Chapter 1: Ch1: A Rainy Day

Through a narrow hole, a ray of light made its way in full splendor, gracing my diary with its brightness.

My cracked wall covered with wooden boards and nails, allowed some tiny spaces to exist.

I used them to peek outside, allowing me to watch over the muddy battered ground. 

Carefully, my eye stood just close enough to one of them, watching over one of the passing villagers.

The elders called our small territory the wetland of the forsaken.

It poured pretty much every day, drenching everything ruthlessly.

But the problem was what changed the falling water.

I sneaked at a different hole, this time one in the low ceiling. My room had many infiltrations and for each, a bucket stood ready to catch all its drops.

The splashing tired my ears, it drove many of us mad, yet, at the same time, it was what kept our hope intact.

I tiptoed back to the nearest wall and looked north. Fragile thin trees remained on the way, and further ahead, I knew of a river that split our territories apart. Our and the one that belonged to the trolls.

Those creatures often feasted on my kin whenever the chance arose. They'd pluck us from the waters that we bathed ourselves in, swallowing us whole.

But that had a certain risk for them, for those waters had a strange property that caused our throats to stay thirsty.

And for them, it turned their bodies into stone, permanently so.

We tried to remove some of that water and throw it at those fiends, but for some reason, once it was out of the source for a while, it no longer had that miraculous effect.

We prayed and thanked the Amy goddess for her grace. Her miraculous fresh fluids kept a lot of us safe.

The enemy didn't need to eat us for the island provided both sides with enough food. But they enjoyed the tender meat of our bodies along with the screams that we produced when squished forcefully.

Knocking on the door caught my attention, causing me to hastily hide under my crappy bed. And then it opened, elderly legs closed in and a familiar voice came forth, "stay here Rain. Grannie will be back soon."

"Yes," I whimpered at her words, respecting them to the best of my abilities. This old woman was the last member of my family, my parents had died when I was even younger. They like many others, had been caught during the purification ceremony, where we bathed ourselves in the goddess mystical stream.

The elders believed that doing so would grace our fortune and future generations.

Yet, once a year many died from it, and only those who survived the tribute were worthy in the eyes of the village chief.

Dying was almost trivial to many of us since we knew it could happen at any given time. But being eaten by a troll was without a doubt the worst that could happen, sullying our very souls, and being eternally cursed in the eyes of the goddess, or so elder Vincent preached.

I had survived ten rituals by mere luck, having no more than 15 years. 

My grandmother had been very proud of my deeds, keeping me at home ever since to avoid the outside corruption of tainting me.

She didn't want to lose me as I was everything she had left, and to be fair, I was quite done testing out my luck for a mere divine bath.

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However, there was indeed a reason why my kin went out of their way to do it.

"The rain," I muttered at the eerie drops that fell everywhere. The entire island was covered by a thin layer of sickening magic. The trolls had a chief who was a shaman, the culprit of this eternal mayhem.

It had found a way to curse this place, disabling the trolls from being petrified by the falling water, and forcing my kin to bathe themselves in the river to remove the many diseases such malicious effects would bring onto their skin.

I couldn't fathom what other effects it could possibly have on us, but as it was, it already meant that I couldn't leave my house unless I wanted to undergo the ceremony.

Not like I minded taking baths, however, in such a scenario it was scary and dangerous. Often complicated to know if my enemies were there, they who were stone, they who were trees.

They were exceptionally good at camouflaging themselves into nature.

By the riverside they'd stay very still, waiting for us to be close enough for their big hands and long arms to pick us up.

More often than not we'd hear our kin scream for a long time. Such occasions were when they'd become a tribute to the shaman.

No one knew his whereabouts, but he had been seen in the past when he was younger and braver. 

Nowadays he was more conscious of the dangers my kin brought upon splashing the river water in an attempt to save themselves.

Sometimes it would result in a troll's leg or arm turning into stone. Sadly for us, we needed to kind of pour a lot of water their way as they were quite big, giants even of about 4 meters. 

With such an impossible scenario, life was that rough for us.

"Drip, drop, little ones," through whispering, I stretched three fingers towards the bucket, watching solemnly over it as it got full.

I prayed to the goddess every other day for the time when I could see real rain, the one that didn't have to go through a purple layer.

For the prophecy passed by my ancestors foretold of such a time. 

"The day of our freedom is nigh," or so I hoped with all my heart.

'I'm so hungry,' my thoughts often ceased into me falling asleep from starvation. After all the food was cooked with eerie fluids.

The seeds we obtained from farming caused us to take a bath at some point.

For the shaman, it was but a cruel tactic to leave no one out of reach.

'From babies to adults,' I loathed these words, together they formed a disgusting thought. But that was our reality and I, too, couldn't escape it forever.

'Cursed fate,' I loathed them, every single one of those evil creatures. There was not a single day I had not prayed for their death. There was in me the will to slay them.

'If only I had the power,' once more, I faded into the slumber that tiredness and the lack of energy brought my way.

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