The War of Elevens| Book 1 of the Space Thief Chronicles

Chapter 18| Salt and Honey and Blood

The Shifter World

City of Shatzu, Té Shezekia

The second cataclysm in world history had involved the man they called Storm.

Children came up with the name first; they created a haunting song about him. The song was forbidden after the government received complaints from parents about the gore their children were singing about; any child caught singing that nursery rhyme was subject to six lashes across the back. The Bloom wanted everyone to forget that song, dubbed the "torture-chant" by parents and elders across every continent.

But everyone remembered it. It lingered on minds the way an acidic aftertaste stays on the tongue. It went like this:

Diamonds and diseases catch the breezes

A big star sneezes as it teases

A storm touched down

Storm split grounds

And now everyone is dead.

During the second cataclysm in world history, Storm made the sky rain diamonds. The gems slashed people's throats. The same man that had made it rain diamonds created a wind stuffed with a disease. The disease made people sing as they tried to kill each other.

People forgot the man's real name and called him Storm because he could split grounds apart with lightning and create hurricanes so vast they could wipe out an entire coastline.

Then the Bloom caught him and the cataclysm was over. The government gave him a private execution and everyone celebrated. The world went back to rebuilding, living. The war was over. Everything would be okay.

Actually, the government didn't kill him.

Storm swung himself onto a gabled roof at the mercy of a Shezekian setting sun. Shezekian sunsets were different than most sunsets seen around the world...Shezekian sunsets were a dark, deep orange that pressed a suffocating haze across the city. For the two and a half hours this heavy sunset plagued Té Shezekia, everything became twenty degrees hotter. Windows opened, vests and outer shirts were shed, and marketplaces got smelly with sweat and rotten food fast. Because Storm's beasts had not yet visited this portion of the nation, the sunset covered the city in all its glory.

Shatzu, one of the busiest trade cities in the world, was smelly, colorful, and loud. It was a tear-shaped city at the westernmost edge of the continent, polluted with smoke from giant factories and waste seeping from overflowing landfills. Crooked little alleyways corkscrewed their way through the town square; street vendors and shops moved with the goings-on of life. Storm could see it all from his perch at the edge of the roof: people beating each other to a pulp in alleys curtained by the smothering orange fog, vendors giving out carved trinkets and foreign delicacies on the streets, shop doors clanging shut, windows screeching open, street performers on stilts decked out in lavish costumes...all this color gave Storm a slight headache, so he decided to rid the city of that first.

He flicked his eyes to the sky and magic bowed; the current of electrons he felt dancing around him quivered, and suddenly clouds were forming, black cumulonimbus monsters that could have been palaces of the devil. Everything in Shatzu stopped as people craned their necks to look at the sky.

Smiles began to spread across their faces; prayers of thanks to their rain god frothed from their lips.

Next came the lightning.

It split across the clouds in a hundred white forks. The city went technicolor, everything descending into gray-black shadow. Storm leaped from his position on the market roof. The glory swelled inside him like a furious hurricane.