amaterasu, Sol and Ra; Liza, Shemesh, Mithras, Surya and Inti – together nursed this mortal woman in their collective palm. Their flames licked through her, but they did not burn. Rather Kenda’s body stirred to life as though awake for the first time.

“What… what’s hap…?”

“Rise, Kendra Saunders, the daughter of the Hawk,” said the Godhead. “He who is Carlo Salón; she who is Chay-ara; he who is Carter Hall; she who is Kate Manser; he who is Brian Kent – born of the ethereal Hawkworld, defender of humankind-” 

Suddenly it clicked. A lifetime of knowledge always out of reach fell into her grasp. Kendra was no longer one person, but countless – one soul pouring between vessels spanning across the bridge of space and time. More than that, she was no longer a mere mortal, powerless against the dark.

Kendra curled, giving room to a metamorphosis. Her shoulders exploded, not with pain but with exquisite liberation, as metallic wings tore from the binding of flesh and stretched for the first time. She arched to the sky and beat them with a strength that had long been denied her.

Renewed in her determination, Kendra reached into the fiery ether for her morningstar. She’d never held it in this lifetime, but it’s weight was familiar and comforting, like meeting an old friend after too long a separation. Now she was whole again.

Her cry was not one of anguish, but of the fury of a military fleet charging toward victory.

“I… I am the Hawkwoman!”

She returned to the tunnel a changed being. The darkness was no longer a great enemy, but an illusion cut with a swish of her wings. Shining silver feathers dispelled the void with their brilliance, and what little substance remained evaporated on contact with the hawk’s weapon.

What power! What freedom! Without realizing Kendra had spent a lifetime weighed down by mortal flesh and the anxieties tied to it. For all her love of humanity, to be one of them diminished her spirit. One cannot be something that they are not, and until embracing that truth one can never soar.

In that once foreboding tunnel the shadows waned, cast from every corner with the power of the sun. Only the outline of a man remained. He, who only minutes ago had threatened to consume her, was made small, humbled by the divine. He scuttled on awkward limbs that embodied the broken man he was. No, he was less than a man – vindictiveness fermented until it devoured him from within.

“I see you, Hath-Set,” said the Hawkwoman. “How many eons will it take for you to get the picture? Nothing will come of your pathetic ‘vengeance’.”

Of course she knew the answer. Nothing would ever sway him from this path. To change required wisdom that he was no longer capable. No doubt he’d heard similar taunts from the hawks of the past. There was no reason he should listen now.

Kendra the Hawk raised her morningstar high and brought it down on the foe’s head. For most it would have been a killing blow, but alas, in a world riddled with shadows and resentment he would return. Perhaps next time he would prove more of a threat. Until that day, the Hawkwoman waited.

The city air was more crisp than usual with the tang of smog easing before the morning rush. A transformed Kendra perched on a high ledge, higher than she’d been in far too long, with nothing to support her should she fall. There were worse things than falling, she decided, and her wings were worthy of trust.

Dawn crept over the horizon, casting a sliver of orange over the world. The rays cast against windows, glistening like a beacon at the start of the work day. Normally she’d be in the shower, or making breakfast, preparing for the journey to the museum, but that was yesterday. Now she was a hawk. What did that mean for the woman she was?

The answer would have to wait. The sun lifted, and it’s brightness grew. Kendra embraced the light and stared, eager to drink it in. This burning orb was the source of life, and the gods who personified it were her generous patrons; but her wings were not the only gift they’d bestowed upon her. 

Hidden among the tints and hues was a shape – an upturned pyramid hanging in the sky. It called her to rest and find comfort as a home would, and she knew to trust it. Kendra, the Hawkwoman, unfurled her metal wings and beat them against the air. She flew as though she were born to it, in the direction of dawn.

Hawkwoman’s adventures continue every month in Justice League.