Leo Franklin had been terribly injured in a car accident in Jalisco, Guadalajara before the Nights that he couldn’t really explain to local police, but it was the last time he saw his son. The driver died at the scene.
“I know it don’t make sense,” Leo explained to the police in English because he was too frustrated to speak Spanish, though he was fluent in the language by that point. “A lot of stuff about that day don’t make sense. But we was driving back from that little town and I swear, the car got struck by lightning. You saw it, wasn’t no other cars on that road for us to crash into. I don’t know how I survived, but my son wasn’t in the car and I crawled away from it until somebody saw me and took me to the hospital.”
The disappearance of Clay Franklin was international news by the time Leo was able to speak to authorities and he didn’t notice the FBI agents assisting in the investigation. In America, Leo was a celebrity and the entire country seemed to mourn with him as they watched round-the-clock news coverage of developments in the search for the boy. Some thought he was kidnapped by cartels and that Leo was being extorted for his riches. Others said Clay had wandered into the desert and was surely dead and dessicated by now. A few, though admittedly not many, believed that Leo was responsible for his son’s disappearance and they point to the fact that his wife and all of his other children were safely in the US when he went missing. There were theories that Leo went to Mexico to sell his son because there was no way he was as rich as he seemed to be and he was desperate for money to keep up appearances. Some said that Leo took Clay to Mexico to kill him, though there was no evidence at all to suggest that Leo wanted to kill his son.
Leo wasn’t able to hear anything that wasn’t news about his son or communication with his wife and family in the US. He refused to leave Mexico until his son was found and he practically lived in the gym he’d founded in the city of Jalisco where he met with as many locals as came forward with stories about the fate of his son. Leo spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private security, chasing down any lead that others brought to him, but time passed with no sign of the boy, alive or dead. Leo was in Jalisco through the Ill Nights and even though the pollen turned his eyes black with red pupils, and society melted away around him, he never gave up his search. His wife and children in the US were in a gated community and they lost all communication with him during that time. Since the world returned to normal, Leo has been missing, presumed dead by his wife and surviving children in the US.
Clay never left the town of Borges. Almost half a decade after his disappearance, Clay had been in the same house that he arrived at following the car accident. But Clay wasn’t just Clay anymore.
He’d been living in a house in the middle of the desert and he was there when the Ill pollen spread, though the cloud couldn’t touch him. Nothing could touch him since he met and joined with his other half.
The house where Clay had been hidden from the world belonged to a man called Don Luis Manuel Santana Nieto by the locals who knew him before his death. After the death of the man, his grandson Ivan inhabited the house as his own and Clay arrived at the house shortly after Ivan had killed the man.
The two boys rarely spoke to one another and their regular need for human sustenance was diminished on the day that they met one another. They existed in the run-down house that was shakily built and had holes in the roof as two entities of silver light who mostly levitated in seeming meditation while bolts of lightning flared between them. They had lost their individual humanity as they became something more, something ancient that had existed on Earth since before the dawn of humanity.
After almost five years in their silver light forms, Ivan and Clay completed their fusion into a single, god-like entity of pure electricity. And after a day in that form, it became what appeared to be a giant, naked man that burst through the roof of the house.
Just as this happened, an oval doorway formed in the sky before the giant. It wove itself from glowing lines of blue energy into a large oval as two men emerged from it.
“Where are we?” a man named Gregory Samin asked. He was covered in the blue energy from the portal that allowed him to levitate behind the other man who had a magnificent cape that wafted behind him.
“Not where I expected the Portals of Wazad to take us,” the other man said in his stately voice that was befitting of his title. The man was Issac Washington, the Master of Universal Arcana. “The portals usually take me to the destination I envision when I summon them, but in times of danger, they can override my will to take me where I am most needed. And judging by the giant in front of us, and the stillness of the clouds, I think the Lightning God has reappeared on Earth.”
“What is that?” Gregory asked.
“You really are undeserving of your powers,” Issac said. “Do you know anything about magic outside of what your family has done for centuries?”
Issac looked back to see Gregory hanging his head in shame.
“That is the condition for the return of your powers,” Issac said and the two slowly floated toward the giant that seemed to be asleep on its feet. “You are my student and you must expose yourself to all of the magics of the Earth. Not only will you read a thousand books from around the globe, you will need to demonstrate mastery of magics from five countries outside of the European continent.”
The two floated before the face of the giant as it’s eyes opened and a bolt of lightning struck the space between them.
“I am starving,” the giant said. “And you two will be the best meal I have had in centuries.”
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