Chapter 2
The Storm Answers
CAELIRA
The name turned me like a key. The pressure in the room shifted and the Hall seemed to pull away from it.
The rulers held where they were, because power knows the cost of flinching.
The air bent around my lungs, thick and electric.
My skin prickled, threads of lightning coiled in the chamber’s corners and impossibly, it stilled.
More rain trickled through the cracks in the ceiling, but instead of falling, it curved toward me. It gathered around my wrists and throat, tracing the pulse there as if committing it to memory.
It wasn’t just a flash across the sky. The sky tore open in silver light, and the bolt hung there, suspended outside the long windows, white as bone, humming.
Serenya gasped, the sound slipping past her control. Tharos whispered a curse that sounded like a prayer. Naerys laugh was quiet and private and promised trouble.
The storm passed through the Hall and through me, and I stood differently afterward.
Do not fear it.
Somewhere inside that steadiness, deeper than the roots of any court, deeper than the river and salt and old silt, a second voice rose. Not the storm’s, not mine. It was thunder given the shape of a man’s vow.
I swore before the sky itself –
The lightning flared so white my vision went black.
--- I will find you.
The bolt vanished. The torches flared back to life under the sudden rush of air.
The rain crashed down in a single sheet, the beads above my palm and along my body bursting at once.
The rulers shouted in a dozen registers, guards stumbled to their spear, the roots retreated, the frost let go of the stone.
I stood at the center of it, hand open, rain burning against my skin, my heart ringing like a bell struck too hard. And I knew then that none of them — not even I — yet understood what the storm had awakened.
Then quiet as the breath between heartbeats, I heard it, not outside. In me.
Mine.