The Silence That Came After - Part 3

 

The silence that came after

Tess stood barefoot on cracked earth, arms raised to the gray, unfeeling sky. She closed her eyes, searching for the pulse, the rush, the heat that used to spark storms with a breath. Her fingertips trembled, anticipating the static charge that used to dance across her skin like a lover’s breath. But the air was inert. Empty.

The wind did not stir. No thunder rumbled in response.

She let her arms fall.

When had it died? That wild, glorious, terrible passion that had once crowned her stormborn? Had she poured it all into the ungrateful dome of Aetherion? Spent it in the rains that drowned Davyd’s village?

With Marcus, she had been lightning in a woman’s body, his touch had ignited her like kindling, his love fed her like oxygen. When she lost him, the storm hadn’t died. It roared. It consumed.

Then came Davyd. Steady, gentle Davyd. He touched her like she was sacred and thought he could hold back the tide. She had clung to him, not out of love, but to silence the void Marcus left behind. It hadn’t worked. Her hunger turned tidal. Her longing became a deluge that could not be controlled, and she’d been banished for it.

Now, the world around her was dry and quiet. The earth was broken. Her soul felt the same.

Time unraveled. Forests reduced to skeletons passed beneath her feet. Riverbeds crumbled like old promises. Once, she found a patch of green and fell to her knees, heart pounding.

She whispered to the clouds. She cursed.  She yelled until her throat tore. Her screams echoed into the void, met only with silence. Time was slipping away, eroding her presence like wind against stone, until all that remained was a shadow of the force she once was.

Night after night, Tess clawed at the past. She lay beneath indifferent stars and recalled Marcus’s teeth against her throat, Davyd’s trembling hands in her hair. She moaned their names into the dirt, touched herself with desperate shaking fingers, begged her body to remember what it meant to burn.

Nothing.

Her body moved, but no current stirred beneath her skin. No spark. No storm.

She began to forget the feel of lightning.

Her skin lost its shimmer. Her hair turned coarse and dull. Her eyes, once violet and glowing, grew pale. Animals fled from her not out of fear, but disinterest.

She stopped moving through the world like it still needed her. Stopped trying to speak to the sky.

Eventually, even her memories dulled. She no longer remembered Marcus’s voice clearly, or the precise way Davyd had said her name. She only remembered the way the rain had tasted on her lips the first time she summoned it with a kiss, how the air had cracked like glass when she came undone.

Now, the air was still, the sky unbroken.

Tess sat alone, knees drawn to her chest, hands cold and silent in her lap.

She wept, but the storm did not come.

Stormborne Part 4

 

Stormborne 

Aetherion never thundered anymore. Not since she left.

Encased beneath its crystalline dome, Aetherion was engineered perfection. Clean, clinical, controlled. Rain fell only when programmed. Winds came in pre-measured sighs. Even thunder had been reduced to sound design, softly piped in through the atmospheric systems for “emotional ambiance.”

For nearly a decade, Marcus Vale had conducted its sky like a silent symphony. Once, he had stood at the pinnacle of Aetherion’s science, hailed as the Chief Harmonist, a title whispered with reverence. He was the maestro of weather, the conductor of the dome’s carefully tuned skies. But now? He was a phantom. A silhouette in a locked office, a faded access badge no one dared deactivate.

He haunted the systems.

No one said her name anymore. Not officially.

Tess Calder.

At first, he had tried to forget her. Had tried to move on. He had allowed them to delete her from public record after she fled the dome. Her face removed from archives. Her work sealed, her research classified. But Marcus remembered it all: the way she stood barefoot on the observation deck, arms spread, calling lightning to her skin like it was a lover.

Tess had been the only untamed thing within the dome, her laughter too loud, her presence too electric. He hadn’t just loved her. He’d felt her in his bones, in every breath, like ozone before lightning. She became stormborne, fused with the very force they had tried to engineer.

And then, because they didn’t understand her, because he didn’t, she was cast out.

The accident had never been an accident. Not really. They were trying to extend emotional resonance into atmospheric systems, pushing the boundary between mind and sky. Tess had gone too far, let herself feel too much. And the sky had responded.

She became a conduit. A catalyst. Stormborne.

He remembered her standing on the edge of the observation platform, arms spread, lightning dancing in her veins. She had laughed at the danger. And gods, he had loved her for it.

Then came the blackouts. The floods. The fear.

He’d let her go. And in doing so, had broken something vital inside himself.

He began studying the accident. Obsessively. He compiled every fragment of data, her neural patterns, resonance curves, biometric spikes.

The committee sealed the files. He broke through the lockouts. Aetherion’s security watched, but no one stopped him. Maybe they were afraid. Maybe they hoped he’d disappear.

He did. He became a ghost in the machine.

Then, one night, through a hazy sleep-deprived dream, a single thought landed like a thunderclap: What if she wasn’t the anomaly? What if she was the key?

What if he could become what she was?

The old lab still smelled of burned copper and sterile regret.

It was sealed under five layers of lockdown, but he got in. Marcus moved through the dark space like a man retracing the steps of a haunting. Dust coated the terminals. The overhead lights flickered to life, one by one, casting long shadows across the cracked floor where she had once stood and changed.

He accessed the system. Her last input still lived in the core, Resonance Pattern Delta, the algorithm she’d written to interface with the sky. No one else had dared run it since.

His fingers trembled as he overrode the safety protocols. Sweat collected at the back of his neck. He stripped off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, pulse racing.

The machine hissed to life.

“Warning,” the AI intoned. “Resonance pattern unstable. Critical anomaly risk. Abort advised.”

Marcus closed his eyes. Saw her again. Silver hair charged with static, purple eyes lit like stormlight.

“Execute,” he whispered.

Power surged from the floor, straight into his body. His teeth clenched; every nerve caught fire. Pain like he’d never imagined slammed into him, white-hot, electric, absolute. His heart stopped. Once. Twice. He collapsed to his knees, mouth open in a silent scream.

He should have died.

But he didn’t.

The world went black, and then returned in color too bright, too alive. The hum of the system became sound. He could hear the heartbeat of the dome. Smell the ionized trace of ozone in the air.

When he opened his eyes, the floor beneath his palms pulsed gently with his breath. Sparks danced along his fingertips. His skin crackled faintly, every heartbeat thudding like distant thunder.

He lay there for a long time, shivering, weeping.

The storm was inside him.

Not like hers. Not vast and reckless and untamable. But real.

He could feel her.

Not just in memory, but in resonance.

Somewhere beyond the dome, in the scorched wastelands, she still lived.

*_*

The desert does not forgive.

It chewed through the soles of her feet, pulled at the loose folds of her clothes, leached the water from her breath. Tess moved through it like a sleepwalker, brittle and brittle-boned, the sun peeling her down to her last layers. Her power was gone. Her skin no longer shimmered. Her veins no longer hummed.

She no longer dreamed of storms.

Once, she had made the sky weep. She had burned with passion so fierce the clouds obeyed. But that was a different life. That was when Marcus still looked at her like she was the beginning and end of the world.

She had let him go, because she thought it would protect him. Because she thought she was too much.

Now, she was barely anything at all.

But today… something was different. There was a storm on the horizon.

At first, she thought it was a mirage. A bruise of dark clouds far in the distance. But the clouds didn’t vanish. They grew and moved. And then the wind shifted, not the lazy wheeze of desert air, but movement. Purpose. A gathering.

Her breath caught. This storm… it was real.

It was not hers. But familiar.

She stood frozen on a ridge of red sand, hair tangled and wild, ribs pressing sharp against her wrap. The air began to cool, the scent of rain curling against her skin.

Then, she ran.

Down the slope, through thorn scrub and crumbling stone, her bare feet bleeding, her throat raw from the dry wind. She didn’t stop. Couldn’t.

The clouds boiled overhead now, rolling, electric. Beautiful. Lightning danced in the corners of her vision, a language her body had once known.

He was here. Marcus Vale.

Her steps slowed. What would he see in her? The stormbreaker, yes, but hollowed. A woman too light to cast a shadow. Her hair, once silver and wild with current, now hung limp against her back. Her skin had lost its glow. Her eyes... she hadn't looked at her reflection in months.

His coat was stained with red sand and sun, his boots caked in grit. His hair was longer now, wild. And his eyes, those impossible, amber-colored eyes, were fixed on her like he had walked through fire to find her.

She turned to flee. She couldn’t bear it, his gaze, his disappointment. She was a ruin now. There was no crackle in her touch, no thunder in her voice. Just the memory of a woman who could call the sky to its knees.

“Tess.”

Her name in his mouth broke something in her.

Lightning cracked behind him, soft rain began to fall, gentle, cooling, golden. It soaked into her skin like love.

Standing soaked beneath the storm, his coat plastered to his frame, hair dark and curling, hands loose at his sides like he belonged to the wind now. He turned slowly as she stumbled into the clearing.

Their eyes met.

“Tess.”

The way he said her name again, half-broken, half-beautiful, split her wide open.

“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I’m not what I was.”

“You’re more,” he said, stepping forward. “You’re here.”

She tried to pull away, to hide herself from the weight of his gaze, but he caught her wrists, gently, reverently, and held them between them. His touch sparked, faint but real. She gasped.

“You…” she breathed, eyes widening in wonder. “You have it.”

“Not like you,” Marcus said, voice low. “But enough to find you.”

His hands cupped her face. “Gods, Tess, you’re still you. Even without the storm.”

She shook her head. “I don’t even know who that is anymore.”

“I do.”

And then he kissed her.

The storm surged as their bodies met.

His mouth devoured hers with hunger and grief and promise. She opened to him, gasping as the first true sensation in months rolled through her, his weight, his warmth, the grounding pressure of his hands on her hips, her back, her thighs.

He pressed her down into the soaked earth, kissed the hollow of her throat, the curve of her breast, the inside of her wrist. She trembled under him, not with fear, but with need.

When he entered her, it was slow, reverent, like prayer. And when her body arched into his, lightning curled above them in spirals, humming with shared desire.

It wasn’t like before.
It was more.

They moved together as the rain fell, again, and again, until they were slick with sweat and wet skin, breathless and tangled, her fingernails carving his shoulders, his mouth murmuring her name like it could save them both.

And somewhere in the rising crescendo of moans and thunder, she felt it.

A flicker. A spark. A stirring deep in her belly, in her bones.

Her body remembered.

The storm had not abandoned her. It had been sleeping, waiting for this. For him.

For them.

She cried out, voice raw and wild, as lightning cracked overhead and her skin lit with violet fire. Her hair lifted, her hands curled into fists, and the clouds above opened like blooming petals.

Rain poured.

Marcus laughed, delighted, awed, as she rose to her knees, naked, glowing, breath heaving. Her eyes blazed violet again. The storm swirled around her like a lover.

He knelt before her, drenched, shaking. “Tess…”

She turned to him, the edge of a smile blooming through tears. “I thought I was gone.”

“You were never gone,” he said. “You were just waiting for the right sky.”

They stayed in the clearing for days. Making love beneath the clouds, curled into one another beneath whispering palms, letting the world around them green with new life. Each kiss brought a breeze. Each touch stirred thunder.

Her power came back not in a single burst, but in waves. Gentle. Fierce. Beautiful. By the end of the week, the desert around them bloomed. And Tess, reborn, rain-drenched, radiant, was no longer lost. She was the storm again. But now she was not alone.

She stood with Marcus, hand in hand, at the edge of something new. And when she looked to the sky, it no longer mourned.

It sang.