Storm Phase – 5
In this epic fantasy, a young wizard with a mysterious destiny, a cat-girl ninja, and a diary that turns into a bat-like creature journey through worlds of monsters and mayhem.
Iniru was vaguely aware of her hand moving, the charcoal stick scratching against a square of paper, as the first image became clear to her.
She saw a boy, about the same age as her. He was baojen. Pale and tall and fur-less like all his kind, though he was especially lanky. Her mother had once met a couple of baojen. They’d mocked her by saying her father must have been a cat. It was a rude thing to say. But not surprising. It was the sort of thing you expected from them. The baojen ruled Okoro, and most of them enjoyed lording themselves over those of other ancestries.
The boy’s traveling clothes were gray and green. The breastplate he wore was burgundy. A sheathed sword hung from his hip. He had a small, round birthmark on his forehead. She sensed something powerful, a force that radiated out from him — fiery and intense, unlike anything she had ever encountered. Then she saw it. An amber channeling stone dangling around his neck.
He was a wizard.
He stood at the end of a rope bridge, in a rainforest somewhere. Tears filled his bright blue eyes. Rage strained his face. Bodies lay all around him and along the bridge. His eyes locked onto her. Something sparked deep within, and her heart skipped… though she couldn’t fathom why.
As the vision shifted, she was faintly aware of shoving a scrap of paper aside to sketch a new image.
Again, the baojen boy appeared. He had changed somehow. More than twice as much energy radiated out from him — so much that her fur stood on end and her skin crawled. On his cheek there was now a cloud-shaped mark, pierced by a bolt of lightning. What it was, she had no idea, but it worried her.
He reached a hand toward her. A fiery spark ricocheted through her chest.
Again, the vision shifted. Again, she began a new sketch.
Bundled in a coarse fur coat, Iniru stood on a windswept plain covered in snow and ice. Exhausted and frustrated, she argued with the boy. Over what, she had no idea. She couldn’t hear anything in the visions.
After another shift, she found herself standing in a lush courtyard. Horrified, she knelt beside the boy. Wounded, he lay still upon the ground, bright crimson blood and rose petals scattered around him. A scream tried to tear loose from her throat.
Then the visions shifted through a rapid blur of adventures in exotic locales, where Iniru and the boy and others whose forms she could not quite pin down battled monstrous creatures beyond her imagination.
Abruptly, this blur of experiences ceased, and for several torturous moments, she witnessed nothing but a gray expanse. The boy was there with her, but she couldn’t see him.
When she was eight years old, she had once eaten some of her mother’s special mushrooms by accident, then snuck out at night to swim in the ocean, even though a storm was lashing their village. She fancied herself the daughter of the goddess Naibane of the Waves, and thus no storm could stop her. Bravely, she had fought her way a hundred paces out, but then the storm intensified and giant waves snatched her scrawny form and dashed her onto a rocky outcrop along the shoreline. Perhaps Naibane had blessed her courage because she survived the tossing waves and vicious undertows, the broken bones, and her mother’s anger — but only just.
She now felt that feeling of terror, lost in the dark water, her body breaking on the rocks. And then, a deep, penetrating sadness — as profound as the grief she’d suffered when her mother’s last breath had slipped away. Something terrible had occurred. Someone dear was lost, though she couldn’t see who.
“Not the boy. Please, not him.” The words tumbled unbidden from her lips to echo in the Cavern of Prophecies.
The endless gray parted to reveal her and the boy cowering before an enormous dragon — a dragon! — of deepest shadow, and the terror she’d felt when fighting the dark waves returned.
A moment — or a lifetime — later, she stood with the boy on a high cliff. A small, ragtag force gathered behind them. A vast army snaked through the valley below. She argued fiercely with the boy, until he seemed to give in. But there was an odd glint in his eyes that she didn’t quite trust, one not unlike the look in the healer’s eyes when he’d said her mother would recover.
The visions picked up speed, going forward and backward in time, racing by faster than her hand, or mind, could keep up with. In every one, the baojen boy was there. They shared bowls of tea and long sunsets. They laughed and kissed, argued and trained, and fought many desperate battles together.
Suddenly, the racing visions slammed to a halt and locked onto one that caught her breath. Again her hand flew into motion, the charcoal stick scratching across the paper. For the first time, the boy was not there. She could not see him. She could not sense his presence.
Alone in a forested land decorated with autumn leaves in all their colors, Iniru knelt across from a rune-carved arch of weathered granite. As if it had just happened, she recalled the surge of relentless determination she’d felt as she’d clawed her way onto the beach that night, defying the crashing waves that would drag her to the bottom of the sea.
Day after day, she watched that lifeless arch. Waiting on the boy. She would never give up hope. He would find a way to be with her again.
Bewildered, she woke unexpectedly, the cavern spinning around her.