Blackfeather Woods your wallet is on a permanent diet

At first he thought it was dry lightning, and anxiety flared through him. He was a filament glowing with momentary terror. His memories of that day were clipped but vivid; most of all he remembered how the flame had moved, disobeying all intuition and godly, reasonable laws of the earth, a demon that had marked him for life. He wondered why the fire and the lightning that had preceded it held such sway over him, though it had been so long. If it was a matter of mind over matter, he resolved that his mind was too feeble to tear up and sabotage the chemical programming of instinct.

Glassy-eyed, he stared at the stranger with half-bared teeth and without comprehension, their unknowing expressions mirrored in the flash of lightning,

but the thunder brought them back into the present, back into their own skin, back into a time and place of real consequence.

Blinking away the afterimage, he hurriedly made room for the stranger to join him so that they would hunker down like runaways in a world that spared them little kindness.