Thunder Dome WITNESS ME

Had he been holding his breath before now? For whatever reason, he managed a short siphon of hot air, like his lungs had shrivelled in his chest. Another thunderclap, deep and ancient and dark as the sky, and Karma felt that raw power tremble through the earth. There was nothing quite like thunder; he'd been so scared of it when he was smaller. Now, he only wondered how he could be as commanding, as terrifying —

She moved, a slash of smoke in the hazy grey, and the feeling that shuddered through his bones could only be described as the chill one might get when a photograph moves or a shadow stands before you and not on the wall. It is so unnatural, this haunt, a spectre in the roar of the wind that he's quite convinced will swallow her up like a dream. This initial horror seeped into him to the bone, that first good draught of unease and distrust in reality that kept jaded old cynical farts like him on his scarred, scarred toes. He's no stranger to his post-trauma — he's seen your kind before, immortal taunt of victims past, and he knows you don't exis —

It screams. General Karma had never run on the battlefield, not once. He had scars aplenty on his breast, his shoulders, his face, his neck - but never any on his hind legs, his hips, his tail. And now he wants to run backward into history and forget he'd ever seen the ghost of maiden's peak and her haunting ground. Banshee's sang (though a traipse of sarcasm tells him there's no way this is a tune) when you were close to death, wasn't that how the stories went? 

He's about to convince himself he's seen her before, that she lived in the vision lost to his stolen eye, that she was the white shadow on the edge of his vision like the cool scythe of the reaper — it's a wonder he's never written poetry. But she turns that wet face on him, quite real, quite girlish, cut of ivory defaced with adolescent graffiti. "What are you doing." His voice is an ugly, baritone, once-handsome sound that ruins the thread of otherworldly silence between them, a dumb question before the marble sphinx, a brief stopper in death. For once in his life, Karma feels very small indeed.