The rain still falls.

  Black and thick, it pours in languid curtains through the shattered bones of the dome, bleeding into the ruins like a final, unrepentant elegy. Ashen light filters through the broken ceiling above, scattered by shards of once-pristine stained glass that now hang like jagged teeth from the ruined oculus. The flames have come and gone with their pale light. The whispers have been silenced. Only the soundless deluge remains.

  Alaric Fintear stands at the center of it all.

  Knee-deep in a pool of black water, he does not shiver. His robes hang heavy, soaked to the threads, the once-silver clasps dulled by rot and ichor. The rain rolls down his face, across hollow cheeks, and pools in the corners of his cracked lips. But he cannot hear it. He cannot hear anything.

  No screams. No murmurs. No voices digging through his memories.

  No whispers.

  He blinks slowly. His fingers tremble as they lift, hovering just beneath the surface of the oily water. He expects to feel something—pain, the bite of madness, the sting of a god’s last breath—but there is nothing.

  Just the silence. Just the weight of the rain.

  He tilts his face skyward, lashes dripping. The storm swirls above him, immense and indifferent, but it no longer speaks. It watches, perhaps. Lingers. But it has gone quiet.

  He should not still be here. He knows that.

  The corruption should have consumed him—shredded his mind into ribbons, as it did to Rax, as it did to so many others. It should have cracked his skull open, poured its god-born rot into his soul, left him a husk mouthing borrowed gospel. But he remains.

  Still himself.

  Still alone.

  He starts to move.

  His boots scrape over fallen tiles slick with slime and rain, past upturned shelves and splintered marble. Every step is a battle—his legs bruised and heavy, breath shallow, hands searching for support. The world feels soft around the edges, soaked through and beginning to rot.

  He moves through the remains of the Grand Atrium of Ivery—once a palace of glass and gold, now a mausoleum entombed in rain. The intricate mosaic beneath his feet is shattered, its depictions of sun-gods and celestial beasts reduced to fragments submerged in ink. It had told a story once. He can’t remember what it was.

  Everywhere he looks, there are signs of what was lost.

  A cracked statue of the High Arcanist Soriel, her gaze forever lifted toward a sky that betrayed her.

  A torn tapestry from the Western Wall, slumped like a corpse, soaked to its threads.

  The skeletal remains of a scholar still clutching a scroll, the parchment melted to his hands.

  Alaric does not look away.

  He has been surrounded by death for three years. But this—this emptiness—is something else.

  It’s not grief. It’s not horror.

  It’s wrong.

  He reaches a crumbling stairwell half-swallowed by rubble. Its spiral leads toward the collapsed upper study, now unreachable.

  So he stands in the open.

  The rain does not stop.

  He stares at his hands. They should be shaking. They aren’t. The air is cold, but his skin is warm, feverish. The storm hasn’t touched him—not in the way it used to. The silence only sharpens the realization.

  He sinks to his knees.

  "Why…?"

  The word is broken. Swallowed by the storm.

  He waits for the rain to lash back. For it to twist his tongue, burn his thoughts, flood him with Rax’s voice. With his father's. With his own.

  But nothing comes.

  No fury. No lies. No promises.

  No sound.

  He reaches into his satchel. Water sloshes over the edge as he pulls free a battered book—his journal. Warped by the downpour, ink running like blood. One page holds.

  With fingers stiff from cold and something deeper, he finds a quill in the folds of his robe. The feather droops. The tip is cracked. He dips it into the black rain unconsciously, then drags it across the page.

  Journal Entry 1131

  The whispers have stopped.

  I should be dead. Or worse. I have heard the things the rain says. I have watched the strongest minds—men and women whose will I once envied—crack like dry bark. But I am still here. Not untouched. Not unscarred. But here.

  Why am I the only one left?

  What has changed?

  What does it want from me now?

  —AF

  He closes the journal and presses it against his chest.

  The rain falls over him like mourning veils, slow and unrelenting. Curling in spirals across his shoulders. Dripping into the cracks of the floor. He sits there for a long time, unmoving. Listening.

  But the silence holds.

  Something has changed.

  The dome is gone. The whispers are gone.

  But the rain has not stopped.

  And neither has he.

  The days that follow unravel in a haze of dim gray light and sleepless wandering. There is no rhythm to them—only repetition, only hunger. Not for food. Not for rest.

  But for answers.

  Alaric does not eat. He barely sleeps. He tears through the wreckage of the Grand Archive, venturing deeper into collapsed halls and underground reliquaries. Books that survived the fire and flood are pried open, pages fanned and sorted, copied and scrawled on in manic ink. His mind is a furnace now, burning with silent questions.

  Journal Entry 1135

  The rain is wrong. Not just evil. Not just holy. Something else. I’ve read six dozen theories on divine phenomena. Ivery’s theocracies insisted divine rot was impossible. That’s what terrifies me. It shouldn’t be possible.

  I found a line in a southern codex:

  "In the Third Cycle, a darkened sky fell for three days before the Twin Sea Gods drowned. The water grew heavy. Thick. But it was not silent. It was full of wailing... as though the ocean had learned to speak."

  A myth, they said. A metaphor. But what if it wasn’t?

  And yet another line in such a codex, found beneath rubble and ash in the main wing.

  "The end of days will start with slowness in the mind, a weakening of the human state. Divine rot is impossible however, for if it were would the god not have already have smited us with it?”

  If this is true, then what is this catastrophe?

  He circles terms in dead languages. Draws sigils he doesn’t fully grasp. The silence gnaws at him not with what it gives—but what it withholds.

  He finds one brittle journal, barely legible. The ink is faded, the pages warped. The name on the front reads: Elira Morwen, dated one year before the Fall.

  "The stars have begun to flicker. Our seers cannot find them. I worry their silence is not the prelude to sleep... but the gasp of a throat just before drowning."

  Alaric copies the line twice. Then underlines it.

  The whispers haunt him now in their absence. Not like before—screaming and seductive. But as ghosts of memory.

  He dreams of the serpent.

  He dreams of Rax.

  He dreams of the bridge.

  He dreams of the forest.

  Journal Entry 1140

  I think it knew me. The thing in the rain. The snake—it didn’t offer power or salvation. It just told me who I already was.

  I keep thinking of the day I almost jumped. The way the water looked from the bridge. How I said nothing when Rax asked what was wrong.

  I thought the whispers were cruel. But maybe they were just honest.

  Eventually, the pages run out.

  The silence remains.

  And so does he.

  Alaric stands in the ruined threshold of the atrium. The sky above is still split. The rain still falls. But its weight no longer burrows into him.

  He stretches out a hand.

  And nothing happens.

  Not a tremor. Not a thought.

  He steps forward.

  No scream. No vision. No whisper.

  The rain washes over him, cold and quiet. But it does not claim him.

  Whatever the serpent did... whatever the silence means...

  He is no longer like the others.

  And he has to find out why.

  The days no longer come with sunrise. They come with the cracking of his spine as he rises from a patch of cold stone, with the stench of wet parchment and burnt oil in his lungs. The rain has become a clockless constant, a heartbeat without pause, and Alaric moves through it like a phantom—drifting down hallways of shattered glass and collapsed knowledge with his journal in hand and an oil-lamp cupped in his fingers like a sacred relic.

  His body aches. His clothes have become tattered rags clinging to his frame, saturated by black water and long dried blood. Yet he moves with purpose. No longer crawling. No longer hesitating. There is something within him now—a terrible clarity forged from silence.

  He drifts through the lower floors of the Grand Archive like a revenant haunting his own grave.

  Each room is its own tomb.

  In the Scriptorium of the Eclipsed Saints, he pulls soaked scrolls from beneath a caved-in statue of the martyr Liran, her stone face cracked clean down the center. The writings are fragmented psalms in dead dialects. He lays them flat on the broken steps and begins the slow translation, his fingers working faster than he can think.

  In the Vault of Arcane Concordance, he uncovers lead-bound tomes hidden behind shattered crystal panes. Most are burned or warped beyond use, but one survives—the ink still glowing faintly beneath layers of mold. It is titled The Unfinished Hymn. The script shifts across the page when read, blurring as though it resists comprehension. He transcribes it anyway, syllable by syllable, his nose bleeding by the time he reaches the fourth verse.

  In the flooded Conservatory of Breath, the water is waist-high. Alaric wades into it without hesitation, the murk swirling with ink and ash. He lifts overturned desks with both arms, tears drawers from moss-covered cabinets. Beneath one shelf, lodged between a collapsed pipe and a collection of cracked alchemy vials, he finds a rusted metal case marked with a seer’s sigil. Inside: a series of folded sheets—divination logs, incomplete, scrawled in frenzied shorthand.

  “Scrying net returns null. No divine signature present. No celestial resonance detected across any plane. Observation 17: We are alone.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  His breath catches. He copies the phrase into his journal with shaking hands, the ink smeared by the trembling in his fingertips.

  Journal Entry 1163

  There are no gods left. I keep finding proof. Prophets writing in madness, seers unable to scry. The rituals yield nothing now. No visions. No answers. No names. It’s as if they were never there at all.

  If the gods died screaming, then what was the last thing they heard?

  The thought hounds him.

  He walks faster.

  Runs.

  Up spiral stairwells, down into half-collapsed basements. The Archive is a corpse, but he treats it like a living thing—pulling back its skin, prying open its old arteries, dragging out the rot to examine it under the flicker of his lantern. Dust chokes the air. Mold coats the walls in sick, veined patterns. The rain filters down through the cracks in the stone above, tracing long, ink-black lines across old frescoes and library seals.

  He speaks to no one. There is no one left.

  But in the silence, he begins to whisper aloud to himself.

  Not madness—method.

  He narrates every discovery. Every idea. Every horrible conclusion he begins to stitch together.

  “The rain speaks—but only once. The silence isn’t an end. It’s an answer. It means you’ve heard all it had to say.”

  “The serpent… it knew me. It didn't persuade—it confirmed. It reflected something already there. That’s the key.”

  “What if the rain was the last god?”

  He begins to write directly onto the floor of the atrium. Pages can be lost. Ink fades. But stone holds memory.

  He sketches diagrams of celestial collapse—how the constellations shifted after the sky fell. He outlines a theory that the rain’s spread follows an ancient divine leyline long thought to be myth. He maps out the cycle of divine silence recorded in fragmented esoteric texts from the south, east, and far western shelves.

  He draws lines between all the names that were forgotten—deities struck from record after the rain began.

  He circles the gaps.

  Again and again.

  Journal Entry 1143

  There is a pattern in what has been erased. Not in what is present—but in what is missing. The rain does not destroy knowledge—it selects. Curates. Prunes the divine tree down to a single, silent branch.

  What if it wasn’t meant to be heard by everyone? What if it was meant to find just one listener?

  He sleeps only when his vision blurs to static. Often he wakes screaming, though no one hears it. The Archive does not echo anymore. The silence has roots. It grows through the walls like a vine.

  On the seventh day since the collapse, he finds the sealed wing of the Archive: The Chamber of Prohibited Doctrine.

  The lock is half-melted, the warding glyphs blackened and humming low with residual energy. The door is barely intact, a single shove away from falling inward. He hesitates. Just for a moment. Then he kicks it open.

  Inside, the air is warm.

  The shelves are mostly intact, but scorched—paper fused to metal, ancient leather bindings charred. At the far end of the chamber sits a pedestal untouched by fire, the book upon it wrapped in chains of silver and obsidian.

  The title has been carved into the metal like a wound:

  “The Rain that Remembers.”

  He takes one step forward.

  Then another.

  The chains whisper as he nears.

  Not with words.

  But with memories.

  Rax’s voice. His own voice. The bridge. The serpent.

  All overlaid in a thousand layers—like a chorus of drowned echoes.

  Alaric reaches for the book.

  He does not yet open it.

  But something behind his eyes stirs.

  He does not open it, not yet.

  The book pulses faintly beneath the silver chains, warm like skin. The black binding is covered in grooves—symbols etched not with ink or flame, but with pressure, as though something beneath had tried to break free. The title, The Rain that Remembers, stares at him with a gaze he cannot see but can somehow feel. It weighs heavier than anything he’s lifted.

  He kneels before it.

  Unclasping the chains is not a ritual. It is a surrender.

  Each link peels away with a brittle hiss, leaving faint trails of ash as they fall. The final lock cracks open like bone, and Alaric opens the book with trembling hands, careful not to breathe too hard.

  The first page is blank.

  The second: a sigil—twisting, recursive, unnameable.

  The third: text. Illegible. Smudged by some unnatural erosion.

  But then…

  “Of the Old Blood Before Flame”

  It is not known when the Rain first came. For it is not Rain, but Remembrance. It falls not from sky to soil, but from past to present. A war was waged before the first sun was lit, before time was taught to flow.

  Those who would become gods—many and vast and young—rose from the void and drank the Black Sea. They warred against the One Beneath All Names, who spoke not in tongues, but in silence.

  The Silence was not empty. It was complete.

  Before speech, before desire, before mercy or meaning—there was It.

  They cast It down, but did not destroy it. They buried It in thought, cloaked in myth, chained in memory.

  But memory leaks.

  And when memories are forgotten… It remembers.

  Wherever it resides, the land is doomed to be destroyed.

  The next pages are blurred beyond recovery. Streaked with water damage, ink turned to blood-colored dust. Whole paragraphs have been scorched or scraped. He finds fragments only:

  “...not death, but undoing...”

  “...the bargain was never for power—it was for amnesia...”

  “...a rain to veil the silence, until a mind could echo it back...”

  “...and the serpent was not the first messenger...”

  Alaric reads until his eyes seem to bleed.

  He does not sleep. He doesn’t notice when he stops eating again.

  He rewrites whole sections of the book by hand, cross-referencing texts he’d thought useless days ago. What little is legible points to something older than the gods—something they didn’t conquer, but merely hid. He fills pages and pages in his journal trying to untangle the meaning. His hypotheses spiral from theology to physics to dream architecture.

  Journal Entry 1144

  The rain is not divine rot. It’s not divine at all. It’s pre-divine.

  It doesn’t destroy faith. It predates it.

  The serpent… the silence… the memory… they’re all symptoms of something waking up. Something the gods tried to erase and couldn’t.

  And now it’s remembering itself through us.

  At night, he dreams of mouths where there should be eyes. He dreams of Rax again, but this time he is smiling—not cruelly, not softly. Just knowingly. The bridge is gone. In its place is a sea of endless ink. He steps forward into it.

  “Come see what I saw,” he says.

  He wakes gasping.

  Journal Entry 1145

  I’ve written everything I can. I’ve translated what I understand. The rest is beyond words. But the book—the Book Remembers—it keeps humming when I near it. Like it’s waiting.

  I need to know why I’m still here. Why I haven’t drowned in the same silence that consumed everyone else. The only variable left… is me.

  If the rain is memory, I need to know what it remembers when it touches me.

  The idea comes not as a decision, but as an instinct—clarity as sharp and cold as a knife's edge.

  He prepares slowly, deliberately.

  He wraps the journal in oilcloth and hides it deep within a crevice under the main dais of the atrium. He packs nothing else. Not food. Not water. Not fire.

  He sheds his outer robe, leaving only his underlayer—soaked, clinging, torn. His skin is pale, almost translucent beneath the lamps. His eyes have the look of someone already halfway elsewhere.

  He stands in the ruined doorway of the Grand Archive.

  Outside, the storm still churns—quiet, endless, black.

  His fingers flex at his sides.

  He breathes in once. Then steps beyond the threshold.

  The rain greets him like an old friend.

  No voices. No screaming. No visions.

  Only the heavy patter of memory falling on flesh.

  His eyes flutter closed as the droplets kiss his face. Cold. Warm. Neither. Both. It’s impossible to say what sensation the rain truly carries. It touches so gently it’s like it avoids him.

  He stands at the precipice of the world he thought he knew.

  Alaric’s hand trembles as it rests on the iron gate leading out from the Grand Archive. The storm hisses against the stone like a living thing, but the sound cannot reach him. He watches the droplets patter down, bursting against the jagged steps beyond like pinpricks in the skin of a corpse. No voice rides within them. No whisper snakes between the wind.

  He pushes the gate open.

  It groans like an ancient beast, rust flaking from its joints. And for the first time in three years, Alaric Fintear steps into the world.

  The city is no longer golden. The grand empire of the sun has fallen to be a drowned city haunted by rain.

  What remains of Ivery stretches before him, a broken skeleton of alabaster and ruin. The once-marble spires have collapsed into jagged teeth, thrusting upward through blackened stone and tangled ivy. Balconies sag like torn wings. The wide thoroughfares that once bustled with robes and song are cracked and choked by thorned vines and flooded canals. Statues of long-dead gods lay face-down in the mire, their features worn to blankness by years of ceaseless rain.

  And yet... there is no rot. No crows. No scent of death. Only that same, suffocating silence.

  He walks slowly at first.

  Each step into the black rain is another breath against fate. It drips from his hair, his chin, slides down his arms, but never takes him. It clings to his robes but does not pull at his mind. He is a ghost in the storm. A remnant the rain cannot claim.

  Ivery's sky is gray and low, pressing close like a dome of ash. In the distance, the mountains that once formed a cradle around the city are faded silhouettes, their edges blurred by the thick curtain of rain. Alaric’s boots sink into the softening road, once paved with sunstone. Now it’s mottled with cracks, ink-black moss spreading in long, weeping veins.

  He passes the ruins of a temple.

  It had belonged to Ilyra, goddess of light and mercy. He remembers its high dome of mirrored gold, how it caught the sun and scattered it like fire across the plaza. Now it’s a crater. The statue at its heart—a faceless woman with arms outstretched—is half-buried in rubble, her hands snapped off, her open palms now fists of stone.

  Alaric moves through the stillness like a revenant.

  He enters the hollow remains of a scriptorium, its walls charred and crumbling. He kneels by the burned remnants of scrolls, pages fused into brittle stumps. He touches the soot, sifting it between his fingers.

  He crosses a flooded courtyard where the rain collects in stagnant pools. In the reflection, his face is pale and drawn, his eyes darker than he remembers. The scars of silence have already etched themselves into his skin.

  In an alley between collapsed towers, he finds a trail of bones. White and clean, arranged like someone had tried to spell something—before they were unmade. He kneels. Touches one. It hums.

  Not a voice. Not a whisper.

  Just a memory.

  He continues on.

  Hours blur. Maybe days. He stops only when exhaustion grips him, sheltering beneath archways and beneath the shattered wings of broken effigies. He writes when he can.

  Journal Entry 1146

  I left the Archive. The rain still does not touch me. Not like before. It feels colder now. Angrier. As though it knows I am out here, walking where I should not walk.

  The city is dead. Not in the way I expected. No ash. No bodies. No blood. Just silence. And absence.

  I found a stairwell that led nowhere. I climbed it anyway.

  Entry 1147

  I’ve been walking in circles. The road back to the Archive vanished behind me. I thought I remembered these streets. But they change. They shift. I can’t tell if it’s the rain or my mind.

  Entry 1148

  I’ve started creating a map of the ruined sun city. The streets have warped in these 3 years and they are no longer the same as they once were.

  Entry 1149

  I saw someone today. Or thought I did. A figure in the distance. They turned a corner and vanished. I ran. I found nothing. I want to believe I’m not alone.

  Entry 1150

  The rain is not silent. Not entirely. I hear something, sometimes. Beneath the surface of it. A breath held. A word not spoken. Not a whisper. But not far from one.

  He wakes in the ruins of an old inn. Moss grows through the floorboards, and the walls lean at impossible angles. Through the broken window, he watches the rain pour endlessly down, pooling at the edges of the street.

  There are no birds. No rats. Not even insects. Only Alaric. Only the silence. And the storm.

  He takes a deep breath.

  And walks further into the drowned heart of the world.

  But then—he hears it.

  A heartbeat.

  Not his own.

  A distant thrum, steady and vast.

  A pulse in the air, in the stone, in the water—echoing through the marrow of the earth.

  And then, faintly—a voice.

  It sounds like a boy, someone whose afraid

  It murmurs like its afraid to wake a sleeping bear “I need to find food, all of the crops won't grow…"

  Journal Entry 1153

  I have found the roads again.

  Three years buried in the dark, and now I walk through what’s left of Ivery like a ghost returned. The city is… unrecognizable. A husk. Stone shattered. Temples empty. Trees growing sideways out of shattered homes.

  I’ve begun drawing more maps. Tracing ruins. Marking landmarks. If anyone still lives, they will need to know the path back. The black rain has left cracks in the ground. Fissures that pulse like veins. There’s a rhythm to it. Like breath.

  Journal Entry 1155

  The dead are everywhere. Some skeletons. Some mummified by rot and rainfall. Some… not truly dead. I found a man today. His eyes had been replaced by black stones. His mouth was sewn shut with silver thread. He screamed with his hands, clawing symbols into the dirt until his fingers bled.

  I could not help him. I ran.

  He explores deeper each day, stepping over collapsed bridges, vaulting through shattered churches. Ivery’s heart is hollow, but not unoccupied.

  In a ruined plaza of broken sun-statues, he finds a woman curled in a fountain. She is muttering to herself, hands submerged in black water.

  Alaric kneels beside her.

  “Are you hurt?”

  She looks at him. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out. Then she begins to sob. Laugh. Scream.

  He flees again. The voices haven’t left them. Only him.

  Journal Entry 1160

  I’m beginning to believe the rain didn’t abandon everyone. Just me.

  I found one sane soul today. A boy, maybe fourteen. Hiding beneath a broken awning near the edge of the southern gate. His name is Corin. He hasn’t heard the whispers in days either.

  “I thought I was broken,” he said.

  “Maybe we are,” I answered.

  He follows me now. Doesn’t speak much. But I see the way he watches the sky. He hears the silence, too.

  The city is opening up like a wound, and Alaric walks its veins.