Muri The Lightning Primordial

Chapter 2 [ What The Lightning Decides]

CHAPTER 2

What The Lightning Decides

The last rock left his fingers at the exact moment the sky split open.

He never heard it land.

He barely heard anything as his eardrums raptured.

The lightning came down not like a strike but a verdict — sudden, absolute and completely indifferent to the boy standing beneath it.

It hit the pit floor between Muri and the charging beast with a crack so violent it evaporated the puddle of water around, a wall of compressed air that picked Muri up and threw him backward like he weighed nothing at all.

He powered off way before he hit the ground.

What the crowd saw, what they would argue about for days afterward in lowered voices around cook fires— happened in the space of a single heartbeat.

The beast outstretched claw mid charge.

The boy releasing his slingshot with a crack deafened by a louder crackle.

The lightning descending and everyone going blind for a second.

The order of those three things was something nobody could agree on afterward.

The lightning was immediate, so consuming in its brilliance that it swallowed everything surrounding it. It bleached the memory of every witness clean, leaving only the aftermath burned permanently behind their eyes and loud ringing in their bleeding ears.

The beast which was seven hundred pounds of prehistoric fury, thorned fur standing rigid with power and defense, took the full force of the bolt and was dead before it completed its fall. It crashed to the flooded pit floor never to move again.

Did not twitch.

Did not make a sound.

Just faint sizzle of burnt flesh and static charges creating parks.

And at the opposite corner of the pit, crumpled against the stone wall like a discarded thing, Muri lay completely still.

The silence that descended over the clan lasted four full seconds.

Then every person present began screaming at once like a rasing wave.

"Get him out!! GET HIM OUT!!!"

Abara was on his feet before the echo of the thunder finished rolling across the sky.

The composure of watching his son fail and rise and fail again for nineteen cycles, the careful measured restraint of a Chief who understood that his feelings were not more important than his duty, dissolved completely in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

He crossed the distance to the pit edge in large strides and jumps, dropped to his knees in the mud and was reaching down into the darkness before anyone thought to bring the rope ladder.

"MURI!!!"

No response from below. The rain answered instead — indifferent, steady, drumming against the stone floor of the pit while remnant of thunder echoed at a distance and the still body of the beast and the boy who lay equally motionless in the corner.

His mother did not scream.

That was the thing people would remember later — how the Chief's fifth wife, the small quiet healer woman who nobody had ever paid particular attention to, did not make a single sound.

She simply moved.

Through the crowd, through the chaos, through the press of bodies all trying to look at once, with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that panic was a luxury she could not currently afford.

She reached the pit edge beside Abara and looked down for exactly two seconds.

"Rope," she said.

"Now."

They brought Muri up pale and unresponsive, his body gone loose the way bodies go when the thing called a soul that animates them has temporarily vacated.

His mother had him assessed before his feet fully cleared the pit ,hands at his pulse, his breathing, his pupils beneath those white filmed eyes that had never shown her anything and now showed her less than ever.

"He is alive," she announced to Abara, who had been holding his breath for so long his face had gone a color that concerned her.

The Chief exhaled with a deep groan like a man released from a sentence.

Around them the clan pressed close, voices layering over each other in that particular texture of collective shock that has not yet decided whether it is grief or relief.

“ The lightning...”

“...did you see it...”

“...it came straight down, straight into the pit...”

“...the beast is dead...”

“...did the boy even...”

The Elder's voice cut through cleanly, the way authority does when it has been practiced long enough to become instinct.

“ Clear space. Give the healer room.”

The crowd shifted back.

Not far.

Far enough.

The Elder stood at the pit edge looking down at the ruined body of the beast and the scorch marks radiating outward from the point of the lightning's impact like a black flower pressed into the stone.

He was quiet for a long time. His face arranged itself into something unreadable.

Abara appeared at his shoulder, his eyes still on his son across the clearing where his wife worked steadily and silently.

“ The lightning killed the beast.” the Elder said.

Not a question.

A statement being tested aloud to hear how it sounded.

Abara said nothing.

“ The boy was in the pit...” the Elder continued.

“...The beast charged. The lightning struck. The beast died.” He paused.

“ In the eyes of the rite, the kill was not his.”

The words landed quietly. The damage they did was not quiet at all.

Abara turned to look at the old man slowly.

“ You saw what you saw...” he said carefully.

“... I would be cautious about deciding what it means before we know what it is.”

“ I know what the rite requires, Abara.”

“ And I know my son.”

They regarded each other across the weight of that.

The rain kept falling. The Elder looked away first.

“ When the boy wakes...” he said,

“ …We will address what must be addressed. ”

* * *

Muri woke to the smell of his mother's medicines and the sound of a clan that had gone too quiet.

He knew that silence.

It was the specific silence of people who have been talking about you and stopped the moment you showed signs of consciousness. He had grown up fluent in it.

He lay still for a moment and took a quick check.

His back ached deeply.

His ears were ringing with a high distant tone that the rest of the world's sounds had to push through to reach him.

His hands — he flexed them slowly, feeling the particular tenderness of his right palm where he had been spinning the slingshot at the end, felt intact.

The last rock.

He remembered releasing it.

Remembered the sensation of it leaving his fingers, the trajectory he had calculated across three full seconds of focus while the beast charged and the rain fell and every voice inside him went silent except the one that knew.

He remembered the lightning.

The feeling of his hairs standing in awe, his locks tremble in pressure as the natural phenomenon had its way during his duel.

He did not remember anything after.

" You are awake.” his mother said from somewhere to his left.

Not a question.

She always knew.

"What happened??" he asked.

A pause that lasted slightly too long.

"You were struck by the force of the lightning. Not directly.” she said quickly, her healer's precision refusing to be imprecise even now.

" The impact struck you to the wall."

" The beast?? ”

Another pause. Smaller but heavier.

" Dead. ” she whispered.

Something in Muri's chest unclenched at the word.

Then immediately tightened again at the quality of silence that followed it.

"Mama...”

"Rest first ”

"Mama... ”

His voice was quiet.

Absolutely certain.

"Tell me. ”

She told him.

She used careful words. Measured words. The words of a woman who had spent a lifetime delivering information that hurt and had learned that how you carry truth to someone matters almost as much as the truth itself.

It did not help very much.

He heard her out completely without interrupting. When she finished he lay still for another moment.

Then he sat up.

"Muri…” she begins

"I am not going to argue with the Elder ” He said.

His voice was level in the way that still water is level, calm on the surface with considerable depth beneath.

"I am not going to go before my father and plead my case. I am not going to sit in this hut and wait for someone to come tell me what my life is now. ”

He found his way to his feet by feel, one hand briefly on the wall.

"Where are you going?? ” his mother asked.

Not quite a question.

She already knew.

She always knew.

"I need air.”

"You need rest.”

"Mama.”

She was quiet.

He turned toward her voice and found her face by instinct the way he always had, his sightless gaze landing close enough to be meaningful.

"I released that stone.” he whispered with clenched jaw.

"It left my hand. I know where it went. I know what it did. I heard what it did! ”

A pause.

"I know what I did.”

She did not argue.

She held on to him and pressed her cool hands briefly against his face,thumb at his pulse point, always checking and then stepped aside.

He walked out into the night.

He did not go toward the clan fire or the Elder's house or his father's hall.

He walked northeast.

He did not decide to walk northeast. His feet simply went that direction with the quiet confidence of something being pulled rather than something choosing.

The silver light behind his dark sight, the formless flickering that had lived there his entire life and meant nothing, had never meant anything was doing the pulsing thing again.

Rhythmic.

Insistent.

Alive.

The jungle received him without ceremony, the way the jungle receives everything —indifferently, completely, closing behind him like water around a stone.

The sounds changed immediately. The rain filtered through canopy became something softer and more complex. The ground under his feet shifted from packed earth to root and mud and the layered architecture of things growing over other things that had stopped growing.

He had walked this jungle a thousand times. Knew it the way he knew the pit — by its sounds, its smells, the specific feelings of its textures under his soles.

Tonight it felt different.

Tonight the silver flashes were pulling him left, slightly left, toward the part of the jungle that bordered the river where the old trees grew so large their roots formed caves above the waterline.

He pushed through a curtain of hanging moss.

And stopped.

The heat reached him first. A warmth completely inconsistent with the cold rain and jungle dark, radiating outward from somewhere ahead like an open furnace door.

With it came a smell , ozone and something ancient beneath it, something that had no name in any language he knew because no human had ever been close enough to it to need one.

Then the sound.

Breathing.

Labored.

Wet.

The breathing of something large that was working very hard to continue doing it.

Muri stood completely still, his skin pricked him, the hair on his body stood stiff and his breath came in short burst as he could not explain what he was feeling.

The silver light behind his eyes was no longer pulsing.

It was blazing.

Overwhelming the familiar darkness he was friends with.

He took one step forward.

Then another.

His hand found the trunk of a large tree and he used it to lower himself toward the ground where the heat was strongest and the breathing was loudest and the smell of ozone was so thick it sat on his tongue like copper.

His fingers found something before his mind caught up with what his fingers were telling him.

Not bark.

Not root.

Not any texture the jungle had ever offered him before.

Skin.

Burning hot but yet soft and unmelting. He felt it crackling at the edges with something that was not quite electricity and not quite light but lived in the space between the two.

The breathing stopped.

Every hair on Muri's body stood rigid.

Then a voice, fractured, enormous, reduced to barely a whisper and still somehow the largest sound he had ever heard — spoke directly into the silver blaze behind his eyes.

"...human...”

A pause that lasted the length of several heartbeats.

"...you dare touch me...are you not afraid...”

Muri's mouth went dry.

His pulse— raced in a manner his mother would have had strong opinions about.

The heat from the figure beneath his hand was intense enough to be painful but for some reason, he found it bearable.

"I am not afraid, because I smell blood, meaning you are hurt" he said.

“ ..what do you mean…” the voice echoed in his mind.

“ It means you can't hurt me ” Muri smirked.

“…cheeky brat…” at this point it sounded more like a rasp and the voice went silent.

* * *

Three miles away, two Elders stood at the bottom of the pit.

The rope ladder swayed gently behind them. One held a burning torch low to the ground. The other crouched over the body of the beast, his ceremonial robes thoroughly ruined by the water and mud, his expression a thing he would not have allowed anyone above to witness.

The lightning had done significant damage. That was not in dispute. The scorch marks were extensive. The fur had burned in places. The force of the bolt had clearly struck the animal with devastating effect.

All of that was true.

And also true and visible to anyone who looked carefully, who tilted the torch at the right angle and examined what the lightning had found when it arrived — was the small, slightly pointed rock buried to its full depth in the ruined socket of the beast's right eye.

A killing blow.

Delivered before the lightning came.

The Elder who was crouching reached out and did not quite touch it.

"The boy's shot landed.” he said quietly.

The other Elder said nothing.

" It was already dead.” the crouching one continued.

"When the lightning struck. It was already dead. ”

The silence between them was the kind that contains a decision being made that cannot be unmade.

Above them, rain drops began to fall and they quickly exited the pit as they remembered how powerful the lightning struck three days ago.

Somewhere in the jungle northeast of the clan boundary, a blind boy marched back home slowly in the dark with his hand pressed against the burning skin of something that should not exist —

And did not pull away.