Heir of the Storm
Tess stood at the edge of the lagoon, barefoot, arms raised to a sky that no longer responded to her whim. The air was hot and dry, the clouds thin, non-responsive. She closed her eyes, calling for the current that used to race through her veins like wildfire. She had been creating storms with nothing more than desire for decades; rain had always answered her hunger. Now, there was only silence.
The water lapped against her ankles, calm and unbroken. She let her arms fall, heart heavy with frustration. The world she and Marcus created felt fragile beneath her feet. Where once palm trees bent in the breeze, gardens thriving with green growth, now the air was calm, the garden all but played out. All of it had sprung from the storms she and Marcus conjured together when their passion could split the sky. But the years had worn them thin. Their love remained, fierce as ever, but the power that once terrified Aetherion had dulled to embers.
It began with a lab accident that fused her thoughts to the atmosphere. She recalled the wild abandon that had led to her exile, as well as her recklessness afterwards, which had almost consumed and destroyed her.
Marcus, unwilling to live without her, had risked the same experiment, becoming Stormborne as well, and had forfeited his life in Aetherion to find her in the wasteland. Their love had been tempest, oasis, home.
But now, their storms were fading.
She stared across the lagoon, jaw clenched, chest heavy. What would remain of this fragile paradise when their power was gone? Would it wither back to sand, leaving only memory behind?
An unexpected resonance pierced her rumination. It came like the ringing of a bell, pulling her senses away from the oasis, out into the wastelands, searching for what she did not know. Vision came: a family staggering through the dunes, gaunt and desperate, a man and woman, a daughter, she guessed, another man close behind. Above them, Aetherion security drones circled like vultures.
She sent her thoughts outward, searching for a signal, or a spark. She found it glowing faintly in the girl’s hands, a porcelain saucer awake with tessellated patterns of resonance. Tess grasped it with her will, amplifying the field until light fractured like crystal charges and the drones screamed, circuits bursting, black machines falling into sand.
The resonance collapsed, leaving Tess gasping at the water’s edge, heart pounding. Yet the vision lingered. The family was real. The girl was real.
And through her, through the resonance field of the porcelain saucer, the storm had spoken again.
Tess and Marcus found them, the family staggereing across the dunes, broken shapes under the burning sky. Derik in front, his skin cracked from sun, dragging Lina by the arm. She stumbled with every step, her lips bloodless, her breath a rasp. Jonas lagged behind, bent under the weight of a pack that rattled emptily.
Mae walked between them. She was sixteen. Tall for her age, though gaunt from thirst. Her eyes were violet, fever-bright, hands locked tight around the porcelain saucer. She carried it as though it were a living heart, unwilling to let it go even as she stumbled in the sand.
Tess felt resonance still clinging to the saucer, faint but insistent, whispering to her senses.
Marcus strode ahead, kneeling in the sand with a skin of water. “Drink,” he urged. His voice was steady, calm, the same voice he had once used to steady Tess when lightning tore uncontrolled from her body.
Derik grabbed the water skin, but forced himself to give it first to Lina, then to Mae, his throat working as he held back his own need. Only after they drank did he tip it back, swallowing with shaking hands, before handed it off to Jonas.
“Why are out here, in the wastelands?” Marcus asked.
Derik’s eyes burned with exhaustion and anger. “We were looking for you. Mae was flagged,” he rasped, jerking his chin toward his daughter. “Scanned on her sixteenth birthday. Category C deviation. Dissonance.” His voice broke on the word. “We fled before they could erase her.”
Lina covered her face, sobbing quietly. Jonas said nothing, his mouth set in a grim line.
Mae did not cry. She stroked the porcelain rim with trembling fingers, as though the saucer spoke to her.
Tess knelt before the girl, meeting her gaze. Mae’s eyes were violet-shadowed, like her own had been when the storm first marked her. “You used it,” Tess said softly.
Mae nodded, her throat dry. “I don’t know how. I just… felt it. I heard you.”
Tess’s chest tightened. Aetherion had called Tess dangerous for the same reason, for resonance they could not contain. Yet here, in this girl, Tess felt not ruin but possibility.
Aetherion had branded her deviation. But Tess knew better.
Mae was storm-touched.
And perhaps, Tess thought with a shiver of hope and fear, she was the key to keeping the oasis alive when Tess and Marcus were gone.
*_*
Later, in the hush of the night, Marcus drew Tess down beside him, into the bed they had shared for so many years. His mouth was familiar fire against hers, his hands coaxing a storm that still came, but no longer with wild abandon. The air thickened, a breeze stirring the palms, lightning flickered faintly in the clouds above. Their bodies moved with the old rhythm, slower now, but no less true.
Afterward, tangled together, sweat cooling on her skin, Tess whispered, “I don’t want that life for her. She deserves more than the burden we carried.”
Marcus pressed his forehead to hers, his breath hot against her lips. “Why do you call it burden, Tess, when it gave us love, and life, and this?” He gestured toward the oasis around them, glowing faintly in the night. “Look at this, Tess. This isn’t exile. It’s excellence.”
Mae’s training began the next morning, despite her parents' objections.
“We didn’t flee the dome so you could turn our daughter into something unnatural,” Lina said. “She deserves a normal life.”
Derik’s jaw was set, eyes burning with the same fear Tess had once seen in the Harmonists of Aetherion. “We risked everything to escape the dome. And now you would make her into a weapon? No. We won’t allow it.”
“She’s not a weapon, but neither is she ordinary,” Tess said, her voice low but steady. “She never was. The dome knew it, that’s why she flagged. And now the saucer knows it. The storms already listen to her.”
Lina’s hands clenched in her skirts, her eyes glistening. “She’s just a girl.”
Tess closed her eyes, remembering. “So was I.” Her voice broke, but she forced herself on. “The dome would have destroyed me for it. Instead, I… We made this.” She swept her hand toward the oasis, the palms, the pools, the gardens. “We made life where there was none. Mae has the power to do the same.”
Derik’s mouth thinned. “And when it consumes her, what then?”
Tess faltered. She remembered the ruin of her first storms, the hunger that nearly devoured her, the exile. Fear twisted in her chest. But then she thought of Marcus beside her, of their nights when their passion lit up the sky, of the love that had sustained them. The storms were never a curse. “It won’t.”
*_*
The saucer was waiting for her.
Mae felt it every time she touched its smooth porcelain face, traced the faint tessellated seams with her fingertips. It hummed like a heartbeat, steady and sure, and in its resonance she found something she’d never felt in Aetherion: freedom. Not the endless pressure of conformity. Freedom.
Her parents didn’t understand.
Her mother’s eyes shone with desperation. “Please, Mae. We want you to find peace.”
Peace. Mae almost laughed. Peace had branded her dissonant, an error to be corrected or erased. The saucer had been her first taste of truth. Tess’s voice had come through it, thunderous and alive, and Mae had understood: she wasn’t broken. She was chosen.
Now Tess and Marcus stood on either side, silent but steady. Tess’s violet eyes glimmered with determination and pride; Marcus’s dark gaze burned with conviction. They weren’t forcing her. They were teaching her to find her voice.
Mae lifted the saucer. Its porcelain warmed in her hands, the hum rising as if in answer. “This doesn’t bind me. It frees me,” she told her parents. “The storm listens. And I…” She swallowed, her voice steady. “It hears what I say.”
That evening, clouds gathered faint and thin above the horizon. Tess lifted her arms, Marcus joining her, their bodies shimmering with old fire. But the storm didn’t answer. Their power faltered, fragile as candlelight in wind.
Mae stepped forward.
Her parents shouted at once, panic sharp in her father’s voice, breaking in her mother’s, but Tess raised a hand to quiet them.
Mae raised the saucer high.
It thrummed through her bones, rising like a second heartbeat. She breathed in, steady, remembering Tess’s words: Not yours to own. Yours to protect. She did not demand the sky. She did not force it. She listened.
The clouds thickened. A breeze rippled across the lagoon. Villagers lifted their heads, their voices softening to murmurs as rain began to fall, gentle, even, soaking into the soil without tearing it apart. The palms drank deeply. The pools swelled.
Mae lowered the saucer, arms trembling, her chest full of fierce certainty. She belonged. Not as a fugitive. Not as a mistake. But as heir to the storm.
Her parents stood frozen. Lina’s hand covered her mouth, tears streaming down her cheeks. Derik’s fists were clenched, his jaw locked tight. He looked at her as though he no longer recognized the child he had helped escape into the desert, but something larger, luminous, untouchable.
Mae stepped closer, holding the saucer to her chest. “I don’t want a normal life,” she said quietly. “I want this. Not for power. For belonging. For the chance to never be helpless again. The storm chose me. And I choose it back.”
Her father’s shoulders sagged, trembling as his anger broke into silence. Her mother reached for her, pulling her close, tears warm against Mae’s cheek.
Tess approached, her hand light on Mae’s shoulder, her voice soft as rain. “The storm is not yours to wield. It is yours to protect.”
Marcus’s gaze met hers, fierce and proud. “Through you, the oasis will endure.”
Mae tilted her face to the sky, rain slicking her hair, sliding down her skin like silver threads. She whispered into the air, into the hum that lived in her chest: “I will not let it die. Not while I breathe.”
And the storm, certain and clear, whispered back.
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