The Storm Inside

"What is it?" Maggenreathe asked me wiping her long obsidian knife on the frayed wool tunic of the destroyed bone golem. The tarry stains on the blade proved difficult for her to clean. The golem's carcass sprawled like a puppet with its strings cut, right where she had downed it, near the entrance archway to this underground rathole.

Maggie's eyes were so amazingly quick, the thought slipped to the top of my mind and was gone again. I had just spotted what she had already seen. I looked more closely at the white knuckled hand of the necromancer I had beheaded with a spell moments ago. The skin on the hand was papery with countless faint tracks. The charred sooty shape of a house cat's skull showed from between his tightened fingers. "Something wicked," I whispered to myself, then said louder for her benefit, "Some piece of nasty business he saved for a master stroke perhaps. He never activated it."

Maggenreathe smiled approvingly, "You never gave him the chance."

"Oh, you're wrong, Maggie," my voice was too bitter, I straightened, "I gave Jir Nilydd two chances too many, that's why I wanted to finish this quickly between us. The city guard is still trying to decide how much more proof they need that you and I were responsible for the deaths of those two people in the tavern last week. Nilydd planted the evidence against us. If the authorities had continued to stall in taking us in, he would have killed others to strengthen the point." I removed my silver sidhe knife from my calf sheath and whispered a blessing of the Mother on the edge. Bending over the headless corpse, I struck hard at the hand that held the tiny blackened skull. Like a dry twig, the wrist snapped through completely and the severed hand spun a few inches across the black stones.

My companion nodded at the cut off appendage, "You are a strong one," she jibed me, "Should we destroy that bone then?"

"It suits me as a good idea." I replied and stepped away from Nilydd's body and closer to the severed hand.

With a tiny rustle of sound, the hand settled to dust as I prepared a silk bag for picking it up. I stared at it, then looked back at the remains of the body, still solid, if not whole. My thoughts hesitated and swung to a new course. Odd that the hand would magically decompose and not the body. I would have to check a couple of things immediately.

I brought up my mage sight and examined Nilydd's body one more time. No. There were no spells running now. He would not be getting up again as the living or the unliving. Just a lifeless man now, thank the Mother.

I turned my gaze back to the pile of fine ash and the feline skull.

Mage sight is not a good substitute for normal vision. It does not provide enough mundane stimulation of the eyes to allow the practitioner to do much moving about or detail work. Accordingly, I did not expect to see a normal image of the skull, but rather the intricate structure of the magic attached to the skull. I saw something else that was neither. The skull itself should have been a less focused background to whatever magical influences were laid on it. The stone floor under the skull translated to my mage sight as a soft charcoal fog. So I was intrigued to see a tiny shape glinting there within the blurry form of the cat's skull. It appeared to be a solid object. Lots of shine to it. Very clearly, as I squatted down over the thing, I saw an oval gem ringed with an amber loop about its long dimension. The amber was carved from a single piece of material, including the tiny prongs that grasped the gemstone. The workmanship could be sidhe. In fact, looking at it through the blur of the surrounding bone matter, it seemed obvious that the gem inside the loop could never have been physically put there without some magical distortion, of either the gem, or the amber.

Definitely interesting.

The gemstone was the darkest shade of plum. Some light, either the dancing candles on the workshop table, or my witch light floating above us, stirred silver veins of color far below the surface of the stone. Could the stone have a liquid center? I had never heard of such.

What was most amazing was that the entirety of this hidden artifact, no bigger than a copper penny, was pure magic. Not laced or structured by magic, not bound or welded with spells, but pure magic energy with no mundance substance.

I had never seen anything like it, so I decided to take it with us.

Just as strangely, the skull had no magic bound to it at all. The little gem was definitely inside the skull. The whole package might have been a functional rattle if the eyes and mouth of the skull had been sealed. As it was, I could not imagine why Nylidd had carried it. And it was peculiar, that I could see the inner treasure through the bone. Then I realized that Nilydd might have been using the skull as I had been about to use my silk bag, as an insulating container.

Where had he found this gem and what was he doing with it? What kind of magic had such a tangible, formed focus?

"What's so interesting?" Maggie's warm voice brought me back from thought.

I smiled at her and nodded at the skull on the flagstones.

"The bone seems ordinary, but there is something far from ordinary inside there." I slipped my hand inside the silk bag for protection. Then slightly curved my fingers to aid the bag's efficiency as a tool.

I swung my covered hand down near the skull and smoothly scooped it up from the stone floor. In that moment, Maggenreathe and Reality both vanished into pit shadows of thick plum drapes.

The weight of everything I had carried vanished in an instant, as well. I felt my nudity before I realized I couldn't see anything. Dress, belt, knife, bracelets, even my wooden hair pins were gone. My hair had come loose around my shoulders. Then I realized that there was no floor, no weight, that my hair did not hang down, that my sense of balance was undisturbed, but should be, by all that was right. I could stretch in any direction to no effect. I tried them all.

Some portion of my senses reacted belatedly to my reaching. I thought I might be rolling. Frightening, but I almost thought my body, blood, limbs were being caressed with small tugs of scattered motion. That motion, or the sensation of it, seemed to wander about me. I tried to seize some experience to equate with this sensation. It was like tumbling down a very long hill. Spinning in this darkness like a log shorn of its branches and sent rolling down the side of a stygian riverbank under a moonless sky.

I think I groaned. Someone did, for I found my ears worked perfectly.

And that snapped me out of near panic.

I was not in a black nothingness if I could hear. That thought sent my mind racing to catalog the other senses again. Everything seemed to be working. The sudden absence of all tactile sensation and sense of my own, or any other, weight had almost driven me to some dangerous limit of self.

I made another discovery. While I had no silk bag wrapped around my right hand, I did have a small oval shape there, no larger than a copper.

Sudden wind chilled the liberal sweat on my skin. The skull wasn't in my hand. Maybe it had never existed and that's why I had been able to see through it with my mage sight. Maybe it just didn't exist now. The tiny amber and gem treasure was there though, and as I became aware that I was still holding it, it seemed to shift in my palm like it too was rolling down a grade. But it didn't, it couldn't move for the grip I had on it. The wind became stronger, my sweat dried quickly and I became cold.

A sudden mirror crack of silver lanced through the blackness, coming from below and stabbing off into the above. My eye saw it still when it was gone, like lightning clinging to the inside of closed eyelids.

The tumbling of the wind told me little. It told me I was being thrown around raggedly in meaningless directions. Above became Left for an instant, and then was Behind. Near darkness became Distant as another silver etching shot through the perfect dark with a faint deep plum halo. Oh, Mother..... if I am struck by one of those, I die.

Somehow, I was in the center of a silent storm. "No thunder. Just me." I spoke, just to see if it was still possible, to take control of what was happening in some secret fashion.

Fate must have heard me.

I slammed into silty powder as if I had fallen from the top of a tree into a black snow bank. My breath was blown out of me from the impact. I groped around, trying to control the urge to inhale. Finally, a flat stroke in a swimming motion let my head break above the unseen surface that I had struck. I shook the fine powder away from my head and eyes. Still everything was blackness. I could feel and hear things. I could see things, when the lightning went by, but there was not much to feel or hear except for the strange grind of fine powder against my skin and the sounds generated by my struggle to survive. After long minutes, floating in the pool of silt, I saw another crack of silver strike from the ink bowl overhead. This one hit something. I saw it before I heard it. A silent obstacle to the racing travel of the bolt. The afterimage showed something solid interrupted the strike and I happened to be looking the right way. In the reverse image in my eyes, I watched it again. A ridge. A line of mountains in the distance? The scale of what I was seeing was unknown. Then the sound reached me. A giant's mallet striking a wooden anvil the size of a farmhouse might sound like that.

Unexpectedly, the silt pool of almost-ground heaved upward and took me with it. I tumbled through the air, this time aware of up and down, sensing the arc of my fall. I had just enough time to hope that I hit soft ground, and not the ridge of stone, when I slammed down again. It hurt, but it was the silt that I plunged into, and not the stone. My return to the surface was quicker and more sure this time. I shook out my hair and looked around. Little seemed changed except that I knew I had traveled from my original landing point.

I began to understand a pattern to this place and with that understanding, came a thread of humor. A lift of spirit hit me. This bowl of black wind and floating islands had more rules than I had initially realized. Rule one seemed to be, everything was Black. Storm, but no rain? Yes, that was possible. I seemed to be the only source of moisture so far. Earlier, my sweat had been blown off my body in a dozen heartbeats. Now, the ground that I 'swam' in, had no feel of water to it. In fact, it seemed that any perspiration I was generating was disappearing quickly into the silt.

The soil. It seemed to come in two varieties. Hard edged and soft powder. A bolt of power came down from above and struck near enough that I could measure its width with my eye. My hair spun out and upward for a moment. The booming sound followed closely and for an instant powder rained down before the ground slapped me up into the air again.

This time I tucked my legs and rolled myself into a ball to avoid the chance of a head injury. The bolts were grinding this land into powder. The intensity of the lightning was such that it delivered huge kinetic force to the ground. The silt and I were thrown into the air each time as sand scattered on an anvil would jump and dance with the blows of a hammer. The safety of my landings was completely dependent on how much powder was under me when I hit.

I came down again. Plunged. Stroking upward, broke the surface, again.

The power of this storm was incredible. Could anything live here? It seemed certainly a dead world. I didn't recognize this environment as anything in the known multiverse of sentient geography. Not even Mortis, where the elemental storms roared out of the Shear Mountains and killed anything in their path, had tales to match what I was experiencing. This place was a merciless battleground between the Land and the Storm. The Storm was winning.

Magic must have brought me here. What spell did I have that could get me out?

Silver death crawled down out of the heavens and smote the ground in three spots this time. Too close! Pain filled my ears. I think my eyes bulged from the pressure.

I came to with powder filling my nose and mouth. I struck out for the surface, made it, and blew and gagged until I could breathe with only the smell of cold silt in my nose. I tasted blood in my mouth. I could hear rasping and sawing sounds that seemed close, but could hear nothing else of my movements. That meant I must be deafened, or worse.......

Water. Fear grabbed me.

What if I was the only source of moisture? The bolts could be getting closer because they were groping for my moisture. Mother's Blood! I scooped up a small handful of silt and scrunched it into my face, trying to absorb all the blood that I felt seeping from my nose. I tossed the handful back, over my shoulder. I moved my feet like a swimmer, kicking at the powder, I didn't want to stay in one spot. How much sweat was I spilling into the ground? Each bolt had been closer than the one before.

Any minute now, my hasty theory would be proven out. I thought I was making distance, but the blackness of everything thwarted my eyes still.

This time, the Stormbolt was so close, I never saw it hit.

I clung to consciousness this time. The Storm's mallet had barely missed me. I had a sensory memory of a strong shock running through the silt and grabbing me like an inquisitor before reaction had thrown the ground I was in up and away. The landing was uncontrolled this time. I hurt my ankle badly. Hit my head. Sucked in silt when I went down under. I broke the surface screaming my defiance, but couldn't hear myself. My ears were only full of rasping creaks.

No more time. The next bolt could be the last for me.

Something mad occurred to me then. I had no spells of translocation with me. I had been prepared for battle, not travel. Nothing I had hung in my mental armoire of power would get me out of here. The priority of the now was to survive here and find my way home later.

There was one spell. I knew its strength. I carried it into battle for emergencies. I had only performed it once or twice to perfect its nature, for I knew it to be dangerous in the extreme. It was supposed to be used on other people.

Paranoia aside, this place was going to kill me. Change over death, I thought. No spellcrafter should experiment on herself, the Second Arc of Wisdom taught that. Prevented from escape, with no time to puzzle an answer that fit more wisely, I decided I needed to be part of the danger.

To become One with the Threat.

I gathered everything of myself together, I could afford to leave nothing behind, and I spoke the Transmogrification.

The Storm smashed into me. It found my blood and sweat and drank it all. Magic rushed in where the Storm had drained me dry. I became larger, where I might have shriveled to a husk. Silver winds flowed beneath my hot tight skin. My eyes.....

"Damn." Came the familiar voice. I could hear.

I blinked. The order of sights surrounding me was familiar, too.

"That was passing strange." Maggenreathe whispered at me, "It almost looked like you weren't there for a moment, keyva."

I stared at the tiny gem wrapped in an amber loop and nestled in my silk covered palm. There was no skull, just the little stone.

"Hey!" Maggie stepped closer, "Stop staring at that thing and put it away or I'm going to bash you over the head and take it away from you!"

I unrolled the bag down my hand, enclosing the gem within it. I tugged the binding closed. Then I ran a hand down my face. No blood flowing.

Hadn't I changed? I had felt everything become fluid in a moment of intense danger. My fingertips lingered in front of my face where I could see the lines in the skin. Talons? I looked at the nails, trimmed short. The hand looked fine, but shouldn't it have muscle bulging beneath the silver..... I turned and quickly looked at Maggie.

She was watching me like a hawk, a sour expression danced across her features, "What idea are you entertaining now?" she hissed. "You look like you just discovered the cure for Rhatva hangovers!"

"No," I shook off the visions, I would have time to study my journey, my impressions, "But I'm ready for a date with the Scrubbed Maiden's best Winter Wine. Lets get out of here."

I slipped the silk bag inside my tunic as we left.

When we reached the street level exit outside, it was obvious the weather had changed. I saw a silver bolt fork down from the clear sky over the city.

The thunder, when it came, was inside.

END