Is there a story to your garb? Few hunters travel in such piercing colors and no garb can absorb electricity like yours.
❝ — I was young and careless. Mistakes have been known to happen to even old fools. — ❞
That wasn’t the whole story - it never was. Too old to bother with long, cautionary tales that he knew no young one would take real heed from, Henryk just sunk into a memory that he could never seem to shake.
Metal armor had been his go-to; something to suck in the blows but flexible enough to keep moving, keep rolling. He could laugh in the faces of beasts who chipped their claws on silvery metal. Not once had he had to worry about the arcane striking him - nothing he had fought had struck him with anything, and super-heated metal he did not have to fear. Fire struck fear in beast and man alike; they did not wield it for they feared it so.
Blue sparks danced across the fur of the beast, shoulders hunched and hulking, maw drooling, hungry for his blood, the blood of the hunter. He laughed at it, screamed and roared as though he too were a beast, letting the rage that always followed him. Such anger had always come naturally to him, since he was but a lad, dirty feet scrabbling at the ground, grubby hands hunting for pockets and purses laden with coins.
Beast, sparking and blue, returned the roar; bloodthirsty, claws grasping. A missed dodge was hardly fatal - but the current ran through Henryk, made him angrier. Sparkling through his veins, lighting him on fire, fire blue fire -
Victory did come to him. Cleaver tore strips of meat from bone; young Hunter with his teeth clenched, breathing HEAVY. Head addled by the rush of the fight, he desired to take a trophy. He thrust his arm to grasp onto the head, expecting the thunder beneath its skin to have died with it.
It did not. The lightning flashed through his arm in a great release, all of it rushing in at once and running through his arm till it smoked and went numb. He screamed and screamed till the lightning reached his tongue and still he did not die. Collapsed upon the ground, arm no longer containing any feeling.
When he managed to pull melted flesh and skin from fused metal and clasp from his body, the scars came to stay. Where there was not pale and melted, warped and scarred meat and aching bone, there were electrical scars the length of his arm. Never had there been a pain like that - never would there be again.
He didn’t plan on getting hit anymore. He didn’t plan on it - he didn’t plan on the thunder anymore. Perhaps it was a weakness of his; this fear of bolt and blue arches coming forth...
Unconsciously, he brought a gloved hand to his ruined arm and grasped it, once more recalling the pain as nerves damaged beyond repair brought the lightning back.
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