A BOY OF RETRIBUTION, A BOY OF STORM—Trey jackknifed into the hurricane’s eye, ready for action.
As Trey dove through the gale center, he launched bolts at each dark silhouette. He couldn’t miss. The feather storm was so immense, so full of birds, that any attack would find its target, a target. And for the dark weather to persist, the flock stayed captive to their own winds, their own predictable flight patterns that conjured and maintained the spell.
His [Zix-shooter] finger guns were aglow with twin orbits of Z-A-P as he released his attacks in a wide-reaching scattershot. The rapid-fire blasts tore at the [Black Tempest] from the inside out, breaking the winds by breaking its birds. As he dove through the spiraling shroud those skies began to clear, the gales relenting, dissipating, and allowing a passing view of the stars.
Trey was the flock’s cancer, their scourge, their divine punishment.
A wave of serenity floated into Trey’s mind. Beyond the storm was madness, a dark and unbreakable wall, but the inside of the storm was weaker. The harsh air hurt his muscles but it couldn’t diminish his attacks like the outside did.
He loved it when a plan worked out.
“Black Zeus has something for that ass!” Trey called.
As he popped the birds with lightning, smoke trails rose from their burnt plumage that was swiftly sucked into the greater gusts.
We won’t let you take us down! We’ll endure! We’ll do it for our fallen soldiers! The ones you’ve killed!
“I didn’t do it!” Trey said—though he was far less than convincing as his [Zap] strokes continued, one after the other after the one, a sheer barrage as he repeated it-wasn’t-me-it-wasn’t-me.
The violent contradiction deepened the red eyes of the blackwheat birds.
Stray birds broke from the [Black Tempest] to attack him as he passed, unwilling to make his descent easy. The snitches darted across the storm’s eye, using the tunnel as a personal fight arena. But Trey angled his body from the blows, becoming the most stylish skydiver there ever was. He even grabbed one bird as they passed, digging his fingers into its wing.
Static danced along the bird’s wing, singing the feathers it landed upon. Trey made eye contact with his victim, the redness of blackwheat fading into the bird’s amethyst pupils. Trey delighted in the oh-shit moment of fear. “Gotcha,” Trey said, caging the bird in a [Zzt] orb that continuously popped its victim.
Trey released the bird to the raging gale, static jittering across its feathers. The young man glared at whirling sets of blackwheat eyes, warning them.
But the birds were undeterred and rushed into the wind-tunnel arena.
Trey shot at these stray attackers—missing some and hitting others. But the successful shots hadn’t changed the situation: the blasted birds retreated into the hurricane to spin their woes away. The flock’s fading red eyes enlivened with brightness once the storm had blown blackwheat grains into their mouths.
The Clayborne had fallen through a quarter of the storm, three-quarters less to go. His assault had thus far been successful at harming the storm, exploiting its weakness—the inside.
But the flock began to shore up their defects. The patches of visible sky, of intermittent stars, were thickened into a black wall. More birds. More pairs of red eyes. The surrounding winds closed around in a polka-dotted cage. They’d changed their formation, shifting snitches from the base of the [Black Tempest] upward to Trey’s location.
The wind tunnel thickened around him, compressing closer and closer to his body, assaulting his senses.
The pitch blinded him, and the bone chill stung every inch of his body. He could hardly breathe with the way air forced itself into his nostrils. The debris smacked against his skin in annoying and itchy pebbles. Fearing that these were blackwheat grains, he shut his eyes and mouth.
It was a sensory hell—and a personal one.
Endure, he told himself. You’ve got to endure.
He couldn’t see where he was falling. He’d suffer until his inevitable crash into the surface.
No, I can’t submit!
The young man brightened his hands, the spell energy glowing against his feathered cage.
Come now, Trey, said the voices in the wind. We just want to talk.
Trey shook his head in disbelief and disgust.
What? No diplomacy? The tornado laughed but the flock’s intentions were clear—they couldn’t hide their tone or otherwise disguise the fiendish words that empowered [Black Tempest]. MALICE, MALCONTENT, MALIGNITY, MURDER…that last one too scarily specific for Trey’s liking.
But he’d teleported skyward to bring the fight to them. And that started with magic.
His focus traveled inward. He imagined himself as a speck of soul coursing through his bloodstream, collecting charge from every knot of tissue, every wrinkle within his organs, and every bit of oxygen swimming in his veins. Trey collected his sparks into his core. The energy was pushed to the outer boundary of his body just beyond his skin. He shaped his power into a condensed, sparking aura, his [Zzt] forming into a type of lightning armor, before expanding it into a full-body orb. A perfect sphere—and a crackling one too. He then pressed his hands to the orb and infused it with [Zap], sending beams straight through his forged barrier.
Trey became a lightning bubble and tank all in one.
His memories traveled back to the sea of souls, that ethereal tunnel of speckled blue aura that he experienced during his [Zlumber]. That supreme state of meditation had supplied his most magical experiences in successive flashes. He remembered the moment Myst absorbed him into the shadows; he remembered the feeling of the scarecrow cast pouring gold magic into his bones; he remembered the plethora of cards he’d used on Swishy during their tutoring-turned-gaming sessions. Trey remembered the most important cards he’d inflicted upon Swishy. DETERMINATION. FAITH. And the image of Swishy taking the HEART card and slipping it into his chest.
Trey fed upon these memories, these feelings, and wondered if Swishy felt like this when the gold-straw was in bloom, when everything was good and nothing was bad.
From the heart outward, a brilliance streamed through to the edges of Trey’s limbs, the top of his head, and his eyes.
His bubble enlarged in repeated pulses, resembling the way one blew breath after breath into a balloon. With each expansion of the [Zzt] orb, the birds and their constricting gale were repelled. The flock strained against Trey’s bubble, forcing themselves to stay in place, but while some maintained their positions, most others were repelled by the constant shocks.
They grunted, they slowed mildly, their flight now irregular and inconsistent. The winds died down in patches before speeding back up again, presumably from chewing down more blackwheat.
There has to be a diminishing return here, Trey thought to himself. There’s no way these straw steroids will let them tank everything.
But tank the hits, they did. For the moment, though, they could draw no closer to Trey, unable to infringe upon his electric bubble.
Adrenaline coursed through Trey—a side effect of his magic supercharge. The lightning jolted through every inch of Trey, overwhelming him with synaptic feeling. His pores stretched open and sweat excreted from his glands. Trey’s electrified heart resounded within his ears with door-breaking force. His eyelashes tickled from the most minuscule of static pops. And his brain…his brain was overwhelmed, to say the least, becoming a mental turbine of galvanized thoughts.
The life he’d left behind, the existence he’d neglected as he dove into his Straw City duties, uncontrollably pulsed against his forehead and temples and brain stem.
The ache of memories, the flash-crackle-pop of his former life refused to be denied any longer. His mind traveled backward, far, far back to a distant and lovely place…
Home. A luminous place.
Clayhearth, beautiful Clayhearth—he channeled that always.
A place where they didn’t use their altar. The altar functioned as a museum, a graveyard, and a place for the spirits of Clayhearth's past. An altar that was hallowed, respected, and un-used.
The altar was contained in their town square, a tremendous all-gold skyscraper, the most ornate piece of architecture in all the land.
Spirit Tower was its name.
Ancient script was etched throughout every inch of the gleaming tower, a long-forgotten language rumored to describe the story of their warriors, their defenders against gold-hunting invaders. Dates, times, battles, techniques. Anything that had to do with Clayhearth's defense resided with the gold-encased spirits of their altar.
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People came to pray, to give thanks, to feel the wavelength of the founders’ souls.
Trey had remembered going to the Spirit Tower with Earth Dimes throughout his childhood. On one of the Tower’s walls was a glass elevator. Both grandson and grandfather rode in one of these, ascending in the midday sun. “My own grandparents defended this place,” Grandpa Earth said. “Before there was magic, before there was any of this shadow business, there was no benevolent Cearth to decide that enough was enough. Other settlements were at our throats, sad but true.”
“Are necks really that valuable?” Trey’s eight-year-old brain was unabashedly skeptical. “They’re just necks. We all have them.”
“Yes, but ours are connected to all this.”
With a flourish, Earth Dimes presented his grandson with a shimmering metropolis. The glass elevator had reached its peak, 80 stories up, presenting the Clayhearth cityscape. The outer walls of the city were stony, jagged, and mountainous, hiding the inner glory from the world. While the buildings themselves were cast in an aural glaze. Ancient scripts were carved into the most ordinary of surfaces—the siding of homes, stores, and even the streetlights. A faintly visible electrical current traveled in a grid-like pattern along the surface, somehow not shocking anybody but powering the city, nonetheless.
“Utopia,” Trey matter-of-factly said. He wasn’t a dreamy kid, just a head-in-the-books quiz-head.
“Not quite,” Earth chuckled, then dimmed his mirth into stoicism. “Anyone could replicate this on the planet—if only they had the enchanted resources shoved behind altars. Cearth just chose us.”
“You mean The Curse skipping over us?”
“Yes, that.”
Clayhearth’s most well-guarded secret: The Curse never touched them—not the way it’d done to everyone else. The mined gems and copper wiring didn’t return to their ore deposits. The rivers remained open. The z-shaped petals of the shockflowers remained in their parks and meadows. While the planet took back its resources everywhere else, turning the lands into a humongous, hopeless plain, Clayhearth kept its status quo.
The only change was the stone altar. It sprouted from the town’s center as a one-story-high arch of swirling shadow.
The shadows made a single proclamation: You’ve already paid.
Earth, a typically strong man, sniffled. He held his head high, disguising his teary eyes.
“What’s wrong, Gramps?”
“Even in my childhood we never liked our gold. The generations before me always hid it, knowing enemies would come for it. And they always came—always. So we never shined like this. And then The Curse came, resetting other lands but protecting us. But even afterward, my parents used to curse our gold. Everyone did. It was wrong to be luminous, a crime against sense and security. Our culture of decoration and jewelry didn’t come until I grew up myself.”
“That’s a nice story, grandad. But if everything is good now, why cry?”
Earth laughed at his grandson. His face was all mouth the way he bellowed. “You’re right, let me get myself together.”
The young Trey reached for his earring, a golden cross, a gift from Gramps. It was a symbol of salvation, according to Earth, a spirit of protection. He wasn’t sure what to make of that then—but he felt protected. His family made sure of that.
“You like that, huh?” Earth said.
“Yeah, I like how it’s cold on my cheek.”
“Well, at least he’s feeling the spirit…” Earth said to himself.
“What was that?” Trey asked.
“Oh, nothing.” Earth flicked his naked lobes. “I never had earrings. They’re not for me. My gold is right here.”
He wiggled his fingers and thumbs—all golden prosthetics. The man never said how he lost his real ones.
Trey winced from the reflected light. “Okay, you’re blinding me, Grandpa.”
“Embrace the shine, my boy. These are hard-won from working the mines. Now my fingers are just like this, gold encrusted. Can you believe that? Ever met a man with gold fingers before?”
“Yes, you.”
“That’s right, me, your own granddaddy.”
“Are they fake? Some kind of trick?”
“Now boy. See this?” He moved his golden fingers again, releasing a shimmering aura.
Trey squinted again. “So it is a trick.”
“No, tricks here.” Earth gleamed, his fingers dancing like a pianist. “Only treasure.”
Trey wanted to gleam too. He wasn’t that child anymore. He resembled Earth more now, carrying the gold with him. There was nowhere in Straw City that one couldn’t see him, not with the shine and power he emitted.
Snitchtalons clung to his ballooning orb—their feathers, specifically—the static cling was tremendous as they fought to break free.
“No holding back now…” Trey’s eye naturally drifted in Swishy’s direction, far below on the surface. The ground was obscured but the boy’s soul shined through. Swishy radiated a calm scarecrow-shaped outline, powerfully blue. “Sorry for worrying you, little homie.”
A new word appeared and disappeared within Trey’s crackling aura. Each static pop produced an imperceptible, unreadable word. He honed his attention to those flash-in-the-pan moments, grasping for those fleeting moments. What was it? Show it to me!
But the meditation didn’t stop the impact of descension. A wall of air slammed against his body in blunt impacts. Pain, muscle strain, fatigue—nothing he couldn’t handle. He gritted his teeth and pressed onward.
Meanwhile, the snitchtalons changed tactics. They knew that challenging the [Zzt] orb was a foolish move, a wasteful one. The birds that’d managed to escape the shocks and static cling had plunged downward into the lower parts of the [Black Tempest]. They joined their kinfolk, thickening the storm, cultivating more oppressive shadows. They refused to allow Trey to go unscathed.
As the below weather darkened, Trey grew doubtful. Fear coolly oozed through him as the obsidian pooled and the wind cycle roared.
Die, die, die, was all the waiting birds said. The [Black Tempest] transformed, roiling, producing friction—heat. Steam rose from the snitchtalons. A tropical storm lay below, a hurricane, a stew of shadowed letters indicating their upgraded ability: “SNITCH GUILLOTINE”.
The bladed winds said it all, glazed glints bouncing off the gusts.
Trey fell through the sky, drawing closer toward spellbound murder. He didn’t want to touch or even graze it. Any contact with that was bad news. The scarecrows could take it—but a human body was far less flexible.
The blades flew towards him then, slicing in humongous, feather-shaped arcs. Trey angled and twisted from the projectiles, and for the unavoidable ones he empowered his [Zzt]. His muscles and soul strained as one, burdened by the crunch and pressure of the attack.
The flurry of blades continued, those arcs splintering into feathered shrapnel.
Trey kept his barrier fortified as dark shards crackled against his shield, wearing it in spots.
The snitchtalons merged with the shadows. The abundance of screeching mouths released guttural sounds, their physical stack of pain catching up with them.
But they spun and spun. The tenacity of togetherness, of siblinghood, was a frightening thing for Trey to behold. And he hated that he understood why they wanted him dead. Their gaping beaks opened toward him, the alleged bird-killer, their revenge served to them within offensive and disgusting static.
The birds were a hurricane once more, one with The Stormcellar spirit from whence they came. Their attack was rich with the pain of starvation, the pain of loss.
These feelings were carried in the gale, chilling Trey’s spine, slapping against his forehead, frosting his eyelashes.
The flock had found their magic through hurt. They knew no other way. Only desperation. And once they’d risen from the original Stormcellar, that desperation never left them. The desperation to never go back to their former suffering had turned black, hoarded within the deepest pits of their selves.
Through their hurricane spell, the birds began to lose themselves then—first their clothing, their accessories, the embezzled earrings and rings from their Clayhearth errands.
They next lost the purples in their feathers, a hue that only grew onto shadowclaws in their times of health and wellness.
And their hearts were next, collapsed by the accursed shadows that urged them to violence. MEANNESS, VENGEANCE, HURT, INJUSTICE formed a dark shell, squeezing upon their acorn-sized hearts, reducing them inside. The damage to their organs was significant. But their pain would live forever. The GRUDGE and HAUNTING intents would make sure of it. Even now, as barely alive birds, their spirits lifted from their bodies, pledging themselves to a darkness that’d long transcend their vessels.
Trey was horrified by the revelation of his [Soul] sight. They had the wrong guy. But it didn’t matter. The darkness had led them astray.
The flock’s beaks opened, waiting to receive Trey. And when their mouths opened, a giant shadow superimposed itself over the whorling abyss, the profile of a shadowclaw, the top and bottom of its beak sharpened into immaculate razors—the true form of SNITCH GUILLOTINE.
No amount of [Heart Strings] would change their minds. They’d paid the cost for power, their heartbeats reducing to flatlines. Rage puppeteered them and nothing more.
May you find peace, Trey inwardly prayed, charging up.
The dark blades sliced through his barrier. The shrapnel poked through and shot Trey in the calf, the shoulder, the arm.
But his hands were rich in bolts, dual treasures ready to be unleashed—
“[Wing Jump]!”
There Swishy was, sky-high, shooting above the treetops. Trey viewed the boy’s blue outline of a pumpkin head and frayed wheat ascending into the sky. Swishy aimed his stubby fingers at the hurricane’s base. “[Swish Darts],” the words slipped from his mouth in soulful blues. Ten fingers, ten bullets. Fingertip-shaped straw shot from Swishy’s hands in an unceasing barrage. He fired multiple rounds of fast-reloading wheat.
As Trey attacked the hurricane from the sky downward, Swishy completed the pincer by rising toward its bottom.
And the birds were blasted off course, wincing, screeching, whining. They slowed their flight, nursing wounds upon their wings and chests. Some searched for blackwheat in the tornado but reserves were low. A couple of birds even converged upon the same strand, shocked at the blackwheat scarcity, shocked at having to share.
“I used it all!” Swishy yelled as he fired more [Swish Darts], shooting dozens of birds. “No more for you!”
What’d he use it on? Trey blinked away the thought and focused on the thinning hurricane, red pairs of eyes disappearing one by one. The flocks’ attack was losing its bottom layers. Birds uncontrollably swerved through the air, unable to fly any longer. Some retreated to the trees. Others simply ceased flapping and crashed to the surface.
Swishy landed upon the low-flying, wounded birds, executing [Wing Jump] after [Wing Jump], using his enemies as opportune ladders.
“Go, Swishy, go!” Trey called, motivated for the finish.
Trey went through the progression in his head, aiming to get his enchantment right. [Zzt] came first, bolstering his shock-ridden aura. Z-A-P spun around his hands and wrist, a yellow serpent of current riding along his body.
A pop upon his fingertip, different, transformed. The new ability flashed, warming his pupils.
Die! The birds called in a disgusting, warbling voice.
“ZTORM!” Trey declared.
The five letters danced upon his fingertips, transforming unpredictably like actual weather. The letters mixed and matched, Z-M-O-R-T into M-R-Z-T-O into R-Z-T-O-M—but the bolts didn’t release from Trey. The electricity stayed inside him, converting his soul into additional charge. His human body became a generator, a turbine, a bolt tearing through the heavens.
His explosive aura plunged toward the bladed mouth of the [Snitch Guillotine] and its accompanying tempest.
It’s time, time for you to pay for your crimes against us! The birds cried.
Trey knew he couldn’t say anything to change their minds. He tore through the atmosphere as a bright beam, full speed—and full bolts—ahead.
Swishy [Wing Jump]’d from below, shooting [Swish Darts].
The birds cawed in wrath and agony, squinting from the brightness, the electro-shine, the bolt-driven meteoric doom Trey cast upon them.
The Z, the T, and the O-R-M arranged themselves into their proper order.
[Ztorm].
Trey crashed into the flock, erupting through every bird.