Chapter 46 The Storm Captain pt 2
My eyes fling open, eyelashes flinging wet tears as a scream erupts from my mouth. I sit up, panting, and look around. I’m in Thorne’s quarters…in my bed… It was just a nightmare.
“Do you always move so much in your sleep?” a girlish voice asks.
I squeak in surprise and fling my body away from the sound so suddenly that I fall off my bed in a tangle of sheets. I’m struggling, sobbing, and at the same time trying to defend myself from whoever is in my room.
“Your face is so animated…and you talk in your sleep. Is Elsie the dead princess?”
I look up, eyes widening, as Whist floats over me. The clouds holding her in the air are dark and gray, sparking with lightning. She leans over the edge, her long blonde braid falling over her shoulder. She uses it to tickle my nose.
“C-Captain W—” I stammer.
“Just Whist, please. You can call me captain when we’re being all official and formal. Nothing about this is formal.” She laughs, looking down at me in my silk shift that's inches away from revealing my chest.
With a flick of her wrist, wind surges under the sheets tangled around my legs and removes them. Grateful, and more than a little embarrassed, I scramble away and tuck my knees under my chin.
“When I was little, I struggled with nightmares too,” Whist tells me, sitting up on her cloud and letting her legs dangle and swing. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” I mutter, slowly pulling myself to my feet.
“Good, there’s no time, anyway. We have to go!” she declares as her cloud begins to float her out of my room. “It’s my turn to train you today, and there's no time to dawdle. You already slept in until noon!”
“What!” I gasp, running over to my window and flinging the curtains open.
Gray, dark light greats me, and thunder cracks over my head so loudly that I can feel it vibrate in my bones.
“It seemed like an important dream,” Whist says casually. “Besides, I had to wait for a genuine storm to start from my influence, otherwise this would never work.”
“What wouldn’t?” I ask, staring up at the sky in trepidation as lightning cracks.
“Harnessing a storm, silly! How else do you expect to learn?”
I swallow hard as Whist floats out of my room and Maggie scrambles in. She has blue clothes today, but these aren’t leather. They are slick and shiny, like silk as she helps me dress.
“How are these going to help me harness the storm?” I ask, confused.
“Oh, they don’t. They won’t even keep you warm. They will, however, repel water so you don't get sodden up there,” Maggie says with an encouraging smile.
“Up there?” I squeak, my voice failing me as the lighting cracks again.
“If you want to live, you have to hold on tighter than that!” Alric roars over the wind, pinning my hands to his abdomen with one hand while he holds the reins to a light blue alicorn in the other.
The cursed beast whinnies as if laughing and spins in mid-air, dangling us upside down so far above the fortress that it looks like a child's toy.
I scream shrilly, burying my head in Alric’s back as I shiver uncontrollably. “How are you so calm?” I wail, terror ripping through me as lightning strikes two feet away from me on my right. My ears ring and a metallic taste skitters over my tongue.
“I’ve already mastered my powers, remember?” Alric roars with laughter, encouraging the mentally insane animal we’re riding to go faster.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I ask, sheer terror, racing through my veins.
“If you don’t learn how to harness the storm…probably!” Alric turns slightly, his excited grin showing in earnest.
I stare at him in horrified silence, unbelieving that he could actually be having fun up here.
Pay attention to your surroundings, see what you are not seeing!
Oh, so my mind mentor is taking part in this lesson, huh? How nice. Where was he yesterday?
Yesterday you had to listen. Could you have heard the attacks coming if I was speaking to you at the same time?
Now is not the time to make obviously valid points, but he’s right. I sigh in frustration, closing my eyes as the damn beast between our legs tucks her wings in and dives for the ground.
Open your eyes and see, Anara!
“Fine!” I roar out loud, startling Alric.
He looks at me quizzically over his shoulder, and that’s when I see it.
Alric is dry.
He isn’t covered in rain like me, his red hair isn’t plastered to his face like my black tresses are. His clothes are flowing in the wind, dry as the moment he put them on this morning.
Meanwhile, my silken ‘water repellent’ garb is stuck to my soaked skin like it’s grown there, and my hair has long since come unbraided in the brutal wind and lashes like wet whips against my face. When it isn’t sticking to me everywhere.
You see, don’t you?
Hell yeah, I see it.
Alric has harnessed the wind to keep him dry.
As we dip and dive through the air, the storm lashing around us, he stays seated like we’re riding a gaited beast on smooth land instead of flying through the air as the monster defies the laws of gravity. The wind holds him to her bare back, where my legs are clenched so tightly to her belly that it must cause her discomfort. But still, I’m jostled around, rattling my bones as I try to stay astride.