By Long ago, deep in the Balkan Mountains, a little village lay buried beneath the clouds.
In all of Stara, people worked hard—long into their old age, and they were happy. Whether it was with sheep, crops, or stone, there was a rhythm to life that one did not venture from. It made the cycle of the seasons pass with ease. For thousands of moons, the old fortified the land for the young, and the young took up the tools passed on to them.
And though it rarely rained in the mountains, the village survived each passing season with hard work and fortitude. But with every season in life, a storm must come.
Sometimes it is only a mist, others a flurry, but when Angelika turned eighteen, it changed the course of her life forever…
It was customary for the women of Stara to choose their mate when they came of age. But each time Angelika’s parents asked her who—which boy was suited to her liking—she refused.
Not Hector with his mop of blonde hair and one hundred sheep.
Not Boris with his strong body to wield a chisel and command stone.
And certainly not Casimir with his anvils and forge, no matter what useful metals he crafted.
“What about the young men in the next village?” Angelika’s mother pressed, reaching a point of desperation one evening. The fire cracked and popped in the hearth before them, as if it, too, was impatient for an answer.
“You can choose anyone you like,” her father added. The old man smiled, his dark beard twisting up at the corners of his mouth. But the worry in his eyes betrayed him.
The parents loved their only child, and they wanted her to be happy, but it was well time she moved out of their cottage and started her own family. They had followed the path their parents set before them, and it was only right Angelika did so, too.
“I would much rather sleep,” was always Angelika’s reply. And she would shut the door to her bedchamber, the iron lever falling into place to fasten her away. Then she would tumble into bed, and into dreams.
No one in all of Stara, and three villages over in either direction for that matter, had ever seen a person sleep away that much time.
But Angelika didn’t want to tend to fields or bake bread or darn clothes. She wanted to know the dark man in her dreams, who came to her every night when she reached the deepest dream. He was always enshrouded in clouds, and his bright eyes beckoned her to him. His skin was so pale it shone like starlight, and when he opened his mouth to speak, she always woke crying.
Not tears of sadness, but of yearning. She knew he was meant for her, and she for him. But Angelika understood well enough that there would never be a man adorned in a crown of clouds in any village, no matter which direction, if she searched until her last breath.
So she would rather be alone.
Days passed as they did, and sleep came as the only solace Angelika had. She wore it like a cloak.
Then, on one particular day, the storm clouds began to roll in over the mountains with their deep purples and blacks. So dark the peaks in the distance could no longer be seen, and the whole of the village watched the sky preparing for what surely was to come. The animals grew restless, people began to shutter their windows, and the elders muttered omens. They whispered of curses and prayed to the old gods for protection.
But not Angelika. She stood at the edge of her parents’ garden where she had all day labored in the sun, feeling a stirring thrum through her body. It wasn’t fear she felt like the others, but the same longing she had felt each night since she could remember. He was here and was beckoning her. As thunder rumbled through the mountains, she felt the pull like a thread tugging her ribs.
That night, while the wind howled like wolves, and her parents slept, she crept out to the oaken chest her mother kept like an altar, adorned with burning candles. Inside was Angelika’s dowry: her mother’s hand-stitched linens, her grandfather’s golden wedding band, a clutch of herbs blessed on solstice. All saved since birth for her wedding day.
She stuffed them into a satchel and slipped out into the night, through the forest, and up the mountain. Barefoot, wind whipping her nightdress furiously around her, the mud swallowed her footsteps, but she carried on. After what felt like hours, a dark silhouette of the healer’s hut came into view beneath a leaning pine.
Three sharp raps on the wind-worn door were answered by a woman with milk-white eyes and a face carved like old bark. “I know who you are,” said the medicine woman. “You are the girl who dreams.”
“I need to find him,” Angelika replied. “The man in the clouds.”
The woman nodded once as if she had foreseen this moment. “Then give me what tethers you to the earth.”
Angelika placed the bundle in her gnarled hands, and the woman led her to the bonfire blazing outside.
The healer spread Angelika’s dowry out in a circle near the fire and, with a potion of ash and wild honey, marked Angelika’s chest, wrists, and forehead. She murmured something older than the mountains and reached for a rod forged from copper and iron, to which she fastened the golden band.
“You do not become lightning,” the woman said. “You remember that you always were. Light is the only thing fast enough to catch thunder. If you wish to join him, you must burn away your past.”
“I am lightning and he is thunder,” Angelika said as the old woman draped the white linen over Angelika’s shoulders and sprinkled the herbs at her feet. Angelika stepped into the center of the clearing, wind tearing at her hair, clouds roiling above, swirling into the shape of a man—crowned in mist.
“Go,” the old woman whispered, raising her arms, and a bolt came down over Angelika’s body with a scream of silver: flesh became flame, soul became spark. A boom so loud the village below awoke, sure the mountains had broken open. The trees at the forest’s edge burned. And in a flash, Angelika was gone.
But the rain fell. For the first time in nearly a year, the ground drank deeply. Crops sprang back to life, children danced barefoot in puddles, and the elders wiped their eyes, though no one dared say why.
Her mother placed Angelika’s favorite shawl on the hearth. Her father stood in the doorway each dusk, watching the sky.
And far above them, among the storm-wreathed peaks where no man had climbed, thunder chased the light. Always together.
If you looked up at the right time, you might see her: a flicker in the sky, a flash that lingered longer than it should. Not angry. Not lost. But free.
For Angelika had found the man in the clouds. And where thunder rolls, lightning follows—wild, bright, and blazing across the sky, forever in love with the storm.
This story has been published by Rock Salt Journal in Fall 2025 and The Bookends Review on January 29, 2027.
☾Jessica♥Malen☽ 