It would be unfortunate that Wilder was so successful with her magic. Whereas the visions—memories—this stone held were mostly good, it was haunted by a cataclysmic storm. Had Wilder been any less of a mage than she was, she might have seen idyllic memories of a sheltered valley that bustled with the life of hidden witches, the storm rumbling in the distance, unable to be shaken by the original bearer whose daylong dreams were eaten by a single nightmare that forever tainted and haunted the rest...
Children were busy laughing, running through the grass and chasing a handmade leather ball, happy to stretch their legs after a long winter. It seemed as if one team of children fought for the ball with their feet against another team; one of the boys, his brown hair streaked with a patch of white, succeeded in outplaying his opponent and managed to sink the ball into a hollow well beneath a holekeeper's feet. He was ecstatic! Bright, lightning blue eyes turned to view the gathered crowd of adults, some cheered for him, others gave warm words of encouragement to the other children.
But beyond them, a flock of birds burst from the forest in the scattered, frenzied way that wild animals flee danger—and the valley shook with a lurching quake and a sharp peal of thunder that crawled through the ground until it erupted into a single, deafening roar. They had all been knocked momentarily to the grass, and as they pulled themselves to their feet to mutter and wonder at the stillness that followed after, they were not left to wonder long.
A distant rumbling from beyond the peaks suggested a storm despite their clear, spring sky—but a cluster of dark, gray clouds began to roll in from all sides, surrounding the valley until it suffocated all of the light from the sky, the air saturated with heavy static and crooked, growing fingers of condensation.
Then came the third crack of thunder, and everything shook.
Some of the children cupped their hands to their ears, some fell, others braced against the ground or by accompanying adults as to not lose balance. It did not take long for them to scatter, afraid, like the birds. One mother scooped her son into her arms—he was too big for her to carry like that anymore, but she ran with him anyway—and from the memory's perspective, his bright blue eyes disappeared into the forest as sheets of iron rain enclosed the valley; as the shadows swallowed him and his mother, the memory-bearer caught a final glance at the strange streak of white hair bobbing with his mother's struggling gait.
But the bearer would need to flee too, and even as she tried, her eyes cast upward to view the dark clouds rolling over themselves, consuming others to grow larger and more menacing. Flashes of lightning lit the atmosphere with cold pink light, illuminating the drops of rain that finally closed in on the valley. Screams rose into the air, challenging the bursts of thunder, as droplets of water, droplets of ice, and acid, and fire, and plasma burned into the skin of those unlucky enough to still be outside—but even those who had sought shelter were not safe as a whipping wind sliced through homes, using the water like blades. Grass and dirt pulled away from itself, the ground splitting with a shattering howl. Pillars of stone groaned as they tore apart as the rain continued to burn its victims.
And the air... swirling with color she could not describe, but it shimmered in her memory like an aurora whose appearance did not strike awe and wonder into her, but fear. Primal, instilled in her and in everyone else—it was more than an unknown, more than a threat. It was death. A piece of her brain could recognize that without having ever seen this before. Streaks of hot, white lightning birthed swirls of scathing fire that began to eat their home alive as the thunder and the chaos consumed the valley whole.
Terror. Fear. Death.
Escape. She had to flee. She had to flee, she had to—
A final clap of thunder tore Wilder from the memory as the ground opened to swallow her after another landscape-altering quake...
Lingering in the quiet dark that came after was the feeling of something familiar to Wilder in ways she would not be able to describe:
For the memory-bearer, the feeling was sadness, the taste of the magic new on her tongue but not far from what she knew herself; something had changed deep within the core of their moon, its magic free and wild and hungry.
But for Wilder, the feeling was birth... THE GREAT AWAKENING.
* Some of this material is paraphrased from Madison Trupp's original writings.
@Wilder