Fire
Ariel clutches her legs to her chest and gets down low. The smoke is all encompassing, carcinogens creating choke points in her developing lungs. Oxygen fights back valiantly but is now quickly losing ground. Her eyes water, vision flickering in and out, bursting at the seams of her retinas. A subtle gaslight of her optic nerve, bright shadows play their tricks in the distance. All she can see is oxygen igniting. Gaining speed, sparking up, a rapid blast of kinetic energy, and then nothing.
Ice
Lailah shivers, the click of teeth echoes in her skull. Blood leaves her fingertips, retreating from the frosty enemy in the dead of an ambush. The air solidifies on her skin creating a fortress; Lailah becomes a prisoner of war. Her motor neurons tighten. Every muscle, every fiber frozen in place, pins and needles up and down the fluid of her spine, paralysis. All she can feel is nitrogen, malleable and liquid but not moving. She wants to grab it, make it bend, shape it to her will but all that comes is numbness.
Thunder
Nathaniel convulses in a steady rhythm. Morse code on a telegraph feed, the shakes of his body convey a message. "Retreat, we're outnumbered! Fall back!" his body echoes. A runner in a minefield, the electricity jumps from trench to trench, the warning intercepted before it reaches HQ. His cochlear nerve is screaming; every hair cell struck in unison. The cacophonous crackle, static and stagnant dampens the outside world. All he can hear are electrons, singing in his ears as they jump through valences. Half step, full step, misstep, and then rest.
Wind
Micah trips, his body reeling as the floor gives out beneath him. Somebody hit the switchboard with a sledgehammer; his mind is off-course. A war dividing left from right, alliances made with up and down, vestibular vitriol razing him of balance. His ear canal is swimming. The gusts of air assault his body from all fronts, tossing him up against the floor, pinning him down to the ceiling. All around him, the world is subatomic, nothing to ground himself in but whizzing motion. His cloudy mind begins to dissipate.
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The Garrison
Fantasy"Fire. Ice. Thunder. Wind. As seraphs, we learn in adolescence how these four natural mechanisms are manipulated and what it means to control them. But do we know why these forces of nature are under our domain? Do we ever stop and ask ourselves wha...