The rain didn't let up.
For seven days I sat there on the shattered earth, in the world that wasn't yet truly world, while the sky emptied itself onto me like it was trying to drown the knowledge flooding my skull.
But it couldn't. The voices… the truths… the laws… they were inside me now. Of Fire's destruction, water's temperament, wind's unrelentfulness. Earth's resiliance, lightning's arrogance, light's gentleness, darkness's gluttony.
Everything, all of it poured into me until my mind felt stretched thin, ready to tear open and spill whatever I had become onto the ground.
Then it stopped. Like someone had shut a door inside my head. I drew in a breath, shaky and heavy at first. As i kept breathing my breath became steady. I felt the weakness i had been feeling ever since the faith energy in my heart diminished gradually disappear.
I pushed the thought aside. The voices the elemental truths began to settle in my skull like sediment at the bottom of a lake and with their settling came a single, almost instinctive urge:
Tame the elements, make them completely mine. Cut off reliance on faith and return to the upper world.
The word fire echoed in my mind, as if whispered by the void, by the world, by the laws themselves.
I decided then that fire would be my first element, I rose. The rain still hammered on my shoulders, running down my face, flattening my hair. I flapped my toga and watched a golden spark sputter off the cloth.
Enough waiting.
I bent my knees and kicked off the ground. My body shot skyward effortlessly ssmooth like the world had no gravity. The rain blurred into streaks beneath me until the shattered land became nothing but a dark smear.
I climbed higher, past the clouds and past the churning atmosphere.
Into the high, empty sky where the air turned thin, sharp and bitingly cold. There… above the battle's scar… above the the clouds was a mountain.
A narrow, steep, cruel spike of stone jabbing into the yellow heavens like the tooth of some ancient beast.
I hovered towards it, breath misting in the frigid air.
Perfect.
I landed at its peak, and the moment my feet touched the stone, the world went still. The rain stopped pouring and drenching the earth, the wind stopped whistling.
Just the thrum of power beneath my skin and the oppressive weight of the new knowledge crushing my thoughts like a fist remained. I sat cross-legged and closed my eyes.
"Essence of fire, come to me" my voice resonated throughout the heavens.
Fire answered. A vibrant red dragon descended from the sky, their whole sky as far as the eye can see was lit in red light and the surroundings became very hot.
It surged inside me, wild and furious, as if waking from millennia of slumber. It clawed at my veins. It wanted to devour me to utterly consume, to reduce everything including me to ash. It was screaming in raging fury
I clenched my jaw.
"So this is fire," I breathed. "You're… worse than I imagined."
I reached inward, I felt the heat. The madness and the instinct to destroy everything it touched. I felt my heartbeat stuttering under the pressure.
"Alright," I whispered, "then let's begin."
The first stage of dominating the elements was sense.
Fire raged. I needed to be calm, I didnt need water but intent. With something gentler than its nature. Like stroking a snarling beast until it stops showing its teeth.
"Be calm my friend. Be stilled"
I reached out to the fire not as a master, not as a god, but as someone trying to soothe a wounded creature, someone who had to prove he understood it before he could control it.
I could feel the passing of time around me, the world was changing slowly but steadily. No night and day cycle was in the world yet but rain and the winter were there.
I started the communication stage. I reasoned with it, it fired back at me with intense heat, my consciousness seemed to get a seer on its edges.
The third stage began, it involved Duality.
Mind versus element.
I shaped myself, my thoughts and my emotions into something that mirrored water's gentleness.
Not to smother fire, but to lull it, to make it listen. To reason, listen to me and allow me to take advantage of it(lol).
It resisted, it screamed, it burned through my nerves until tears leaked down my cheeks and steam hissed off my skin. However slowly… slowly… the roaring heat softened, Like a raging river settling into a warm tide. I breathed out in relief and letting my guard down the fire struck. It lunged inside me like a serpent.
My breath caught, my chest spasmed, my vision blurred red.
The fourth stage began.
I seized the fire in my consciousness and slammed the walls of my will around it. The world itself shook, the mountain groaned.
My mind felt like it was tearing, but I held it at bay. Sweat poured down my skin. My hands trembled, my heart felt like it was burning itself from the inside.
"Stay," I hissed. "Stay where I put you."
For a moment, unbelievably, it obeyed.
At this point, I stopped. I needed help, the domination of fire's essence taught me that
I needed help.
If I was going to refine all nine elements, I couldn't monitor all of them with a single mind. Just having the fire element in my consciousness felt like forming a clockwise and an anti clockwise circle in the air with my other hand.
So i needed a second consciousness, one that would monitor all the elements while my main consciousness would continue as it has.
I needed a fragment of myself.
Funny, Im a fragment yet im making fragments of my own
"What would make this fragment, a fragment of a fragment" I mused aloud
I inhaled.
"Alright," I muttered. "Let's see if I can do this without scrambling my brain."
I split my awareness and pain lanced through me like needles dipped in molten iron. I grit my teeth and pushed through it.
Piece by piece, thought by thought, strand by strand, I shaped a tiny, rough version of myself inside my mind. A hollow consciousness.
It flickered, stuttered, nearly collapsing but, fortunately it held. It turned around in my seat of consciousness. It flew towards the cage where the fire essence was trashing and it pressed its small weight onto the trapped fire, keeping it from breaking loose.
Good, very good.
"Now, the fifth stage."
The Sacrifice.
Fire wanted a price for submission, all the elements did. For fire, it was joy. The flame within me trembled with hunger, wanting something bright, something precious, something warm.
I reached into my memories. I found one. A memory of when I played games with my friends for the first time after my knee surgey in childhood.
The laughter and giggles all around me, the look my mom gave me when it was my turn to be the catcher.
A memory I treasured.
A memory I'm sure fire would enjoy destroying. My throat tightened.
"I hate this," I whispered.
Then I fed it to the flames. The memory burned bright, agonizingly silent and It vanished, devoured forever.
I tried thinking recalling it but felt hollow, more alone than I had when I died on my hospital bed.
But the fire stilled.
The sixth stage domination.
Elemental essences were prideful and would never alow anyone to control it. So the correct word for this was domination. You dominated it and made it submit. It wasn't a very hard task, since it was really just blackmailing it into submission.
It would be along the lines "I gave you something precious, now give me what you hold dear. Your power, that means you"
The moment I opened my eyes the sky responded in its red and resplendent light, It burned the heavens igniting in ribbons of red and pale blue. Flames fell from the sky like rain, scorching the land below, burning cracks into the mountain.
I breathed out and then, as if listening to my exhale, the flames stopped raining from the sky and the rain returned.
The sky darkened to slate-blue. Clouds rolled in like lazy giants, then a figure condensed below the rain.
Fluffing up like a man sculpted from the clouds themselves and when the storm peeled away, my blood froze.
"Caelus…?" I whispered.
Ramona's father stood far above me.