Thundar Stormstrider's Arc

Chapter 3 of 10

Thundar lay on the dry wood and watched his hand thin into gray smoke. The shack held him, but it could not hold him together. His tattered cloak crackled weakly, the lightning in its threads sputtering out like wet matches. On the floor beside him, a piece of his own bolt had fallen loose — one half still glowing, the other half dark and dead as stone. He stared at the dead half. That was what he was becoming. Weight without sound. He pressed his dissolving palm against the cold floor and felt the planks hum. Not wood. Glass. He pushed himself up and saw it through the back wall of the shack: a tall glass tower rising from the dry calm, a small storm spinning forever inside it. Thundar dragged himself across the floor. The door at the tower's base opened at his touch. Inside, the trapped storm pulled at him, recognized him, and the smoke at his edges slowed. He stepped onto the platform. The swirling cloud wrapped his arms, stitched his chest back into shape, and gave him a borrowed voice of thunder. He was whole again. But this storm was not his. It belonged to the tower, and the tower would not let him leave with it. Thundar stood inside the glass and understood: he had traded dissolving for being kept.