Did I ever I tell you about the man made out of lighting? How about the woman made out of stars? People are more than just flesh and bone. We can be made out of stone in our resolve or fire in our passion. We are more than the sum of our accomplishments. We are everything that we’ve ever been, everything that we could be, and things beyond imagining that will someday be written in the annals of time proclaiming with proud voice that we were here and we were legend. I’m Al, by the way. I’m kind of a big deal.
I think that out of everything that a man can find value in, his memories are what he should treasure the most. Food spoils and things break. Gold can’t buy love and love dies over time, anyway. But your memories are with you from start to finish and every memory is a story. When time runs out and I stand toe to toe with the creators on the scales of fate, I hope my worth is measured in the stories I’ve lived and learned because if that is the only coin that carries over into the next life, than I’m the richest man you’ll ever see.
For money, though, I’ve always kinda just had what I needed to make it by but I’ve never been about seeking more than what meets my ends. My reason has always been to live and I’ve never needed more than that. If something calls to me that needs more than I have, get I what I need and go to it. After that, I don’t need money anymore and I get by again as I always have. I’m never rich but I’m also never hungry. I think that’s what’s wrong with people in the world. They all get too worried about being hungry to know when they actually are. Can’t yearn for something you’ve got more than enough of but at the same time, who’s going to starve now that you’ve got it all locked up with you?
There are those that think that hunger is literally the problem with everyone and everything. Not just any hunger, but The Hunger. They have this belief that there is a primordial force, old as the titans or even older, the opposite of the creators. The thing weeds its way into everything and breaks everything down so it can consume it. Must love people or something because it messes with them the most. They say all the worst things you can find in people were put there by The Hunger. The reason we want to lay everything in sight? The Hunger. The reason we want to grift good people out of all their hard earned cash? The Hunger. The reason we want to stab our friends and family in the back? The Hunger. Or maybe people are just assholes. I’m not a theologist.
I don’t think wanting to screw or make money makes you evil. I think it’s when you are willing to hurt people, make them cry, kill them, that’s when you know it’s got a hold of you. That’s when you know you care more about yourself than others and that’s what makes you evil. Not to be selfish cause we all need that little bit of selfishness for the sake of survival. But when you think that the only way you can live is if others die, then you’ve given up your heart for your head and the body needs both. Otherwise, you’re just an empty shell wasting the world’s time and oxygen.
That’s all I wanted out of life, was to live. Surviving is actually not that hard. All you gotta do is never risk anything ever. But damn is that boring. Don’t fall in love cause it’ll hurt your heart. Don’t stand up for anything cause it’ll get your into fights. Don’t spend your money anywhere cause then you won’t have it when you need it. Don’t set anything on fire cause the flames could burn you. Just sit in the cold and be grateful nothing is on fire. There’s no beauty in a world where nothing burns. I like the fire because I’d rather my life be short and brilliant than long and mundane. People in fancy suits with sticks in their asses can be mundane. No one writes a story about the man with the biggest stick in his ass. They write stories about men made out of fire and lighting.
Creators know I’d have given anything to be one of those men. I wanted to be made out of fire. I wanted to be a story told in every corner of Embre. I wanted to be a legend. Maybe I am, somewhere, but it all feels like I was just a watcher, a bystander meant to be there to witness it all rather than be the one to make a difference but I did once. I was something legendary once. But if I’ve got nothing else to give to this world, then at least you can count on me to tell you about the legends before me, what they did, and how you can be one too. So let’s talk about the man made out of lightning.
An age or two ago, I was a punk. Every boy at a certain time in their life growing up in a certain place gets the right to be a punk. And grown ups get to yell at them and tell them not to be stupid but you don’t get to start out smart. You gotta be stupid first. And then, if you survive being an idiot, you get to be smart. Or at least you stop being a stupid. Hopefully. I know a few that never grew out of that. But learning comes from more than just reading books about history, math, science, things other people discovered already. Sometimes, learning is being a punk and getting your ass handed to you for it.
Where does a punk get his ass handed to him? The streets. Specifically, the streets of Hotallis, the heart of Brace. Hotallis is crowded, humid, and full of people who are full of themselves. Every building was pressed tight together and built higher than it needs to be because you can’t fit that many people in one place horizontally so the logical step is to go vertical. That was the other thing about Hotallis and Brace itself; it didn’t have enough room to expand in any direction but up without bumping into your neighbors.
Brace had two neighbors. One of them was the kingdom of Sol, full of folks just a little too nice for their own good. Solites were the kind of people that you could stab in the heart and they’d apologize for getting blood on your clean knife. Solites were the kind of people that would get ticks so the little critters had a home. Solites were the kind of people that would throw themselves down a hole just because you asked how deep it was. Brace’s other neighbor was a giant mountain range; Bahemos Rest.
That’s a fun tale on it’s own. Bahemos is the Titan of the Land. And Bahemos was in love with Delunari, the Titan of the Sea. The land loved the sea and the sea loved the land. But one day, Kahlzeek, Titan of the Wind, made the land in the north cold. Blizzard after blizzard made North Embre nearly impossible to all but the toughest of the tough to endure. Bahemos could endure but Delunari hated the cold. So the Titan of the Sea moved herself to the south where it was warm. Bahemos didn’t want to be alone so he moved as well. The thing is, Bahemos’ preferred form was that of a massive mountain so when he moved, he moved as a massive mountain, walking across the land. Much of himself fell away while he searched for where Delunari went, making the ranges we see know. Bahemos’ rest is where he finally found Delunari and settled down, next to the sea, to be with his love again.
So, caught between a rock and a not-so-hard place, Brace began prodding the softies to see what they could get away with, threatening to invade. Tensions grew and soon it became apparent that Brace had every intention of taking the Sol kingdom for their own. The Queen of Sol, with that big heart of hers, tried to use Sol tactics to defuse the temper of King Ashel of Brace. She held conferences, gatherings, negotiations after negotiations with King Ashel and King Heirel of Jellete to try and give them something to satisfy Brace. She wasn’t that spineless though and she was more clever than King Ashel thought. That’s why she invited King Heirel to the negotiations. Jellete was Sol’s other neighbor and they liked having the space between them and Brace. They liked having Sol as an ally. But Jellet would only go so far for Sol. Jellete didn’t want a war on the edge of Southern Embre and when Brace was deadest on conquering Sol, nothing Sol could offer would convince Jellete to help.
I hardly knew anything about it at the time. At the time, I was just a punk. There are two things that make you a punk. One of them is when you've been dealt a bad hand, got a lot of anger inside you, and no one stops you from taking that anger out on everything and everyone around you. You turn into a punk cause no one ever told you it was okay, that life doesn't suck all the time, that it's gonna get better but it won't get better if you don't treat people right and let them treat you right in turn. No one is going to help out a punk if he is dead set on being a punk without a reason not to be. As they say, attention is attention and even f it's the wrong kind of attention, at least someone is paying it to someone who didn't get anything but the rough end of the life-stick growing up. That's one kind of punk.
The kind of punk I was had everything to do with one thing in particular; girls. Creators know I did the dumbest stuff for the dumbest ideas about what it took to impress girls. Well, okay, it was guys too because you can achieve more when you got friends willing to do the stupid stuff with you. So, what started as one punk trying to make a pretty girl make a pretty smile turned into a group of punks trying to make all the girls everywhere smile forever. If you're going to dream stupid dreams, dream big. And that's what got me in trouble.
See, there was this incident in
Gerret's thought process was simple. First, girls have a weakness for someone in uniform. Second, if you can fake being someone in uniform just by getting your hands on a uniform. Third, in order to reduce the chances of getting caught impersonating someone in uniform, find a large group of them and blend in. So naturally, we started lying to girls saying we were military and that we were on leave. And when they'd call our bullshit, we'd say "look for us in the parade." After that, we just had to steal uniforms, sneak into the parade, be seen by those girls, and then sneak back out and meet up with those girls and it was just that easy. What could go wrong?
Spare uniforms don't just grow on trees especially when anyone who would loan you one has already been threatened with punishment for letting anyone else wear it and also, we didn't actually know anyone in the military so it's not like we had a connection to rely on. We just had to bother as many as possible until one of them was just shady enough to rent us some uniforms. We only needed four, myself, Gerret, Ramas, and Micks. Just four punks looking to play pretend to impress some girls. Seemed harmless enough to me.
Not everyone saw it as boyishly quirky. We got the uniforms for almost all our coin and we found a way to sneak into the parade. There was an uneven line towards the end where four could fit in and follow without raising too much suspicion. The problem was that we were bad at marching. It's not something you can just eyeball and figure out as you go. We thought it was a piece of cake. Just walk in a straight line, right? We lacked order, conformity, and discipline. We were punks. No uniform was going to change that.
So not only did we stick out like sore thumbs, but we some officers had already heard about us asking anyone and everyone if we could borrow their spare uniforms to disguise ourselves as soldiers and sneak into the parade. We jumped in for all of a minute or two before we were promptly yanked back out. Men a hell of a lot bigger and a hell of a lot meaner than we could ever hope to be had us on our asses, pulled away so as not to make a scene, and we got the beatings of a lifetime. But that wasn't enough. At the point, we were criminals caught red handed. We ended up in cells and after that, we faced a trial. Not a regular trial. A military trial despite not being military. But we weren't non-military for long. Our sentence wasn't prison or payment or shoveling garbage out of the gutters or cracking rocks in a quarry. Nothing traditional at all. We were drafted.
I thought that was the end of my life but it turns out military life is not that hard. That or I just took to it like a duck to water because I expected the punk in me was going to get me neck deep in trouble. The thing is, some officers have a sense of humor, some punishments are durable, and above all, if you just do what you're asked, you don't generally catch anything for it. Micks wasn't a fan of all the "yessirs" but I figured it was a price. Everything cost something. That's a lesson from the streets. The price we paid was saying "yessir" and running stupid drills until our brains bled as much as our feet but what that price paid for was meals we didn't have to spend coin on, beds we didn't have to find where no one bothered to go, and people like us who knew where we came from and were just like us before they put on the uniform too.
I got good, too. I learned a lot of things I wouldn't have doing stupid stuff for girls. It's more than just keep your mouth shut and do as your told. Well it is that but there's a reason to it. What makes defines a kid as a punk is being too young to know anything and thinking you know everything. Compound that with the inability to know when to stay your hand and keep your mouth shut, you got the perfect recipe for a long life in a cell. Military life taught me when to hold my tongue and when to stay my hand. They called it stuff like "baring and discipline" and "strategic mentality" which are complicated ways to say "use your head, idiot."
Captain Fiscus was a man with a mile long patience and plenty of experience with punks. He was also a hardass and that's what I loved about him. His philosophy was "it takes more time to do it over and over again than to slow yourself down and do it right the first time." There was a lot to respect about that. And that was wisdom in its own right because if you're not going to work hard to get what you want, do you really want it? Maybe your goal isn't to get something you want but to get everything you want the easy way. And that's not a dream for anything great. That's a dream to be lazy. Laziness is, by far, the worst dream I've ever heard of. No one writes stories about the laziest man to ever live unless they're trying to make a point about how ridiculous it is to be lazy.
Captain Fiscus taught me something else. Not everything nor everyone is how they appear to be. Yeah, he was a hardass but what made him hard? What made him want to act like such a heartless man with no patience for cutting corners? It was what happened to the people who cut corners. Micks would cut corners and that was what got him in a medic's tent more often than not. Half our scouting exercises ended with Micks getting hauled back because he thought he could do something faster and easier. Why set up a line to climb a tree when you could just start jumping at branches until you got to the top? Why sneak up on a bear when you can just run at it at full speed and hope your sword is faster than the massive paw it was swinging your way for the audacity of stepping into its territory? Because it takes a lot of effort and pain to be lazy, that's why. And that's how Micks ended up losing a leg.
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It was after we had become infantry, sword swinging, shield holding, soldiers of the mighty Kingdom of Brace guarding the great forests of Rellovar and protecting the people from the edge of Sol to the backs of Behemos Rest. We were champions of honor and everything we did was for the glory of Brace. Every step, every struggle, every shit. We were proud soldiers that had a lot to be proud of and pride goes right to the head. And how are you going to be able to fight when your head is too fat to fit your helmet? You can't see danger when it's miles below you cause your mind's up in the clouds with fantasies of what it means to be a "protector of the Kingdom". You think it can't hurt you because it's so far beneath you but it turns out you're still on the ground. You're just looking straight up and think you're sky high. Life will teach you where you're at in the most inconvenient ways.
Micks put his head too high once and got knocked on his ass. See, we had been sent into the Sol Kingdom to scout the edges, see where it was least protected. We'd seen a number of soldiers run pratol on the border before but some places they didn't like to go. They didn't like to go to some of the villages on the edge and we thought that was because they didn't want to disturb them or maybe they were not fans of the military so they'd treat them rough whenever they showed up. Maybe, and this was the key reason we were there in the first place, they wanted to defect to Brace but were too poor to leave Sol. And we couldn't blame them at the time. Brace was a magnificent place with the best beer and bread and people and Sol was a bunch of weaklings who got the luck of being settled in the right place at the right time before anyone else could swoop in and take that sweet spot from them. They just begged to be conquered.
So we trudged into the Sol kingdom like we already owned it, me, Captain Fiscus, Micks, Gerret, and Rulf. Gerret suggested we take to the pub first and none of us could argue with his logic. Captain warned us not to get sauced so much it kills out senses but Rulf was sure she could drink herself silly and still be able to toss some soft, Sol soldiers all the way back to Hope. The way she could drink Micks under the table, we believed her.
All lined up in a row, we sat at the bar and waited for some sweetie to come by with blonde hair all caught up in neat tails to flirt and serve us drinks with a honey-dipped smile on her bright, copper face. We got Jorg instead. Jorg was a monster of a man in a leather apron like any minute he was about to put a hammer through the forehead of a cow. No hair, no smile, no sense of humor. The man's scowl could scare off chickens from two Kingdoms away. When he asked what we wanted, I swear I could hear Gerret mutter "a different mission" under his breath.
Fiscus had the bravery for all of us, calling for three ales and a lemon water. The lemon water was for me. Captain had a sense of humor. It wasn't the most refined sense of humor, but he knew how to poke fun of you, say, accidentally let it slip that'd you rather be drinking lemon water than beer. Let that slip and guess what he'll order you at literally every place to go to? Lemon water
Jorg said "no." The captain asked what he meant by "no" and Jorg explained that they didn't serve Brace because they didn't have the brains to pay for their drinks, let alone tip. I guess a few bad apples spoiled the bunch a while back because this pub didn't plan on catering to anyone from our fair country. Micks and I wanted to try and take him, already working out how to get the drop on him while Gerret and Rulf worked out a way to convince him we were worth the service when the captain decided to just find another pub. The problem was Jorg wasn't going to let us just leave. No one in that pub was going to let us just leave.
It was obvious why the military didn't come to this town. We heard it in the passing of metal over taught leather. Swords, knives, clubs, and I think I saw one of those brand new pistols from the Mainland; all of them came into play and not a single one was in our hands but you you can be sure that they were all pointed at us. The Captain wanted us to leave but we weren't given the option. That's a pretty hardened heart that would kill a man for being on the wrong side of the fence. We were stuck in a room full of them.
Bold men are the first to action half the time. The other half the time, it's the smart ones. Jorg didn't look like he was bold or smart, just big and intimidating. Captain Fiscus was a smart man. Micks was bold. That boldness was like a bolt of electricity coursing through his veins, running to the tips of his fingers and driving him to extend out and curl around the hilt of his sword and in the same motion, pull it free from his hip and slash at Jorg's neck. Fast and strong, he hacked at Jorg. One hack isn't enough. It buried into the thick of his neck and stuck there. Micks seemed surprised. The woman with an axe next to him, less so. One downward swing and off went half of Micks's arm. Oh, the screaming. Oh, the blood. He was useless after that.
We still had fight in us. With Jorg eventually dropped from a gaping wound in his neck and too much red pumping out that gash, the rest was easier to fight off. Captain insisted we don't kill our way out. I agreed. Gerret wanted thought it was the only way out while Rulf was stuck hauling the crying pile of brainlessness that was Micks. When we got out the door to the sound of weapons clashing, we got a chance to make a real run. Only one or two pursued us. The rest were trying to keep Jorg alive. It was a pointless effort but we would have done the same, even for Micks. Micks survived. Gerret helped Rulf to keep him running until we found refuge back on our side of the border. Micks got treated but minus his best arm, he was no use to the Brace military. He was sent home, relieved of his duty, and I think that might have been a blessing because he got a chance at a happy life. The rest of us didn't.
It was in the same year, towards the end of the summer season, that I met the Man Made of Lightning. Sol had lost its last bargaining chip to keep Jellette involved and that gave Brace full permission to take what it had been waiting for since it first rest its eyes on that sweet sapphire at the edge of the AlBlu Sea. No one could shut up about it.Every corner of every town was talking about the push to invade Sol. We wouldn't be taking cities and towns on the slow march to conquer. Not Brace. We were mighty.We didn't need a long campaign to take a kingdom with the defenses of an anthill. We crushed in one swoop. Our target was the crown city of Hope, where the throne rested. They sent ten thousand of us, from grunts like us to mounted knights to riflemen. We weren't just going to conquer; we were going to make a show of it.
That was the point of such a vulgar display of force. It was a spectacle. We weren't just going to bring them to their knees. We were going to put a hell into their backs and put their faces in the mud and grind them down and talk about what big men we are that we turned a nearly defenseless kingdom and its queen into dust cause we wanted to be a little bit closer to the sea. Damn, we were arrogant but I believed all the propaganda. I had to. What was the other option? Run around telling everyone I know and love are the citizens of a rotten nation with rotten goals to be petty tyrants and murders of a people that did nothing to anyone? I was just a punk. Punks don't overthrow their government and they don't run around trying to expose their lies. They enlist and thank the military for giving them the opportunity to give their life meaning and direction even if that direction was into a surprise slaughter.
By all knowledge, we should have been bashing down the gates and pulling up stools in their bars before sunset but something stopped us on that open field before the high walls of the royal city. With their back to the water, we could have come that way, made it a naval fight, but the King of Brace wanted show so we met them at the gate and I was shoulder to armored shoulder with the other enlisted punks while the commander, some steel-rod-in-the-rectum general named Howe, called from across the way to drop their swords and let us trounce through their streets. The military we faced wasn't about to drop their swords. They were not the Sol military we came to fight.
Strangers from a strange place, there was no reason why they should have been there in the first place. Sol wasn't their kingdom. Sol was the land of soft people but what stood between us and those soft people were hardened warriors and their swords were drawn towards us. Howe told them to surrender. A man, big and bronze like a statue come to life with stark blonde hair down his back and a sword the size of a sawfish told us to come and make them. Then he said they'd widow our spouses and orphan our children. That was the commander's chance to motivate us, assure us we were ten thousand and they were about a hundred. It was the chance for him to tell us we could destroy them, we were better, we were stronger, we were faster, we were Brace. He didn't. He just yelled "charge!"
Damn if we didn't charge. We made our own fire and we burned through the field to meet the standing army. I don't know what we expected to come of it. The clash of swords and the sickening crunch of flesh and muscle and bone giving way to steel cleaving its way through. And screams, lots of screams. They made a horrid symphony of the battlefield and I expected a lot more shouting than screaming but death was conducting this mad opera and I had no say on the music we played. I wish this wasn't my first big battle but it had one upside. After this, it became the standard for all nightmares. Anything that wanted to call itself hell had to do worse than this.
It's always chaos. Every fight is a test of the heart and the mind. You can't just know what to do or how to react. It's got to be instant. You don't just have to think of a way to survive and come out on top. You got to feel it at the exact time. Anywhere else, your heart tells your mind what to do or your mind tells your heart. In battle, they have to think as one or you're gonna lose them both. In madness this thick with blood and brutality, a single false step or inch of hesitation would see you losing everything.
A sword went over my head. Another missed my midsection. I swung. I sliced. I stabbed and parried. I ducked and dodged. Nothing I did had any effect. Not a hit. Not even a nick. We weren't fighting the Sol Army. I doubt we were even fighting anything human. There was a pain in my arm. Someone got a piece of it. Some man without armor above his waist. Someone who was better than me.
There was so much yelling and screaming, I was surprised any sounds managed to stand out. Maybe it's because with all this carnage, I was already desperate for something familiar. This was my first battle and I was ready to hear my friends call my name, but not the way they called it. "Al!" Rulf would cry out. She called a second time, but it was ruined, made a gurgle in her throat with all the blood pumping out of it, spurting from the sword-shaped hole in it. The monsters. The butchers. They stabbed her right in the neck. We couldn't land a glancing blow on any of them and they were able to stab my friend in her neck.
I looked for Gerret. I had to find him before he got run through or sliced open. I had to find him before he was butchered. We can't stay here. This was stupid. That's why the commander had no words for us. There was no point in this battle. We deserved the slaughter we were experiencing because we were the bad guys. We were going to hurt a lot of people because we wanted what they had. No wonder we were dying. The bad guys never win.
Gerret found me. I heard him yelling my name in one ear while someone else was yelling "RAH!" in my other. A hard shove and I was thrown to the ground, pinned down by something heavy and hard. I felt something sharp and sudden. My armor was shit. My sword was lost when I was thrown to the ground. Never mind a shield. Creators know how much it hurt. It was hot and made every nerve in my body scream starting from my stomach. I couldn't concentrate on anything else. Not the battle still going on around me. Not the body on top of me.
The blood pooled on my belly. It was warm, wet, sickeningly sticky. The unmistakable scent of copper flooded my nostrils. I got enough sense to grab the shoulders of the guy on top of me. I was gonna shove him off me. Then I saw his face. It was Gerret. Gerret was dead. The sword that pierced my stomach had run him completely through. I got only the end. He got the whole thing. I can't say how long the battle itself lasted but my fight was over then. From then on, I was just a witness.
From beneath Gerret, I could bodies piled across the battlefield. They must have sent a thousand of us to fight a hundred and ten to one, we lost. Even if we turned it around, we'd feel it here and back home. Spouses had become widows. Children had become orphans. I learned something about promises that day.
The din had died down for the moment. Our vulgar display of force had become an embarrassing display of arrogance. And the foolishness just kept coming. We had idiocy to spare. The general demanded surrender again. On what conditions? That he'd stop sending in soldiers to be mutilated in their meat grinder of a defense? He sent in a thousand soldiers and they lost to a hundred without a single enemy falling. On what assumption did these demons have to surrender? I tried to ask Gerret but he had no answer. Probably for the best. I wasn't proud of it, but if I stayed under him and quiet, I would live. Shamefully, I remained still, watching and hoping against all odds I'd go unnoticed.
Naturally, they refused. The tall man with the big sword even laughed at the idea. With a stupid smile on his stupid face, that general of ours told the riflemen to line up and shoot them where they stood. If you're close enough to your enemy you shout at them, they can probably hear you shout orders to your own army. I found out where the Sol Army was. The inhuman army shrank back behind barricades and what replaced them was a blanket of arrows, stretching from one horizon to the next. I was only glad they aimed past the already dead. Those rifles, they take too long to get ready. None of them got a shot off. The arrows just kept coming, raining from the sky like a storm of death. I think a few soldiers got shields up to protect a rifleman or two for a hot second, and then the arrows just shredded through the shield, armor, skin, and bone.
Death was growing fat off of the feast we gave her that day. We still had three quarters of our army left. Would the general turn around, sacrifice pride to save thousands of lives? Nope. General Idiot had the brilliant strategy of "overwhelm them with numbers" and when the arrows stopped, it was "Charge!" again only this time, everyone was sent in. The sky grew dark again. Only this time, it was actual rain. It wasn't enough to wash away all the blood, though. It wasn't enough to wash away the death.
I was stupid too because, lying on by back in a puddle of mixed blood buried under the body of my dear friend, I thought we had a chance at winning. That thought alone was laughable for some many reasons, least of which being the word “winning” like this was all a game of king of the hill and we just had to overwhelm them with numbers to take the prize. Yeah, me under a corpse and being half a corpse myself thought there was any way we could survive this, let alone come out on top.
I heard another command from General Idiot. “Take their commander! Cut off the head and the body dies!” Kill the big guy? Kill the guy with a sword as tall as a man? If it hadn’t already been invented and I wasn’t playing dead, I would have loved to coin the phrase “easier said than done” right then and there. But they tried. They practically buried the man under Brace soldiers, swarming him like ants trying to take down an angry badger. His warriors peeled away to try and hack off the mob that overtook him but we had too many. I’m sure that gave us hope for a minute. Then the sky split in two.
Lightning arced its way down, chasing a wicked trail to the ground and blasting through bodies and striking the center of the mob. Parts of people and chunks of the battlefield exploded from the epicenter. Lightning struck the man and he didn’t fall. He rose. He rose a new man. He was a man of unstoppable force, of indescribable power, of terror and awe that inspired death to move with great fervor. He was a man made of lightning.
My every waking thought was of what that man would do to me if I found me still alive. Thankfully, he never did find me, but the beastial way he tore through the legions of Brace turned minutes into terrified hours; days even. An eternity passed as I lay there, watching this man with coils of electricity crack from his skin move about like a blur and cleave men like paper. General Idiot was the first to go. With how easily his head rolled from his body by the force of a single slice, I was certain it truly was empty. The thud is made on the ground made my stomach queasy and I almost gave myself away along with the contents of my breakfast.
I didn't know what he was fighting for. For the queen? Why? He was already a god of violence, a king in his own right. The warrior king. And the warrior king made his throne of heads hewed from their shoulders and so much fucking blood. And that thing about hours? That's about how long I spent under Gerret's body before I was sure I was safe to move. They were carting us off, or the parts left, by the time I snuck away. After that, it was a long battle just to walk back to Brace. I didn't take that walk. I didn't go back to Brace. I went to someplace closer. I went to the sea, to the Alblu, and I asked the Creators themselves how a man becomes made of lightning.
Fate answered me with another question. It asked, "why be a man made of lightning, when you can be made of so much more?"