"You've always thrown everything you could at me! NOW STRIKE ME! You've never held back before!"

No answer.

He collapsed to his knees with a desperate yell for something, anything, to happen. He now didn't even care whether he survived the experience or not- maybe that was what he really wanted all along.

What was he trying to do anyway? His mad words of a moment of purely thoughtless passion and rage finally registered with his brain. You've always thrown everything you could at me. Well I can take it! And now I can give it back! Now come on! Strike me! You've never held back before! Where had that come from? How would he ever control lightning if he couldn't even control himself? He didn't even know what he was doing!

Or did he? The rain fell hard as ever; the thunder, if anything, echoed louder, but he rose and returned his gaze to the Heavens, silently wearing the sad, serious look that best became him. You're delirious, he persuaded himself. What are you so angry at? Destiny? Life? The world? Lightning?

He couldn't deny this. If he hadn't said, "Strike me!", he could believe he'd been yelling at Destiny and Life and the world for "throwing everything they could at him." And if he hadn't said that, he could believe he'd been yelling at Lightning itself. But he had said too much. He knew who he was talking to- someone he hadn't acknowledged in a long time. And he knew why...

His memories took him back to his first thunderstorm as a small child, the first time he ever saw lightning shoot across the sky in all its ferocity, frightening glory, and untamed power. He stood at a window in the palace, afraid, but still less afraid than he was fascinated. He asked his mother what it was. At first, she honestly tried to explain how the positive and negative energies in the air, when separated, collide back together with a bang, only to get a puzzled stare in response. Finally, she laughed and simply told her son, as another strike of lightning lit up the Heavens:

"But some call it the Finger of God."