"Trauma Storm"

The storm came from nowhere and it came from everywhere.

Abigail felt it before she saw it a pressure behind her eyes, a static charge crawling across her skin. The electromagnetic readings were impossible. Not random interference, not equipment malfunction, but emotion. Concentrated rage given weather patterns.

The clouds spiraled in a perfect eye over the center of Nowhere, black as grief and flickering with lightning that struck the same spots over and over, as if the storm was targeting something specific. Through the wind and rain, those who dared to look upward saw a shape something massive, something winged, riding the thunderheads like a surfer riding waves.

At the Bailey Family Clinic, Drs. Ian and Jennifer Bailey were having another fight.

They didn't know they were the eye of the storm. They didn't know the storm was them.

Jennifer's voice cut through the clinic's quiet, accusing Ian of resenting her, of having resented her since the day they chose her paper for publication over his. Fifteen years, she said, of watching him dim every time she succeeded. Did he know what it was like to have to apologize for being good at her job?

Outside, lightning struck the clinic roof. The lights flickered. Neither of them noticed.

Ian responded quietly, dangerously, that he'd never asked her to apologize. Jennifer countered that he'd just made her feel like she should.

Their daughter Willow sat in the waiting room, headphones in, volume up, face carefully blank. She'd learned long ago that feeling things in this house was dangerous. Every time her parents felt something, the world shook.

This time, it was shaking literally.

Abigail tracked the storm's emotional signature to the clinic just as the creature made its first pass.

It was impossible to describe fully a thing that shouldn't exist, combining legends that had never been meant to merge. The Thunderbird of countless Native American traditions massive, storm-bringing, ancient. The Piasa of Illini myth dragon-scaled, antlered, with a face like a snarling cat. Together they formed something new: a chimera of judgment, a predator that hunted emotional poison.

Benji's research, hurriedly conducted via landline calls to folklore specialists at regional universities, painted a grim picture. Thunderbirds are associated with cleansing, he reported. They appear when a community has become spiritually sick. The storms they bring are supposed to wash away corruption. And the Piasa represented judgment according to some stories, it only attacked those who had lost their way, those who had become monstrous inside even if they looked human outside.

Abigail watched the hybrid creature circle the clinic, lightning streaming from its wings. She realized it wasn't attacking the whole town. It was centered on the Baileys.

Getting inside was nearly impossible. The storm seemed determined to keep everyone out except its targets. But Abigail had learned to read electromagnetic fields, and she found the path the creature wasn't watching a service entrance around back where the emotional static was thinnest.

She found Willow first, still sitting in the waiting room, still wearing her mask of indifference. But up close, Abigail could see the cracks. She stated that Willow knew what was happening. Not a question.

Willow removed her headphones. The music was so loud Abigail could hear it from across the room metal, aggressive, the kind of thing you used to drown out everything else. Willow explained flatly that the storm was her parents' fault. It was always their fault. They couldn't feel anything without making it everyone else's problem.

Abigail started to protest that wasn't fair, but Willow's mask slipped for just a moment, and Abigail saw the terrified child underneath. Willow told her about every time her parents fought and something bad happened car accidents, power outages, that time the basement flooded for no reason. And now this. She gestured toward the window, where lightning was striking the parking lot in a pattern that looked almost like writing. She explained that she had stopped feeling things years ago because her parents' feelings were dangerous. And they didn't even know.

Ian and Jennifer had retreated to their respective corners by the time Abigail reached them. The silence between them was worse than the shouting a cold, dead thing that had replaced what might once have been love.

Abigail told them there was something outside, something responding to them both. Ian responded dryly that they'd noticed the storm. Abigail stepped between them and explained that the storm was them. Their anger. Their resentment. Everything they hadn't said to each other was manifesting, becoming real. Every time they fought, the storm got stronger. Every time they retreated into silence, the creature circled closer. It was feeding on the poison between them.

Jennifer laughed without humor, observing that their marriage was literally destroying the town. Abigail corrected her: the marriage wasn't destroying anything. Their silence was. The things they wouldn't say. The resentments they'd let fester. The creature wasn't punishing them for fighting it was punishing them for not fighting. For letting everything rot.

The clinic shook. Through the window, Abigail saw the Thunderbird-Piasa diving, its lightning-wreathed form aimed directly at them. She told them they had about thirty seconds before that thing decided their corruption was too deep to cleanse.

What followed wasn't pretty. Real arguments never are.

Ian admitted he'd spent fifteen years comparing himself to his wife and coming up short. That every award she won felt like a judgment on his own mediocrity. That he'd started hating the best parts of her because they reminded him of his own limitations.

Jennifer admitted she'd been afraid to be herself around him. That she'd learned to shrink, to dim, to apologize for her successes because his fragile ego couldn't handle them. That she'd been living half a life to protect a man who should have been protecting her.

And Willow screaming, crying, feeling things for the first time in years told them both what it had been like to grow up in a house where emotions were weapons. Where love came with conditions and silence was safer than speaking. She sobbed that she'd stopped feeling things because every time they felt something, the whole world shook.

The storm paused.

The creature hung in the air above the clinic, wings spread wide, lightning flickering around it like a nervous heartbeat. Waiting. Watching. Judging.

Ian took Jennifer's hand. Jennifer took Willow's. They stood together not healed, not fixed, but honest for the first time in years. Ian acknowledged that they'd been so busy hurting each other, they'd forgotten they were supposed to be partners.

The Thunderbird-Piasa screamed a sound like tearing metal and transformed.

What had been a monster of rage became something else. Its lightning, no longer aimed at the clinic, turned outward burning away something dark that had been gathering around the town, something Abigail hadn't even noticed until it was gone. The creature wasn't just judging anymore. It was protecting.

And then, with a final crack of thunder, it rose into the dissipating clouds and was gone.

They held each other in the rain the Baileys, the family that had nearly torn itself apart. Willow let herself cry for the first time in years, really cry, the kind of weeping that comes when walls finally crumble.

Abigail watched from the clinic doorway, understanding something new. The cryptids of Nowhere weren't just monsters. Some were guardians. Some came not to destroy but to force confrontation, to make people face what they'd buried. She murmured that some monsters don't come to destroy. They come to force a reckoning.

Clara appeared beside her so quietly Abigail jumped. Clara observed that the Baileys had a debt to pay now. They'd been judged and found wanting but redeemed. That came with obligations. When Abigail asked what kind of obligations, Clara told her they were the kind that become clear when they're needed. Nowhere gives second chances, Clara said with ancient eyes holding secrets Abigail couldn't begin to guess. But it always collects.

Across town, in a rented room above the general store, Asher Drake reviewed the footage from his hidden cameras. He had everything the storm, the creature, the Baileys' breakdown, Abigail's intervention.

He picked up his phone and told whoever answered that they weren't going to believe what he got. This town was a goldmine.

On the other end of the line, someone began to make plans.