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As the Strength carried both the Speed and Reggio through the floodwaters of the raging storm, back at the church, Jade was standing out in the rain as it was whipped around her by the wind. The ground beneath her feet was dry of floodwaters, but the rain poured down onto her while she watched as the mortal’s settlement was systematically ripped to shreds before her eyes. They had all since evacuated themselves into the large barracks building they used to house their military. And while that barracks rocked back and forth with the wind, their huts were being torn apart left and right. The wind knocked them over and threw them up into the air, playing with them as if it was a child, and they were mere toys.
The mayhem soothed her. It calmed her nerves. Out there in that madness, and out of that stale, cramped room, she was able to think with clarity.
She knew that no one else was out there. She knew she was alone, that it was just her and the fury of Terra. It was just her, standing within Mother Nature’s strength, right in the middle of all her power, at the center of all her glory, where truth, the only inexplicable truth in all of existence, could be found.
She had expected it to be flooding by now, and was surprised that it hadn’t. But she knew that the chambers had to be under water already, that Jane was already caught by the witches coming to find the vampire and drowned, though she still expected her to walk out of that swamp at any moment. She had no idea what was going on out there, if Jane was alive or dead, whether she would be allowed to further her coup or forced to defend her allegiance to their brood, but she did know that what she did was wrong.
The choice she made was abrupt, and possibly a bit premature, but with the storm approaching, she felt that there was no other option, that this chance was the only chance she would receive and it had to be acted upon. Whether she liked it or not, she could not have let this opportunity pass without at least trying something. She knew that the other witches would come to assassinate Reggio, as did Jane, because of some stupid vision that The Mother received, warning her of the vampire’s arrival. The only difference, though, was that Jade was not willing to die for him.
She could have easily done as Jane had asked and tried to stop her old friend Angela before she arrived, but became influenced greatly by the way the vampire was spoken about. It was as if he had some sort of importance that Jane was trying to hide from her, something she intended to keep for herself, and that only made Jade want him that much more, all to herself. Jane had hoped, though, that the arrival of the flood would stop their foes from attacking, but knew that it would not.
She’d known that they were already on their way since Heather arrived with news of the second storm, and that no flood would stop them, but neglected to tell anyone but Jade. That’s when it was arranged for Jade to stop them in the swamp and allow Jane to retrieve the stones, something Jade purposefully neglected to do. She knew that if she was right, and the other witches were allowed to penetrate all the way into the chambers, and even though it would cost them the stones, for the time being at least, it could have trapped them all in the chambers when they went under, leaving them all as good as dead.
Jade had already thought it all out. She was not killing anyone, just putting them in positions to be killed. She figured that being so far away from the lake, the other witches may not understand how bad of a storm this really was, and that finding and retrieving the stones consisted of navigating through an elaborate maze of traps that would give the witches adequate time to find Jane down there. She knew she had no control over the outcome, no way to change any choices that anyone else made, and understood perfectly well that those choices would decide the outcome all on their own, without her ever being involved.
So Jade just stood out in the storm, thinking about all the ways it could turn out, all the possible endings to her not-so-well-devised plot. Only one of those endings, though, she knew, would make way for the new beginning that her kind so desperately needed. And that was the outcome she hoped for.
As her thoughts continued to race, the wind had altered its course and began blowing right in her face, suddenly shifting directions, almost instantly, and her hair was now flapping behind her. That is when she noticed the change. It caught her by surprise, and her eyes, through the blinding rain, were directed straight out towards the river. She knew that when she first came outside, the wind was blowing at her side. But she had failed to notice its shift until the rain was stinging her right in the face.
Her heart then began to pound faster as she realized what was happening, how the shift of the wind was significant. She saw firsthand what it did to the lake, churning it up into a violent monster after only a few hours of blowing from the north and eventually pushing it into the swamp. She could only imagine what that wind could do to the river. But as she stood there, the rain blasting her in the face, staring out at the waves now beginning to crash up over the river banks, she did not have to imagine any longer.
Off to her left, maybe thirty five yards out, through the blinding rain, she saw one of the large boats that the mortals kept docked in the river being pushed out into the trees of the swamp just beside the settlement, riding atop the monstrous waves that were now brought forth by the new direction of the wind.
The ground vibrated gently beneath her feet and a low rumble filled her ears as the large boat was dragged through the dirt. She knew it was only a matter of time now until that same power reached the settlement, and the church where she stood. She knew that the mortals had chosen this area because it was the highest ground for miles around. They had claimed that when they arrived, everything was flooded except for this one spot, that being where they built their settlement. They also claimed that this area could never flood, that being the reason all the highest ranking witches chose this church to hide within. But within all this chaos, Jade could now see the truth.
Mother Nature was proving a point, as she so often seemed to do, that this was her world, and that nowhere, and no one, was ever safe.