Storm Bringer

Quite suddenly, she opened her eyes.

Outside, the night was peaceful, even pleasant, but clouds gathered in the corners of the sky and the temperature slipped a couple degrees down.

Her eyes were dry like chalk and dusty, and spiders had drawn their webs across her face.  Her muscles creaked as she used them.  Her skin cracked.  Her hair crackled.  She drew moisture from the air, whatever moisture there was to be had inside the mausoleum, and whatever she could pull in through the stone.

Outside, the cemetery grew quiet.  The clouds shifted.  The air trembled.  Things that were best left undisturbed hid a little more deeply.  One whippoorwill did cry out, as little can keep those things silent, but even its lonely cry seemed somehow out of place.  The bird fled.

She stretched her fingers and toes, stretched her neck left and right until the bones nearly snapped.  Then, she drew a breath.

It was a deep breath, perhaps even a breath of life, drawing sustenance from the air, and liquid, and hope.

Outside, the grass around her mausoleum turned brown and shriveled and died.  A crack appeared in the door which had, centuries before, been sealed.  It spread upwards from the ground, and smaller cracks moved to the sides as the main bit deepened into a fissure, a crevice, a hole.

She swung her legs off the side of the slab of marble that had served as her bed.  She touched the floor.  A miniscule, nearly invisible line of nighttime light penetrated the sealed mausoleum door, growing until it reached her bare feet.

She’d never felt so alive.

Outside, the wind whipped, trees swayed, and clouds obscured the moon.  A word had been etched onto her door, a name perhaps, in an ancient and unknown language, which at one time translated roughly as water or ocean or lake, but not as river, and not as sea.  When the crack reached the letters, the door shattered.  Stone shards fell away.

She stepped outside.  She took a second breath, deeper this time.  A tree broke; its top half plummeted and crushed a scattering of gravestones.  The clouds thickened and roiled, and passed miniature bolts of lightning between them.

Thunder followed.

She spread out her arms, she tilted her head, she closed her eyes, and she opened her mouth wide to the sky.

Rain came in a deluge.  And the first, thick jag of lightning to strike the earth exploded around her, highlighting the bones beneath her skin, her teeth, her closed eyes.  Her teeth sharpened, her skin became more like skin and less like parchment, her hair became lush, her breasts lifted, her stomach tightened, her fingernails grew to razor edges.

She felt alive.  She felt life.  The storm drenched and revived her.

From the trees, three men came in swiftly.  One carried an unused fishing net, which he threw over the naked storm goddess of old.  It bound her.  One carried a black-handled, silver-bladed athame, which he drove under her sternum and into her heart.  Her blood flowed drily.  One carried a tincture of mercury and herbs in a small glass vial, which he stuffed into her still open mouth, which he then closed.

Abruptly, the storm ended.  This great and powerful storm goddess of old, cried out, silently, unable to reopen her mouth, so that the ears of all three warrior monks bled, and their eyes bled, and the glass in her mouth shattered.  The liquid dripped down her throat, and coated her tongue, and penetrated her blood vessels.

Gently, the men carried her into her mausoleum.  They lay her on the slab of marble, though they left the net over her and the black handle of the dagger sticking up from her between her breasts.  They whispered prayers to other forgotten gods, and before dawn returned to reseal the tomb.