The Necessity of Rain by Sarah Chorn EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Sarah Chorn
- Language: English
- Genre: Gaslamp Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Isra – Three Years Ago
Everything is burning. A bomb explodes. Too close. The halls of the World
Tree tremble and groan.
It is just the three of us now: me and my two brothers, Manab and
Atheed. We are all that is left of our monarch swarm. The war is picking us
off one by one and I cannot help but feel I am next.
Before me, the goddess we serve sleeps, the life leaving her a bit more
with each breath. I feel the loss of her Divinity like the severing of a limb.
Where she once filled so much of me, now only emptiness remains.
Suddenly, I am hollow. I lack purpose. I am alone within the ocean of
myself.
“The age of the Divine ends,” Atheed says. His wings are closed tight,
his body clenched, a bowstring the moment before an arrow is loosed. “She
is mortal.”
I wonder what it costs him to give voice to our new reality.
Divine Falcon lays before us on a bed we crafted of her favorite
flowers, gathered fresh from the verdant forest of her Creation. A day ago,
she settled herself upon them, her old crone’s body rattling with every
movement. The feathers around her face have fallen out and what wisps of
hair remained were gray as storm clouds.
We have borne painful witness as the World Tree grew around her, first
like a hug, and then a coffin. All I can see now are her eyes through the
branches holding her close. They are closed and lined with wrinkles.
She had not recognized us, in the last. She had thought us dreams.
Fantasy. Figments of her imagination.
Her final words were to her father.
Mortality is a blessing, she often told me as a child. Now, I see her
wrapped in it and I shudder. It does not look like a blessing, but rather a
cage.
“May she forgive us for what we do to her Creation.” Manab’s voice
trembles.
I listen to the violence beyond our walls and feel cold.
Change is never bloodless, and Dawnland is hemorrhaging. Every day
we are reduced. No one, it seems, has taken time to mourn what we have
lost. And that… that feels like another kind of loss.
Another explosion rattles the World Tree, followed by the deafening
roar of shattering. A glass bomb, then. Strange how easy it is for me to
identify weapons based on the sounds of their destruction.
Manab’s wings flutter and he runs a finger along his antenna, a nervous
gesture I recognize from childhood. The three white spots on his left cheek
shine, wet with tears.
None of us speak. This is a moment for which there are no words.
The World Tree vibrates again. Dust rains down from a fractured
ceiling. Through a gap in the branches, I see Dawnland beyond. Where
once was the sprawling Sacred Milkweed Grove, I now see a field of ash.
Further, the charred husks of Dawnland Imperial University line the horizon
like teeth. Further still are the blasted remains of the Imperial Hospital and
Imperial Library
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB