In the city of Drenchford, where it rained 265 days a year, Elias Holloway crafted umbrellas unlike any others.
His shop, tucked between a butcher and a boarded-up apothecary, smelled of wet wool and ozone. The canopies he stretched over whalebone ribs weren’t made of silk or oilcloth—but compacted stormclouds, stitched together with threads spun from lightning strikes.
When opened, they didn’t just repel rain.
They remembered it.
A widow might buy a parasol that wept her husband’s last storm when unfolded. A guilt-ridden man might carry one that dripped water the exact shade of his victim’s eyes. Elias called them “Soul-Shields”, and business thrived—until the day a woman brought him an umbrella she hadn’t purchased.
It was bone-white, its handle carved into the shape of a choking hand.
“It appeared on my doorstep this morning,” whispered Mira Thorn (no relation to the others—probably). “When I opened it… the rain stopped. Not just around me. Everywhere.”
Elias’s blood turned to ice.
There was only one umbrella that could silence the sky.
His first.
Made the night his daughter Lillian drowned in Drenchford’s floodwaters, when his grief had been so vast he’d sewn the very weather into mourning. The umbrella had vanished with her body—until now.
When he lifted it, the shop’s windows rattled with dry thunder.
And the whispers began.
Not from the umbrella.
From inside it.
“Papa,” sighed a voice that was almost Lillian’s, “you kept me so warm under here.”
Then the stitches burst.
What poured out wasn’t water.
It was absence—a roaring, devouring hollow that drank the sound of rain, the warmth of breath, the concept of wetness itself. By dawn, Drenchford’s river ran dust-dry, its fish gasping on cracked mud. Townsfolk clawed at their throats, their lungs starving for humidity that no longer existed.
And Elias?
They found him kneeling in his shop, clutching the umbrella’s skeleton.
His skin was parched paper, his mouth sewn shut with fishing line.
Above him, the ceiling bulged like a stretched canopy—
—and dripped.
Now, travelers say if you stand too long in Drenchford’s drought, you’ll hear the faint snick of an umbrella opening behind you.
Don’t turn around.
The rain remembers faces.
