It began in the southern foothills.
A low roll of thunder.
Then a crack—
and the sky opened.
Sheets of rain poured over the earth, washing down valleys, flooding fields.
Stone paths vanished beneath water.
Trees bent low.
Birds scattered.
And in the center of a soaked meadow—
A single flame sat on a wooden fencepost.
Small.
Still.
Open.
It didn't flicker.
Didn't rise.
It simply stayed.
Elsewhere:
In a forest shrine left in ruin, a blue flame hovered above a mossed altar. Rain flowed through the open roof. Still, the flame rested.
On the tip of a boat's broken mast, drifting on a flooded river, a warm red spark floated above the deck. Passengers didn't shield it. They just watched.
In a small garden, beneath an overturned clay bowl, a child lifted the cover—and saw the flame still glowing inside.
It hadn't moved.
It hadn't tried to survive.
It had simply remained.
And not a single one—
Went out.
In the Soulstream, cultivators panicked at first:
"We're losing containment."
"The rain will wash out the anchor threads!"
But then…
Nothing disappeared.
No flame was lost.
Because these were not flames that needed to burn to exist.
They had learned to be present without performance.
And the world responded not by extinguishing them—
But by making room.
Tenji stood atop a high ridge, soaked through, watching dozens of sparks drift slowly through the rain.
He didn't shield them.
He didn't call to them.
He whispered:
"You don't have to fight the water."
"You never did."
Later, in the archive's anomaly log, a rare designation auto-generated:
🔹 Event: Multi-region storm, flame test
🔹 Outcome: 0 spark loss
🔹 Flameform Response: Passive stability
🔹 Classification: "Rain-Tolerant Anchored Flame"
🔹 Archive Note:
These are no longer survival flames.
They are belonging flames.
And the Fire That Waits, hearing thunder and laughter together, echoed across the silence of the storm:
"This is the day they learned…"
"That flame does not end when rain begins."