He is an oddity in the brightness of the meadow, and while usually the thought of standing out even slightly would have been enough to discourage him from even coming here, his curiosity has gotten the better of him.

There have been stirrings, as of late.
Nothing too extreme — more like a single drop that has sent a series of subtle ripples out into the world, and he caught the fading edge of it.

There are new voices that have joined the murmuring of others, and a rumor of a new queen in the Chamber. He has never really paid close attention to the politics of Beqanna, having always felt like somewhat of an outsider (because he is an outsider; he was not born here, and despite fathering a handful of children he also has not forged any lasting connections), but it is easier to track the changes when everything is so quiet.

And so here he is, a storm cloud in the sunshine drifting across a sea of wavering grass, his lightning a strange flicker across his darkened body. He stands, those odd wings of his settled at his sides, the rain only a very sporadic drip as his eyes sweep across the land. She is a flicker at the corner of his vision and he turns, holding her captive with his gaze. It takes him a moment to realize that he is staring; he forgets that others find that rude, and sometimes unsettling. In an attempt to appear at least somewhat normal he starts off toward her, eyeing her carefully for a reaction — not everyone cared for the storm clouds that rolled across his skin, or the living lightning that sparked amongst them — before greeting her the low rumble that is his voice, “hello.”

The way they say hello is such a stark contrast that he notices it immediately. From his mouth the word sounds like the beginning of thunder, but from her it sounded like a song. He watches her watching him, as she takes in the drops of rain and the flickering webs of lightning, and he realizes instantly that she is unlike most that he has met. He found himself most often drawn to other storms; it is not often that he is in the company of ones that feel as though they could be sunshine. She seems to laugh and to smile easily, a notion so foreign to him that it stirs a long-dead curiosity.

“I could say that the lightning is just for you,” he begins with his own dark lips quirked into the barest of smiles, the motion not quite reaching his storm-cloud eyes — not for a lack of sincerity but mostly from disuse. “But I would hate for us to start out on a lie.” This is, even by his standards, a poor attempt at a joke. He tries to amend this by explaining further, “unfortunately I cannot control the lightning. It’s always here, much like the rain from my wings.” There is actually very little of his abilities that he can control, and while that has always been a sore spot for him, he does his best to conceal that at this moment.

The rain, the lightning, his storm creation…none of it actually obeys his whims.
Perhaps one day he would work to rectify that, but it is out of his hands for now.

“Tipsy,” he repeats her name with another almost-smile, thinking that it fits her. “My name is Tumult.” And perhaps his fits him, too; there is hardly anything orderly about him. “I didn’t interrupt you, did I?”

The air between them hummed, electric and waiting, and for a moment he only watched her. Something about her seems too soft, too bright to be from here. It is an inexplicable thing, the way those born here seem to come into the world with every awful and tragic thing in their ancestor’s histories carved into their bones, sealing their fates before they take their first breath.

This place, this land, fed on innocence and light, and though he has just met her he already wishes he had a way to protect her from it, even though he could not protect himself.

“If there is one thing I have learned about Beqanna, it’s that there are far worse things that can happen here besides rain and thunder,” he says, a bit wryly.  In his short time here, he has witnessed the kingdoms fall and reshape, he has seen two entirely unheard of realms unearth themselves and bring with them creatures of the sea and sky, and numerous other strange displays of magic that left him unsettled. He had not known power could be used in such ways until he came here, and so often he wonders why he has not left again. It is addicting, almost, the way this place grabs hold of you, forcing you to bear witness to the way it will continue to tear itself apart, to feel the need to see what terrible and strange thing might happen next.

And perhaps he is doing her a disservice to think that she could not fend for herself in this wild world, and she did not need him as a shield, but that soft lilt of her voice causes something to twinge inside of his chest, and it may be all beyond his control now.

He is quiet for a moment as he watches the small prisms of light created by the mist of his wings, the way the glittering silver droplets cling to her skin in places before he answers her last question. “I’m not sure,” he muses, the words spoken low, contemplating. “I usually prefer to be alone, but the meadow called to me today, it seems.” There is another of his minuscule, barely-there smiles, his storm-gray eyes finding hers, “perhaps there is about to be a change in Beqanna, again. Everything here seems to shift when there is.”

“Perhaps it did,” he answers her, storm-gray eyes sweeping across her face, a smile flickering along with the lightning. “I suppose we will have to wait and see what that reason is.” It almost sounds like flirting, although he has yet to master the art of being charming on purpose. He spends too much time in his own head, turning over his failures — the storms he never fully learned to command, and that endless sense of drifting without a point to anchor him.

He is not immune to beautiful women, though, and the proof is out there somewhere in the form of children he sired. She is a beautiful woman, too, but he has the self-awareness to know to tread carefully. He has never been a thing meant for staying; much like his storms, he had a tendency of blowing through and fading away. The faces of past flings — if they can even be called that — have blurred beyond recognition, and he doesn’t want her to become just another victim to the storm he uses to break up the stillness.

So he tells himself he will take this for what it is: a quiet crossing of paths in a meadow, a brief filling of his solitude with someone else’s voice and warmth.

He knows that is what he should do, but the way she looks at him and the way she gravitates towards the rain that falls from him tells him he will have a hard time letting her walk away.

Nearly imperceptibly he shifts forward, that space between them shrinking just slightly. He had no control over the lightning across his skin, but there is a moment where it seems to flash brighter, faster, as if feeding off an invisible current. He notices the way the sunlight glints off the vibrant strands in her mane, and wonders what they would feel like beneath his lips.

“Where are you from?” He asks her a question instead of touching her, keeping them suspended in this moment where he has not yet made any kind of mistake and she is still just a beautiful stranger in the meadow.