Interactive Quest gunpowder instead of a heart

You knew what it was the first time it happened, or you should have.

Maybe you were too caught up in the moment. It was something little, something that began benign and grew the way a fissure will grow, in ice or a continental shelf: nothing, and then the breaking point. You might have been alone, but it is just as likely you were not. You were always volatile, it didn’t matter if the whole world was watching or nobody was. Everything provoked you, even yourself. Maybe especially yourself.

Did you notice the way the hum in your blood didn’t end there, the way it always had before, but spread into your teeth, your bones? Maybe your rage, all scarlet and crimson and black down beneath, blinded you to the thing your body was waking up to. It tried to warn you - the hair standing on end, the crackle back-and-forth between your shoulders, arcing out to those long black wingtips. Were you paying attention yet? Did you guess?

That was the lesson - the realizing. Call it knowledge, call it understanding. If you slowed down enough to know it was happening, you could begin to control it.

But not this first time. When did you realize - was it when the electricity began to trace over you, little arcs of blue light, capillaries to your volatile heart? Maybe not even then. Your anger was the fuel, after all, and it only kept building, until all those little warnings died away, and -

Were you surprised (shocked works too, but is perhaps cruel under the circumstances), when it hurt? Maybe you’d come to expect that from your fury; the pain was never over for you just because someone else was bleeding. But everyone expects magic to be a blessing. At least from this god - so wise, so patient, so gentle. Dull, to some. Maybe he didn’t start out that way. Maybe he had to learn it, too, how to turn all that terrible wrath at the world into something useful, something powerful, something that wounded by intent and not accident. Rage must have purpose or it is only a weakness that will eat you up from the inside.

That is the ongoing lesson of this magic, this gift. That you are not a black hole or a dying star, set to swallow up yourself or everything else and be left wanting and alone. That it is a choice.

It was not a choice, that day. That first arc flash, an explosion of noise and heat, the acrid smell of burning afterward, the world that rang and rang before falling to silence. Were you amazed? Horrified? There was collateral damage. There always is.

Awesome used to mean more than it does now. It was a word for the old gods, the power they held, the wonder and the terror both. It did not mean good. It mean fear and trembling, supplication, worship to appease. It is not a comfortable thing, an easy one.

You have an awesome gift. The trick now, the key, is what it has always been, and what has always frightened you -

Know Thyself.