Bruise

Archivist’s Note: The head archivist saw him too, today. The thing that is the Head of Institute. He seemed quietly pleased, as if she had passed some sort of test in seeing him. But if that is the case, what of me, who saw him before her? Somehow being ahead in this matter does not seem a comfort.

Statement of lightning ridgeback Bruise, regarding her experience above an electrical storm

I used work on a lightning farm. The great machines of the Stormcatcher require great power to run, power that is drawn straight from the sky. To do so is terribly simple. In the right parts of the desert the conditions are such that storms brew eternal, and within those storms brews a terrible charge. This charge seeks nothing but cross the void of the sky and join the earth, and all we must do to capture it is to build it a bridge.
Almost anything can be a bridge. Make it tall, make it conductive—the lightning will come. The work of a technician has little to do with attracting lightning, and everything to do with making sure it only strikes what it should.
It was to this end I was up on one of our towers, repairing the rubber insulation that so often melted off. Without it our sensitive instruments would be subject to strikes—strikes that should have been directed toward our high voltage wires.
Being on the tower is not so dangerous as you might think. Certainly it is not without danger, but we use faraday cages and refrain from touching ground. Accidents do happen, of course, but they rarely have anything to do with lightning. Still, in my case it wasn’t the lightning that got me—it was the wind.
In theory we have tethers when we’re up there. But the wind rarely gets terribly strong, and proper safety measures take a long time when we’re supposed to maximizing our output. When I went up it wasn’t even raining. But the storm came on quickly, and before I even knew what was happening I was ripped from the tower and into the air.
There was nothing I could do. The winds were so terrible they would have torn my wings off had I opened them, though their strength meant I didn’t fall. Instead, the storm dragged me upwards into the clouds, tossing and buffeting me as if I weighed nothing. It was nigh impossible to breathe, and I could see nothing but the occasional flash of lightning as I was spun wildly about by forces beyond my comprehension.
And yet as terrible as it was, my plight meant nothing. The wind, the rain, the sky had no malice for me. That would require awareness of my existence. No, I was nothing to them, and for all of my pain and fear the storm would carry on in complete ignorance of me. I would live or die by its hand, an entire lifetime’s worth of experience extinguished or saved without so much as a glance.
So I waited. Not for judgement but simply for what must be. And in those terrible clouds my body began to fail me, and I slipped into unconsciousness.
I awoke to utter stillness. I was still airborne, carried by the wind. But this was a gentle, steady wind, so smooth that I could not feel it. I only know it was there because I was floating. My wings were somehow open now, though I didn’t need to beat them.
I was above the storm. Below me the clouds stretched endless in every direction, little more than a white fog at these heights. And what heights those were. Storm clouds can stretch up to twenty kilometers high, and yet the tallest peaks below me were dizzyingly far away. The rest of the sky was empty. A faint glow lit the entire horizon, or rather, lit the line where the clouds gave way to open air. So high up I should have seen the earth begin to curve away from me, but the clouds were flat, and the light upon them perfectly even, with no hint of the sun or moon to be seen. Above me the blue of the sky only grew deeper, turning a color as dark as any black, and yet somehow still so terrible blue that no stars could be seen through it.
That is, if the stars had been there. I suddenly knew with a terrible certainty that the sky stretched upwards forever, that there was already no difference between where I was and the yawning void of space. I could see no sun or moon because they were too small to exist, the entire world having simply simply curved away into nothing beneath me.
I folded my wings and did not fall—or perhaps I had always been falling. There was no difference. The clouds beneath me were so far away that I could drop forever without ever reaching them, or even seeing them grow nearer. And if I tried to fly upwards I would never reach the dark.
So I did nothing. And I waited.
I don’t know how long I was up there. I don’t even remember how I left. All I know was that I was later found collapsed on the shores of the tangled wood, supposedly washed ashore from the open sea.
And it was terrible blue.

Statement Ends

Supplementary: Researching yet another unverifiable statement is the last thing on my mind, but I need to keep up appearances. Then again, if he already knows…No. I need to keep taking the statements.
…
Fortunately, the lightning flight keeps detailed spreadsheets on its workers, and it seems a technician fitting Bruise’s description was recorded failing to clock out after routine tower maintenance. However, the report mentions nothing about an incident, and seems only to note that she left without giving her two weeks notice. However, it still is possible that a storm swept her away and deposited her in the northeast portion of the Sea of a Thousand Currents. Her experience above it is then easily explained by the fact she lost consciousness. Head trauma is the source of many a statement. And yet, I did check the weather records for that time. Supposedly both the Sea and the Tangled Wood had clear skies the entire week.