It was bad weather. Real, hard, cold, cruel weather. The kind where the rain’s half-hail and half-mad; the kind where the air is aching and your cheeks are slapped silly by the breeze; the kind where you get your umbrella out indoors.
It was just the kind of thing that Lalie liked to listen to, in her crib, laughing and cursing at each new thunderbolt and oohing and aahing as the trees came down around her. She was five days old but already she knew what she liked, she’d known it since her mother laid her down.
Her mother’s name was Gogtride, and she was a hag-giant. She had come down from the hills and given birth with one hand and slapped a cradle together with the other and put them both together.
“I name you Lalie,” she told the scowling infant. “After my great-aunt. Now stay the hell away from me.” And then she beat it before Lalie could figure out how her legs worked.
Since then Lalie’s days had been rather dull, especially after the second bear, when all the wildlife had decided to avoid her. This storm was the best thing she’d ever seen in her little life, and she was smiling crazy as her soft, downy hair stood on end with static force.
Then a hailstone came singing down out of the night and smacked her right between the eyes so hard they crossed twice.
“Hey!” she shouted. “What’s the big idea, numbnuts?”
Thunder boomed and cackled and ignored her. The cloud was moving on, the rain was already ending.
Well.
Not if SHE had anything to say about it.
And so Lalie stood up in her crib made from the bones of her enemies and wrapped herself in the swaddle made from the skins of her enemies and she breathed out her fierce, one-toothed grin and set off in pursuit of the thundercloud.
It was a long, hard chase. Lalie had never walked before, much less run. But the thundercloud was idle and lazy, rolling over the landscape rather than sweeping, and she was a fast learner when she was irritated. Soon she was back in the full froth of the storm, and that was when she closed her eyes and started counting mississippis after every lightning strike.
One and TWO and THREE and BOOM
One and TWO and BOOM
One and BOOM
One and GRAB and Lalie latched onto the lightning strike bare-fisted and was up it like a monkey, giggling all the way up its length and into the streaming, tearing heights of the thunderhead, feet dancing over arcs of electricity already fading out and turning back into normal old dead air.
Whump!
Bump!
Wham!
And she was in the clouds, safe and sound, as safe as anything could be, when it was around Lalie. Or anyone, and there were a lot of anyones up there, tall and thin and wearing expensive clothing and cheap grins. They were mingling in crowds, chatting and lying to each other as they dined upon dainty bites of fog and mist; comparing lightning strokes; seeing who could spit the most rain the farthest distance. A few of them were wielding long clubs and knocking hailballs the size of golfstones into the earth. “Fore!” called one. And they all laughed.
They were all Lalie’s kind of people. The breakable kind.
She elbowed her way into the crowd and headed straight for the driving range, leaving a trail of confused and bruised shins behind her. When she stood up to the line, the attendant holding the clubs raised her perfect eyebrows at her.
“Little short for this, aren’t you, sweetie?” she said. “Come back when you’re older. Where are your parents, anyways? Children your age should mind their manners and stay at home.”
“I am here to defeat and destroy you in every way I can,” Lalie told her, for truthfulness was in her genes.
The cloud-golfers laughed, laughed, laughed, and around them the thunder boomed. And they kept on laughing right until Lalie snatched up one of the clubs and drove it as hard as she could into the attendant and the three cloud-golfers standing right behind her.
After that they stopped laughing and started shouting. The thundercloud wobbled and gained height; the lightnings stopped flickering out and started crackling in. The whole mess boomed and bobbled against the sky like a drumskin, and here and there a cloud-person fell out screaming, pow-pow-pow, like popcorn popping. But just as each of them was about to hit the ground they swooped back up again, riding little fuming cloudlets, and came back into the fight.
This was annoying to Lalie, who had been enjoying herself at first. None of the cloud-people were staying punched at all, and their lightning was beginning to make her skin itch and her eyes water. This was the first fight she’d ever been in where she was losing, and she didn’t like it, not at all. Like her mother, she was a sore, sore loser. And the best way to help a sore is to spread it around.
So she threw the cloud people harder and faster and faster, whirling them around her head like bolas, and by chance she came to see something, which is that the little cloudlets and the lightning bolts and the booms of thunder were all coming from a single place, buried under her feet in the center mass of the thunderhead.
“I’ll break THAT,” said Lalie. And she stomped once, twice, thrice, and each stomp drove her down four times her height until she fell through a roof of soft fog and landed in the heart of the storm, a hazy little cavern tucked away above the world.
This heart, though, was something strange. It was clotted and clogged and overflowing with bones, great stone bones, and every time the cloud rumbled and the lightning surged they groaned in soft, long, endless sighs.
“Now what’s YOUR problem?” asked Lalie. The bones couldn’t answer her, but they rolled in their prison, empty skulls gaping, fleshless jaws gasping. Every time they bumped together the world boomed and sparks flew, and she could see they were cracked and bruised from their rough treatment by the cloud-people.
A shout and a yell came from above Lalie’s head; the cloud-people had found her again. She glared at the stone bones, then cracked all of her knuckles and half her back for good measure.
“I want you to know,” she told them, drawing back her biggest, best fist, “that this is because I don’t like hail, and not because I am your friend. Got it?”
And then she punched the bones.
Well.
They got it, all right.
Boom, and stone chips flew everywhere, poking the thundercloud apart in a dozen dozen places and leaking raindrops everywhere.
BOOM, and the heart of the storm burst on the spot.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM and down out of the sky flew Lalie, the last scraps of thunder, and a hundred, hundred screaming cloud-people, each and every one of which went splat, splat, squirt on the ground like fruit dropped off a skyscraper.
Except for Lalie. Lalie just went thunk. It ran in her family.
And as Lalie stood up and knocked the dirt clods out of her ears she saw the tails of the thunder beasts fleeing over the edge of the sunrise-ridden horizon, shaken free of their bones and back in the world again.
“Nice,” she said.
And she grinned, twice as strong as before. Her second tooth had come in.