I.

The sky roared with unbridled rage, lightning streaking and shattering the pitch-black sky. Acidic rain burning through his cloak, the burning of his raw skin was the only thing keeping his tortured mind awake.

“How long has it been, this bleak wasteland with no place to hide from the sky, wandering for years.”

Behind him the horizon grew, turning flat as he walked for days, the burnt jungle up ahead. Once trees had stood tall here, but the rains had taken away their majesty, eaten everything but forsaken stumps. Standing like tombstones, I walked through a graveyard with unmarked tombs and unknown dead heroes and cowards lying below.

And with all this, the walled city of Milagre was right in the middle. The ramparts higher than any persons hope that may ever live under these evil skies.

They saw me trudging through the mud towards the gates, two of the night guards between me and some refuge from the burning rain. One was an ape of a man and a weak looking mouse behind him still hiding in the shadows of the wall. The ape was yelling something and pulled out his shock stick but was drowned out by the murderous thunder.

Ironic that the lightning and static in the skies went into the sticks that cackled and sparked in his power hungry hands, the ape approached me as his prey. They burned and there were people with plenty of scars from their wrath.

I did not slow my approach to the gates, he stepped out into the raining, burning fire. Yes, let him also feel some of the agony of a wanderer. Even though he wore the scale cloak and helm, that which only the rich could afford. I with my head bowed, hidden beneath my cowl.

“The gates are closed, get out of here.”

So the ape can talk.

“Did you hear me? No one in, no one out when the storms come.”

They are all trapped in their own private cages.

“Leave now, I’ll drop you without a thought.”

His venom voice still an empty threat, an empty man. Was the mouse hiding from the rain empty too as the hollow cretin’s features lighted from the sparks of his stick?

“You nomads don’t belong behind gates, go back to the rains and die.”

I have been dying for years. Let him spend a day under a ragged leather cloak, skin scorched and raw from holes burned through the back.

“The walls and the roofs are for the forgotten, not drifter trash.”

Ah, the forgotten ones, the refugees of this ravaged world.

“You want shelter go crawl in a hole and die.”

I kept my head bowed beneath my cowl, not uttering a word to this waste of a man.

“Now leave, I won’t tell you again.”

“That’s right, you won’t,” I said raising my head, staring through him with empty sockets. The last thing he saw perhaps a spark deep within the dark eyeless sockets, the last thing he heard the thunder as lightning shot from the black angry sky.

His smoky form held its shape for a few seconds before the strong gusts of wind blew and he was gone. A billow of charred ash and he was gone. The mouse was two steps from the alarm bell before I sent light, burning blinding light and thunder from the skies reducing the rodent to a pile of dust. The spark in my eyes flared for a moment. The wind seemed to approve of this sacrifice, slowing its roar, gently blowing the dust to the corners of the world.

I pushed aside the side door and slipped into Milagre, a fitting welcome to a village on the edge of Hell.

II.

It had been a while since I had a roof over my head, but I liked to travel from town to town. Heat beat down on me from twin suns. There was no night in this place, only a dessert in most of the globe burned by the distant celestial fires.

I had been told that up north, where the suns burned less, plants grew strong. Trees reached for the sky and towns flourished. I was never one for horses, I liked to walk. It would take much longer but I liked the ground beneath my feet, the sense of my own travels. So I started my long trek under the blazing blue sky. It will be nice to see trees above me to give me shade.

I had been walking for a few weeks when I started to hear the thunder. A roar like the very planet was angry, and it grew, rage was building. I do not know what was overtaking me but I knew I had to keep going north, I had to keep walking. It felt like darkness was taking over the core of this world, so I kept going.

The thunder had not stopped for days, and I was crossing the mountains when I saw it. I had heard some birds chirping for a few days and they all stopped at once, it was as if they already knew something was coming for them. I looked behind me and saw what looked like fog, a heavy fog in this scorching day rolling across the plains below me. It was going in all directions, it was coming for me. It started up the mountain, boiling steam climbing higher and higher until it overtook the silent birds and swallowed me. I could not see a thing, my hand barely a silhouette against the fog.

It started getting hotter, hotter than I had ever felt before, more than the deserts that I had wandered in my life. Soon I felt as if I could not stand the heat, but I saw the fog starting the clear, the gray nothingness was growing orange and red. In an instant more it became clear, the fog melting away. Though I saw what followed the fog, what was driving it on, a wall of flame engulfing everything as it raced up the hills.

I saw trees explode as fire swept across them, heard brief screams from animals hiding in the brush, and staring at a wall of fire, inescapable. I had seconds, I was near the peak, I had a chance to get over, I did not make it. Searing pain across me, a burning beyond comprehension as my mind tried to wrap itself around a new focus of pain.

As skin exposed to the flame was charred and burned, I felt my eyes melted out from their sockets and I only wished one thing.

I wished that I was afraid.

III.

“So did you hear, two of the night guards were killed last night,” said one man leaning over the bar, his blackened face from working in the mines.

“One of the big guys, but I heard that the Governor’s son was out there last night too. He’s put out an order for a manhunt, and anyone that gets the guy that catches him gets rations for a year,” the other a half drunk from bad liquor and the possibility of eating real food for a year.

“Word is going around that it was one of them elementals. The ones that survived the blast and got all messed up from the chemicals and radiation in the air. They only found dog tags.”

“I don’t know man, that’s all just rumors. People that can control water and fire and all that stuff, sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.”

I listened from the corner of the bar, in the shadows at my own secluded table, drinking some sort of alcohol. It burned and tasted foul but took some of the pain off my mind. There were not that many people in the bar, just an old man about to pass out at another table and the two discussing my exploits at the bar. Better to not attract any attention, I was just a blind man having a drink. I would go look for a place to stay after.

Another man walked into the bar from out in the storms, a ragged looking man, took a look my way for a moment but turned back to the bar and went to get a drink from the old bartender, his shaky hands would struggle to pour a shot. I did not like how he looked at me but was ignoring me now so I went back to my drink.

I saw his reflection in my amber drink a second before I got a fist across my face knocking me to the ground. Burly hands grabbed me around the neck pulling me up off the ground, off my feet hanging in the air as he began to strangle me.

“Enjoy killing people boy? Killed the Governor’s son and thought you could hide in his city, I’m gonna make you suffer.”

Still strangling me with one, he placed a hand over my face and I felt a burning, I smelled searing flesh. Elemental, he was going to burn me to death.

I kicked wildly, I swung my fists and got a hit right in his throat and he dropped his rag doll to the ground. I was possessed by the need to escape. I crashed through the window beside me, small shards of glass in my arms as I picked myself off the ground. Make for the gates, get to the forest. The rains had started, I left my cloak in the bar, but I did not feel the burning as I ran to the gates of Milagre. I heard the alarm bells but it was too late as I turned the corner and saw the gates, found the door I had entered triumphantly hours ago, I now exited as I fled for my life.

I ran past a small burnt patch in the clearing past the gates, all that was left of the brute that had messed with a nomad and I began to feel an intense pain, as if the ashes of the dead man were reaching out in revenge to torture me. I just have to make it to the forest I thought, no one can follow me there, I can disappear.

I started to feel like I might not make it though, the burning storm, my cloak lied on the table and I felt every part of me was in pain. I never felt the rains like this, I had to make it to the forest, to find somewhere to hide. My sight started to blur, ground and sky became one and I tried to stumble on. Falling into the mud it was harder to get up each time the pain became so excruciating.

One last fall and I could no longer get up, I was a few steps from the trees but I would not reach them, my hands stretched out and falling short. The burning of body and my mind was complete, I was dying. My hands were no longer stretched out for the trees, I was back in the bar, yearning for freedom, my arms flailing wildly for anything as I was burning in his hands.

I died a burnt cinder hanging from his hands under black skies.