The Shifter World

City of Shatzu, Té Shezekia

The second cataclysm in world history had involved the man they called Storm.

Children came up with the name first; they created a haunting song about him. The song was forbidden after the government received complaints from parents about the gore their children were singing about; any child caught singing that nursery rhyme was subject to six lashes across the back. The Bloom wanted everyone to forget that song, dubbed the "torture-chant" by parents and elders across every continent.

But everyone remembered it. It lingered on minds the way an acidic aftertaste stays on the tongue. It went like this:

Diamonds and diseases catch the breezes

A big star sneezes as it teases

A storm touched down

Storm split grounds

And now everyone is dead.

During the second cataclysm in world history, Storm made the sky rain diamonds. The gems slashed people's throats. The same man that had made it rain diamonds created a wind stuffed with a disease. The disease made people sing as they tried to kill each other.

People forgot the man's real name and called him Storm because he could split grounds apart with lightning and create hurricanes so vast they could wipe out an entire coastline.

Then the Bloom caught him and the cataclysm was over. The government gave him a private execution and everyone celebrated. The world went back to rebuilding, living. The war was over. Everything would be okay.

Actually, the government didn't kill him.

Storm swung himself onto a gabled roof at the mercy of a Shezekian setting sun. Shezekian sunsets were different than most sunsets seen around the world...Shezekian sunsets were a dark, deep orange that pressed a suffocating haze across the city. For the two and a half hours this heavy sunset plagued Té Shezekia, everything became twenty degrees hotter. Windows opened, vests and outer shirts were shed, and marketplaces got smelly with sweat and rotten food fast. Because Storm's beasts had not yet visited this portion of the nation, the sunset covered the city in all its glory.

Shatzu, one of the busiest trade cities in the world, was smelly, colorful, and loud. It was a tear-shaped city at the westernmost edge of the continent, polluted with smoke from giant factories and waste seeping from overflowing landfills. Crooked little alleyways corkscrewed their way through the town square; street vendors and shops moved with the goings-on of life. Storm could see it all from his perch at the edge of the roof: people beating each other to a pulp in alleys curtained by the smothering orange fog, vendors giving out carved trinkets and foreign delicacies on the streets, shop doors clanging shut, windows screeching open, street performers on stilts decked out in lavish costumes...all this color gave Storm a slight headache, so he decided to rid the city of that first.

He flicked his eyes to the sky and magic bowed; the current of electrons he felt dancing around him quivered, and suddenly clouds were forming, black cumulonimbus monsters that could have been palaces of the devil. Everything in Shatzu stopped as people craned their necks to look at the sky.

Smiles began to spread across their faces; prayers of thanks to their rain god frothed from their lips.

Next came the lightning.

It split across the clouds in a hundred white forks. The city went technicolor, everything descending into gray-black shadow. Storm leaped from his position on the market roof. The glory swelled inside him like a furious hurricane.

People gathered in the town's square and those prayers died fast. Storm needed an audience anyway, so he put on his best grin. He heard the stars gasp when they saw it; he smiled bigger. He sauntered out of the shadows into the town square and clucked his tongue; more lightning exploded above, brilliant blue against the black clouds.

"Hello," Storm said through his smile. Someone screamed. Children clung to the adults, and the adults clung to the elderly people. The elderly people gripped the children back. "So. I heard there was a song about me. Shall I sing it?"

"Mommin," a little girl squealed from behind him. Her voice went from a scared snivel to a shriek. "Don't cry, Mommin, don't cry. You better stop crying or you'll make me cry!"

Storm whirled. People kept their distance, wouldn't dare get within ten feet of him. The little girl—she couldn't have been more than six—pressed herself so hard into her mother that she was practically hidden into the woman's large hips. Her mother was crying. In fact, she was sobbing. Sobbing! Deep heaving gasps, all because of him!

The girl's hair was twisted into double plaits with bows clasped to her hair ties. She was honey-skinned and tall for a six-year-old, her eyes the color of the storm clouds above. Storm said, still smiling, "Please don't cry."

He took a step towards the girl and her mother, tonelessly singing the first two lines of the song: "'Diamonds and diseases catch the breezes; a big star sneezes as it teases.'"

The mother stepped back and shoved her daughter behind her. The girl whimpered.

Thunder groaned in the sky's belly.

"'A storm touched down; Storm split grounds.'" Storm snapped his fingers and lightning slithered away from its home in the clouds to touch down against the cobblestones. Stone went up in a spray of gray, and the woman staggered into the man behind her. Storm grabbed the little girl by her upper arm and hoisted her onto his hip.

The girl wailed and the Shifters gathered on the block gasped and whimpered and protested. Storm continued singing the rhyme as the girl jerked and twisted in his grasp. "'And everyone was dead.'"

He set the kid down, grabbed her two braids, and yanked them towards him. He spat out that last line again—really, whatever child came up with this song was a genius. "And everyone was dead."

From the corner of his eye, Storm saw physiques in red appearing on market roofs and warehouse windowsills. He felt the magical current tightening, clamping down over his body. He loved it.

"Can you all hear me?" Storm asked, raising his voice. Bloom Officials wouldn't dare come near him. They were too scared. It was a mystery to him that Shifters put their faith in this government. "Good! See, everyone thought I was dead. The Bloom didn't kill me. I escaped. Your government lied to you to keep your precious hearts feeling safe."

The girl screamed, convulsing into trembles. "Mommin! Mommin!"

Storm twisted her braids and the kid screamed again. Her mother started forward, and Storm spat, "Oh, I dare you to come after me with her in my hands, woman."

The woman was gasping, hiccuping, begging. "Please don't hurt her...please don't hurt her...please don't hurt my baby!"

"I see my beasts haven't visited your city yet." Storm glanced around at the Bloom Officials. They were gathering other weapons, martial swords and hunting knives and jugs of gasoline. "What a shame; they could have made you all accustomed to screaming and discomfort. I can't wait to see all the damage they've caused first-hand. As for her—" Storm twisted the little girl's braids one last time, and her little chubby arms flailed in protest. "I don't usually kill random people on my visits, but I'll give myself a welcome-back-from-faking-being-dead present."

"Wait—!" A hoarse voice cried. Storm narrowed his eyes; an old man shoved through the crowd. He leaned on a cane, and his body was frail and withered from time. "Spare her. Kill me instead."

"How disgustingly honorable," Storm snarled, softening his voice for effect. He sighed theatrically and shouted, "It would have been more honorable if a Bloom Official would hightail their sorry old asses down here and give themselves up! Then I would have said yes."

The old man's watery eyes widened.

Storm clucked his tongue twice, then sang, "And everyone was dead." Another fork of lightning dropped from the sky and hit the girl square in the face. Storm let go of her braids, snagging one of the bows between his fingers, and held the lightning bolt there so no one could see anything but bright light.

Stone sprayed. A tiny, burned body collapsed, the braids disintegrated to ash.

***

The whole world smelled of salt and honey and blood.

When waves lapped the beaches, piles of salt were left behind. All along every coast, people dipped their hands into these piles and let the silver run through their fingers. The smell was awful. It was so tangy, so sour, that as the salt layered upon the sand, red-gulls dropped dead and fish could no longer breathe. People got sick from the strong smell.

This was a result of the beasts that had risen from the ocean.

Further inland, honey seeped through the roots of trees like syrup through a clenched fist, spilling out so slowly that at first, people thought it was merely tree sap. But the grounds didn't open for honey just around trees. They opened in the deep, wooded plains of Te Shezekia and split open canyons in Anna Mae. People stuck their hands into the chasms and their fingers came back sticky. Sweet and gold and good, foliage of all types dripped in honey. It smothered the ground, choking grass and flowers. Plantlife died. Crops failed. Maybe honey was sweet and gold, but it certainly wasn't good to the earth.

This was a result of the beasts that had crawled through the earth's surface.

The air swelled thick with blood—not that anyone could see it. It was the blood of monsters, dark cobalt veins of liquid that hung suspended in the air in an otherwise expansive light blue sky. No one could quite place their finger on the smell of this blood or why the sky looked a little darker in some spots until a Bloom Official stationed in the Lightning Islands put two and two together. Specifically, beast-blood does not have one specific smell, but rather a mixture of both citrus, tropical fragrances and an iron, sour effluvia.

This was a result of the beasts that had torn through the sky's flesh.