[Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen] What the Thunder Said

Out of Character (OOC):

Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler

Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

What the Thunder Said

a Jack Bismuth short by Alexander Van Belkum

Colorado Springs, 28 July 2016 10:15 pm

There’s a difference between the smell of a storm from the earth, and the smell of one from the air. Jack stands on nothing, breathing deeply. A storm rages around him, and hides him from sight; between the dark of night, the thick black clouds around him, and the fuzzing scene of rain and hail, he’s as good as invisible up here.  Far, far below, Arji hunkers down in the garden behind Jack’s private sanctum, protected from the force of the storm by a thick sheet of translucent plastic, and from the cold by a humming space-heater.

                Jack doesn’t even realize he’s posing, feet akimbo and hands on his hips as he breathes the heady scent of lightning crackling through the clouds. A cloak billows out behind him, as though he were some shonin protagonist in a pretentious b-class anime. If not for the spells muting its resonance, that cloak might have shone with the force of the spells layered on top of it, in preparation for just such a night as this.

                But that would have defeated the purpose. Instead, Jack had removed every other piece of magic gear on his person, and stripped himself down to the barest of mundane clothes. Excepting the cloak, which spread out behind him like a pair of great wings, even as it enveloped him in the protections a human would require to survive a storm from the troposphere.

                Hail smacked into his skin, leaving him bruised and pushing him about. Winds conspired to place him directly in the path of the lightning. And the thunder was deafening in its roar. Jack cast his fears aside, purposefully shunning them, and smiled the wide, manic smile of revelation.

                There, suspended in the heart of a thunderhead, Jack pulled aside the veils lain across the world, one by one. He left them open, and dedicated every portion of himself to understanding the storm. Charge crackled around him, flowing in a brilliant, open connection between the earth and the sky; Jack was at the center of it when they connected in a crash of thunder.

                After an hour of the storm tearing at his mind as it did at his body, the cloak returned Jack to the earth, where it began to peel apart in tired, mundane threads. Jack thanked it with the woozy air of someone pushed passed their limits, and Arji dragged him inside.

                There, Jack took off his clothes, and found seven round eggs, slightly misshapen by the force with which they had struck his body. Hailstones, tangled in his clothes instead of bouncing away to fall to earth.

                One by one, Jack ate them. The dissolved slowly in his mouth, leaving behind the flavor of water, and lightning, and something more.

                Jack slept, and dreampt of Thunder.