And Then It Rained
Rain began as a whisper.
Not enough to put out the fires.
Not enough to clean the air.
Just enough to make the smoke sag and bleed into the sky.
Fourteen-year-old Arin walked through it.
He had been away for three days—sent to a nearby settlement to deliver grain. His feet ached. His clothes were damp. All he wanted was to see his mother's face and hear his father complain about his slow walking.
As the path curved toward the village, he frowned.
Something was wrong.
There was no music.
No smoke from cooking fires.
No dogs barking.
Only black pillars rising into low clouds.
Arin slowed.
"No…" he whispered.
The rain thickened.
When he reached the edge of the village, his feet stopped moving—but his eyes did not.
There were no houses.
Only frames.
Charred beams reaching upward like fingers begging for mercy that never came.
The ground was black. Sticky. Soft in places where it should not have been.
Arin stepped forward.
Something cracked under his foot.
He looked down.
A bowl. Split clean in half. Festival-painted. Burned on one side.
His breathing changed.
"Mother?" he called.
His voice sounded wrong—too loud in the emptiness.
Rain hit the ash and turned it into gray paste. Smoke hissed as it died slowly, reluctantly.
He walked faster now.
Past a doorway that no longer had walls.
Past a cart melted into itself.
Past shapes he did not want to name.
"Father?" His voice broke.
He found the square.
Or what had been the square.
Tables lay overturned, split apart. Food was still there—burned, soaked, trampled into the earth. A child's toy lay nearby, half-melted, its smile warped into something unrecognizable.
Arin's chest tightened.
"No… no… no…"
Rain fell harder.
He saw them then.
Not all at once.
One shape at a time.
A hand.
A foot.
Cloth he recognized.
His legs gave way, but he caught himself against a blackened post.
"Please," he whispered—not to anyone. "Please."
He ran.
Slipping. Falling. Scrambling through ash and water and ruin.
He reached what had been his home.
There was nothing left of the roof.
The walls were gone.
Only the floor.
Only the place where his mother used to sit in the evenings.
Only the place where his father sharpened tools and pretended not to worry.
Arin dropped to his knees.
Rain soaked him through instantly.
"Mother…" he said again, softer now.
He found her shawl.
Burned.
Still familiar.
He clutched it to his chest like a child much younger than fourteen.
Then he saw his father.
Or what was left.
Arin made a sound that did not belong to language.
His body folded forward. He retched, but nothing came up. His lungs refused to work properly. Each breath felt like pulling air through fire.
"I came back," he whispered. "I came back… I'm here…"
Rain poured harder now, finally strong enough to crush the remaining flames.
Ash washed into streams.
Tears mixed with rain until even Arin could not tell which was which.
He crawled forward and pressed his forehead to the ground between them.
"I did what you asked," he sobbed. "I came back fast…"
There was no answer.
Only rain.
Only ruin.
Only the sound of a world that had already moved on.
Arin's body shook until it stopped.
Not because he was calm.
Because there was nothing left to shake.
The rain kept falling.
It washed blood into the soil.
It flattened ash into mud.
It erased footprints—except his.
By the time night came, the fires were dead.
So was the village.
And in the middle of it all, a boy knelt in silence, holding what little remained of love, while the sky cried for him because he no longer could.