[AW] i smell the blood [patrol]

[Andras]

and i was a hand grenade
that never stopped exploding

He knows this storm in the heart of him, knows it like he knows his own brothers. Knows it like he knows his sad-faced mother.

From the canopy, wedged between the last thick branches of a tree far older than their haunted country, Andras sees its fat, dark clouds sagging toward the horizon, sees them light up like a bomb in the gray, rainy sky. He counts the seconds.

One. There is so much to do, always. Ghosts to hunt. Monsters to slay. Fights to fight. He is so tired of dead faces and the rock that sits in him like teeth with their points in his stomach.

Two. No one has seen Andras in weeks. From charts to maps to empty rooms to the dark tangle of the words everything has become a colorless smear. If he is anyone but a machine that hunts and hates he does not know who that is. If he has ever seen anything that is not carefully rendered drawings of mutilated animals it feels so far removed that it must not have happened at all.

Three. Below him is a forest that stinks of fear and death and blood. Another season has passed. There is no more red snow, just red dirt. There is no more ice to cool the rage in him. There is no more anything but fatigue and anger.

Four. The storm's pressure breaks over the canopy, the crackling of thunder that drums in his bones, spreading through him in a way that does not seem entirely holy. He has been a storm all his life but he did not know what it meant until it woke up inside him and bathed him in hissing blue light. Before the rumbling has stopped there is another branch of light arching its way toward the peaks, one that glints off the lens of his glasses. The leaves rattle with fat raindrops.

Below him there is a sound: the beat of hooves, soft but not soft enough to be secretive, slow but not slow enough to be sly. Andras looks and sees Ipomoea, tracking through the woods with boulders on his back. He recognizes that look, a long-suffering andger that he has worn since his birth and surely since the dawn of winter.

"Storm's here, Po." he says, and his magic punctuates the statement with a crackle of its own that rolls of his skin like toy thunder. "Find anything?"

He must look like a beast, leering down from the treetops. He feels like a beast. Sometimes he wonders how he can be anything but.

@ipomoea