Blood Beneath Thunder
1056 Words
The smoke thickened the closer they came, painting the sky in bruise-colored streaks. It wasn’t fire now, not fresh—but remnants of something older. Something still smoldering beneath the soil. Aeryn stepped carefully, each footfall echoing louder than it should’ve. The old borderlands didn’t speak with words—but they listened.
Theron kept close, his expression unreadable. “We should scout first. If Elric was right about others like him…”
“He wasn’t,” she said sharply. “Not about all of it.”
Theron didn’t press. He simply nodded and veered toward a crag above the ridge, vanishing like mist into stone and shade.
Aeryn turned her face to the wind. Her eyes—once a soft dusk-grey—now caught the light with flickers of storm-glow. Not always. Just when she wasn’t afraid to feel. Just when the power no longer fought her.
The village came into view.
Or what was left of it.
No walls. No gates. Just scattered bones of homes—some half-standing, most collapsed inward like lungs too long without breath. The well she remembered still stood, but it had dried. The stone ring was blackened, scorched.
She touched it.
Images surged up—brief and brutal.
A child’s scream. A flash of fire. Thunder that did not come from the sky.
Aeryn reeled back.
The storm inside her, the thing coiled and waiting, did not grow wild. It grew quiet.
“They used her,” she whispered. “Kaela… they pushed her to shift. Before she was ready.”
She didn’t notice Theron return until he laid a hand on her arm. “They built a prison to hold stormblood. Below the village. Old magic. Broken now, but it’s still marked.”
Her gaze snapped to him. “Then that’s where we go.”
He nodded. “There’s more. Tracks. Three riders, maybe four. Passed through here yesterday.”
“Elric?”
He shook his head. “One of them was smaller. Light. Younger. No hunter would bring a child.”
Aeryn’s mouth tightened. “Unless they needed bait.”
Together they descended the slope, boots crunching on brittle earth. As they neared the remnants of the chapel—the only building left mostly intact—Theron paused.
“There,” he said, gesturing to a patch of disturbed ground.
Aeryn knelt, brushing dirt aside. Beneath it, carved into the earth, was a sigil—rough, but familiar.
The storm’s mark.
Not hers.
Someone else’s.
Aeryn traced it with two fingers. The edges pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat buried deep.
“She left this,” Aeryn whispered. “Someone like me. Recently.”
The storm inside her stirred again—not in warning, but recognition.
She pressed her palm flat to the ground.
Heat flared—then vision.
A girl. No more than thirteen. Eyes wide with panic, but her hands glowing. Not flame. Not lightning. Something in between. Her voice rose in a scream of fractured air. The men behind her shouted.
One struck her.
The vision shattered.
Aeryn recoiled. “They’ve got her. She’s like Kaela. Like me.”
Theron crouched beside her. “They’re taking the stormborn alive now?”
“For what?” she asked.
Theron’s eyes were grim. “The same reason they killed them before. Control.”
She stood fast, her pulse thundering. “We follow the riders.”
“Aeryn—”
“I won’t let another girl die for what’s in her blood.”
He nodded, and they moved.
Through ashfields and bone groves, over the broken roads that once fed the heart of the region—paths no longer drawn on maps. The signs were there if you knew how to see them. Cracked bark that bled silver. Rocks humming with low voltage. Birds silent for miles.
By dusk, they reached a hill overlooking a ravine. A camp burned below—small but heavily guarded. Tents. Torches. Iron poles hammered into the earth in a circle. And at its center—chained and curled beside a dead fire—was the girl.
Aeryn’s throat tightened.
“She’s storm-touched.”
Theron watched her. “If we go in loud, they’ll kill her before they run.”
“Then we go in quiet.”
He offered a small grin. “For once.”
They waited until night buried the valley, until torches were no longer fire but memory of fire. Then they moved—Aeryn shifting the air around them just enough to silence their steps, Theron a shadow on the wind.
They breached the outer ring silently.
One guard saw them.
He didn’t live long enough to warn the others.
At the center, Aeryn dropped to her knees beside the girl. The child stirred—barely conscious. Her skin was marked by runes, her wrists chained with stormstone.
“Kaia,” the girl whispered without opening her eyes.
Aeryn froze.
“Who told you that name?”
The girl’s lips trembled. “She did. The one in the dirt. She said you’d come.”
Aeryn looked up at Theron, whose expression had gone pale. “Kaela’s memory—she passed it forward.”
The chains cracked under Aeryn’s touch, lightning melting the metal like butter. The girl sagged into her arms.
That’s when the horn blew.
Too late.
Aeryn rose with the girl cradled against her, and the storm did not wait.
It came.
She did not scream. She did not rage.
She simply raised one hand—and the sky answered.
Lightning rained.
Not wild. Not blind. Precise.
The camp went to chaos in seconds. Guards scattered, some crying out for mercy, others drawing blades that meant nothing now.
Theron covered their flank, his knife red and sure.
When the stormlight faded, only ash and silence remained.
Aeryn turned her back on the ruin.
Theron followed her into the trees.
They didn’t speak again until the sun began to rise.
The girl stirred, blinking slowly in Aeryn’s arms. “Are you her?”
Aeryn tilted her head. “Who?”
“The one they fear. The storm that walks.”
Aeryn smiled, but there was no cruelty in it.
“No,” she whispered. “I’m the storm that remembers.”
And still—it waited.
The storm.
The truth.
And the war they could no longer outrun.
- Writer
