We Also Make Thunder

Hannah had known two indisputable truths about lightning: it required broody clouds to be formed and a quick eye to be seen. An indisputable truth challenged without proof inspired laughter. An indisputable truth challenged indisputably simply inspired. So it was with Hannah when, having hidden herself in the old haven from her childhood, she spied a Starry One in the near clearing. Creeping forward in the forest brush, Hannah crouched in the loam soil and fragrant scent and watched, a woodland creature whose den had been intruded upon.

The Starry One, a woman of ordinary appearance whose only distinction were her lambent eyes, bore an expression of sternness come from concentration rather than anger, and Hannah had learned from school that anyone with such an expression was not to be interrupted. Unaware that she was being watched, the Starry One knelt and from her sidebag withdrew a plain glass bottle, stoppered with a thick cork which she twisted out with a squeaky pop. This she sat on the grass, pressing it down so that it would stay upright. Hannah’s legs were growing numb from her crouch, but she did not dare move. Without further ado, the Starry One rose smoothly and stepped back and removed her slippers, which she tossed aside with the insouciance of someone well-practiced. Then, as if she danced a timeless pavane, the woman began to pace around the bottle, her steps deliberate and graceful. The wind had ceased, as if hesitant to unbalance her; the birds had alighted upon branches to watch. Hannah noticed these things but briefly—she was spellbound herself. Round and round the Starry One went, arms flowing, enacting. Her beringed fingers plucked and twirled the air as she danced with rising intensity until, finally, she stopped, bowed, flung her arms wide; a jagged lance of gold boomed from the firmament. As if rejected by that intense summer blue, searing Hannah’s eyes and ears with its punch. She fell back, too shocked to shout. There she lay, ears ringing terribly, her vision reduced to mottled green, the magic’s opposite. By the time she stirred and sat up, the Starry One had put her slippers back on and had recorked the bottle. A slim smile lit her face as she admired her handiwork, turning the bottle so that the bundled lightning caught within shimmered. A thrumming skein. The impossibility emblazoned itself in Hannah’s mind in an instant. She admired it, agape, eyes stinging and yet she could not look away. The Starry One, well-practiced, did not look at it for long, sliding the bottle back into her bag and turning to leave. Only then did she see Hannah. Her smile rivalled the lightning. And then she was away.

Hannah took the scenic path home that day. Once, she had been swept away by it. The irregular cobbles all so arranged that they formed a perfect path, as if they were jigsaw pieces; the rows of pine trees that carpeted the ground with their fragrant needles, and the bushes with glossy berries that her mother warned her away from for they bleached clothes with their juice, and from all of these the swinging charms of yarn and wood that tossed in the wind; the little stream that purled alongside the path for most of the way before doglegging beneath a bridge that was so rustic, so twee; the old-timey lamps that stood sentinel along the way. The entire scene had ached like something from a fairy tale. Now, the shining veneer had been stripped away by familiarity, as Hannah had walked this path many, many times. And besides, that day her mind was so preoccupied by what she had just witnessed that any dregs of wonder would never pierce it. In bed that evening, Hannah turned that bundle of lightning over and over in her head, and she reduced it to lengths of sparking thread tugged apart one-by-one, and from this she weaved the weft and warp of motivation.

The first attempt was a failure. Hannah stared at the empty lemonade bottle, the glass dull in the overcast morning. Another round of steps and gestures and meaningless chants afforded her nothing. There she left it, with the impatience of a teenager.

The second attempt she made was during a clear day, trying to mimic the Starry One as much as possible, the only clouds pressed white by the blasting sun. Nothing. Hannah was forced to admit that she had no idea what she was doing. Slumping to the ground, she lashed out with her foot and knocked the bottle over. Birds gyred overhead. The warm sun on her skin soon lifted her spirits. Hannah recalled the Starry One; she recalled her smile. And so, she came up with a plan as brazen as it was logical.

The town was of middling size. In the high summer, pollen from the surrounding fields mingled with the shimmer of hot tarmac to create a haze that stuck in the memory, that planted seeds of nostalgia. The evening sun burnished the walls and the friendly faces of the townsfolk. Able to wander alone in the bucolic town, Hannah asked after the Starry One. The first few people she met frowned. “A Starry One?” they said. “Here? Are you sure?” And they walked away casting all about as if the sorceress might emerge and hex them with forces unknowable. Hannah was not discouraged. As she walked deeper into town, the people she asked had different reactions, if not different answers. “Oh, I’ve heard of her,” they said, eyes widening slightly. But they still did not know where she resided.

As Hannah drew closer to her quarry, the people became more helpful. Their faces did not even flicker when she asked, for they saw her every day and considered her a neighbor not to be feared. Finally, Hannah was directed to a small house apart from the others, painted a dark purple and with a bellpull instead of a doorbell. She pulled on the tassel and waited. Eventually, the door swung open. The Starry One stared down at her, bright eyes widening in recognition.

For Hannah’s third attempt, she riffled through the pages of the sorceress’ gifted incunabulum until she found the spell she desired. She studied it, parsing the words, speaking them soundlessly as she read; though she did not understand many of them, she felt confident now in her ability to replicate the arcane dance. Setting the book aside, she fetched her bottle and placed it in the grass of her garden as before. Anticipating her moment of triumph, Hannah went through the motions, eyebrows speared together in concentration, and yet no birds came to watch and the wind blew as it always did, and as Hannah committed the final bow, the sky did not split itself with lightning.

The grimoire was put away for a year. Hannah attended the local school. Plain, ordinary school with its staid subjects and listless people. The only subject she truly enjoyed was mathematics: she excelled at it, and the teacher lent himself to effective learning.

“It’s all about building blocks,” he had said once, after a student had complained about the difficulty of the recent test. “You learn addition and subtraction and division and multiplication, and the rest of it is just twisting these rules in as many ways as possible. If you understand the step before, then you will understand the step after; eventually, you will understand it all.”

These words engendered a fresh inspiration in Hannah. This was not like the feeling brought about by the lightning, so heady and exciting. This was a workmanlike inspiration. Something that could get things done. Once school had finished for another summer, Hannah retrieved the dusty book from where she had stashed it beneath her bed. She sat on her desk, turned on the little lamp and began to read it from the start.

She learned of sorcery’s founders and how they discovered their respective fields. She learned of the elements and their consonance and dissonance and their merits by themselves. She learned of their names and how such names could be used to influence. As she took on these fundamental truths, school started once more, and she was forced to split her time between the two. Once Hannah felt sure in her understanding, she moved on to knowledge of the cosmos. The vagaries of lunar phases and how they affected magics, the potent calendar days and how to prepare for them, the effects of weather and how to defy them. This she wrote down in red ink for emphasis, bright scarlet that was muted on the page. Her fingers cramped from her work.

Her parents attributed her work ethic to the increased rigours of school, and they were correct, to an extent. Each year, the summer sky held an unbearable pressure, as if it might crack like an egg, for the end of the season heralded new subjects, new topics, new exams. Her teachers caught her doodling magical theorems in the margins of her notebook. More than once, she snapped the pencil carbon on the page, creating a sooty star.

The study of control required the study of essence, just as one could understand how water enabled itself to be turned to ice by its very structure, by the hydrogen bonds so solid. Hannah considered the salient material of air and cloud and lightning and began to dissect their makeup. Diagrams were drawn with a detail she never afforded her other work. She found herself reviewing her previous notes less and less, and soon her notebook sat unopened, having been superseded by a new one with tighter lines and greater promise. If one knows the essence of a thing, that thing could be influenced: this was how amulets were made. Charms as well. And, crucially, how lightning was cut from its sky and sequestered in a bottle.

She met with the Starry One once more, aged sixteen. They had crossed each other on the street, and the sorceress had beamed.

“How do you fare with the magic?” she asked. When Hannah revealed that it was slow and twisty, she nodded sagely. “It will be. You do not have the gift.” Here, she swiped a thumb across her eye as if she might rub the fire from it. “But that does not mean you cannot achieve it. Magic is not the magic of popular belief: it has a logic to it. It is like our emotions; our feelings can sink and soar in wee quibbles or great leaps but there is always a logic to it, however obscure.”

Hannah compiled a great table of all the commanding gestures and words judged by magic’s pioneers. Some movements could fillip different elements and then other elements still on certain days of the year and Hannah studied them until her head pounded. Once she was satisfied that all relevant commands had been gleaned from the list, she took to learning them, comparing them to the page in the book in which lightning was concerned (and which she now read without falter) until she understood when they were to be used and why.

On the day of completion, she was seventeen and snow fluttered against her window like pure moths.

The path held a different air in the winter. The bridge was coated in the snow and its underarch was bearded with glistening icicles that on occasion would break loose and stab into the ice of the river below. The light from the lamps held a delicate quality in the cold, draping their golden glow on the mists underfoot. Hannah walked this path without care. She knew of ice. She knew of light.

She sat the glass bottle in the clearing which she now knew held a leyline of great power. Her breath rolled from her as fug as she readied herself. Then, she began to dance.

Each step a call, each fingerpluck a beckon. The air was slippery in her grip, but she could tug on it like strings on a marionette and the world could not help but bow just as she bowed. There was a certain second where the air trembled. Hannah’s ears burst as the fork shot down before her. Finally.

There was no time to celebrate. Methodically, Hannah stepped into the circle her feet had made in the snow and knelt. The cap spun wild as she twisted it on, blocking all escape. Then, she stared at it. Her prize jumped and jigged within its glass cocoon, pale as the winter moon. Hannah’s heart did not race. Her fingers did not tremble save for the cold. Her eyes did not even widen. She slipped the bottle into her bag and rose to leave. She understood many things.

As she walked the path home, boots scrunching the snow, Hannah passed a man on a bench who clutched a notebook in his red-knuckled hand. He wore a thick beanie and glasses which blazed in the sun. Hannah stopped and asked what it was he wrote, and he informed her that he was a writer come outside to seek inspiration in the beauty of nature. He revealed that it was slow-going, and often hard, but he would very much like to be published one day; Hannah wished him luck and left him to it. The writer bowed his head and scribbled away, pen flying across the paper. The man knew his craft from a long time of study, and was well-versed in structure and tropes and mechanics and how to use structure and subvert tropes and break mechanics with intent, and knowing his work so deftly the writer enjoyed it very, very much. And when the sun began to set early, he stood and headed not for home but towards it, meandering through the snow, savoring winter’s breath.