Solomonar

Rule I from the Red Book of the Solomonari: A storm is not a force of nature, but a living creature—bloodthirsty and violent. If you show it fear, it devours you. If you show it hesitation, it strikes you down. A solomonar does not command the heavens through prayer, but by wrenching the reins from Death’s own hands. — The Codex of the Solomonari, The Philophobia of the Skies

The sky does not merely split apart; it collapses on top of me.

My underarm burns beneath the weight of the leather-bound crimson volume clutched against my chest, yet I refuse to let it go. Rainwater pours into my eyes, icy cold and blinding, mingling with the hot sweat streaming down my forehead. The drops hammer the earth with an almost tangible violence, a deluge of needles piercing my skin through the silk gown now heavy with mud and plastered to my legs.

A bolt of lightning tears through the air less than ten meters away.

BOOM.

The flash is so blinding it scorches my retinas, leaving behind a purple stain dancing across my vision. The air reeks of ozone and scorched wood. A centuries-old oak in the palace gardens—a giant that had survived three hundred years of dynasties—splits clean in half with the agonized scream of rending timber and crashes directly across the path I had been running.

I stop so abruptly that the sole of my shoe skids across the sucking mud.

My ankle twists into a grotesque angle.

Pain erupts in a pure white explosion that shoots straight into my brain. I scream, but the sound is swallowed instantly by the thunder that follows—a cataclysmic roar that makes the ground tremble beneath me. I lose my balance. My hands claw desperately for something to hold onto, but find nothing except rain-soaked air and crushed leaves. I slam into the mud on my side, wrapping my arms around the book as though it were my own child.

Move, Ilinca. Move!

My mind screams at me.

But my body refuses.

My ankle throbs in waves of fire, while fear locks my lungs shut. This is no ordinary summer storm. It is an apocalyptic tempest, the kind I had only ever read about in the forbidden passages of the Red Book. Above the palace, the sky is not gray, but a filthy black veined with unnatural streaks of green and violet.

The Storm of the Solomonari. The season of cursed storms has begun—the season that returns again and again, stealing countless innocent lives from among us.

“If the sky turns green, do not seek shelter beneath trees. Find stone, or bare earth instead.”

My memory recites the words instinctively, turning the pages I had been studying barely ten minutes ago on the marble bench before chaos erupted.

“A green sky means a solomonar is losing control. Or that a beast of the heavens has been provoked.”

Another bolt of lightning crashes straight down, striking the fountain at the center of the palace gardens. The marble statue shatters into thousands of fragments that fly like shrapnel. A jagged piece of stone whistles past my ear, slicing across my cheekbone. I feel warm blood trickling down my face—a brutal contrast to the freezing rain.

I have to reach the palace’s stone galleries. They’re fifty meters away. Fifty meters of mud, lightning, and death.

Tssssss!

The air around me begins to hiss. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. The static electricity is so dense I can taste metal—copper—on my tongue.

Another lightning strike is coming. Right here. Right on top of me.

The book’s golden rule screams inside my head: “When the air begins to sing against your skin, do not run. Throw yourself to the ground and become one with the mud.”

I throw myself face-first into the soaked earth, burying my forehead in the waterlogged ground and shielding the Red Book with my own body. A fraction of a second later, the world explodes. It feels as though a bomb has detonated barely a meter away. The shockwave lifts my body off the ground before hurling me back down, driving every breath from my lungs. My ears ring with a sharp, relentless shriek. I can no longer hear the rain. I can no longer hear the thunder. Only that maddening ringing... and my own heart pounding like a hammer against an anvil.

One. Two. Three. I count silently, struggling to catch my breath. You’re alive. You’re still alive.

With agonizing effort, I roll onto my back, gasping, spitting mud and rainwater from my mouth. And then I look up.

Above the chaos, where the black clouds churn like an infernal vortex, something moves. Something that should not exist in this world.

It emerges from the clouds like a colossal shadow, cleaving the storm in two. It’s enormous. Its wingspan must stretch at least thirty meters. Its scales do not reflect the lightning’s glow; they consume it. It is the color of cold hearth ash—a massive, visceral dragon with powerful limbs and a tail ending in jagged stone spikes. The membranes of its wings are torn in several places, and from those wounds drips something that burns through the air like phosphorus.

And upon its back... upon its back stands a man.

A man.

Even from this distance, even through the curtain of rain and smoke, I can see him. He wears a black cloak that lashes behind him like a tattered battle standard. He is anchored to the dragon’s back, commanding the storm.

Another bolt of lightning, as massive as the trunk of an ancient oak, crashes down from the dome of clouds straight toward them. But the man doesn’t dodge. He leans forward, raises a long leather whip, and catches the lightning.

Dear God... he catches the lightning!

Pure electricity courses through his weapon, flowing down into his arms. Even through the rain, I see his entire body blaze with blinding white light. My insides twist into a tight knot. I feel... I feel a searing agony erupt inside my own chest, as though that million-volt current were surging through my own veins.

How is that even possible? I’m on the ground, buried in filthy mud, while he’s hundreds of meters above me. And yet every tensed muscle in his body, every wave of agony ripping through his being... I feel them. I feel them with terrifying clarity—physically, viscerally, devastatingly.

“Vladislav,” I whisper.

Everyone in the kingdom knows the name of the last solomonar, the storm tamer.

The ash-gray dragon releases a roar—a brutal, baritone sound so powerful that several of the palace windows explode into thousands of shards. The creature tilts its wings at an impossible angle, diving straight into the heart of the vortex.

The man roars as well. It is the cry of pure fury, of defiance against forces older than the world itself. With one savage crack of his whip, he hurls the captured energy back into the clouds. An explosion of violet light tears across the heavens, unleashing a spherical shockwave that scatters the storm clouds across a radius of nearly a kilometer.

For one second—one single second—the rain stops in midair. Every drop hangs suspended like a string of crystal beads.

The battle between man and sky is terrifyingly beautiful, a symphony of destruction. Vladislav is drawing upon the last of his strength. I watch him sag to one knee on the dragon’s back, his shoulders trembling with exhaustion. The light surrounding him begins to flicker, fading with every pulse. He wrings out the very last drop of his magic, the very last spark of his life, to subdue the monstrosity raging across the heavens.

And I weep.

I don’t know why I’m crying. My tears mingle with the warm rain that has begun to fall again. I press one hand against my chest, over my heart, which is pounding so violently it hurts. My legs are numb, the mud swallowing me whole, but my eyes remain fixed on him. A searing pain splits my head, followed by an exhaustion so profound I feel like I’m about to faint. It’s HIS exhaustion. It pours into me through something unseen, an absurd and impossible connection.

“Stop...” I whisper, my voice breaking. “Please, stop... it’s going to kill you...”

The storm begins to show signs of surrender. The vortex slows. The green veins threading through the clouds fade into a washed-out gray. The sky is losing ground. Vladislav has won.

Then something happens that stops my heart.

One last bolt of lightning—a stray sliver of energy, as thin as a razor blade—lashes out from behind a brooding cloud. It isn’t a great bolt, but it’s treacherous. It strikes the man squarely in the back, just as he lets his guard down.

I watch his body arch violently backward. The whip slips from his hand, disappearing into the void.

The man slips.

Time slows to an agonizing crawl. I watch him lose his balance. I watch him reach toward the dragon’s neck, but his fingers slide helplessly across the rain-slick scales.

And then... he falls.

He plummets through open air. No anchor. No magic. No defense.

An enormous, inhuman scream tears from my throat. I clamp both hands over my mouth, my eyes wide with absolute horror. My heart leaps into my throat, stealing every breath.

“No!”

The world collapses around me. There is no palace anymore. No mud. No injured ankle. There is only that man falling through the sky like a stone, his black cloak spiraling around him like broken wings. I feel the sickening void in my stomach, the relentless pull of gravity, the terror of the fall—all of it reflected inside my own mind.

The ash-gray dragon releases a cry of heartbreaking despair.

The creature folds its wings and dives after him in a kamikaze plunge. It twists through the air, slicing through the atmosphere with such speed that the wind screams around it like a missile. The distance between the man and the ground closes at a terrifying pace.

Just before the man’s body can be dashed against the towering spires of the palace, the dragon stretches out one of its massive foreclaws and catches him in midair.

A dull thud. A catch at the very edge of the impossible.

The dragon throws its immense wings wide to brake, unleashing a blast of wind that almost sweeps me completely off the path. Its scales devour the air, and the creature manages to steady its flight only a few meters above the tiled rooftops. I watch it holding the motionless man in its claw with extraordinary care, as though carrying the most fragile piece of glass in the world.

With the man unconscious—or perhaps dead, dear God, please don’t let him be dead—clutched in its claw, the dragon beats its wings twice, sending a wave of water and leaves spiraling into the air, then turns north, disappearing swiftly into the dense mist that still blankets the mountains.

I’m left alone.

The storm suddenly dwindles into a fine drizzle, almost insignificant. The black sky fractures apart, revealing the first pale, cold rays of sunlight piercing through the shattered clouds.

I’m covered in mud, blood streaks my cheek, and rainwater soaks every inch of me. My ankle hurts so badly I want to scream. The Red Book lies beside me, stained and drenched.

But none of it matters.

I curl into myself on the ruined palace path, pounding my fist helplessly against the ground. I’m crying for a stranger. I don’t know him. I’ve never seen his face up close.

But I was terrified for him. A terror so deep, so visceral, that it feels as though a part of me fell from the sky along with him.

And inside my mind, like an echo from another realm, Rule I of the Red Book continues to resound, tauntingly:

“A solomonar does not command the heavens through prayer, but by wrenching the reins from Death’s own hands.”

Only today, Death very nearly wrenched everything away from him.

And I felt every single second of it.