Elysivy's Point of View

There always was something dangerously beautiful about a storm. Not just rain, but with thunder and lightning.

As I wrote, my eyes begged for light as they strained to see. I pushed my spectacles closer to them, but it helped little. My eyes wanted the light; yet the light they could not bear because it seemed too artificial. It couldn't compare with the enchantment of the storm. Every so often a grand burst of near-sun brightness filled my writing room, illuminating all I wrote.

The skies shuddered at every daring caress of the lightning that swept the sky.

I was in my favorite room, high above the ground, in a tower nearest to the sky and equally breezy. I always went there when there was a raging storm outside: it's the closest point anywhere to the shifting rains and wind. My family knows to find me there, just as they know Nuncle Briar will be down in his first floor bedroom, tending to his shakkan, and that Aunt Daja will be in her forge, pounding or pulling away at some metal. I watched the storm without a shaky heart from my vantage point high above the seas. If my family had seen me, they would have thought me crazy, for all the strange life we have led.

I knew the world ambient mages lived in is false and fictitious: my family had all told me so. Although they told lovely stories of four children and their teachers, each with a respective talent through magic, I knew it was false. Magics like that no longer exist, if they ever did.

I knew weather mages don't exist; except for in the grand tales Aunt Trisana spun of them, just like Mother spins her wool.

I knew I was not in Emelan, the place they spoke of as if they once were part of a city grand enough for mages, were they the stuff of legends or not. If a mage ever existed anywhere, they spoke of them there.

But when I ran a hand through my deep brown --almost a red, I liked to think-- hair, I felt otherwise.

The storm made me feel otherwise.

Regardless of what was real.

I tried to harness the storm, just as the wonderful fairy tale Nuncle Briar told me of a girl, who he always suspected to look much like my favorite aunt, Tris. I replicated the tale quickly, as I knew it by heart.

I fell into my core, looking around for the magic that's supposed to link me to …whatever my gift was. I should have liked to try the weather. I looked for a link that tied me to the weather, finding bolts of lightning power and some odd vines, threads, and metal wires. I grabbed the lightning…the rest seemed inappropriate for my trials.

I drew it out, pulling it from the storm battering our little estate in the middle of nowhere. It felt odd; my body trembled delightfully under the sparks of lightning falling about my long, lazy hair, and dancing on my fingertips. Experimentally I put my hands together, watching the light-bits surge and whirl around my clasped hands.

A burst of thunder startled me, and light flooded the room. As the brightness outside died away, I noticed that light was still in my usually dark tower room.

With a shocked gasp, I looked up, my hands flying apart and clenching to hold the lightning as long as I could.

It was too late: I saw Aunt Tris standing in the door, her little glass dragon flitting about her head and alighting on her tangle of braids on her head.

"Well, my little magelet Elysivy…hold out your hands."

I did as I was bid, shyly bringing forth my hands, the sparks dying away to rejoin the storm, lingering the barest of instants.

But she had seen it.

And I knew, by the look in her eyes, this was something direly important or unimaginably shameful.