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Description
It was a curious thing, the idea of standing upon a cliff side in a gale. Thunderheads rolled ever closer; soon, a gentle drizzle became a torrential downpour, soaking the young woman through, down to her bones.

The wind battered her, pushed her to her knees but she remained there. In fact, she laughed giddily, delighted by the playfulness in the storm that evening. Her storm.
She stood and spread her arms wide, leaning forward against the edge of the cliff, allowing the gusts of wind to be the only thing to hold her body stable there.

And in a moment of calm, she fell, plummeting down into the churning seas below. It didn't worry her; she knew her storm would catch her.

He did exactly that, forming up a wave to catch her and take her out of the air. It dragged the young woman away from the rock-laden shoreline and out into the sea, so far away from the land that she could no longer even dream of seeing it again.

She cared naught, only drifted in the water where ever he fancied taking her. Immense tidal waves were bent and torn, allowing her to float through them with ease. Though around her the hurricane stirred the ocean with a vengeance, winds cutting through the surface of the waters, rain drops like projectile weapons piercing anything that strayed too near the top, she received only the occasional brush of soft mists across her face- her storm reminding her of his presence, as if she could possibly forget it.

He carried her out until she would have reached the eye of the cloudburst, the sea gently lapping at the edges of her hands as she turned them within it.

In the grey sky, she could just begin to make out the sunlight as it was filtered through the center of the hurricane, bathing everything around her in a soft and golden glow.

He whispered to her in breezes, taking up damp strands of her unruly hair and toying with them invisibly, as if to turn them around his fingers.

She felt herself being lifted up, the water rising beneath her into a pillar that she could sit on, manipulated by a vortex within it to form a steady pedestal.

His presence, though unseeable, caused the air to pressurize around him considerably, popping her ears almost immediately. If she looked closely, his slender form was visible, silhouetted with tiny wisps of smoke-like mists.

The now suddenly gentle winds tickled the edges of her ears and made the hair on her forearms rise with goose-flesh: his voice.

"I missed you, too," she whispered, not even loud enough to be heard over the sea, though she knew he understood her.

"I know you want me to stay here, but I can't." A pause. The young woman, to any untrained eye, anyone who just might have been passing through a stormy ocean at that time, for no apparent reason, would have seemed to have been speaking with herself.

"I'll drown if I stay out here too long."

Her laughter was sweet and kind, though clearly remorseful. "You can only hold me up for so long, dearest."

A sudden silence, as if the world just then stood still. Nothing moved, in fact, the vast sea stiller than an untouched pond.

She was lowered out of the air to stand with flat feet upon it, and she did not sink, did not bring about any sort of ripples. It was as though she was standing over a massive pane of dark glass.

The sky cleared, fading away to nothing at all, just walls of golden light around her.
He appeared before her, taking her hands and pulling her down to sit with him on the once-thrashing water. Touching all the spaces between her fingers and filling them up with raindrops, he spoke at last.

"You will not stay with me." His throaty tones sounded as thunder, almost, a distant and rumbling roar. Sadness filled his voice, his statement longing to be a question and not a fact. "I will hold you up," he declared stubbornly. "I will. Forever. If you so wish it, your feet will never touch the land or sea."

She smiled, disturbing the delicate and yet firm expanse of liquid-like skin upon his cheek with the brush of her knuckles. "Who will hold up the waves and throw them against the shore?"

He said nothing.

"Who will bend the trees and fill the land with water when it is parched for it? Who will nourish the creatures that dwell upon the Earth?"

His silence betrayed his acknowledgement of her being correct. He knew that she couldn't stay with him, for the sake of his duties and for the sake of those who benefited from his work within the clouds.

She pouted a little at the very thought of not being able to remain with her storm, however. "I want to, though..."

No more words were passed between the two for a number of hours, the hurricane working quietly in the company of his land-dweller, only half-heartedly beating the shoreline and inland areas with harsh, strong gales, forcing those that lived there into their homes and out of the falling rain.

Finally, the time came when he was required to return the girl home again. The pair walked over the swells of the ocean, her hand in his surprisingly warm, but wet grip the entire way.

At last, the shoreline appeared on the horizon. As any time before then, she sat down atop the sea and laid backwards, relaxing as much as she could.

Slowly, she fell beneath the surface, and he used his great strength to bring up a large wave, with which to carry her back to the beach.

She rode the very crest of it until it gently deposited her on the sand, then crashed on top of her, soaking her already damp form in a new layer of salty water.

Turning quickly she used both of her arms, over her head, to wave good-bye to the receding blanket of chilly, silver-colored clouds while they gave way to the reddening sunlight that pierced through them at this time.

It was then that she shouted out for her hurricane:

"I will see you when next the sky chooses to bring you to me."

Each day she spent waiting for her storm to return to her. After completing the daily tasks, she went and sat down upon the perch of her favorite cliff-side, overlooking the ocean, anxiously searching for any, even vague signs of a thundercloud or cyclone on the horizon.

For weeks and months, there was nothing but sunlight. She grew weary of it, learning to shun it in the mornings when it roused her from her dreams. It became a habit to avoid the sunlight, walking only in patches of darkness on the streets, keeping to shadowed corners. She felt dirty if she touched the sunlight, and thought herself to be further unworthy for her storm when he would return to her.

At last, he did, bringing with him a large gale of winds, beating on the buildings and homes in the town she lived, as if to search for her.
In the middle of the day, she ran out to him, sprinting as fast as her legs would carry her to the mountain's edge where she always chose to meet him.

Without waiting, without hesitance, she leapt, falling straight as an arrow toward the sea, having no doubts that he would protect her.

She collapsed into a wave that was risen up just for that sole purpose, sinking downward for a moment before kicking her legs powerfully to guide her back to the surface again.
The pelting rain stung her face and back, but she swam anyway, diving beneath the skin of the water to dart forward a few meters, and then rise again for breath.

Before very long, she reached the point where she could no longer see the shoreline and she laid backwards, gasping heavily, allowing the bliss of being in his presence to wash over her. He pressed breezes against her cheeks, bringing soft, chilly mists with them to caress her.

Abruptly, she sat up, and extended her legs into the water, moving them around rhythmically so as to stay afloat.

"Drown me."

The world became still all in one instant, the sea forcing her up to sit upon it as it had before. He materialized in front of her, a stern look to his grey features.

"No," he told her firmly. "I will not."

She fell and wept by his feet, begging him to indulge in her wish, sobs wracking her form and ruining her words so that she could not properly speak. Of course, he got down on his knees with her, and then drew her in closely to him.

"If you drown me," she managed at last, "I will stay with you forever."

At this, his expression darkened considerably, a selfish need coming over him. Finally, he could look at her again. "...Forever?"

His human smiled. "Forever."

Her storm was silent for several more minutes, a deep furrow in his brows, debating his upcoming task, as if he was unsure whether or not it was the right thing to do.
Suddenly, he let her go, and the world caved back in on itself. A colossal wave swallowed her up and then spat her back out, rain lashed at her head and shoulders when at last she surfaced again.

He grasped one of her hands, pulling her up to look him in the eye.

"You wanted this," he reminded her. "And I want this. Do not hold your breath."

When he released her, she felt as if there were dozens of hands reaching up to grab her, drag her down beneath the surface of the ocean, into the blackness and unforgiving pressure that lay beneath it.

Her eyes slipped closed against the salty water and she opened her mouth, all the air within her chest escaping and rushing back to the top again. It was cold, she realized, her body felt very cold all of a sudden, as the water flooded her mouth and began to fill her, the cavity in her chest.

Deeper and deeper she was forced downward, grasped by limbs she was unable to see. At the surface, hovering there, was her storm, waiting for his lover to give herself up to the ocean at last.

An ache penetrated her bones and she inhaled another mouth full of saltiness and liquid, swallowing it until she could no longer find the strength to.

He paced anxiously in his golden-bathed world above, casting only tiny ripples in the vast puddle. They bounced back from an unknown place to capture his feet again. All night he waited, his growing fury showing in the vicious manner in which he beat the shoreline with his hurricane.

What seemed an eternity of falling and fading later, she only drifted, rising and sinking, pulled and pushed by the underwater currents. After the sun rose the next morn, he saw her again, floating carelessly near to the surface of his domain.

Excited to see his human's face again, he laid flat over the glass-like plain, when he reached out to touch her, his hand was met with a solid, transparent substance. She sank again, farther from his grasp.

Crying out in dismay, he smashed his fists against the surface of the sea, earning a wide crack for his efforts. He bashed himself against the floor of his prison, the only separation between he and his love, until, at last, he was rewarded with the ability to reach her. Diving into the icy darkness, he retrieved the young woman and carried her back to his dwelling place. The hurricane held her tightly to him, willing to wait endlessly for her to awaken again.

Many days and nights she waited, her water-logged form becoming grey and rotten. He wailed in anguish for what he had done, taking his anger and frustration out on the innocent things that lived upon the land so very far away from there. For months, there was no sunshine, only torrential rains and horridly strong winds.

Though, one afternoon, his rage ever at peak, she appeared under the pane of glass that seemed to coat the surface of the ground in his territory. Gently, she knocked on it, splitting her lips in a benign grin.

Leaving her decaying body in an instant, he ran to her and fell down against the smooth surface. Without having to think about it, he sat up and threw his hands against the glass-like expanse. It shattered instantaneously, but when he reached in and tried to grab a hold of his lover and bring her to him, she vanished. His hands simply phased through her form.

Silently, sadly, she gazed up at him upon re-materializing, only an image in the water. She winced slightly as her storm threw his head back and screamed at nothing, at everything.

She had been correct, though: every day and night, the image of her tormented him, appearing in the floor of his golden, watery realm. He had been promised that if he was to drown her, they would be together for all of eternity.

The hurricane spent all of his years taking his anger and frustration out on the land and sea, flooding both with rains to last weeks and months with no signs of letting up.
It became such a threat to all the creatures of the Earth that the sun came down from his place in the sky and vanquished the hurricane, evaporating him until he was no more.
Fading away sounded like something beautiful, like something to hope for. He would no longer be tortured by the sight of his human.

This was untrue.

The pair would remain ever separated from one another, even in the afterlife. He was forced to spend his infinity walking across the vast and endless oceans, an outcast and wanderer. And she was destined to follow him from underneath the waves, always unable to escape the surface tension between them.

Sometimes, if they pressed themselves against the top of the water, she could hear his heart beating, and he could hear the liquid in her lungs.

Description
It was a curious thing, the idea of standing upon a cliff side in a gale. Thunderheads rolled ever closer; soon, a gentle drizzle became a torrential downpour, soaking the young woman through, down to her bones.

The wind battered her, pushed her to her knees but she remained there. In fact, she laughed giddily, delighted by the playfulness in the storm that evening. Her storm.
She stood and spread her arms wide, leaning forward against the edge of the cliff, allowing the gusts of wind to be the only thing to hold her body stable there.

And in a moment of calm, she fell, plummeting down into the churning seas below. It didn't worry her; she knew her storm would catch her.

He did exactly that, forming up a wave to catch her and take her out of the air. It dragged the young woman away from the rock-laden shoreline and out into the sea, so far away from the land that she could no longer even dream of seeing it again.

She cared naught, only drifted in the water where ever he fancied taking her. Immense tidal waves were bent and torn, allowing her to float through them with ease. Though around her the hurricane stirred the ocean with a vengeance, winds cutting through the surface of the waters, rain drops like projectile weapons piercing anything that strayed too near the top, she received only the occasional brush of soft mists across her face- her storm reminding her of his presence, as if she could possibly forget it.

He carried her out until she would have reached the eye of the cloudburst, the sea gently lapping at the edges of her hands as she turned them within it.

In the grey sky, she could just begin to make out the sunlight as it was filtered through the center of the hurricane, bathing everything around her in a soft and golden glow.

He whispered to her in breezes, taking up damp strands of her unruly hair and toying with them invisibly, as if to turn them around his fingers.

She felt herself being lifted up, the water rising beneath her into a pillar that she could sit on, manipulated by a vortex within it to form a steady pedestal.

His presence, though unseeable, caused the air to pressurize around him considerably, popping her ears almost immediately. If she looked closely, his slender form was visible, silhouetted with tiny wisps of smoke-like mists.

The now suddenly gentle winds tickled the edges of her ears and made the hair on her forearms rise with goose-flesh: his voice.

"I missed you, too," she whispered, not even loud enough to be heard over the sea, though she knew he understood her.

"I know you want me to stay here, but I can't." A pause. The young woman, to any untrained eye, anyone who just might have been passing through a stormy ocean at that time, for no apparent reason, would have seemed to have been speaking with herself.

"I'll drown if I stay out here too long."

Her laughter was sweet and kind, though clearly remorseful. "You can only hold me up for so long, dearest."

A sudden silence, as if the world just then stood still. Nothing moved, in fact, the vast sea stiller than an untouched pond.

She was lowered out of the air to stand with flat feet upon it, and she did not sink, did not bring about any sort of ripples. It was as though she was standing over a massive pane of dark glass.

The sky cleared, fading away to nothing at all, just walls of golden light around her.
He appeared before her, taking her hands and pulling her down to sit with him on the once-thrashing water. Touching all the spaces between her fingers and filling them up with raindrops, he spoke at last.

"You will not stay with me." His throaty tones sounded as thunder, almost, a distant and rumbling roar. Sadness filled his voice, his statement longing to be a question and not a fact. "I will hold you up," he declared stubbornly. "I will. Forever. If you so wish it, your feet will never touch the land or sea."

She smiled, disturbing the delicate and yet firm expanse of liquid-like skin upon his cheek with the brush of her knuckles. "Who will hold up the waves and throw them against the shore?"

He said nothing.

"Who will bend the trees and fill the land with water when it is parched for it? Who will nourish the creatures that dwell upon the Earth?"

His silence betrayed his acknowledgement of her being correct. He knew that she couldn't stay with him, for the sake of his duties and for the sake of those who benefited from his work within the clouds.

She pouted a little at the very thought of not being able to remain with her storm, however. "I want to, though..."

No more words were passed between the two for a number of hours, the hurricane working quietly in the company of his land-dweller, only half-heartedly beating the shoreline and inland areas with harsh, strong gales, forcing those that lived there into their homes and out of the falling rain.

Finally, the time came when he was required to return the girl home again. The pair walked over the swells of the ocean, her hand in his surprisingly warm, but wet grip the entire way.

At last, the shoreline appeared on the horizon. As any time before then, she sat down atop the sea and laid backwards, relaxing as much as she could.

Slowly, she fell beneath the surface, and he used his great strength to bring up a large wave, with which to carry her back to the beach.

She rode the very crest of it until it gently deposited her on the sand, then crashed on top of her, soaking her already damp form in a new layer of salty water.

Turning quickly she used both of her arms, over her head, to wave good-bye to the receding blanket of chilly, silver-colored clouds while they gave way to the reddening sunlight that pierced through them at this time.

It was then that she shouted out for her hurricane:

"I will see you when next the sky chooses to bring you to me."

Each day she spent waiting for her storm to return to her. After completing the daily tasks, she went and sat down upon the perch of her favorite cliff-side, overlooking the ocean, anxiously searching for any, even vague signs of a thundercloud or cyclone on the horizon.

For weeks and months, there was nothing but sunlight. She grew weary of it, learning to shun it in the mornings when it roused her from her dreams. It became a habit to avoid the sunlight, walking only in patches of darkness on the streets, keeping to shadowed corners. She felt dirty if she touched the sunlight, and thought herself to be further unworthy for her storm when he would return to her.

At last, he did, bringing with him a large gale of winds, beating on the buildings and homes in the town she lived, as if to search for her.
In the middle of the day, she ran out to him, sprinting as fast as her legs would carry her to the mountain's edge where she always chose to meet him.

Without waiting, without hesitance, she leapt, falling straight as an arrow toward the sea, having no doubts that he would protect her.

She collapsed into a wave that was risen up just for that sole purpose, sinking downward for a moment before kicking her legs powerfully to guide her back to the surface again.
The pelting rain stung her face and back, but she swam anyway, diving beneath the skin of the water to dart forward a few meters, and then rise again for breath.

Before very long, she reached the point where she could no longer see the shoreline and she laid backwards, gasping heavily, allowing the bliss of being in his presence to wash over her. He pressed breezes against her cheeks, bringing soft, chilly mists with them to caress her.

Abruptly, she sat up, and extended her legs into the water, moving them around rhythmically so as to stay afloat.

"Drown me."

The world became still all in one instant, the sea forcing her up to sit upon it as it had before. He materialized in front of her, a stern look to his grey features.

"No," he told her firmly. "I will not."

She fell and wept by his feet, begging him to indulge in her wish, sobs wracking her form and ruining her words so that she could not properly speak. Of course, he got down on his knees with her, and then drew her in closely to him.

"If you drown me," she managed at last, "I will stay with you forever."

At this, his expression darkened considerably, a selfish need coming over him. Finally, he could look at her again. "...Forever?"

His human smiled. "Forever."

Her storm was silent for several more minutes, a deep furrow in his brows, debating his upcoming task, as if he was unsure whether or not it was the right thing to do.
Suddenly, he let her go, and the world caved back in on itself. A colossal wave swallowed her up and then spat her back out, rain lashed at her head and shoulders when at last she surfaced again.

He grasped one of her hands, pulling her up to look him in the eye.

"You wanted this," he reminded her. "And I want this. Do not hold your breath."

When he released her, she felt as if there were dozens of hands reaching up to grab her, drag her down beneath the surface of the ocean, into the blackness and unforgiving pressure that lay beneath it.

Her eyes slipped closed against the salty water and she opened her mouth, all the air within her chest escaping and rushing back to the top again. It was cold, she realized, her body felt very cold all of a sudden, as the water flooded her mouth and began to fill her, the cavity in her chest.

Deeper and deeper she was forced downward, grasped by limbs she was unable to see. At the surface, hovering there, was her storm, waiting for his lover to give herself up to the ocean at last.

An ache penetrated her bones and she inhaled another mouth full of saltiness and liquid, swallowing it until she could no longer find the strength to.

He paced anxiously in his golden-bathed world above, casting only tiny ripples in the vast puddle. They bounced back from an unknown place to capture his feet again. All night he waited, his growing fury showing in the vicious manner in which he beat the shoreline with his hurricane.

What seemed an eternity of falling and fading later, she only drifted, rising and sinking, pulled and pushed by the underwater currents. After the sun rose the next morn, he saw her again, floating carelessly near to the surface of his domain.

Excited to see his human's face again, he laid flat over the glass-like plain, when he reached out to touch her, his hand was met with a solid, transparent substance. She sank again, farther from his grasp.

Crying out in dismay, he smashed his fists against the surface of the sea, earning a wide crack for his efforts. He bashed himself against the floor of his prison, the only separation between he and his love, until, at last, he was rewarded with the ability to reach her. Diving into the icy darkness, he retrieved the young woman and carried her back to his dwelling place. The hurricane held her tightly to him, willing to wait endlessly for her to awaken again.

Many days and nights she waited, her water-logged form becoming grey and rotten. He wailed in anguish for what he had done, taking his anger and frustration out on the innocent things that lived upon the land so very far away from there. For months, there was no sunshine, only torrential rains and horridly strong winds.

Though, one afternoon, his rage ever at peak, she appeared under the pane of glass that seemed to coat the surface of the ground in his territory. Gently, she knocked on it, splitting her lips in a benign grin.

Leaving her decaying body in an instant, he ran to her and fell down against the smooth surface. Without having to think about it, he sat up and threw his hands against the glass-like expanse. It shattered instantaneously, but when he reached in and tried to grab a hold of his lover and bring her to him, she vanished. His hands simply phased through her form.

Silently, sadly, she gazed up at him upon re-materializing, only an image in the water. She winced slightly as her storm threw his head back and screamed at nothing, at everything.

She had been correct, though: every day and night, the image of her tormented him, appearing in the floor of his golden, watery realm. He had been promised that if he was to drown her, they would be together for all of eternity.

The hurricane spent all of his years taking his anger and frustration out on the land and sea, flooding both with rains to last weeks and months with no signs of letting up.
It became such a threat to all the creatures of the Earth that the sun came down from his place in the sky and vanquished the hurricane, evaporating him until he was no more.
Fading away sounded like something beautiful, like something to hope for. He would no longer be tortured by the sight of his human.

This was untrue.

The pair would remain ever separated from one another, even in the afterlife. He was forced to spend his infinity walking across the vast and endless oceans, an outcast and wanderer. And she was destined to follow him from underneath the waves, always unable to escape the surface tension between them.

Sometimes, if they pressed themselves against the top of the water, she could hear his heart beating, and he could hear the liquid in her lungs.