They say the world was once dry.
No rivers split the land. No lakes gathered in valleys. No rain ever kissed the soil. The earth was quiet, and the sky above it colder still.
Then came the First Mourner.
No one remembers their name. Some say it was a woman who lost her child. Others say a man, left behind by a village that forgot him. Some say they weren’t man or woman at all, but simply the first soul to carry grief too large for the body that held it.
Alone beneath a sky that did not know feeling, the First Mourner fell to their knees and wept.
One tear, then another, and another—until the ground beneath them softened. The soil drank deeply. The sky, curious, watched.
This was a new thing: sorrow.
Moved by this strange sound—the hitching of breath, the trembling hands—the sky tried to answer. But the sky did not know how to weep. So it watched. It waited. And it learned.
And when the Mourner's final tear fell, a spring bubbled forth where their grief had sunk deepest. It sang gently, like a lullaby hummed to no one. And the sky, trembling with this strange new knowing, let fall a single drop of rain.
That was the first covenant.
For every true sorrow shed by humankind, the sky would return a drop of rain. Not as punishment, but as an echo. Not to drown, but to nourish.
And so the lakes formed. The rivers wandered. The oceans, deepest of all, came from grief shared across generations—wars, famines, partings too large for one voice alone.
The world wept with us, and in this we were not alone.
But sorrow, like all things, changed.
In time, humans no longer wept from love or loss alone. Their sadness became tangled in wanting—more, faster, again. They wept for things they hadn’t lost, or things they never had. They learned to sell their sorrow, to rehearse it, to package it in song and screen and market. They cried in chorus without meaning a note.
The sky, still faithful, tried to respond.
It poured down rain onto lands that did not need it. It soaked the hungry with flood and left the earnest dry. It became confused. Where once it had known the shape of sorrow, now it only heard noise.
The waters turned.
Oceans rose not from mourning, but from error. The rivers changed course. Some vanished. Some boiled. Rain fell without rhythm, or not at all. The world, overwhelmed, began to dim.
They say the sky tries not to listen now. That it closes its eyes when it hears us speak. That the wells are drying because the grief we give them cannot be trusted.
And where once fire was rare, now it walks freely across the land—because there are no honest tears left to hold it back.
But not all have forgotten.
There are still those who feel sorrow, and do not turn it into spectacle. Who weep alone, without audience or applause. Who rise—not to perform, but to mend.
They do not beg the sky to stop crying. They do not curse the flood.
They walk where the water has receded and begin again.
They pull weeds. They clean wounds. They carry buckets.
They speak to children in low tones. They listen to the old without impatience. They do not sell their mourning. They do not bottle their grief.
The world watches them—warily, quietly, hopefully.
And when they pass beneath the clouds, the rain waits.
Not because it is confused.
But because, for once, it remembers why it ever fell.