Thundar Stormstrider's Arc

Chapter 2 of 10

Thundar walked into the dry calm, and the dry calm began eating him. His boots still moved, but the edges of his arms blurred into thin smoke. His cape, dark and frayed and stitched with crackling lightning, lifted at the hem and started to come apart thread by thread. He looked back once. His storm hung behind the seam like a painting, a tall swirling cloud full of frozen lightning, motionless, waiting for a master who could not return. His fingers thinned to gray air. He pressed them against his chest and felt less chest to press. Without the storm, he was only weight moving through air, and now even the weight was leaking out. Then he saw the shack. A small wooden building sat in the dry calm, low roof, stone chimney, one warm window. It did not belong to any storm. It had never been rained on. He understood, plainly, that if he reached it he would have a wall to lean against while he came apart, and if he did not reach it he would simply stop. He ran. The cape shredded behind him in long dark ribbons. He hit the shack's door with a shoulder that was barely a shoulder anymore, fell inside, and lay still on dry wood. He was not dissolved. He was not whole. He was, for the first time, somewhere.