Chapter 5. The Thing That Followed the Rain

The rain showed no mercy as she passed beneath the twisted iron bars of the outer gate. Each drop clung to her hair and slicked along her shoulders before splattering into the dark soil. With every cautious step, the tall grass sucked the water up around her ankles, the thaw-softened earth giving way underfoot. At once viscous and hungry, it swallowed her footprints whole, as though the ground itself refused to record her passage. Overhead, the sky had dissolved into a boundless veil of colorless light—neither night nor dawn but a suspended grey that obliterated stars and hollowed out the moon’s shape.

She pressed on, unhurried and silent. She neither ran nor cried out, but moved into the one place the storm would not touch: a narrow wake in the air where something had drifted through the world without belonging. There was no form to see—no shadow at the edges of vision—only an absence so tangible it squeezed around her ribs.

Beyond the last ring of trees, just before th