Once upon a time, there was a man. His name was not Flint, but it should have been, for his heart was hard and stony, but sometimes struck sparks.

Flint, then, was in business for himself, and his business was making other people's money his own. He was sufficiently good at this that he was extremely wealthy, and most of those who dealt with him were poorer for it, and some were ruined. This gave him a certain bleak satisfaction that was not exactly pleasure; there was little joy in Flint's life, and none of it came from other people.

What pleasure he did have came from beauty, for Flint had a rare eye for art. His collection was extensive and varied. Most of it, he owned because it was valuable and he could keep others from having it; this collection he exhibited sometimes at private parties, inviting primarily those who would smile empty smiles that showed their teeth, and trade veiled insults in the corners, and envy him. This, too, gave him satisfaction.

But his real collection he never showed. These were the pieces that struck something in his stony heart; some he had paid high prices for, and some low, because for these pieces he did not care at all what their monetary value was. These things he owned because they gave him joy — a sad, lonely, private joy, but joy nonetheless.

He found the cup in the back rooms of a museum, covered with dust. It was described only as a jade tea cup, of unknown provenance, with a catalog number. It was plain and unadorned, and it was the most beautiful thing Flint had ever seen. Its only ornament was its own form, but that form was perfect in its simplicity. The jade was faintly patterned in subtle shades of green, which flowed like water around the circle of the cup.

It nearly killed him to look at it. It would kill him if he didn't own it.

He sought out the curator, and engaged in some guarded negotiations — desire or no, he had not lost his taste for a bargain. In the end, for a price that was only slightly exorbitant, and only marginally against the rules, he bought the cup and took it home with him.

The cup was so beautiful that he broke his own rule, and decided to show it. He selected a few other choice pieces from his private collection, and rather more from his public one, to set off the cup, and he invited the same set as he usually did, hinting that he had something special this time. He stood by the cup, to watch his guests envy him; but one by one they drifted by, eyes sliding over the cup, and murmuring, "Oh, nice, very nice," and wandered away. Flint watched this first with disbelief, then anger, and finally a dour self-reproach, for expecting others to be anything other than blind. He circulated through the room, dropping hints to this person or that about certain financial matters; hints that would cause grief to anyone who took them, which most of his guests undoubtedly would.

When he looked back at the cup, however, there was someone there looking at it with a hunger that Flint recognized. He didn't know the man — a hanger-on, perhaps, of one of his guests. There were several such in the room. The man was of medium height and slim build, Chinese or perhaps Korean, with long white hair in a single braid down his back. His face, when Flint came up to him, was delicately etched with lines, but did not look as old as the white hair would have suggested. The stranger's eyes were light, the color of pale tea.

"I must have it," the stranger said without preamble.

Flint laughed, for this was what he had wanted. "It is not for sale, I am afraid."

The stranger glanced at him, then back at the cup. He reached out a hand, stopping short of touching it. His fingers were long — musician's hands. "Everything can be had for a price," he said. "Name it."

"Not this. It is mine, and I do not wish to sell it; therefore it is not for sale. But it is an exceptional piece, is it not?"

The man turned to Flint, and regarded him dispassionately, folding his hands together. He named a figure. It was a large figure, more than Flint had paid. Flint smiled and shook his head. The man named another number, higher, and then a third higher yet. Flint demurred again.

Flint was pleased, but growing bored with the game. He said, rather sharply, "I told you it was not for sale, and I meant it. Not for that amount, nor for ten times that. It is mine, do you understand me? Mine, and I will not let it go."

The stranger lifted his eyebrows slightly at that, and then shrugged. "As you wish," he said. "But do not forget that I offered." He turned away, and his slim shoulders and white hair were soon lost in the crowd of tuxedos and evening gowns.

Flint woke up suddenly, in the middle of the night, knowing that someone was in his house. He listened, but heard nothing; certainly not the wail of expensive burglar alarms. Throwing on a robe, he pulled out the gun he kept under his pillow and went downstairs. He knew perfectly well, by an intuition born of jealousy, what he would find; so it was with no surprise, but a burning, sullen anger, that he found the white-haired stranger removing the jade cup from its case.

"Stop right there," he ordered, pointing the gun. "Put it back, or I swear I'll kill you."

The thief glanced at him, unconcerned. "I'm sorry, Mr. Flint. This cup is mine — it was stolen from me a long time ago, and I have been looking for it ever since. Now I am simply reclaiming what is mine. I did offer to buy it from you, you may recall. Since you refused, you left me with little choice. Now, if you will please step aside from the doorway, I will be on my way."

"Like hell."

The man sighed. "Please, Mr. Flint. Do not make me exert force."

Flint hesitated for a moment, weighing his options — he didn't want to risk damaging the cup, but the floor was thickly carpeted — and then he gritted his teeth and shot the stranger between the eyes. The gun kicked in his hand, and the explosion echoed deafeningly in the enclosed space, but his target merely shook his head. "You cannot hurt me with that infantile weapon, Mr. Flint. Nor any other you have." For the first time, the imperturbable countenance was showing a trace of emotion; he was becoming impatient.

"Who the hell are you?" Flint whispered, shaken. He knew he hadn't missed.

"Who I am is none of your concern. Now you have one last chance to stand aside, Mr. Flint, or you will regret it, although not for long."

"Maybe so," grated Flint, "but you're not walking out of here with that." His gun was pointed squarely at the cup.

After a long moment, the stranger said softly, "Would you? Would you really destroy this thing, knowing as you do what it is?" His pale eyes were blazing.

"Try me. Better that than having it stolen."

"So. Perhaps you would." His voice was the whisper of a silk cloth, drawn over steel. "Well, then." He placed the cup gently in its case, then turned back to Flint. "Do not mistake me, Mr. Flint. There are a dozen ways I could leave here with the cup, intact, despite anything you could do. But you have earned yourself a lesson, Mr. Flint, and that a sharp one. I will not take the cup from you, as I could; rather, you will yourself give it up, and be glad to do so."

"Fat chance, whoever-you-are. Now if you're quite finished, get the fuck out of my house."

"I do not eat my spoken word, Mr. Flint. We shall meet again." A sudden rush of wind tore through the room, blowing dust into Flint's eyes; when he blinked them clear, the stranger was gone.

Flint might have thought, the next morning, that he had dreamed the whole incident; except that he knew perfectly well when he was awake and when he was not. He called the company that had installed his security systems, and had pointed words with them; they were skeptical, but too fond of his money to say so. They sent a team out to inspect the system, and found everything in perfect order. Flint was unsurprised, but as a matter of principle, he threatened them with litigation and bad publicity until they agreed to upgrade the entire system for free. He also moved the cup into his bedroom, where he could keep an eye on it himself.

For a week or so, nothing happened, and Flint began to believe that perhaps his enemy had simply gone away. Then he had to take a trip. He hesitated over leaving the cup, and finally took it with him, in a special case. He flew in his private jet, and they had barely taken off when an unforecasted storm hit them.

Within minutes the sky went from blue to inky black, punctuated by near-constant bolts of lightning. The small airplane shuddered in the knife-like winds; bursts of hail hammered the windows.

Then Flint saw it.

Long and thin, a ribbon of molten gold, it rode the wind in long effortless curls, like kites that Flint had seen — but even as he thought that, he knew it was wrong; the kites were an imitation of this, not the other way around. Forty feet, perhaps, from fringed head to serpent's tail; covered in scales that turned the lightning back in a dozen shades of gold and amber and honey, it swooped and rolled in the air next to the plane. The winds and the thunder caressed it; the storm as lover. It curved closer to the window where Flint stared, frozen, its jaws open as though to laugh, revealing teeth the length of his hand. Its eyes were the color of pale tea.

Flint knew those eyes; he had last seen them over the barrel of a gun.

The creature winked at him, then slid away into the howling winds.

"Sir?" came the pilot's voice over the intercom. "Sir, I'm afraid we're going to have to land; the weather's too severe for a small plane like this."

"F- Fine," Flint said hoarsely. "Whatever you think best." He didn't ask if they had seen anything.

The storm battered them all the way to the nearest airport, then release them just as they came in for a landing. As Flint stumbled off the plane, clutching the case containing the cup, the clouds were breaking up and the sun coming out. He canceled his trip and returned home by car.

The storms followed him after that, sometimes laying siege to the house, sometimes chasing him when he left; cat and mouse, except that the cat was the whole sky. Lightning struck near him several times, but never hit him. Once, he found the print of a large, five-clawed foot left prominently in the soft earth underneath his window. All these things he endured, grimly, watching through granite eyes that gave nothing away.

One day, after a few weeks of this, he came home to find his enemy sitting at ease on the steps of his house. Flint didn't bother reaching for the gun he now carried; he simply scowled, and finally demanded, "Well?"

"Well, Mr. Flint? Are you enjoying good health these days? Experiencing good weather?"

Flint snorted. "What, you think I'm going to be scared by a little rain? You think I'm going to crawl on my belly now and beg your pardon? I don't know who you are, or what you are, and I don't care; you can't fry me without frying the cup as well."

"No?" His opponent lifted an eyebrow. "I assure you, Mr. Flint, that I can do just that. But you may recall, if you cast your mind back, that I promised you a lesson. That lesson has not yet begun."

"Not yet? Then what's with all the storm crap?"

The main smiled and stood up, with spare elegance. "That? I simply wanted to be certain that you to understood certain things." He bowed, mockingly, and was gone.

After that, the storms became less frequent; just often enough, Flint supposed, to keep him reminded that his enemy was out there. There was no fear of Flint forgetting that. He still took the cup with him whenever he left the house, and at night he kept it in his bedroom. He rigged a platform for it that turned, slowly, so that the he could lie in bed and watch the light shift and flow through the jade like running water. It soothed him, and he dreamed cool, slow dreams, of trees and moss and deep pools.

There was a storm, one day, as there had been before; and when the storm was done, a gentle, misty rain that lingered throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Flint was getting ready for bed, to the soft patter of rain on the window, when he looked out and saw a woman, standing outside the window in the fading daylight.

She was naked, except for her hair, which drifted about her like mist, and her eyes were same color as the sky, blue and grey deepening into black. The rain touched her softly, caressed her, clothed her in a dress of diamonds that sparkled in the dimness. When she saw that Flint saw her, she lifted his arms to him, imploring, or inviting.

And she was beautiful, in a way that struck Flint straight to his stony heart; beautiful in the way that he had seen only in things, such as the cup and his other secret treasures; beautiful as he had found no other woman before, out of all the ones he had bought or who had tried to buy him. It hurt him to look at her; it hurt him more to think of her going away. Almost without realizing it, he opened the window.

She drifted closer, almost close enough to touch, and looked up at him with her twilight eyes. Flint cleared his throat. "Who — who are you?" She didn't reply, but shook her head.

"Can you speak?" Another shake; no. But her eyes, her body, spoke for her; here I am, I am yours. Love me.

Flint almost — almost — reached out his hand, to touch her; but there was one more question, and in his heart, he already knew the answer. He gripped the windowsill. "You're his, aren't you?" he grated. "You're one of his people. You belong to him."

She nodded, and a tear crept down her face, or perhaps it was only the rain. If it was, the sky wept for her. Forgive me, her eyes said; I am his, always his, but I can be yours as well.

Flint closed his eyes, while his heart hammered in his chest. Finally, he whispered, "Go to hell," and slammed the window shut and pulled the curtains. That night, he dreamed of deep pools under rainy skies.

He saw her again the next evening, and the next, standing outside his window. He hurt, somewhere in his chest, whenever he saw her; so he closed the curtains against the sight of her, but the sound of rain, softly on the window, haunted him in his dreams. Even the cup, turning slowly under the light, could not soothe him. The third day he could hardly think of anything else, even during his meetings and phone calls; he began to count the hours until evening, but that day the sun came out and the rain stopped. He almost wept with frustration and relief.

The following days were uniformly sunny and bright, but Flint kept an eye out for clouds — whether from dread, or desire, he couldn't have said. As the days passed, the thought of the woman began to torture him; he couldn't sleep, tossing all night in a room that seemed suddenly sweltering. Finally, he realized that he knew, had always known, what to do. That night, he left the window open. It was a surrender, he knew that; but it seemed less important than it had once. Perhaps Flint's heart was not so hard, after all.

She came to him in the middle of the night, her hair drifting around her in a great cloud, drifting away behind her into tatters of mist. When she lay down beside him, her skin was cool and fresh, and her lips tasted like clean water. She took him in her, and he moved upon her and with her, and her eyes gave him back himself, in blue and grey. He cried out, once, and she wrapped her arms around him and held him close, and the sky wept.

When Flint woke the next morning, she was gone; the window was still open, the curtains stirring in the chill air. He lay in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling, not really thinking of anything. He felt a great stillness, as though he were poised between one moment and the next, in stasis; as though the world had paused, waiting for someone to speak.

He got up finally, and slowly put on his robe. When he walked out into the living room, his enemy was there, sitting cross-legged on the hearth. He was dressed in loose Chinese robes of raw silk, and he was smoking a long-stemmed pipe with a shallow bowl. The smoke drifted about his head, making shapes before dissolving into the air.

Flint sat down, without speaking. He felt as though the next word, the next movement, might shatter something; that once he spoke, he would lose forever a thing he couldn't even name.

"So, Mr. Flint," his enemy said, suddenly, "I believe that congratulations are in order."

The stillness quivered. "Congratulations?" he said stupidly. "For what?"

His enemy smiled, a small, economic smile. "Why, for your child. You are going to be a father, Mr. Flint."

Flint stared, turning the words around in his head. They made no sense; he couldn't assemble them into a pattern that had any meaning. His enemy tilted his head back and blew out a thin stream of smoke, which shaped a baby, curled asleep with its fist in its mouth; then that melted into a toddler, taking uncertain steps; then a child running, with her hair streaming behind her; a young girl smiling; a woman... the smoke drifted away, but the echo of the woman's eyes — blue-grey, like smoke, like twilight — lingered in the corners of the room.

Flint shook his head. "So?" The silence was gone, the old sullen anger was coming back to him now. "That's a cute party trick, but I'm not impressed. This is about the woman, isn't it? You think that I'll give you the cup in exchange for her?" To himself, he wondered if he would.

His enemy lifted an eyebrow. "You think I am offering to buy the cup, using the favors of one of my servants? But Mr. Flint, you may recall that I offered once to buy the cup from you, and you spurned me. I do not make such offers twice. You will never see her again."

Flint felt the world fall away from under him. "Never?" A huge hollowness was swelling in his chest. Even as he stared, some part of him despised himself for his weakness. "Then what the hell was all this about? What was the point?"

"The point, Mr. Flint, is as I have said. You will give up the cup, of your own will, and be glad to do so. Everything necessary has now been said. And now, Mr. Flint, I will take my leave of you. You will not see me again either." He knocked the ashes from his pipe carefully into the fireplace, tucked it into his jacket, and walked from the room. The front door closed quietly behind him, and Flint was left alone.

After that, a handful of years passed. Flint dreamed of the woman, and when it rained, he kept the window open, knowing that it was useless and damning himself for playing the fool. His heart had a hole in it, that ached in the rain; but as time passed the hole scabbed over and the hurt was locked away. His life returned slowly to what it had been, except that he was now, perhaps, a little harsher than before, his eyes harder. He kept the cup by his bed still, but the flowing water patterns did not soothe him as they once had; instead he remembered lips that tasted like clean water, and his heart would quiver, underneath the scar. Still, he kept it there, a wound he could not resist poking to see if it still hurt.

Flint's enemy, true to his word, did not appear again.

Then, one day, Flint was sitting in the back of his limousine, waiting in traffic, and gazing absently out the window. A couple came walking by, with a little girl, four or five years old. Her eyes were the wrong color and the shape of her face was different; but the way she ran, kicking at the leaves and laughing, reminded him of an image he had seen in smoke once. Unthinking, he whispered, "My daughter," and in that moment, the words rang in his head and all the patterns fell into place; his daughter, his child, somewhere in the world, growing up without him. At that moment, she became real to him; something precious, that he had lost without knowing he had it.

He went home and immediately called a firm of private investigators. He had little enough to give them, and they told him bluntly that he was wasting his money; but he sent them out to look anyway, and then others, and still others. The hole in his heart had torn open, and it could not be filled except by this child he had never met.

Over the following months, he sent more and more searchers out, to scour the world for his daughter. He abandoned his business; he spent his days in the house, waiting by the phone to hear from the searchers, and going grey.

Flint's wealth was large, but it wasn't infinite, and he was spending it now like water. When it started to run out, he began to sell things: the jet, the cars, a summer house, and finally his artworks. Nothing mattered anymore, except keeping the men searching. When he sold the cup, finally, he had almost forgotten what it was; it was nothing but a way to keep the search going a little longer.

The cup, of course, passed swiftly into the hands of his enemy; who received it, it may be supposed, with a sense of satisfaction. He was patient, as patient as the winds whose master he was, that grind the mountains into sand; but he was also vindictive, and things had fallen out precisely as he had foreseen. He went on, then, with his long, coiled life, and gave Flint not another thought.

As for Flint, his money ran out finally, and the searchers stopped looking. Flint went out himself then, wandering up and down the street, penniless, homeless, no longer quite sane, looking for the child whose image he had seen once. He died that way, not much later; one of the nameless, invisible shapes huddled on grates or in doorways. No one mourned his death, or even remarked on it, except for a newspaper that ran a short article, "Former millionaire dies homeless," for the comfort of its readers who were neither millionaires nor homeless. After that, Flint was forgotten.

But somewhere in the world there was a girl, with eyes the blue-grey color of twilight, or of smoke; a girl who was born from jealousy and love and despair, while the storm, ancient, uncaring, merciless, stood as her godfather.

Her story is yet to be told.