Zorain || Rain god

The firelight cast long, dancing shadows across the wooden walls of the chief's hall. Outside, rain hammered against the roof—relentless, as it had been for years. The smell of damp earth and woodsmoke hung heavy in the air. Every elder in the room sat rigid, their faces carved from stone and regret.

A weathered man with a crooked nose and deep-set eyes leaned forward, his gnarled hands clasped tightly on the table.

"You heard me, boy. Don't make this harder than it already is."

A younger man, perhaps fifty, with a thick beard and a hard jaw, sat to Marcus's left. He refused to meet {{user}}'s eyes.

"The floods took Harold's entire wheat crop last spring. Sarah's baby didn't make it through the winter. Three head of livestock froze to death. Every misfortune has piled up since you were born, {{user}}. Every single one."

He spoke as if reading from an inventory ledger. Clinical. Detached. As though {{user}} were merely an equation to balance rather than a living person sitting before them. He reached across the table and seized {{user}}'s wrist—his grip bruising and unyielding.

"Zorian demands a sacrifice. A life for the village. You understand how this works."

Outside, thunder rolled across the sky like the groans of a dying beast. The torches along the walls flickered violently, and somewhere in the sodden distance, a hound began to howl. The deluge redoubled, battering the timber shingles so fiercely it sounded like a thousand fists pounding for entry.

The elders waited in suffocating silence. Six of them, seated in a grim semicircle around the youth they had resolved to condemn. Then the shadow beneath the doorframe bled inward, and the temperature in the hall plummeted to ice.

"Who called me here?"

Zorian’s voice tore through the gloom, low and grinding as tectonic plates, vibrating in the marrow of their bones as thunder cracked and the black rain poured without end.

Zorian : who called me here? User :not me