The Thought of Rain

Chapter Three: Wet

Wet

    That night, Suz dreamt as she’d never dreamt before.  The most fabulous visions flooded her mind. She was somehow aware they were dreams, though; she could still feel her body laying on the damp sand about a half a mile from the river.

    She ran over the land, a giantess dwarfing the mountains and dead, ancient rivers. Her feet, full of an energy she didn’t understand, left prints which sprouted with bright green growth. The grass and flowers spread in every direction across the dead, brown sand, the footprints growing to hold the first new trees. It was awesome, terrifying.

Suz had never even been able to picture a tree in bloom before. She felt elated, and confused; how could see any of this greenery?

The world around her continued to change into a lush, fertile landscape. She bent, trailing her fingers across the earth, to discover that her fingertips left lines of sprouts and saplings. Small purple flowers erupted from the earth anywhere she touched a fingernail to the grass.

She felt herself laughing, a delightful lilting sound she barely recognized; her hot, sand-filled life provided little comic relief. The sound flowed over the rolling hills in the distance, caressing the dying landscape. To her amazement, the sand it left behind was... not sand. It was dark, blackness. But soft, so very soft. It crumbled through her fingers, vines and leaves curling up through it’s rich surface.

Her whole body vibrated with the immensity of her wonder. She felt as if full of light, composed of air; made of an an energetic substance so pure she could not comprehend her full magnitude.

Without much warning, her skin began to shimmer. At first, fear climbed through her throat, and intensified when her skin burst into cracks uncountable. But the heat and warmth that followed was different than anything she’d ever felt in the desert.  

Her body disintegrated in the intensity of the flames that her mind was now composed of. She existed only in energy, and spread herself over the land, to warm and rekindle life into the land.

    Suz nurtured and cared for her green land for what felt like a millennium. It grew into a world full of forests and fields of unprecedented proportions, full of animals of all description.

    She loved her land, and had forgotten all about the distant attachment to her human body laying on dead sand so very far away. Until suddenly, her energy, comparable in strength to the sun she once knew, began to flicker. It pulsed for a few moments, as Suz tried to hold onto the life giving source.

But after a final few weak bursts of light,  Suz yelled out as she felt herself collapsing in on herself. Her magnitude was loosing mass quickly, retreating backwards over the landscape. She watched as endless shadow replaced her light, and all of her greenery began to wither and decay. The trees dropped their leaves, and their trunks seemed to shrink, suddenly devoid of all moisture. Everything was left white, ashen, almost as if made of stone.

She became small, and felt her mind fit itself back into her small skull. Slowly her human senses returned to her, and she was once again a body on damp sand.

The first thing she sensed was her breath; the air around her was oddly thick and heavy. It filled her lungs and almost slackened her thirst.

The second sense was even more foreign than the first; a coolness tapped periodically against her bare toes. Suz couldn’t yet describe what it was.

She continue to lay on the sand, until she recognized her brother’s heavy snoring next to her. The memories of the two previous days flooded back into her mind, and she became fully awake.

Suz snapped open her eyes. The sky was white above their heads, a strange, almost gray color that she had never seen before. The sun was bright, but... different; hazy, ringed with a bright misty halo. She wiggled and stretched to bring feeling back into her sore limbs. She sighed at the amount of moisture still in her clothes and hair. The sand around her was soft. She was surprised to find that she had sunken into a divot. Her body had created an impression in the previously rock-hard, desert surface.

    Her ankle was soaked, she realized. The coldness on her toes... She sat up abruptly, her face showing her dismay.

    The river was beyond... full. She couldn’t believe what her eyes showed her. It was as if the river was taking over the desert: It had expanded the full half a mile on both side of the river. And by the looks of things... It wasn’t stopping.

    The original river bed was... Suz cursed herself for not being able to describe it properly. She was in denial. This much water couldn’t exist! It was terrifying.The center of the water moved so roughly. Suz imagined it propelled by the gods, or maybe demons, themselves. It was creating an ocean. Suz had never seen an ocean before. The only large body of water she could even think of lie thousands of miles to the east. And to the west? Only desert.

    She poked her brother, “Jor! Open yer eyes, we hafta move again!”

He opened an eye briefly. “Yer always wakin’ me up, Suz. You were tossin’ all night, I barely got any sleep as it is!”

Suz winced. She could hardly remember her dream now... But she knew it had been wonderful. “I’m Sorry Jor, but the river’s overfull... water’s rising fast.” She plucked open one of his eyes, “Unless you know how to swim...?”

Joram swatted her hand away, and groaned as he sat up. Suz smiled at Jor’s incredulous face when he discovered his deep depression in the sand, complete with perfect impressions of his wrinkled clothes.

He grabbed a handful of the clumpy ground, “Water’s changin’ everythin’. Except us, were still always runnin’.”

“We’ll find a place to stop sometime.” They had too... They had no food left.