cumulonimbus | barometric pressure

Her name's Isabella, and she prefers Bella, and she's called Stormy.

She has never slept through a stormy night since she was a baby. Till she was seven her mother thought she was scared; her mother reassured her that the thunder couldn't get her, her mother told her over and over that it was just a sound and she should try to sleep. Bella told her she was wrong, but Ranae thought she was just putting on a brave face, denying fear so she wouldn't look babyish.

When she is seven she drags her mattress out the back door in the middle of a stormy night, flops onto it in the rain, and sleeps like a log in the pouring storm, and after that her mother realizes what is really going on in her head when she tells them storms don't scare her.

The mattress is ruined. Ranae replaces it. That one is destroyed the next time Bella is left unsupervised during rough nighttime weather.

Ranae gets her a hammock.

When Bella is eight she learns to really touch the weather, not just with her skin but with her self. It's delicious. She can't do it all day, so she still plays and goes to school and sleeps and eats and writes and reads books - but she does it a lot. Stolen moments, here and there, where she can feel the raindrops and the air - she can reach farther and touch the clouds - she can skim the tops of the clouds and the dry rarefied winds above them - she can reach farther and farther, grab shards of sunlight -

Sometimes it is a little hard to come back, but she gets tired if she stays out too long.

She can change stuff she touches. She can "breathe", and the wind will swirl this way or that. She feels like she is the sky, sometimes, when she's in deep, and the sky-self is even clumsier and harder to control than her regular body, but she can move it if she tries. (This is also tiring, but she gets better and better with practice.)

By the time she is nine, weather happens around her all the time. It's mostly humidity, and temperature - the air is dry when she's happy, wet when she's sad, hot when she's angry, cold when she's calm. But sometimes rain comes to comfort her - even indoors - sometimes winds kick up and break Ranae's good china, sometimes there are tiny playful bolts of lightning, and they seem to like Bella, but just as though they were badly trained puppies that doesn't mean they won't bite other people.

Of course Ranae takes her to a magic-checker. But the magic-checker insists on doing his tests indoors, in a nasty stuffy room, and no weather to touch at all (there's barely oxygen), and Bella is unhappy and nothing happens because the air is behaving in a very unskylike way. The tests all turn up negative. Bella goes home. Ranae writes it off as "just one of those things", though when prompted for a list of those things, she cannot produce one.

Bella plays with the sky. Work small, be big. Feel small, think big. She makes tiny little breaths, because they're easier to control; but she inhabits the biggest storms that she can, stretching miles across and miles high, a billion drops of rain. She sinks deep into the tiniest snowflake crystals and puffs of air and beams of sun to feel how they work; but she imagines being the whole sky, over the whole world, and dancing.

By the time Bella is ten, she no longer makes indoor weather unless she chooses to. (It is always very dry where she keeps her notebooks.) It rains in the vicinity of Firebird City exactly twice weekly, as more would harm local flora, but when it does rain it's usually a doozy, intense thunder that shakes the windows, lightning that crackles between the clouds. Sometimes she calls down just a little bit of lightning, when Ranae's not looking, and it touches her outstretched hand, and she feels all aglow and invigorated, like instead of being the sky the sky is being her.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cumulonimbus

"I'm going to make tiny weather for the tiny trees. Or try, anyway. Is Mathilde going to be my teacher or somebody else?"

From:

neverbeatme

"Mathilde's going to be your teacher if she can't find anyone else, and there aren't any other weather mages at Winding Circle either, so probably she can't."

From:

cumulonimbus

"How do people who don't have the same kind of magic as their students teach it, anyway?"

From:

neverbeatme

"I don't know how people do it generally. Rook and I just sit and talk about magic and he suggests things and I try them. And he's teaching me how to make ink and paper. Or we're both learning it; I don't think he knew before. He says paper mages are very rare, and he says that's good because I don't have to be limited by tradition."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Why would you have to be anyway?"

From:

neverbeatme

"Good question."

From:

cumulonimbus

"What's meditation like?"

From:

neverbeatme

"I don't know if I can explain," she says consideringly. "I like it. It's... quiet."

From:

cumulonimbus

"What is it, though?"

From:

neverbeatme

"You sit still and count your breathing so it's the same every time, and kind of... fit your mind into a shape."

From:

cumulonimbus

"...that sounds boring."

From:

neverbeatme

"Niva complains sometimes, so she and Mercy are learning a different kind with Dedicate Finch, but they say it's harder because you have to move around and fight with sticks. I like the kind where you just have to sit. It doesn't bore me at all."

From:

cumulonimbus

"...Um, what if I think the sitting kind is boring and also I can't do any complicated moving around without falling over?"

From:

neverbeatme

"Then you probably just have to learn the sitting kind anyway."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Rats. Maybe it's not as boring as it sounds," sighs Stormy.

From:

neverbeatme

"I did say I might not be able to explain it well," says Elyth.

From:

cumulonimbus

"What's it for?"

From:

neverbeatme

"It helps keep your magic steady so it doesn't do things you don't want it to and does do things you do want it to," she says. "And so you know what it looks like and where to find it. And some other things that are harder to explain than that."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I can already keep it from doing things I don't want, and do things with it whenever," says Stormy, puzzled.

From:

neverbeatme

"Then maybe you do something else that helps with those, or maybe you're thinking about something different from what I mean because you've never meditated and you don't know what it's like. Or maybe both."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Maybe I'm secretly meditating every time I'm the sky. My body sure isn't doing much at the time."

From:

neverbeatme

"Someone should check if that's true, because if it is, Rook and Sedge might want to draw circles around you when you do it. They say that it's important to have a circle when student mages are meditating because they might spill magic around and it could cause problems."