It felt like he'd only been a sleep for a moment when something woke him up.
Rei's eyes flickered open, and he rolled over in his bed, looking out the window at an angle that didn't really let him see anything. He and his little band of companions – or, his brother's small entourage – had taken residence in this old fort in the foothills of Bern while traveling to the capital of the rebuilding country. It was just them, and nobody would attack a place they thought uninhabited.
He thought about what he'd heard. It had sounded like warping metal, like something very large was being dragged across stone. The first moment he'd heard it, he'd thought it was thunder, but then he decided it was too loud and too crisp to be thunder. He sat up, and leaned around his headboard to look out his window.
Nothing. Just the pre-dawn night. There was perhaps an hour before the sun would make an appearance. It was hard to tell but it didn't look stormy. So he shrugged it off and decided he'd ask about it later, and pulled his blankets back over his head, curiosity ignited.
He only lay for close to five minutes when a flash of blue caught the corner of his closed eye, so faint it could have been a mirage, but his nerves were already fired and he sat up straight. Lightening!
Thunderstorms weren't common in Lycia – they rarely came from the south and they died before reaching the small country from any other direction, so he held them in deep respect, his sneering exterior broken into a small child giddy with excitement whenever one rolled through.
He moved to his window, wearing only his worn knee-length trousers, shivering slightly at the cool night air that blew through. There was nothing. His heart sunk slightly. There were even breaks in the thin cloud cover where he could see the green-black night sky that promised the sun in an hour.
He almost turned away, but something set in his gut that prevented him from moving. And then there were flashes, behind the trees, so low to the ground he thought it some idiot practicing magic. And then he was annoyed. Who would be practicing magic at this hour? Idiots! He stepped back, annoyed, frustrated, and looked back at the window.
There was a spot from between two trees his eyes wandered to when looking out the window, because one branch stuck out and made it look like half a round pastry. He was focusing on a spot just above it when the spot between the trees shone as bright as the sun for a split-second, illuminating the world so brightly Rei could see nothing. It faded from his vision, pulling a ring of purple after-light with it as his pupils re-dilated from the sudden white light.
He stood for a moment, stricken, and the thunder rolled.
It was close, close enough to not really roll but crackle, growling, deeper than if it had come from the depths of the earth itself. It was more powerful than anything he'd seen or heard before, even the dragons he'd spent the better part of a year fighting. It made his blood churn, and he found his heart racing.
Even after the thunder faded, he stood in his room, alone, hand over his heart, shaking. He'd seen far worse thunderstorms. But the one clap of thunder had shaken him to his core.
He heard movement from within the fort, and knew it had woken the others up – but they hadn't seen it like he had. He followed the thumping of people walking to windows, confused, hail beginning to pound on the fort's stone roofs, deafening but quiet compared to the fury of Mother Nature.
Rei followed the noises to his family and friends, quivering, cowed, awed.
This just happened to me. Except I thought it was power lines, not mages. And there were, unfortunately, no dragons to compare it to.
I live in the Willamette Valley and I live in the one place where we NEVER get thunderstorms. So imagine my shock to wake up and hear THAT monster. I bet some of you are like "HAH you should hear OUR STUFF" but to a Valley-born Oregonian who gets maybe one mediocre storm a year… It's powerful.
So I threw it into the Fire Emblem world because I can express it that way and I did an awful job and I just posted a freaking story but FFFFFFMAN.
With love,
the Moose.