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Thescent of ozone, lightning. The air was hot and close, and I knew in that moment that it wasn’t that I wanted Mistral inside me when the storm broke, but that the storm would not come until he was inside me. He was the storm, as Abeloec had been the cup. Mistral was the heavy press of the air, and that neck-ruffling promise of lightning.
I raised up and shoved my body onto him. He actually stopped me with his hands on my hips. “No,” he said, “no, I will say when.”
I went back to pressing my upper body to the dry ground. I said, “Mistral, please, don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel it?”
“Storm,” he said, and his voice seemed lower than it had been, a growling roll, as if his voice held an echo of thunder in it.
I raised up, but not to try to control him. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see if there had been other changes besides the growl of thunder in his voice. He still glowed with power, but it was as if dark grey clouds had moved in over that glow, so that I saw only the shine of his power through the veil of clouds.
He stared down at me, and his eyes flashed bright, so bright that for a moment his face was half obscured by that white, white light. The brilliance faded, leaving afterimages in my vision. But without the lightning, his eyes weren’t the grey of rain clouds; they were black. That blackness that rolls across the sky at midday, and sends us all running for cover, because just by looking at the sky, you know that something dangerous is coming. Something that will drown you, burn you, concuss you with the power that is about to fall from the sky.
I shivered, gazing down my body at him, shivered, because I wondered…was I too mortal to survive this? Was his power going to burn along my flesh, and hurt me in ways that I did not want?
It was as if Abeloec heard me thinking. He spoke, in a low, soft voice that made me look at him. He was still kneeling in front of us, but it was as if his pale skin were fading into the growing dark, as if he, himself, were dissipating into the circle of power. His hair was shot through with lines of blue, red, and green, and those lines traced the circle that held us, and on into the dark to the men beyond. His eyes held sparks of all those colors, but it was as if his power grew. He began to be that power, and not be as much Abeloec. I could tell that if he were not careful, he would become only the lines of power that traced out into the dark.
“Earth and sky is a very old dance, Meredith,” he said. “Do not fear the power. It has waited too long for you to allow you to be harmed now.
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