To Fly the Soaring Tides

The mass of lightning began to stretch like something was pulling on it in different places. Before my eyes, it formed arms and legs, then a head threatened to sprout. As I grew more alarmed, Cira only crossed her arms.

“Fascinating. I never knew lightning could form something so terrifying. Do you think it personifies the wrath our dear creator was made to endure or do you think it embodies their grudge?” She looked to me earnestly for an answer as if there wasn’t a monstrosity being born of the storm directly in front of us.

“Are you serious? How am I supposed to know?!” I couldn’t believe her right now.

She only sighed, visibly fighting the urge to look disappointed, “I understand it’s a lot to ask you to understand the language of the sky in a mere few hours, but I would hope you could at least think critically about it and give me your opinion.”

What is wrong with her? Fine. I’ll play her game. “It’s both. Didn’t you see his own wrath converging wholly independent of the, uh, cumulonimbus that attacked us? In fact, the creatures grew weaker as this titan took form.”

Cira smiled, chuckling mildly, “I really hadn’t thought of it like that… Well done.” It was irritating that I had to stifle a smile of my own—it was difficult, but I preferred to look abjectly displeased instead. “A storm titan, is it? Know that unless I find a match in the forbidden archive, you will have named that… thing.”

“What…?” A harsh cry like that of a dying creature yet vocalized in thunder broke across the sky. It didn’t stop but I could still hear its echo as I covered my ears despite the barrier.

“The mana comprising this so-called titan is loose and undefined. Due to its erratic nature, electricity is difficult to harness, apparently, for itself as well.” She stared at this natural disaster-born entity of pure lightning with bemusement creeping onto her face. “Like its half-bestial predecessors, form cannot be so simply assumed by merely taking shape. This storm is naïve at best, if it even hopes to claim some semblance of sentience. Something drives it beyond the ancient wrath which lingered in the creator’s heart, I just don’t know what it is yet.”

The titan let out another roar and its body exploded in white light with a soft purple hue, imbued with so much power that it rattled through my entire body. The world seemed tinted in it as I felt faint crackles all around me.

“None of that…” Cira’s mithril ring at her back glowed and the purple haze slowly dissipated. “You dare encroach upon my domain, Titan of the Storm?”

I could buy every plot of land on Porta Bora if I had an ancient mithril coin for every time Cira complained about people exacerbating her deeds, but she’s literally fighting a storm and belittling it with her sharp tongue, even giving it a nonsense title like any given drunk bard would. What is my master’s deal? Is she just trying to sound cool or is it on accident? Rather, why is this person my master? She seemed to burn it up for fun, but fate must be a truly fickle thing.

I watched Cira push back the so-called electricity—some manner of manifested elemental lightning of the purest form, I presumed—and the border of her domain became clear as pitch-dark mana like the shadow-drenched tomb she dragged us all through pushed against the storm. Domains were the mark of an advanced mage, it’s said… so, I couldn’t help but be jealous at the massive range of Cira’s and ridiculous amount of mana swirling around us.

The storm titan was met by her domain’s rapid growth and easily pushed away. Glued to the barrier like a gnat stuck on a bubble as it expanded, but not destroyed utterly like the lightning creatures. Instead, it seemed to be getting absorbed slowly.

“Take note.” Cira said coldly, focused on the titan, “Lightning—electricity… It is created through natural means, reactions between various materials or states of matter and such, but it has no physical state, per se. One could say it’s the purest form of energy that can occur naturally, while another could argue it’s the most natural analog for aether. Now… What would we do were this titan made of aether?”

“Well…” I was past the point of arguing, and the sooner I got her to finish talking to me, the sooner she would resolve this threat, “That necromancer comes to mind. Didn’t his void absorb everything indiscriminately?”

“Indeed,” She grinned. The storm titan had completely ceased the downpour of lightning beasts and the storm only flashed to a single point, flooding this titan with successive bolts of energy. “As void destroys all, light destroys dark, life to death and back, so on and so forth, yadda yadda. Tell me, Tawny… what is the void of lightning?”

It was an element I was unfamiliar with. As much as Jimbo talked about it, nothing substantial came from that which could be drawn as a conclusion to what it even was. I understood light and dark well enough, but what could possibly be the absence of lightning? “I… I don’t know.”

“Precisely.” She smirked. “There is none. One can create an environment where electricity could be expelled from or unable to enter, but energy of any kind follows a rule. Remember how light also consumes dark and grows? Flame does the same to air, as you well know. Ever wonder what happens to the mana-charged waters which fall off the side of any given island from the spring’s relentless path over centuries or even longer…?” She was grinning ear to ear as she watched the titan form, spinning her absurd yarn about energy to me—though I suppose it was more of a lecture. She seemed to really enjoy it. “Energy cannot be destroyed. Even I who burns the fate which arrives in my path like a coarse shrubbery cannot destroy energy outright.”

The ball of crimson flame at my side, my passive reservoir, flickered like a candle as the titan seemed to take full form and let out another blood-curdling cry. Strangely, the storm titan reminded me of those shadow goliaths. Human form with slightly-off features, but those were massive, and not so well defined. The titan had very clear features comprised of countless arcs if I could bear more than half a second even looking at it before my eyes burned. I never realized how bright lightning was.

I thought this monster was going to fight as soon as the egg rocked, but it had continued to gather mana ever since it started taking shape. In fact, its power had only risen exponentially. It was beginning to affect my breathing and I even noticed Cira reinforce her barrier, which took a huge weight of my chest.

“Relax,” Cira called out, “I will take care of this foe. But make sure you watch. Perhaps it will help you understand the element.”

Is she joking? The foe is the entire storm… isn’t it?

“Wrathful titan,” Her orichalcum staff glowed, as did the absurd mithril ring, and metallic silver dust sprinkled in the air. It seemed the titan’s form was drawn to it, and as it was pulled closer, her rivers seemed to follow a path that phased in and out of what must have been space. They flowed through the shroud of electricity while the titan swung its arm out to try and grab Cira, just a few strides in front of me. “If your residual fury is so weak, you have no business challenging me.”

Black bolts shot out from her palm and started tearing away at the titan, leaving gashes in its form that was like a mass of arcing lightning trapped in a bottle in the shape of a giant. It didn’t make any sense that it could take wounds, let alone that Cira could inflict them. All I could do was watch.

“I think you would serve well to increase my aura, in fact.” Cira’s lightning formed a black sun above her head, and the titan’s form was drawn into her barrier, dissipating into what ended up actually being the slowest bolts of lightning I had ever seen. They resisted her pull but could not overcome it. It seemed everything was going according to plan and even Cira’s face had a reassuring smile on it as she glowed with power.

Something doesn’t feel right… mana assailed me from every direction of varying pressures, but the absorption of this titan didn’t feel like it was lessening the threat in any way. Perhaps it was my fine-tuned perception of danger as someone truly weak… but I just didn’t feel like the whole picture was before us. This guardian was not so simple.

Still, the titan started falling apart and its purple glow dimmed. Despite my concerns, it seemed this guardian would really be defeated just like that. “Cira… I’m sorry for calling you a whelp back then… It turns out I was the whelp all along.”

She stood there in the sky with her arms crossed, watching lightning find its way into her tumultuous black sun as expected. Despite the unfamiliar situation, everything was so calculated. I couldn’t believe, or even begin to imagine how my master’s mind worked. What had she been through and how could she possibly have such vast knowledge at such a young age? Hardly a few years younger than me, I think… It was absurd. Was she even human?

I had been around her for quite some time, but this was perhaps one of the most sincere smiles I ever saw on her face. The lightning’s flash lit her golden hair and her cheeks creased beneath her eyes, “I appreciate you saying that. You know, it’s not good to disparage people for their weakness. Those born without aura can become as strong as they wish if only their will were nurtured, yet they too often grow up knowing they are less than their peers. Their will suffers—”

Thunder struck, and a bolt of lightning thicker than Acher’s pillars of light struck the lingering sparks from the titan’s remains. Suddenly, the world flashed purple and white and the very first moment my mind could register what was before my eyes, there was a new creature born of the purest lightning. Denser, much brighter, than the titan, and much smaller. Aside from its radiance, it reminded me of the goblins—

Thunder struck a second time in the same moment and the fiend born of solid lightning appeared within arm’s reach. Its body was just larger than Cira’s and its skulls bore shallow points, though no features. Its arms were ambiguous and constantly changing in form, but an unmistakable fist thrust from its side, purple haze coalescing as it reached my master’s gut to the sound of a hundred shattering plates. Her barriers all fell, and I felt the full force of the storm bear down.

In an instant, her domain of wisping shadows had a massive hole in it, like a column that ran all the way through from the force of that single strike. I watched the storm push in as the domain rapidly dispersed into just regular lightning.

I only caught a glimpse of what was happening as the explosion of mana that shook the sky forced me to curl up in place—there was no ground to kneel down on. The pressure was so great, the shockwaves from that one punch burst countless times before I even had time to flinch. As soon as I could manage to look up, Cira had disappeared while a column of mana seemed to trail her path like a cannonball shot from inside a cloud.

I didn’t even have time to think. Cira was gone, and I was face to face with the newborn fiend. It watched Cira disappear for a brief instant, then its chin turned until I could feel a deadly gaze pointed right at me.

If even a single second passes, I’ll be dead, I thought. It was one of those things I instinctually knew, yet as soon as fight or flight ended in acceptance, that orichalcum staff pierce the fiend through its back. The staff protruded from its chest and kept going. Like a lightning rod, the staff took the fiend with it, and I was left alone beneath the thunderous sky.