Flash of Lightning

2020/09/26

He was standing at the top tier of the viewing platform, leaning on the railing with a drink in his hand. Despite the festivities all around him, all the people talking and laughing and walking around with their own partners and circles of friends, he seemed strangely alone, as if there was something about him that pushed other people away. He looked up, with an expression that seemed to resemble wistfulness and pride, at the giant sphere in the sky and the spectacle that would happen there.

The sky above was dark, splattered with what could be stars, if you believed it, if you didn’t stop and think how they would be visible with the all the lights of the festival. Within the spheres, however, the sky transitioned between indigo to soft maroon and pink with bits of colour swirling within. Impressive the first few minutes, merely warm-up for the main event now, but still he kept glancing up at it and each time he did it was like his first time. A mix of emotion played in his face. Joy, amazement, pride, though this last one I could not tell why. He took a sip from his drink. Leaned back, as the main event was beginning.

Fireworks exploded within the sphere into a hundred different colours. The colour seemed to coalesce, fuse together and transform into shapes. Two dragons, one red and one blue, a barren land, and then—and I noticed he smiled at this one—a flash of white lightning followed by an abstract shape of another dragon. It was a story we’re all familiar with, of our world’s creation. The Sun and the Moon created a stagnant world, and then the Storm came bringing change and chances and possibilities, allowing life to grow.

Another fireworks was shot into the sphere and the images shifted again. The Sun became a sphere above the land, the Moon the same on the other side, and the Storm swirling within itself, becoming a phenomenon. Rivers and trees and people, washed away by rain, struck by flames. Another god only visible in the margins with black scales, Death. The story of how mankind caught a flash of lightning and discovered magic, how Storm danced above them and gave them a chance, a weapon, to fight nature’s capriciousness even as we fall, eventually, unfailingly, into the dark.

I had watched this story-spectacle countless times, first as the sketches that my wife had drawn, and then again and again in my own little sphere of colours, in my laboratory. It was a feat of alchemy and engineering, of changing the colour of the sky and telling a story with them, a discovery I had only made a year prior but had been in my mind for as long as I could remember, for as long as I could see the traces of light in the sky during storms, as if it was Storm himself was telling me what we could do.

To make this more than just a childhood dream was not an easy feat, of course. I tinkered with it relentlessly before I could show it to the Guild of Magi, and then we had to learn to work together to make it more than just a blotch of colours in my laboratory, and afterwards it took more than a little convincing to get the King to agree to this festival, this spectacle. Something to show followers of the Sun and the Moon that we’re worth paying attention to, that the disciples of Storm weren’t just troublemakers or a menace to their world of perfect order.

And I should be proud of this moment, I do, but all I could feel was worry. That it would not be enough. That we’d be an outcast forever, the way my own parents never looked me in the eye since I cast my first spell.

My anxieties got the best of me and I couldn’t make myself watch the culmination of my work, so instead, while the story played out, I looked at him, the lone man drinking at the top tier of the viewing platform. There was something strange about him, and not just the way he was alone while everyone was all together, the way he seemed content to be alone, or the strange electric air around him. Not just the way his expression seemed to change a hundred times as the story—one that all of us were told at childhood—progressed. It was, most of all, the way he smiled at my life’s work.

There was pride in it, I’m sure, though I could swear I’ve never seen him among the people who helped make this event come true. I wanted to be angry at that—who was he to feel that way, when it was us who had worked hard on it?—but something about him stopped me. There was something familiar about him, like a memory from my childhood or a dream, perhaps. After the spectacle was over, and people were cheering left and right, I excused myself from my wife and my peers and went over to him.

“Did you enjoy the show?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

He seemed taken aback, as if not expecting anyone to talk to him. This close to him I realised that I could not quite focus on his face. He seemed to shimmer like rain.

“I do. It was impressive. Thank you,” he said, and his voice was like a soft drizzle. “You know, I never expected that you will go to this height. When I gave your people the gift, I wasn’t really thinking what it would create.”

I barely caught what he was saying. There was something lulling about this voice, like the sound of rain at night as I curled up inside my blanket. “Pardon?”

“I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I just taught you how to conjure light, at first, and then to move the earth, to shape the air. Nothing much. I should have seen it coming. Left you with that ever-changing mind of yours for generations and you’d come up with all sort of things. Changing the colour of the sky. Maybe you’ll learn to fly soon. Reach up to Sun and Moon. Become gods yourself.”

He smiled, and then for the first time he turned to me and it was like looking at the eye of a storm. The rest of the world seemed to be swept away. “Do you remember me?”

I wanted to say no, but there really was something about him that I felt like had been a part of me forever.

“Though I was the first who brought storms into this world, not all storms are by my hands alone. Your first storm, however, was mine. The midwife that should have been by your mother could not go pass the pelting rain. Your father was clueless, but I helped him. You know of this, your legend told of how I strike whoever I please, and that night it was my pleasure to teach your father how to help bring you to this world.”

Something uncovered in my mind, but something else caught my attention. “My father doesn’t believe in Storm,” I said, spitefully. “He thought the world would be better off with only the Sun and Moon in power.” And without me being born in this world, the words I kept unsaid.

“A world without changes? But then you’d never would have made something like this!” He turned to the sphere in the sky, my life’s work that I had been so anxious about. “Your father can pretend he had never met me, but he still used my gift to bring you to this world, and in this world you have made this, and it is wonderful. Will you say that the world is better off without it?”

I bit my lip, swallowed the words in my mouth. Something in his words was like thunder rumbling in a distance.

“I do not care what you father think,” he continued, his voice rolling thunder, “only what he has done with it. Do you think I care where I strike? Only of what will happen afterwards. What the lightning leave behind. And what you do with it.”

He looked up again at the sky, the artificial constellations we had made by casting holes in the sky—a work of another engineer, a friend on mine—and the the sphere of moving light, the work of me and my wife and others who believed in trying, in bringing changes. Above all that Lady Moon still shone, oblivious that she was being upstaged.

He drank the last of his glass and then it seemed to disappear in a gust of wind. “I should go,” he said. “More places to strike. Perhaps more wonders your kind had made elsewhere. But I thank you, for making so much out of what little I gave you.”

“You gave me my life,” I said, the realisation damp and flimsy in my head. And then I remembered the gentle rain that helped me fall asleep since I was a child, I remembered the flashes of inspiration that helped me solve the riddles of my work, I remembered the coincidence that allowed me to meet the woman who became my wife. “You gave me more than that.”

“Perhaps, but all I gave was rain. You were the one who gathered them and used it to make a garden.” He turned and smiled at me, a passing storm, the pleasant smell of dirt after rain. “I will see you again, I’m sure.”

I blinked, and he was gone. The festivities returned, the happy buzzing of other people. I heard my wife calling from a distance, and I could tell she had found more people to congratulate me, more people who wanted to work with me, bring more things to life than just a splash of colours in the sky. A chance to show the world we belong here as much as anyone else. I was worried, always am, but I feel rain rumbling in a distance. I would do my best to do what I could, and that would be enough.