Trateri and horse moved back toward the main body as Drake and a few others stood guard.
Jason paused as he mounted his horse, tilting his chin at the sky. "What do you make of that?"
Eva looked up, taking in the giant wall of clouds that reached high into the atmosphere. They roiled and frothed as if a great battle was taking place within.
The storm was unlike anything Eva had ever seen. It rolled over the mountains. The parts Eva could see a mix of whites, grays, and near blacks.
Beneath it lay darkness, while its depths briefly lit with flashes of bluish white before fading again.
"You ever seen anything like it?" Drake asked softly.
From the look on his and the other's faces, they seemed uneasy as the storm bore down on them. Almost fearful.
"Not often," Eva said.
The Lowlands were no stranger to storms, but rarely like this.
The storm in front of them looked like one from stories told during the dark of night. The kind that reshaped the world into the broken place it was now.
A storm meant to wipe away all before it. A reminder to humans that for all their arrogance and pride they were nothing more than transient existences, there and gone, in the face of the full force of nature.
"My mother would have called a storm like this a man killer," Eva said softly.
She would have been right. It had the ability to wipe villages off the map, leaving only the land behind.
Then again, Eva's mother would also have thought the storm a result of their own sins, relying on practices rooted in fear and superstition to drive it away.
"Your mother sounds like a lovely woman," Warin drawled as he joined them.
Seeing their looks, he lifted his eyebrows at them.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just wasn't expecting you is all," Jason said.
Warin curled his lip. "Losing a string of horses affects us all. I'm not so short sighted that I can't see that."
Jason met his stare with a mocking one of his own. "You sure about that?"
Warin turned his head, ignoring the younger man as he jerked his chin at the sky. "What are our winged former allies doing anyway?"
Dozens of Kyren dipped and wheeled, darting into the storm front and out again. They played on its edge, fighting the winds Eva knew had to be buffeting them.
There was an air of joy in their actions, as if the storm held no fear for them. Rather, they welcomed it, celebrating in the face of danger when others would have run.
"Crazy bastards. What would possess them to tangle with something like that?" Warin asked, sounding baffled.
"The storm calls them," Brisa answered from her perch atop the boulder.
"What do you mean?" Eva asked.
Brisa opened her eyes, their gold piercing as she fixed Eva with a stare. "Can't you feel it, Caller? The summons?"
Almost unknowingly, Eva found her gaze drawn back to the storm.
There was a yearning deep inside that she'd been trying to ignore. A voice that said she didn't belong here on the ground, but rather up there on the back of a Kyren. Diving through clouds and racing lightning.
It was an insane feeling. Round the bend and down the creek level of insane.
