I wake with lightning in my blood again.

  It's been thirty-four days since the Harvest Festival. Thirty-four days since the sky broke open above Ashgrove. Thirty-four days since Lior died because of me.

  My fingers find the familiar spot on my wrist—rubbing, circling—as if I could somehow erase the pulse of energy beneath my skin. The storm lives there, has always lived there, a second heartbeat that used to whisper but now roars in my ears when I least expect it.

  I always felt the storm. Not just in the sky, not just when the clouds piled up and the air thickened before rain — no. It was inside me. Coiled up under my ribs like a second heartbeat. Quiet most days. Loud when it wanted to be.

  The first time I really noticed it, I was eight. Barefoot and breathless, standing on the orchard ridge with the grass sticking to my ankles, watching the stormclouds roll over the western hills. I remember how they curled, slow and heavy, like they were tasting the ground before swallowing it.

  Lior laughed at me, said I looked like a storm-witch in training. Mira dared me to chase the thunder. I didn't. I just stood there, toes dug into the dirt, chest tight, like the storm was pulling something loose from inside me.

  Back then, I thought if I stayed still enough, if I didn't breathe too hard, the storm wouldn't notice me.

  I never reached for it. Never warned anyone. Never asked why it felt like my bones wanted to hum when the clouds came close.

  I should have.

  Mother left breakfast by my door again. Two bowls. Always two.

  I don't touch either of them.

  The morning air hangs heavy as I slide my window open, careful not to let the hinges creak. It's become a routine—slipping out before anyone can catch me with their pitying glances or fearful stares. Before Mother can find more ways to love someone who's half-gone anyway.

  "We'll get through this together," she says every night, setting a place at the table for a daughter who's no longer fully here. I can't tell her that the girl she knew fractured at the same moment the altar stone did.

  The path through the village is mercifully empty this early. Still, I tug my hood lower, tucking strands of dark hair beneath it. The wind keeps pulling them free—the storm's little reminder that it's always there, playing with my hair when I least want its attention.

  Mrs. Colter is hanging laundry as I pass. Our eyes meet for just a moment before she drops her gaze, fingers fumbling with the sheet she's pinning. A month ago, she would have called me over, slipped me a honey cake, and asked about my mother.

  Today, she pretends not to see me. Just like everyone else in Ashgrove.

  I don't blame them. How do you look at the girl whose grief cracked open the sky? The girl who stood at the centre of destruction while lightning poured from her fingertips? The girl who—

  No. I push the image away, but it comes anyway: Lior's face, his smile turning to concern, then fear, then—nothing. His firelight-bright eyes went dark as he reached for me.

  My wrist burns from my constant rubbing. I force my hands apart and quicken my pace toward the eastern edge of the village.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "It wasn't your fault," Mother keeps saying, but she never knew what lived inside me. The storm was always there, coiled and waiting. Lior knew. Not everything, but enough to stay close on the days when the air felt heavy against my skin, when I couldn't explain why my fingers tingled or why thunder made me dizzy with something that wasn't quite fear.

  "You're just connected to things others aren't," he'd said once, his golden hair catching sunlight as he laughed. "Some people feel the turn of seasons. You feel the sky itself."

  If he had known what that connection would cost him, would he have stayed so close?

  The village thins behind me, and I find myself drawn to the ridge trail that winds up toward the cliffs. I haven't planned this—haven't planned anything since that night—but my feet know where to go, pulled by something that feels like memory but isn't mine.

  The climb steepens, loose rocks skittering away under my boots. The higher I go, the stranger the feeling grows—a pressure building in my chest, not painful but insistent. The storm inside me shifts, awakening. Anticipating.

  "Stop it," I whisper, pressing my palm flat against my breastbone. "Just stop."

  But it doesn't stop. It never stops. And today it feels almost... eager.

  At the top of the ridge, the world opens up—Ashgrove a patchwork of fields and rooftops below, the distant mountains drawn in smudged blue ink against the horizon. The beauty of it catches in my throat. How can the world still be so beautiful when everything inside me feels broken?

  The wind picks up, sudden and sharp, pulling at my clothes and hair. Not natural. Not normal. Something shifts in the corner of my vision—a ripple in the air like heat above summer stones.

  I turn, and the world seems to crack sideways.

  There, rising from between two weathered boulders, is something both solid and not—smoke and molten glass, twisted into a form almost human but wrong in ways that make my eyes hurt to look directly at it. Through its translucent chest, lightning pulses and flickers, trapped beneath its cracked surface. Its eyes—if they can be called eyes—glow with the same energy that haunts my dreams.

  The thing looks at me, and I know with absolute certainty that it sees me. Not just the girl standing frozen on the ridge, but the storm inside her. It recognises me.

  And the storm—my storm—recognises it.

  Power surges through me, violent and familiar, electricity crawling beneath my skin. The hair on my arms stands on end. The air around me crackles, tasting of metal and rain that hasn't fallen.

  I should run. Every instinct screams it. But I can't move, caught between terror and a horrible, unwanted fascination. The creature tilts what might be its head, studying me with eerie intelligence.

  "What are you?" My voice sounds strange, threaded with static.

  It doesn't answer—not with words. But something passes between us, an acknowledgement. A claim.

  The storm inside me strains toward the creature like a compass finding north, and I realise with sinking clarity that the quiet month after Lior's death wasn't peace—it was merely a pause. A gathering of breath.

  And then, as the creature takes a step toward me, something shifts in the storm beneath my skin. The energy that's always felt chaotic, dangerous, untamable—suddenly it feels... urgent. Specific. Like it's trying to form words I can't quite hear.

  A memory surfaces—all those times as a child when the storm stirred inside me before bad weather hit the village. The way it would buzz under my skin days before the clouds appeared. The restlessness that drove me to higher ground when others sought shelter.

  The storm wasn't just responding to the weather.

  It was warning me.

  All those years, the storm was trying to speak, trying to prepare me for something I didn't understand. And now, facing this creature of smoke and lightning, I finally realise what my storm has been trying to tell me all along.

  This isn't the first time these creatures have come. And the storm inside me—this thing I've feared and hidden—wasn't a curse.

  It was a defence.

  The realisation comes too late as the creature lunges forward, its molten-glass fingers reaching for my throat. The storm explodes outward from my chest in a desperate, instinctive shield, and the ridge fills with blinding light.

  The calm is over.

  And whatever is coming next, I am already too late to stop it.