A Clash of Wind and Lightning

Art by J.E. Shields

Throughout its history, mountains in this region were more for the hardy and less for the fashionable. Spirits claimed the high places, and durable men and women claimed the places in between. Settlers of the upper valleys eked out a living and raised their families in splendid and harsh isolation, vaguely but persistently aware of the forces above.

Few there were who ventured up the steeps though it was known that the highland meadows were good for grazing. Every so often, however, the high fever seized upon a restless, earthbound soul, and up past the crags he would go to be nearer the clouds and to have a closer look at the peaks and glaciers towering over vacant pastures. Of the few who went, some never returned. Those who did reported the strange ways in which the spirits exercised their power over the forces of nature. Some said the mysterious oneshowled in the wind and made mischief, others that they took on corporeal form, still others that they inhabited the lightning and thunder, but many details of these accounts were not in agreement. Those who hadn’t climbed dismissed the superstitions by light of day and shivered in their beds at night.

Certain victims of the high fever were unfit for valley living thereafter, and they would wander until they chanced upon one another in the heights. Their encounters were infrequent; once made, however, they lasted. A small community of goatherds and shepherds formed on the slopes of the high pastures, and this settlement degenerated into a cult of the wind distinguished by lines of gray message flags strung between its stone dwellings. Therein was a society of peculiar ways. Its members claimed that spirits communicated through the variable fluttering of the banners, but the valley folk were generally skeptical of this practice.

* * *

Gavin Smiley was a good man, as good men go. He kept his words plain and his furrows straight. He and his wife worked their land, sowing crops in spring and reaping a harvest in autumn before the snows came to blanket their fields in deep white. They tended flocks of sheep and goats, repaired stone fences, gathered crops and hay, and brought forth such vegetables as they could from the garden by their house. A good house it was, built sturdy to withstand harsh weather, and contentment and domestic tranquility pervaded its confines.

Gavin was bent to the plow one morning in spring when the high fever hit him. His steady hands faltered on the wooden handles as his ox pulled and the soil parted on either side of the blade, and it was in vain that he called upon his powers of concentration. Flesh and blood can do only so much despite the best of manly intentions. There was no denying it. He was in the grip. His wife, occupied with turning goat’s milk into cheese back at their low slung barn, couldn’t see out to notice when he left his ox standing in the field.

Up the green slopes he ascended, up past the crags and above the tree line. The air grew thin. His head grew light. His breath came in gasps, and his heart pounded with wild abandon. He was outside his right mind. Before him lay a path along a steep-sided ridge, and above him loomed gray, rugged mountains capped with snow. He ventured onto the spine and moved among exposed rock spotted with crusts of lichen.

A fierce wind screamed in his ears, and he felt the eerie sensation of someone rushing toward him from a great distance away and to his right. Suddenly, a fair looking young man of crafty air and fine features was walking beside him. The man’s smile bore hints of threat and amusement, and his eyes gleamed with malice.

“One should know better than to go walking in the places where spirits dwell,” he taunted.

Full of the high fever, Gavin was unfazed and careless in his address. “That’s mighty strong speech. You low spirits play tricks with the wind, but the high spirits bring lightning and thunder. I expect I’ll have a look at them and see how you fare by comparison.”

“Brash words serve the ignorant poorly,” his uninvited companion reprimanded. “The wind is indeed present, but the sky overhead is clear.”

The wind gusted to alarming force, and Gavin’s high fever broke. The gale swept a more contrite man bumping and tumbling over the rocks and meager grasses. There ensued a pause, and in that momentary calm, he came to rest near the edge of the ridge. He had just enough time to behold the vaulted heavens, clear and blue. The first wisp of cloud entered the periphery of his vision, and he made silent supplication as the offended and malevolent spirit blustered out its judgment.

“Tricks, you said? That’s enough of your insolence, and it’s over the precipice with you.”

Gavin grabbed at the tip of a large half buried rock, but the wind gusted once again and weakened his hold. Without announcing itself in advance, timely deliverance arrived out of nowhere. An intense flash and a simultaneous crack shattered the airy blast, making Gavin burn and tingle from his scalp to his fingers and toes. His hair crackled with static and stood on end as he sat up in a daze. With bewilderment, he considered his body, which was glowing. He looked up and saw that he was alone.

The sky had grown suddenly gray, mantled with steely rolls of cloud, and the air was still. In less than a blink, a man with a well-traveled look about him was sitting on the ground next to Gavin.

“Good deliverer, tell me what has befallen,” beseeched Gavin.

The new stranger’s expression was one of stern kindness and correction.

“Consider yourself fortunate,” the man admonished. “You have survived a direct strike from the lightning of heaven, but one such as you was never meant for the high places. Ambition rests poorly on the wrong shoulders.”

“What remains for a man of the soil to do once he has traversed the heights?” the farmer lamented.

“What he has always done,” answered the high and benevolent spirit. “Go down to your wife.”

* * *

By the time Gavin reached the valley floor, retrieved his ox and plow, and crossed the threshold of his dwelling, the glow had dissipated, but his appearance was altered in a way difficult to put into words. He spoke little and ate heartily at supper. Ellen Smiley watched him and wondered, but she knew better than to question why he had returned to her so late. When she lay down with him later, she knew that a profound change had come over her husband. They conceived a child woven from lightning, thunder, and marital embrace that very night.

* * *

Some miles distant lived Gabriella Fulton, a young woman barely past her teens, who took to the heights under similar compulsion. She was the first woman to do so, and she distinguished not between the high and low spirits. Such recklessness was in her nature as she had not yet acquired that discerning perspective afforded by maturity. Dark and desirable, up she went, away from the home of her parents, away from the duties of house and hearth, up among the lonesome spires and pinnacles. The impetuous Miss

Fulton would never again see her parents, who out of bitterness at this abandonment would come to judge her riddance a good one.

Atop the same ridge traversed by Gavin Smiley, a low, disconsolate wind moaned, and Gabriella sensed the presence of someone behind her. This produced in her only amusement and not the slightest fear, and she wheeled about with her hands in the air and her winsome head thrown back in a laugh. A dark-headed woman in gray attire, a woman of remarkable beauty, smiled back with equal amusement. Her dress flowed in hypnotic patterns, and it was impossible to tell whether her feet truly touched the ground.

“What is this?” challenged the wild pilgrim. “Who follows my steps?”

“I should think you know,” the woman replied. “Is this not why you ventured into our domain?”

“That it is. So you are a spirit. What should you want with the likes of me?”

“A nature in whom I can work,” came the reply. “Can you contain the wind?”

“I can try,” Gabriella laughed.

These were ignorant words, for it was one unborn whom the spirit really desired. The wind filled Gabriella’s lungs till it seemed she would never breathe again. Her mouth remained open, and her abdomen swelled then flattened as she let out an ecstatic shriek.

“Wander, child. Wander wherever the changing winds push you. They will be ever at your back, and you will offer them no resistance. Go now, and fulfill our bidding.”

* * *

That evening, the door to a dwelling blew open, and Gabriella Fulton crossed its threshold. She smiled in provocation at the hut’s lone occupant as he looked up from a bowl of goat stew.

“There’s a portion of that held for me,” she announced as she looked toward the black pot suspended over the hearth.

William Cole was a weak-willed, susceptible man who lived meagerly off his goats. He had long since sold his mind to the wind. The fire in the hearth flickered in his eyes and made the stones in the walls glow softly, and he nodded with desire.

“Then you’ll be living here with me.”

Under a moonless sky, the cult of the wind received its only woman in this manner, and the wind howled through the heights above that precarious settlement. Several embraces would form and break in weeks to come, but no man who had grasped after the wind would know with certainty that the product of conception was his.

* * *

Spirits invaded the valley on the winter night Justin Smiley was born. The moon was full as an ill wind blew out of the barrens and descended into the draws, humming eerily through the walls of cabins whose occupants drew their covers tightly about them. After the wind had abated, an unearthly fog billowed down the slopes and spread into the fields as if poured from a jug. Out of this obscurity proceeded a pack of wolves, more shadow than substance. Silently, stealthily, they streaked through the darkness and over the snow, and the moon illumined the fur on their hides as if they were wisps of vapor.

The wolves passed through one meager farm and then another. They ignored the pens of bleating sheep and goats, the stalls of whinnying horses and lowing cattle, and a chill followed their passing. At the boundary of the Smiley farm, they solidified, stopped at the fence, and panted. Here they would find the prey the sought, but that prey had not yet arrived. With a series of low growls, they flowed effortlessly over the fence and continued running.

They surrounded and approached the cabin, scratched at its windows and door. Then they stood upright and transformed into ghostly men attired in cloaks—hooded, long, and dark. They pounded on the door, but the only response was the sound of a rifle bolt clicking into place. The sky was suddenly alight, and the shadow men disappeared. A few seconds later, a low rumble shook the window panes.

Ellen wailed in great anguish at the nearest flash of lightning, the loudest crack of thunder, and Justin Smiley issued forth and filled his lungs. The first cry he expelled with tightened fists was neither tentative nor frail. It was explosive. Rather than an expression of need or fear, it seemed more a call to war, and his mother took solemn note of its implications. She drew her son to her breast and trembled at her thoughts of what he would become.

* * *

In the community of the wind some months later, the wind seemed to blow from everywhere at once as a Bighorn ewe, gray as mist, leapt nimbly over the rocks above. The stones in the walls of the dwellings below vibrated in mourning, and drafts permeated the interiors. Under a clear sky and a bright sun, dun-colored flags made of

goat hair waved frenetically, and all lines leading to William Cole’s abode snapped. A couple of foolhardy souls were outdoors to see it.

“Well,” shouted one, “it looks like poor William’s done for.”

“Wild Gabriella won’t be long without a man,” shouted the other.

Both men shuddered at the memory of her frightening and irresistible embrace, but they were wrong in their prediction. With a shriek of horror, Gabriella Fulton expired at the point of childbirth in Cole’s stout hovel. The wind swallowed her travail as a more ominous cry pierced the confines of every habitation, and an even fiercer personage invaded the cult of the wind. The name William bestowed on her was Lila Cole, a name that in years to come would cause weak-kneed trembling in any man of the cult who heard it. None would venture to touch or even to go near her.

* * *

Justin Smiley’s first laughter was to the sound of thunder, his first word to the flash of lightning. Throughout his toddling, his parents could scarce contain him, and he grew in both strength and stature. He was drawn to the darkest storms, the brightest electrical displays the atmosphere could muster. Once he was steady enough at walking, keeping him indoors during inclement weather was an exercise in futility. He listened intently to each boom, stared rapt at each flash, as if receiving instruction. On his eleventh birthday, he made his first foray above the valley and didn’t return for two days. It was to become a regular practice over the ensuing years.

Gavin and Ellen learned not to worry whenever their son was absent, for he always returned in a literal glow of health and vigor, his body bristling with static. The lad was impervious to the wind. As he worked in the fields, strong gusts that descended into the valley neither disturbed his clothing nor ruffled his hair. During his ventures up to the heights, not the slightest breeze came down to the farms, and his parents marveled as they imagined the confrontations faced by their son.

Farmers prospered. Fields yielded their crops in abundance, and livestock grew fat and strong. Goats and cattle produced more milk than their owners could use. As Justin grew overconfident, the Smiley’s neighbors lapsed into complacence. The spaces between the heights were ripe for spiritual mischief, and each year brought cosmic confrontation nearer.

* * *

Not counting the night of his birth, the first time the spirits manifested in physical form to make an attempt on Justin’s life was in the autumn following his sixteenth birthday, when aspen groves decorated the slopes in quaking, golden patches. It was a bit on the warm side for that time of year as Justin stood upon the ridge where his father had been struck by lightning. Beads of perspiration, the evaporating products of his labor, stood out on his forehead. The sun bore down upon him through the altitude. A pillar of cloud rose over the mountains to greet him, and he raised his hands in gratitude for the shade.

Six wolves sprang from their places of concealment among the boulders ahead and ran toward him in their fury. Up until then, the spirits had only challenged him with disembodied words and wind, but their strongest efforts had stirred not a hair on his head or a thought in his mind. The lad lowered his hands and calmly faced the approaching pack, waiting until the last second to thrust his arms forward in simultaneous, sweeping motions from either side. At the clap of his hands, howls and snarls met with an intense flash and a concurrent crack, and six low piles of cinders scattered in the wind of their passing.

At the reappearance of spring, Justin ventured to where the winds were strongest among the crags. He was undisturbed by their currents as he leapt nimbly from rock to rock, and he stopped to survey the lower elevations from a ledge. Hints of valley appeared in the notches among the lower peaks. Clouds swept across the summits above. In his peripheral vision, he spotted a Bighorn ewe, and he noted that she was bounding toward him across the scrabble. When the ewe landed on his ledge, she went into a full charge.

“Hmph,” he snorted when her horns were less than a yard from his person.

He snapped his fingers. A single bolt of lightning struck the rock between them, and an otherwise beautiful woman with black hair sat awkwardly on the ledge with her feet splayed in front of her and a confused look on her face. In the next instant she was gone, leaving an insolent gust in her wake.

* * *

Reputations spread, and it can only be so long until trouble pursues them. During his eighteenth summer, an ominous stranger invaded Justin’s valley and intimidated the greater part of its inhabitants. By menace and imprecation, he secured the directions he required, leaving fear in his wake. He was clad in animal skins from head to toe, and a chain of three human skulls clattered below his leather belt as he walked. The man eventually stopped before the porch where Gavin and Ellen Smiley were seated. Placing his meaty fists on his hips, he threw his head back and addressed them with imperious manner.

“My cap is from the fur of a wolf, my coat from the hide of a bear, and my trousers and moccasins I took from the hide of a mountain lion. I killed everything I wear, and I’m practiced in the ways of spirits. I’ve heard there’s a spirit man in these parts. When I find him, I’ll try his mettle and add his skull to my belt.”

Ellen concentrated on her knitting, and Gavin looked up casually from the knife he was sharpening.

“That sounds like an announcement, not a question.”

“Tell me where he is, or I’ll call down a curse on your house.”

The farmer raised his eyebrows and glanced at his wife.

“Do you think we should tell him?”

“I’ll not have a man’s blood on our heads,” Ellen insisted. “You’d better warn him first.”

He nodded and turned back to their obstreperous visitor.

“You’re a mighty pushy fellow. Our son is liable to push back.”

“By sundown, his skull will hang from my belt,” the burly man predicted. “You can only hope to save yourselves.”

This pronouncement amused Gavin greatly, but he restrained himself a bit so as not to appear rude.

“You can go on and gnash your teeth as much as you like, but it’ll be for naught if you can’t chew what they bite.”

He pointed the way.

“If you insist on going, follow that direction up till you see him standing on a high ridge, but I’d recommend against it.”

The warlock huffed and clattered off as directed, but Gavin waited until he was out of earshot.

“Ellen,” he proclaimed, “it’s difficult to feel sorry for that sort.”

Dark clouds crowned the mountains late that afternoon, and lightning and thunder proceeded forth in abundance. Three days later, Finian Cates found the warlock cringing and mumbling incoherently among the hay in his barn. The intruder had lost all sense of reason. By the following morning, that violent man was gone, never to be seen or heard from again.

* * *

The air grew cooler, the days shorter. Autumn turned the aspen leaves to gold, and the wind swept them steadily off their branches. They fluttered brightly as day faded into the gray of approaching twilight. On a barren, windswept peak in the dead of night, the lower spirits convened in their eyrie to hold council, and they took on their human shapes.

“How fares the wanton child?” they murmured almost in unison.

One among them, the beautiful woman who had once hailed Gabriella Cole, stood forth in their midst.

“I attacked the son of lightning in disguise in order to prevent her discovery before she was ready. I had hoped he would think me a natural creature, but he saw through me at once.”

A collective, groaning zephyr emanated from their assembly.

“We are vulnerable in such forms,” reminded one of her fellows. “Taking such a chance could remove you forever from the sphere of this earth.”

“Yet here I remain,” she followed, “and I hold that he used lesser measures because of my female form. He spared an ewe after incinerating wolves.”

“And the child of wind and passion?” the assembly inquired.

“Her power of persuasion is now complete.”

“Ah, good,” the breezes whispered. “Soon shall his spirit succumb to the impulses of his body.”

* * *

In the course of his high wanderings, Justin Smiley was bound to chance upon the community of the wind. It could have happened sooner, perhaps later, but it happened after the spring thaw of his twenty-first year. When he reached the stone huts, he caught sight of the flag lines and instantly found offense in their existence. He reached up to take hold of the nearest line with the intention of pulling it down.

“That wouldn’t be yours,” said a sharp, feminine voice, the kind he least expected to hear.

Justin lowered his hand and turned to behold the loveliest creature he had ever beheld, more beautiful even than the changeling who had attempted to ram him off the heights. Instantly smitten, he concealed his surprise beneath a show of bravado. The sap was rising higher in the tree, and he was unaware that he was weakening already.

“What little bird do I hear chirping so boldly?” he inquired.

“I’m Lila Cole, and today is the day of my unveiling. As for you, your name is known throughout these parts, Justin Smiley.”

This saying pleased his pride, and he weakened further, still unaware.

“Explain your impertinence,” he challenged.

“Many desire me, but none have had me. Have you strength of nature to be the first?”

“I’d be the only or nothing at all,” he corrected, “that is, if I was interested.”

Lila laughed a mocking, tempting, and sensuous laugh, and the same wind which failed to ruffle Justin’s hair wrapped her dark skirt around her legs to reveal her figure. A fine and incomparable figure it was, topped by a graceful neck and intoxicating face.

From within that face, eyes as gray as twilight danced and sparkled. Her hair—long, raven, and moved by the wind—gesticulated around her head as she spoke.

“Oh, you’re interested, or you wouldn’t be still and staring.”

“You’re more than fetching,” he conceded, “but that alone wouldn’t be enough.”

Her beauty was such that it was hard on his eyes, and no man yet had beheld it for long and remained at peace. Sensing her advantage, she pressed further into his thoughts.

“It’s not just my looks. It’s the way I move, given as I am to the currents of passion. Many have imagined me theirs despite their fear, but none before you dared approach. My path has yet to blow across a fit match in any man.”

“Maybe a fit man would know better.”

So declared the son of Gavin and Ellen Smiley with a voice of casual authority, but one, small feature of his appearance betrayed him. He failed to notice what Lila saw then: a single, golden hair of his head stirred by the wind and catching sunlight. She stood aside as he climbed past her, and then she turned and smiled wickedly at his ascending back.

“Before the sun sets and rises seven times, I’ll have him in hand,” she whispered to herself as he crested the rise and disappeared from sight.

* * *

That growing season marked a change in the fortunes of the valley. Fickle as the wind, Lila Cole and Justin Smiley skipped and played on the mountainsides—he ever pursuing, never noticing the wind as it stirred his locks; she ever leading but never succumbing—as malicious spirits once held at bay raided the homesteads with impunity.

Rains came at the wrong times for planting and then not at all. The sun beat hotter, and clouds rarely darkened the sky. Livestock and people took sick, and much of the meager crop from each farm failed, fallen victim to rust and blight. Gavin and Ellen fretted uncharacteristically over their son’s prolonged absences.

The final insult came one desolate night when the summer moon was full and shining down upon the pens. A ghostly pack of wolves descended the slopes and raced across the fields like mist driven before the wind. On this occasion, they neglected bothering the various flocks save those of Gavin Smiley. Silver light illuminated the carnage, and bleats of panic drew the farmer and his wife forth from their house of wood and stone, rifles at the ready.

They shouted as they squeezed their triggers. The sound of gunshots echoed faintly and belatedly off the mountains flanking the valley, but the pack did not scatter. The wolves focused their ire on the desperate man and woman, circling and snarling. Bullets aimed true had no effect, and in that moment the married couple knew they were dealing with spirits, not beasts. The residual lightning in Gavin and the goodness of his wife’s soul were all that kept certain death at bay.

“What’s this?” cried a familiar voice in anger. “What low beings make so bold as to threaten my parents?”

And then the wolves were upon Justin Smiley. They tore at his arms and legs, and as the struggle resisted resolution, the young man encountered the physical and mental anguish of fear for the first time in his life. It took the combined efforts of father, mother, and son to send the pack slinking insolently away, but not before the infliction of wounds on all three. Bruised and bleeding, they gazed upon one another in disbelief and shock. Ellen swooned, and cradling his limp wife, Gavin inquired gravely.

“Son, I have but a trace of what strengthens your members—and that’s more than I deserve—but what has become of you? How came you to such a sorry condition? What transgression brings this tragedy upon our heads?”

“Father,” the young man answered with contrition, “the blame is mine, but what of our flocks?”

“This weak bleating in my ears speaks of decimation. Only time and favorable circumstance will restore their numbers.”

“But not without penance,” Justin lamented, and he confessed his errors of pride and passion.

Ellen moaned as she came to, and they all staggered homeward to tend their wounds.

* * *

Throughout the rest of that summer and into the fall, Justin worked the remnant of their fields and flocks with his father. Pausing frequently to stare at the sky, he waited in vain for the appearance of clouds, but neither storm nor rain came to the valley floor. Here and there, now and then, thunder resounded from the distant heights while sheets of lightning silhouetted the peaks at night. The power was unattainable, for Justin dared not traverse the remote and inaccessible places in his current condition of body and soul.

As frequently as he gave voice to his sorrow, the wind swallowed his apologies. Still he confessed his transgressions; still the heavens gave no answer. The Smileys gathered what they could during the time of harvest, a subsistence diet barely sufficient to last through the winter and into spring, and their minds and bodies grew lean in anticipation of continuing hard times.

This dreadful period of remorse and penance came to a close at the onset of winter. The ground hardened, and surface waters froze into crystalline mirrors. Snows put nearly everything under their thick blanket. With the miraculous disappearance of his scars and those of his parents, Justin knew he had received forgiveness on the condition of his doing what must be done.

* * *

It was in furious humility that the son of lightning climbed up steep ascents of white under a blue, cloudless sky. He was alone and insufficient of himself, forced to trust in the appearance of aid he could neither summon nor see. Vowing to follow the internal command or die in the effort, it was a chastened young man that traversed the familiar ridge, now grown treacherous with ice, and he rejoiced in his unexpected sureness of footing. It was a sign of returning capability.

Higher he went until at last he looked upon territory strange to his footsteps. This was the dominion the high spirits had previously constrained him from entering, the place in which the low spirits convened their dark councils. Craggy, snowless sentinels looked impassively down upon him, and the rock walls seemed to breathe with wicked intent. Justin spied a peak where he knew the air would be so thin as to strain breath, and the muscles in his jaw clenched. This was where she and they would be.

The way was more difficult than any he had passed, requiring hands as well as feet as he worked upward. Twice, he nearly fell to his death, but ever higher he climbed. When at length he passed between two massive boulders, he caught sight of the foul assembly. Spirits provocative and sinister in human form leered, and Lila Cole, clad in a hirsute cloak, turned to behold him.

“One of us must destroy the other,” he announced.

With an enticing smirk, she met his eyes in defiance.

“One of us will.”

At a wave of the maiden’s hand the low spirits howled out a fierce blast of wind, but not a fold in his thick coat moved. The gust intensified, and Justin lowered his hood. His golden locks remained undisturbed.

“This cold, mountain air is death to ordinary men,” he conceded. “Judge you now whether I be an ordinary man.”

As he removed his coat, the faces of his adversaries turned to consternation. Gray clouds thickened and gathered, and blinding illumination accompanied a simultaneous explosion of sound. The low spirits had vanished in that instant, and man and woman stood alone in confrontation. Justin felt it then: an ability to summon the forces of nature, stronger than any that had previously marked his unusual life. One clap of his hands could reduce his greatest adversary to a pile of ash, but his righteous indignation turned quickly to grief.

Lila was not to blame. She had remained true to her nature, but he had violated his. Full of desire and pride, he had done no better than she had. No, he had done worse, for he had known better. Should he pursue it, her destruction would be his; therefore, his redemption must be hers. Anger subsiding and meekness rising, he kept his hands at his sides.

He looked upon her with compassion then, and her eyes gleamed. Could her opponent be weakening? In unassuming manner, she with one hand loosened the tie and allowed her cloak to slip from her head and shoulders. She kept her other hand motionless at her side, and the wind played in her dress and her hair, accentuating face and figure as the discarded garment flapped noisily over Justin’s head.

Desperate hope, fey and wanton, animated her face. If by chance and guile she could entice him into approaching closely, his life would be at her disposal, and dispose of it she would.

“You have great force of character,” he acknowledged with begrudging admiration. “Who are your parents?”

“I wouldn’t know either, I’m sure.”

“As for mine, I can name both.”

“How fortunate for you,” she reprimanded. “My mother died in birthing me, and among the stone huts, my father could be any old man alive or dead. Does the hearing of that quicken your pride, Justin Smiley?”

He crossed the rocky distance between them and knelt down before her. She had him now. Deftly, she removed a stone dagger from the folds of her dress and held its blade to his throat, but he offered no resistance.

“Your virtue exceeds mine,” he confessed. “Consent to be my wife, and live with me in the valley. I’ll count you the better of us for as long as I live.”

She pressed the blade, drawing a thin line of blood, yet still he did not flinch. The wind howled. Numerous wolves swept into sight and formed a circle around the contending pair. Justin clapped his hands swiftly but lightly, and shafts of lightning incinerated the pack in less than a blink.

“For too long have you drifted on the whims of the low spirits. If you must kill me, let it be as a natural woman ending the life of a flawed and mortal man.”

* * *

In the churning vapors above, two of the high spirits observed and held counsel.

“He restrains himself,” declared the first. “Should we call the others?”

“To what purpose?” answered the second. “All hear as one, and he may summon all whenever he pleases.”

“Then he has finally learned, but this newfound wisdom could be his death.”

“And a noble death it would be,” they concluded in unison.

* * *

Then Lila Cole—she who had been groomed by spirits, desired by men, but never loved—felt the gentle hand of remorse fasten upon her heart and wrist. Her grasp faltered, and the dagger struck the rocks at her feet. Chastened in conscience, the daughter of the wind fell to her knees and embraced the son of lightning.

“I had never known mercy were it not for you.”

“And from you I have received a backhanded lesson in purity,” he confessed.

The biting cold affected them but little in their transformation, each softened and deepened to the same state by different paths.

“We must wait,” he spoke softly in her ear. “The high and shining ones live in chambers of light, and they will soon come down to commune with us.”

There was a clash of wind and lightning, and the powers became of one mind, so to speak. Peaceful violence settled on the mountains as the heavens roared and flashed.

Below the pinnacle of resolution, several Bighorn ewes turned into women and sought clefts in the rocks where they might hide.

* * *

It was long after nightfall when the door flew open, revealing a radiant couple, and Gavin and Ellen Smiley could scarce recognize their son for the intensity of the light.

“Would this be Justin alive and come back?” exclaimed Gavin, but Ellen only nodded and smiled.

“It would,” the erstwhile prodigal responded, “and with someone worthy of welcome.”

“I thought never to be surprised again,” father chuckled to son, “but before me stand two wonders beyond expectation.”

* * *

In the lowlands, the rich horde their cankering wealth, and the poor strive to be rich. It is at altitude that the light shines more clearly. The mountain folk have the seasons, their families, fields, herds, flocks, and labors, the elements and spirits, and it is unseen wealth in which the most content find satisfaction.

Now and again, maidens succumb to the high fever and take to the heights, and the laughter of children fills the community of the wind. Their mothers extract dyes from the leaves and blossoms of mountain flowers, working them into wool and goats’ hair. On fair days, parents and their offspring dance about in brightly colored garments, and flags of varied and cheerful hue flutter in celebration.

Men still follow their upward inclinations when the urge falls on them, some faring well and others ill. The wind moans foul in only the loneliest places; it is bluster and little more. Nearly devoid of their former power, gray clad women of haunting beauty occasionally entice the susceptible up into the mist and down to their deaths over unseen precipices, but these sinister spirits flee from sight before certain personages from the valley.

Justin Smiley might not clap his hands in judgment against the forms of ewes or women, but Lila certainly would. Whenever these two ascend the mountains with their formidable sons and daughters, the high spirits descend in response, conferring tranquility and rain upon the slopes and over the low places in between. Flocks and fields prosper, and the valley folk tremble and give thanks at the clash of wind and lightning.

Art by Kim Holm

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