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Author's Notes:

"…the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh upon the glass and listen for reply…"

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Temples for Volt were always easy to identify, no matter where they were. They were always built tall, reaching for the sky. During storms, lightning would strike the metals along the rooftops, guarding the monks and nuns who lived there. Volt was a Spirit of judgment, and all who chose to live in his Temples were those who lived by faith, lightning constantly crashing above them with no guarantee that it wouldn't one day fall upon them.

It was a rite of adulthood, to walk through one of Volt's Storms, where the sky was black and entire fields were shot through with lightning. The participants could take nothing in with them, and would walk across. The elders played the loud, banging drums, an accompaniment to welcome the thunder, as the Storm Claws circled, their wings sparking.

For adults who had already been through a Storm, they would take the ashes of their recent dead and scatter them there, for the dead must care for the dead. The living had only to let go. If you carried doubt, fear, or guilt or anything else with you, it would weigh you down, and you could not avoid the lightning strikes. There was nothing to stop someone from walking a Storm again, but it only got harder the more attempts you made.

Those that successfully made it through the Storm walked out with a piece of sardonyx. The sizes varied, but people made their pieces into jewelry and beads, letting the stone absorb their bad energy until they could be cleansed again in a thunderstorm. The greatest warriors had several pieces that adorned their bodies, and more than often, red scars spreading fractally across their skin. They wore them with pride, bearing to the world what they had survived.

Volt was one of the first to be shunned and forgotten, deemed barbaric by the leaders of the Church. His Temples were destroyed, his believers scattered to the winds. Anyone caught with their sacred drums were attacked and the drums burned. Even the beats, translating so well to slapping on the thighs and on tables, were seen as suspicious. Volt's believers were hard to spot, once they weren't wearing their purple garments and sardonyx so openly. They had come from everywhere, after all, and would scatter to everywhere once more.

But in thunderstorms, they would be out on their front stoops and fire escapes, on the roads and out from under the cover of trees, and they'd tap the rhythm of their drums on their fingers and on the wall. It was without the proper, booming volume that was required, but they had no wish to be taken beneath the Church's floors, never to be seen again.

They taught the beats to their children in the form of little hand games. A secret game, they called it, just for family, so that they wouldn't share it with other children and put everyone in danger.

Where the beats could still be heard at proper volume and enthusiasm was out on the sea, in Sybak's ships, with the Goddess on the prow and Storm Claw's wings on her back. The songs the sailor sang, keeping time with their work. If some of the shantymen had fractal scars along their bodies, the public had lost context for them. They knew them only as things to be pitied, for such vast scars must have been incredibly painful. They did not think to listen for the strong beats that had been translated from drum to voice.

Those shantymen were lucky, the sailors said. For the storms were never as violent when they were the ones leading the song. It was the Goddess, others said, impressed by such strong voices, that had spared them, never thinking to properly notice the sardonyx dangling from earrings that would be used to pay for their funerals.

The storms came early that year; the spring planting wasn't even finished, but the dark clouds gathered on the horizon. The people of Mizuho locked their shutters and doors, bringing the livestock into the stables. They put kettles on the fire and braced to wait the storm out.

In one house, there were only two boys. Two boys in an ancestral family home full of ghosts. They still had to stand on chairs to reach the higher locks on the shutters. They were as ghosts themselves, still dressed in their mourning white, moving about the house to make sure there were no gaps in the sills and that all the doors were shut tight.

Orochi started a fire, looking at their kitchen with a critical eye. He knew some cooking basics, and one of their neighbors had been helping them with properly fleshed out meals. Orochi could fry some of yesterday's rice with some onions and the last of the eggs their neighbor had brought them.

"It helps me to take care of someone," the neighbor had said after the first few visits. No one talks about the people they've lost to the failed summoning, about the amount of red lanterns that had to be made for New Year's, all the homes in Mizuho half vacant at best.

"Are we staying in here?" Kuchinawa asked.

Orochi stared at his little brother, who looked too small in his plain white robes. "…Yeah. I'm making dinner and we can use the oven to keep warm."

The thunder rolled in and Orochi flinched, dropping a bowl. It was nothing but the sound, Orochi reminded himself. Volt wouldn't come here. Volt hadn't left his Temple in centuries. Kuchinawa tugged gently at him, pressing the bowl back into his hands.

Dinner was done quickly, and they settled against the innermost wall to eat. The sturdiness of the wall at their backs helped when the windows and doors rattled in their frames, and the wind howled outside.

"Miss Haruka said that we shouldn't go outside during a storm anymore. That we shouldn't even look out the windows."

Orochi looked down at him. Kuchinawa was still small for his age, eternally annoyed that he hadn't hit his growth spurt yet. Orochi bumped shoulders with him. "Did she say why?"

"Said it was bad luck. That Vo—he would be offended."

"Maybe she's right."

After they were done eating, Kuchinawa curled into his brother's side, head still on his shoulder. Orochi wrapped an arm around him automatically, the other straightening Kuchinawa's socks.

"I miss them," Kuchinawa said into their dim kitchen, the only light from their iron stove.

Orochi's arm tightened around him, going to the bracelet on his wrist, the beads all made of orangey-red stones. It had been their father's, and their father's father's. It had been supposed to be passed to Orochi when he passed his mastery exams, which he wouldn't take until he was seventeen. And now the bracelet had come to him four years early.

"I do too."

Mizuho used to welcome the storms with cheer and raised voices and stomped feet. The end of dry winters and the beginning of spring.

This year was the first that, when the storms came, the village of Mizuho was silent as a tomb.