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.