The first drops of rain fell like mercy on Dryhollow, a village that had not seen water from the sky in nearly three hundred days. Farmers wept openly in their barren fields. Children danced with upturned faces. The village elder, Marwen, watched from the steps of the meeting hall, his weathered face betraying neither joy nor relief—only resignation.

I knew what the others did not. This rain came with a price beyond measure.

Three weeks earlier, I had followed Marwen into the Misted Mountains as his apprentice. The journey had been his idea—a desperate gambit after our wells ran dry and the river shrank to a trickle of mud. "We seek the Sorceress," he had told the council, his voice hollow. "It's said she commands the storms."

The council had protested. All knew the tales of the Sorceress of Storms—how she had once flooded a kingdom that denied her tribute, how ships that failed to leave offerings upon passing her isle were swallowed by whirlpools, how those who sought her power returned changed, if they returned at all.

Marwen had silenced them with a withered hand. "The children die of thirst while we debate. I go tomorrow at dawn."

I volunteered to accompany him. I was seventeen, curious about magic, and naive about its cost.

The Sorceress did not dwell in a palace as I had imagined, nor a cave festooned with lightning. We found her in a modest cottage perched on a cliff face, accessible only by a narrow path that seemed to shift beneath our feet. Above her home, the sky was divided precisely—clear blue to one side, roiling thunderclouds to the other, the division between them as sharp as a knife's edge.

She opened her door before we knocked.

"The desperate village sends its elder and its future," she said, her voice like distant thunder. Her eyes were the deep gray of storm clouds, her hair a cascade of silver that moved as though underwater. Around her neck hung vials of different waters—rain, mist, dew, tears—each glowing faintly with inner light.

Marwen bowed. "Mistress of the Changing Sky, we come seeking—"

"I know why you come, Marwen of Dryhollow," she interrupted. "The question is whether you understand what you ask."

She invited us inside, where the cottage seemed impossibly larger. Maps covered the walls—not of lands but of air currents, cloud formations, and patterns I could not comprehend. Glass containers of every size held what appeared to be captured weather—a miniature tornado spiraling in one, a snow squall in another, ball lightning bouncing gently against the glass of a third.

The Sorceress gestured to a table where a shallow bowl of silver sat. As we approached, the bowl filled with water that reflected not our faces but the image of Dryhollow, its fields cracked and dying.

"Three hundred years ago," she said, stirring the water with one finger, "your ancestors diverted the river that fed the lake of my homeland, all to grow one more crop of grain to sell at profit. The lake dried. My people scattered. The weather patterns that had existed for millennia... disrupted."

The water in the bowl swirled, showing a lush valley transforming into a barren wasteland not unlike our own.

"You ask me to undo what your ancestors caused?" Her laughter was like hail on a rooftop. "Nature remembers, Elder. It keeps its accounts across generations."

Marwen fell to his knees. "Our children had no part in those sins. I beg you, take what price you will from me, but spare them."

The Sorceress considered him, then turned her storm-gray eyes to me. "And you, child? What would you offer?"

The question caught me unprepared. "I... I have nothing of value," I stammered. "Only my service, if it would help."

Something flickered across her face—interest, perhaps. Or calculation.

"Three gifts I require," she declared. "First, the elder's remaining years—fair exchange for the generations of rain you've stolen."

Marwen nodded without hesitation.

"Second, the waters of your village's memory. They will forget the drought, forget this bargain, forget the wrongdoing of their ancestors. They will know only that rain has come again."

Again, Marwen agreed, though I saw pain in his eyes at the thought of history erased.

"And third," she said, fixing me with her gaze, "an apprentice. One with the potential to learn my arts. One who will help maintain the balance after I am gone."

My heart stopped. "Me?"

"You have the gift," she said simply. "I felt it when you crossed the threshold. Weather-sense, they called it in the old days. The ability to not merely predict storms but to feel them in your bones, to understand their voice and intent."

I looked to Marwen, hoping for guidance, but his eyes were downcast.

"The boy has family," he said quietly.

"Who will forget him," the Sorceress replied, "as part of the village's memory-waters. It is kinder this way. A clean severing."

I wanted to protest, to run, but as she spoke, I felt something unfurling within me—a recognition of truth. All my life I had known when rains would come before the clouds appeared. I had felt the electricity of approaching storms. I had dreamed of wind patterns and woken to find them precisely as I'd envisioned.

The Sorceress saw my realization. "It is rare, this gift. Without training, it will drive you mad eventually. You'll feel every drought as physical pain, every flood as drowning. Better to master it than be mastered by it."

I made my choice with a single nod, though my heart felt as parched as our fields.

The Sorceress wasted no time. From Marwen, she took a lock of hair that turned white as she wound it around her finger. From a shelf, she retrieved a glass sphere that she told me contained the essence of our village's collective memory of the drought. And from me, she took a single tear, carefully capturing it in an empty vial she wore alongside the others.

She instructed us to return home, promising the rains would follow within a day. As we prepared to leave, she placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Return when the first moon of summer is full," she said. "Come alone. Bring nothing from your old life. By then, they will have forgotten you entirely."

The journey back was silent. Marwen, already looking decades older, refused to meet my gaze. "I have sacrificed you," he finally whispered as our village came into view. "May the waters forgive me."

I wanted to comfort him, to say I had made my own choice, but the words felt hollow. Instead, I asked the question that had burned in me since the mountain. "Is she... evil?"

Marwen considered this for a long moment. "The Sorceress is like the weather itself," he finally said. "Neither evil nor good, but essential. Uncaring about our desires, yet bound by patterns and purposes deeper than our understanding. She is balance made flesh."

Now I stand in the rain, watching my people celebrate a miracle they don't understand, paid for with a price they'll never remember. Already I see the confusion in my mother's eyes when she looks at me, the slight furrow in my brother's brow as he tries to recall my name.

Tomorrow I will begin walking back to the Misted Mountains. Not because of our bargain, but because I felt it when the Sorceress summoned the rains—a surge of power so intoxicating it made my knees buckle. For one brief moment, I understood the language of clouds, the grammar of lightning, the poetry of precipitation.

I have seen behind the veil of the world, and I cannot unsee it.

If you find this account in the archives of the Treasure Tavern, know that I left it here on my journey to become what I must. Perhaps someday, when my apprenticeship is complete, I will return—not to Dryhollow, where none remember me, but to this tavern where forgotten tales find sanctuary.

Listen for me in the storm that rattles the shutters. I am learning its secrets, syllable by syllable, drop by drop.

• From the journal of Tanis Reed, discovered sealed in a bottle that appeared on the Treasure Tavern's doorstep during a thunderstorm of unusual intensity. The ink changes color with the weather.