Twelve Gifts and Broken Things (The Stormbringer Chronicles #1.5)

Twelve Gifts and Broken Things

The harmattan came three weeks before Christmas. It was on a Tuesday, 9 o'clock GMT+1 in the morning to be exact, when you and your fellow wind spirits watched as the dust-laden winds they unleashed swept the earth. You giggled at the exasperated curses and hisses of office workers whose files and papers took flight, and laughed at the unlucky market women who chased after their fleeing umbrellas. You smiled at the happy shrieks of school children as they ran outside and breathed in the sweet chill of Christmas.

You had always enjoyed looking at the lives of the mortals, had always loved to watch them grow and die and grow again. And the other spirits never let you rest because of it.

"What do you even see in them?" one had demanded. It was a rain spirit and it stood with its hands akimbo, a spectacular robe of thunder and lightning flying from his shoulders.

You had simply smiled and nodded and agreed that you were weird. You knew that the other spirits were puzzled by you. That even the gods struggled to comprehend you. But you never stopped looking and you never stopped wanting.

You and the other wind spirits turned away from watching the earth and looked to the raised platform where the sky gods supervised the proceedings. As always, Igwekala, Sango and Amadioha had declared a truce, saying that the beginnings of seasons were too important to be disrupted by petty quarrels. It was an old practice of theirs and you knew that sooner or later, they and their wind spirits would be back at each other throats – to the detriment of the mortals who would hold solemn conversations over a particularly harsh dry season or a never-ending thunderstorm. Gods werelike gifs, sooner or later they would go back to where they started.

Some of the wind spirits preferred the scorching breaths of Sango or the subtle devastation of Igwekala's winds. But you'd always like Amadioha best. He was strict, but only when he needed to be and of all the sky gods was the coolest headed and contained.

You turned away from the gods and looked and it was then that you saw him. He was young, barely out of his teens and he was standing on the balcony of a one storey building. He was absentmindedly watching the ambling vehicles below him. There was a sadness to him that held you like a vice and so you looked deeper, into his soul, and learned his name.

Munachi. It beckoned to you and you cradled the name in your inconsequential hands and smiled. Munachi. You laughed and repeated it until the other wind spirits stared at you. But you didn't care and you turned back to your not at all creepy stalking.

You watched as his father came home drunk and beat his mother with a belt, and when Munachi tried to intervene, winced as the blows came landing on him too. You watched as his father, sober in the morning, promised to never lay hands on them again, only for that promise to go flying out the window when darkness fell. This time Munachi didn't intervene, he'd learned from last time. Instead he ran to his room, locked the door and wept.

You wanted to help, wanted to act so bad it was an ache on your immortal soul. But you were a gentle spirit. You didn't have the fire of a drought spirit, or the lightning and fury of a rainstorm spirit. But you made sure to hound the father when he staggered off to work and for a long time phantom winds made anything not nailed down prone to launching themselves at him.

The other spirits weren't happy with this new obsession of yours, and though they discussed about you at length, but they made no move to stop you.

"It'll learn," they told one another when they thought you were out of earshot. "It will soon learn the foolishness of caring for mortals."

But you had much more on your mind than what your former friends were saying. It was one week to Christmas and Munachi and his mother had surprised you by running away from the one storey house. You hadn't known that they'd been searching for accommodation, but you watched over them protectively as they moved to their new home, and blew away their tracks when the father tried to follow.