On the first evening after the lightning season, there was the Warling.
Great bleached voltage sat in her hands on the evening that would bite through all of history. Zeetje would bring the very first complete rendition of this majestic event into the world. Along with Pipaluk and Husk of course. You couldn't film a hubbub of music and talking and laughing slapping louder than waves all on your own. She had her cousin Pipaluk with her as director, she had her friend Husk with his camera. Zeetje would control the lightning, because merely striking the bolts down wasn't the end of the ride. You couldn't just leave your eyes off all that silver starmatter spinning out of the sky once you had released it. Besides, she wanted to keep feeling the lightning, not just see it.
They arrived at the big square, waved at aunts and postmen, zigzagged through the crowd. Hopefully they had smiled enough so that it looked like they were on their way to get iced fruit and dizter, the special Warling drink that everyone raved their heads off for. But they couldn't get distracted. Not by the strings of woven flowers in wine red, home-dyed patina and alabaster milk. Not by the penumbrae chalked on the ground, the golden rings of eclipse steaming off floral scents all night round. Not the red roofs of the surrounding houses glinting like rosehip jam in the moonlight. And not the people with their most intricate bracelet designs displayed in mazes on their arms. All that they would capture on film, with a camera that actually was Husk's mother's. They hadn't asked her. Not because she was very strict. But because it was forbidden by law, by lightning and by word.
In the entire line of time, the Warling had never existed as a thing on its own other than in mouths. People spoke of it like they did of the first rains after a drought. But seeing it, that could only ever be a thing you experienced first hand. Before explorers had stumbled upon a leaden box containing very old books like The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, and the first camera they had ever beheld in their lives, this had been largely no issue. Any attempt at a written account of the Warling was futile and harmless. No one believed that written words could ever capture an event of such scale through ink and dead wood. However, once said explorers had figured out how to utilise a camera and develop the film, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the Warling was not an unending night with shadows dancing on scrims and music notes hiding in bushes and treetops far beyond the perimetres of the square, but it was a rectangle. Stuck in a nothing-saying image or awkwardly hung between the walls of a moving picture. Paintings and drawings and any other art were different, those images could never entirely cut anything out of the Warling and display it as reality, those were just ignored as pretty colours and shapes. But this new curse? Zero tolerance policy.
The reason why Zeetje, Pipaluk and Husk were allowed with a camera on the Warling square was simple. Carrying one wasn't a crime, but no one dared to use one inside of the Warling, the repercussions were far too great. They could track the chemicals inside of the camera the very second that a picture was being taken, and then you were in for it. You couldn't get away from a mob of people all ingrained from birth or from the Photo Stop Movement which restricted all camera-possessors from ever photographing or filming the Warling. Confiscated pictures were burned, photographers were locked up and some never seen again, and if anyone had ever succeeded at keeping hold of a picture or a film of the Warling in the past years, chances were very great their community had shunned them or that someone had ratted them out to authorities.
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But before that, Husk, Pipaluk and Zeetje, all bored, were prawling a field the very first day of the lightning season, and when sharp angles started electrifying the sky, when Pipaluk froze in fear, but Zeetje felt something in the air right before which made her muscles jolt on fire and cry a zoetrope of thought through her bones:
