An island in the middle of the forgotten sea, the island has been shrouded by an eternal storm and guarded by ancient leviathans patrolling the waters for well into the distant past for so long in fact that the sea lays forgotten by many races due to the loss of life of those trying to explore the waters.

Coming away from that island and the storm surrounding it. Soon the image of landmass completely containing the island comes to focus. The surrounding land mass functions as a focus for the great storm in the center. Many great empires and civilizations have made attempts at harnessing the lightning strikes coming off the very edge of the storm. All of them have been devoured by the sea, the monsters inside the sea, or the storm itself. All but one. They call themselves the Stormir-opis. The race themselfs stand at an impressive twelve foot tall in their great cities. With walls standing the passing of time and the weathering of the storm that has raged on for the entirety of their generation, and every generation before them.

The people of this race were hardy to say the least, each one would be expected to leave their homes at the age of twenty they would go to sea for five years never allowed to stop, ever moving deeper into the storm and never allowed to come home till they understood the storm.

Understanding the storm came in many forms some would go into the storm only to be struck by lightning, their entire body becoming laced with such potent lightning elemental mana that their hair, that up until this point would have been a light blond would turn into a pitch white. Their skin would turn black with their very veins leaving blue marks on the black canvas that their skin turned into. And their eyes from the trauma of the lightning would dye their eyes white, blue, purple, or even black for the vast majority of their lives.

If their eyes went back to normal, they were expected to take the journey once more, as they lost their understanding of the storm. Some of the people who went into the storm and came back would come back incredibly sick. The longest someone had ever lived with what was called lightning blight, was around four years, that person is the young princess of their empire.

She stood at an impressive thirteen feet tall with skin that was absolutely pale white, unlike what other races would expect that color skin was considered cursed because the paler your skin the closer to lightning blight you were. The color is caused by the marks the lightning leaves on their veins and arteries. Her hair had been shaved due to it having a tendency to start floating, and sending lethal bolts of lightning at anyone nearby, when one of her coughing fits started. Her eyes stood as a striking reminder of the royal bloodline, a perfectly black center with the colors of the storm spinning and mixing together.

The princess lay in a large bed, even larger than a bed for a person of their size. Her eyes blurred with pain, they still remained locked firmly looking into her fathers eyes. The same eyes as her. “Dad I don’t think I can hold on for much longer.”

The man looked up from behind his hands and he looked bewildered, this was the first time in his long life one of his children called him dad, after all he was the emperor and each one of his children were kings and queens under him ruling large swaths of territory. All but one his youngest child of the five he had. “Daughter you just have to be stronger, you’ve already survived for so long.”

The princess’s eyes no longer seemed as filled with physical pain, instead emotional pain raked its terrible toll on her body. “Dad I’m dying, please don’t be some distant tyrant now, and if you are at least give me the dignancy to die in peace.” Resphell remembered when her father would let them sit on his knee when he was working in that grand study of his, how he would tickle them with the end of his fine feather quills whenever they grabbed his beard. How he called them by little names that only the child in question could know the reason. How before grandfather died and the wars came, her father was always there for them. To give his sons stern but heartfelt advice about avoiding the blunders of youth, how he’d make little jabs at his daughters for leaving their old father in his dust castle all alone when we started talking to boys at the academy.

How he looked at her when she said she wasn’t interested in the pigs the academy called boys. He laughed so hard she had to have thought he was laughing at her. She ran to her room but before she could even make it half way, she found herself in the gentle embrace of the giant called er-avu-bolly or more commonly known as the last emperor of the Stormr Empire, and less commonly known as Resphells dad. She still remembered the words he said to her that day.

“Little bolt, please don’t hate me for laughing, I was laughing because I agreed with you that not a single one of those boys at the academy will ever amount to anything even half of what you will in your life. I believe in you.”

Those words fed her need for love and validation for years to come, she put herself through the best training amounting to almost torture to other races, being dowsed with salt water and electrucuted till she could move around like normal, and many other trainings that would have broke a lesser member of her race or even other races if they knew those existed anymore.

But her father never said anything like that again, he only ever got more dark and serious as the years stretched on. Soon her time had come for her to travel to sea, she fought the leviathans as expected she kept to a code of starving herself not falling to temptations of eating the monster meat, only allowed to eat a small amount of pre prepared food that qualified as a super conductor in our words, making her be struck by lightning hundreds of times, yet she never turned back she was out at sea looking for the meaning of lightning, for three years, she understood lots of things bits and pieces of it. But still felt she needed more. This continued all the way till she saw it, the whole sea being illuminated by light of every color imaginable, the clouds that could never be parted by the empires in the past cleared away for just a moment.

During that moment everything clicked together and she started making her way towards an island. Every foot of progress was hard fought. Having to fight the leviathans, the sea, and the sky itself. She made it almost to the shore. There she realized the truth the island she saw was part of a much bigger one, that was spewing forth and up into the air a massive what we would call mushroom cloud but she hadn’t the words to describe the massive pillar of matter rising into the sky. Then she felt the heat, cold, and pressure, all at once her body that had up till this point only experienced lightning element was exposed to the potent and distilled element of every type. Her body was forced to house inordinate amounts of energy turning her very bones into crystalized mana. She fled before the effects could get any worse. She made it back to the shore of her homeland without a boat, her form flitted across the forgotten sea leaving cracks of thunder for the brief moments that she was visible, she made it to the shore at such a fast pace that people for generations claimed that the princess had been made of lightning.

“Resphell, I can’t treat you like a child, you surpassed all of my expectations like always, I still want to think of you like a little girl but at this moment the only person I see before me is a proud queen of her own nation, a sick queen but one who would have done anything to make her people's lives better. But you’ve still not told me what did this to you, what happened?”

Resphell layed in bed silent, turning her head to look up at the ceiling, the sight around her and the conflicting words of her father made her smile for the first time in the year she had been in the room.

Around her stood ready the best mages of the empire, pulled away from their studies by order of the emperor, being treated like common foot soldiers, even the headmaster of the academy couldn’t use the political pull of his school to avoid standing amongst mages that made even his abilities look like nothing. Each and every one of those mages were struggling holding devices of their own special design to trap the energies she was constantly letting off in absurd amounts.

The ground, walls, and even the ceiling were layered in runes inside every square inch of the room. With master ranked rune smiths sweating and toiling away like apprentices to upkeep the unstable formations, and to make sure the already unstable formations didn’t explode from the damage they were taking at a constant rate. Then she remembered that the room she was in wasn’t even inside the castle that she was the so called queen of. She was inside a mountain one of the smallest in their empire but it was the closest to her “kingdom”

The room itself was actually a large room that was filled in with layers of bricks especially made so that they would be able to survive the year she was estimated to live, till all the space that was left was the cramped room with barely enough space for the mages and rune smiths to work without having to push each other around. Not a single one of them were able to stand straight, some sitting on their knees and others forcing their overworked mana system to force their bodies to be smaller.

Her father was nowhere near her, he was safely away from the mountain that would become her tomb as soon as she died. He was using a communication stone, they had only ever been able to make a few of them a year. And for her father to be forced into using such a precious resource to talk to her made her enjoy this if only a little.

“Father. I’m afraid that I don’t fully understand what happened, all I know is that something happened on an island at the very center of the great storm. It was beautiful and I’m going to be brutally honest. I believe that the only way you or anyone else will be getting any more information about the phenomena that occurred would be to launch an expedition into the forgotten sea.”

Resphell knew that speaking to her father like this would make him angry, he hasn’t been spoken to in such a dismissive tone in well over fourteen years. But she couldn’t bring herself to care, considering that everyone inside the room with her was in the same boat. They had found this unfortunate news after one of the sages, people from generations past they had studied a number of subjects. That didn’t mean that they could wield magic like a mage with that much information, but they could teach a person and even for a race as long lived as them, each one of them being able to live for well into two hundred years on the lower end, being able to learn so much from one person was invaluable.

So when a sage that was ranked four aeg’s suddenly drops dead people tend to notice. An aeg is a unit of measuring how many cycles of gaining an understanding of lightning and losing it and going out into the ocean again to gain an understanding someone has been through, the first cycle isn’t counted, and each time you are able to repeat the cycle you get another two hundred years of lifespan.

The sage who died was named rey-ul and he had lived for one thousand one hundred and fifty years. He had memories of emperors as children going back at least six emperors. He was at one hundred and fifty years on his newest cycle fifty years before he even had to worry about losing his understanding and yet he died two months after examining Resphell.

Resphell began having memories of what the sage was like when he examined her. He made his way towards her at a speed that made her wonder if he even understood the amounts of energy she was off loading into the room and the damage it was causing. By the time she was going to tell him just in case he was already next to her looking into her eyes, she could see flecks of green inside his crystal clear eyes. He treated her very kindly, making jokes and telling her stories about her father when he was younger. He was smiling the whole way till he sighed and looked at her, his eyes no longer filled with that passion and confidence from earlier.

He told her that it seemed like she did in fact have lightning blight, but there was something different about her, and the amount of energy she was outputting was far too high for a simple case of lightning blight, he made the joke that whatever she had was new, and never seen before. He winked and asked her if she wanted to name it. The joke was heard and she wanted to chuckle at the dry sense of humor coming from a man so old he could have been her great great great grandfather and still be an old codger. But she at the time didn’t like hearing that whatever ailed her was outside of his knowledge, so she politely declined and asked to be left alone.

The sage nodded and left, two months later she received a letter the letter was addressed to her from the sage, it was a list of symptoms and thing he noticed as his condition worsened, he mentioned how almost as soon as he left her room inside the mountain he noticed how dull the world looked, he could see new colors and hear new things but took no joy in them. There was an entire poem inside the letter but it was crossed out with a note saying that his mind was leaving him.

His body was found at the bottom of a waterfall. He sat there with his little book writing down different things and thoughts he had while he was getting closer and closer to dying. Those symptoms he listed had been plaguing her since she made it back to her home. The most interesting part of the letter said how if he touched people they spontaneously gained an understanding of lightning, some of them had reactions like they had gained an understanding, but they looked different, they were called abominations, freaks, devil worshipers, and soon those who found themselves different from others left the empire.

They traveled and founded new kingdoms in areas with the same elemental mana they had gained an understanding of. No one had figured that bit out yet, they would find out later but that was going to be at least another twenty years.

Resphell shook her head, she found that her father had disconnected the communication stone knowing him like she did she knew that he wouldn’t spend another on her. She sighed and went to sleep. Mages let way for men in full armor they carried shackles and chains, she could hear their movements but didn’t fight them, not even when they put the heavy shackles onto her, each one loaded with so many runes that they only way they could work was when they were being powered by a person outputting more mana passively than hundreds of people did in their entire lives.

She knew this was the end for her, the men in armour opened the chest they had with them inside lay a set of intricate needles. Each one designed to destroy a person's ability to use mana in any way. It was incredibly painful even for a person that wasn’t almost literally made of mana. But for a person who was? It was beyond all rhyme or reason in the amount of pain that type of person would experience.

Inside Resphell’s head a little voice on the inside wanted to cry for her dad to come back, to save her from the mind rending pain. But that little voice knew better than to cry for him. And as long as she died without saying what she saw, her father would be forced to weaken his position as the emperor by sending his loyal soldiers to die in the cold depths of an unexplored ocean.

On the 47th day of the 2nd month Queen Resphell died inside her bedroom after becoming the unwitting victim of a new disease. Mages, knights, and sages, buried alive with her body to contain the disease.