Rain

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They looked up in wonder.

~0~

If the human race could ever be said to be united in a common purpose, this was it. The faces of the human race were turned up to the heavens, the eyes of millions looked up in bewilderment, confusion and fascination. And fear.

~1~

Where the eternal unchanging blue sky stretched over from horizon to horizon, where the relentless sun paced every corner of the earth from dawn to dusk, where nothing stood between the common man and the fury of the red-hot star above but an upturned hand, a giant shield of opaque gray … gray … things (he had no other word to describe it) left the world dark when it was rightfully day.

~2~

He was fascinated. Renan Ky lay on the flat of his back, watching the world pass by in a blur of grayness, feeling the softness of the grass and the wind sweeping over his face. The gray … thing grew more ominous by the minute. He wondered whether Mother was back from the peddlers yet. Immobile in his wonder, he made no move to get up when the clippety-clop of horses announced Mother’s arrival back home. Mother will erupt when she finds out that crops were not harvested yet, the cows have not been taken out into the fields, and the other field had not been plowed yet, but today, Renan thought lazily, today, was different. He doubted anyone else had done any work at all.

~3~

He yawned. Stretched. Every muscle in his body screamed satisfaction as he lay, watching the sky as it grew darker and darker. And it was still day. Not night. But day.

~4~

It made everything different, everything was different. Since that thing started evolving a day ago, everything became possible. If a miracle could happen, this would be the time. It changed every notion of the possible and the imaginable because the sky, the ultimate symbol of everything permanent and unchanging, was disrupted by this ... this… thing, which he had still no name for.

~5~

For one thing, he could look at the sky for an eternity, and it hurt his eye not. The glare from the sun, once only shielded by a large hat, or by hiding indoors, was now tempered by that gray … thing that spread and covered the once-invincible-blue sky, and shielded the sun from his eyes. And another, the wind was different. No longer hot and dusty, it chilled his overheated bones and calmed restless hearts. Not any longer like the angry breath of a dragon, but rather a soft sigh of a lover in the moonlight.

~6~

He felt like a white-hand lily-hearted girl thrown out into the chaotic city.

~7~

“Renan? Renan? Where are you? Are you slacking again? Renan!” Mother’s voice filtered through his pleasant thoughts of sleeping and resting, and he sighed, picking himself up in one graceful movement, he shuffled towards the old, depilated house with boards falling off one side and windows in disrepair on the other.

~8~

“The peddlers are saying that that Cracuk has forgave our sins! There would be rain soon! Rain!”

~9~

Renan blinked. He thought Mother would whip him for not doing his chores. But no, her face flushed with happiness, her normally sallow skin with intertwined veins showing was now radiantly glowing and filled out, her blue eyes sparkled in a way he had not seen since Father died three season-turns ago. And she wasn’t berating him. He barely caught a word of her exclamations, so he asked her to repeat her words again. Nicely. Politely. Obviously Mother was in a very good mood and he be damned if he was the one to break it. Starting at her words, and especially at her careless naming of Highest God of All, he carefully absorbed this information in. Renan was not particularly religious, but it was wiser to not mention the names of gods, lest they happen to get interested in human fates. And woe be he who attracts attention from the gods.

~10~

“Rain? Rain is water falling from the sky, and not that … that… thing there,” he carelessly motioned at the sweeping sky above “… right?”

He learned about rain from school, of course. He learned from his teacher in the arid classroom five fields away from his house with twenty other children of his age, that Cracuk, Highest God of All, decided to punish mankind for their sins by denying them rain, and therefore, denying them water. “So, we must all try to live a blameless life if we ever want rain to fall again. We must try not to commit sins (I know that this is a hard thing to do, but we should try. For example, Greorrgh, stop pulling Thaina’s hair) We should also make regular offerings to the temple,” his teacher, white-hand city-bred, sunnily said. The class snickered. Rain was distant hope for future, and one had to live now. Now! One had more pressing problems such as the cattle and the field than to make offerings in the temple. The white-hands never learned that.

On the other side of reason, he learned that Cracuk lived in the highest floor in the Tower of Allaward, and was kept imprisoned by the Allaward. A prisoner held under the influence of a special ring made by the wizards of the past, the ones who built the Tower of Allaward itself. But to say that out aloud was blasphemy, and one could risk death, or worse, denial of water.

Mother’s brow furrowed. “That gray thing … is a cloud. It holds … rain. Nova told me so,” she finished emphatically. Nova was one of the village elders, so old that if anything were to happen in the life span of this world, she would know.

“Does this mean that we are forgiven for our sins?”

“It would seem so, doesn’t it? Anyway, the rest of the village seems to think so, there will be a feast tonight, at the Commons. As for myself, I think that… I think that the other … legends… have more truth in them than a half-baked legend of being punished for our sins,” She paused only for a fraction before saying, “For Tayhuk’s sake, at the feast tonight, do dress with a little more decency!”

Renan sighed. He knew that it wouldn’t last.