It’s Grant’s turn, but he’s sleeping. Thank goodness he’s silent. He was beginning to drive me mad.

The walk to the pond was green, like the rest of our island. Normally I would have expected to see birds, but there were no traces of them, save a brightly colored feather peeking out here and there, from inside a hole of tree, from behind a clump of rocks, wherever they thought they could find shelter from the approaching storm.
The clouds churned and boiled, with lightning dashing out to kiss the ground with fire. Hailstones pelted down, but these were larger than usual; nearly three quarters of an inch around. And they were colored. Never in my life had I heard of colored hailstones, but here they were, flashing pale pink and deep blue, green the same color as my eyes, and an occasional dead black one.
The black ones struck me (no, not on the head) strangely; they were pearlescent and perfectly round. The other stones were oblong, and slightly translucent, these were entirely opaque. Also, they were warm. They didn’t seem like real hailstones at all, but then, the others didn’t much, either, except that they were actually cold.
When I looked up, I noticed the lightning didn’t quite look right either. It stayed on the ground too long, maybe three seconds or so, and it wasn’t blinding at all. I had sat here ever since I could remember, and never once had I seen something like this. The clouds hung in pouches.

Grant’s woken up, and he says first of all, I shouldn’t tell everything at once, so as to create suspense, as if he knows anything about it; and second of all, it’s his turn. Grant and I drive eachother crazy, more or less. I tell Grant he can go back to Giuliao whenever he wants and I won’t stop him.

What happened next was a little fuzzy to me. I was on my way back, having decided that just maybe, this was a storm I should sit out at home. My pockets were filled with a few of the black hailstones. I would have taken some of the colored ones too, except that they seemed to be melting.
The wind was picking up, swirling my hair and breaking some of the smaller branches off the kuel trees. I felt a prickling in my hair. There was a sensation of flying, a smell of burning, and then blackness. Complete, utter blackness.