The Night of the Hollow Storm — A Leyra Story

The storm came without a sound. That was how they knew it was wrong.

It began as a smudge on Wren's horizon glass, off the port bow of The Pale Wisp: a bruise-colored wall of cloud where the charts said there should be clear current. Bram frowned at it. Sefra flattened herself against the rail, which she only did for weather that meant business.

Leyra went to the bow and listened.

Nothing. No hum, no pressure-song, no temper. A storm the size of a city, and it made no sound at all — not even the absence-of-sound that a listener expects. It was like pressing an ear to a door and finding no room behind it.

“That's the Hollow's weather,” Bram said quietly. “We go around.”

“There is no around,” Leyra said. “It's sitting on the current. Everything behind us is dead air.”

What followed is the story every dockside tells differently, but the bones are always the same: Leyra went up alone, past the point where Sefra would follow, and asked the silent storm what it wanted — the way you would ask a grieving person, not a enemy. For a long time, nothing answered. Then, very faintly, the storm remembered how to hum: one note, then another, like someone recalling a song.

She rode the edge of it all night, feeding it small willing winds, teaching it its own voice back. By dawn the Hollow's edge had a sound again — thin, but real. The current reopened. The Pale Wisp sailed through singing.

Leyra slept for two days. When she woke, her first words were: “It was lonely. That's all. It was just lonely.”

“Courage isn't not being scared. It's being scared and holding your heading anyway.”— Leyra, that night

A fan-created fictional tale. More in Stories.