Thunder rolled, rumbling the promise of a storm, and lightning fractured the sky into jagged fragments. Mist danced across the pavement of a broken city, shattered by the sacrilege, the profanation of the sanctimonious and the sinners.
This was not the goal. The goal was equality, absolute and omnipotent. The goal was all-consuming, anarchic.
(archaic. but the rest of the world didn’t need to know that.)
Chaos. Catastrophe. The beauty of the broken, the exquisite in exonerating a city of fools. It had fallen to new masters, replaced the old with idols made of a different metal. These people—crippled under the sting of another whip—needed a new vision.
He had that vision, and he had the voice they needed.
He rolled a coin across his knuckles, languid.
Heathens. Suckling like newborns at the first promise of something—at an incompetent legal system, or the spike-kissing idolaters who thought themselves better than the rest. Still, the people scraped and bowed. Sickening. He knew what they needed. He knew how to deliver them into true freedom. They would thank him, worship him—
oh, but not above the Survivor. never.
But they would become their own masters. They would thank him. They would see the error of their ways, how they’d submitted to sacrilege after all the Survivor had done for them, all of his sacrifice.
He burned steel, feet thumping against the ground as he hit it in a run. He tossed the coin into the air and it flipped neatly, clattering to the ground as thunder hammered the sky—he launched himself into the air, freefalling onto the rooftops and rolling on his shoulder to absorb the impact. Coming up into a crouch, he surveyed the skyline of Elendel. Lightning flashed, illuminating a dark silhouette. A tasselled coat stirred in the storm’s winds. Mist gathered around him, cloaking him in an ethereal haze. His return was long since overdue.
The city had gone to the dogs in his absence, but it was his, and he would bring it back to its knees.
( in reverence, of course. )
The thunder cracked the sky, rattling windows like teeth.
The storm was here.