Raindrop's Arc

Chapter 4 of 15

The drum pulled the drops toward the pond, but they hung mid-air in loose sheets, frozen between fall and gather. Raindrop saw them then — hundreds of suspended drops, glinting like glass beads stuck on invisible thread. Past them, far out, a spinning ring of water turned slow and bright. The spiral he wanted. He could not reach it from here. "You are too light alone." A calm voice. Seraphine Veil stood on a thin ledge of mist, gray robes still. "I have watched you try this six times. You need mass. Become the cloud first." Raindrop closed his eyes and pulled. He let his shape soften, swell, thin out into a small gray puff above the pond. He felt bigger. Slower. He drummed from inside the cloud now, and the beat carried wider. The suspended drops shivered. One leaned. Then a sheet of them tipped and slid into him, and another, and another. He grew. He felt the ripple. The small cloud thickened into something with weight. Below, the pond drank the first wave of joined drops. Ahead, the bright spinning ring still turned, closer now but not his — separated by open sky he had no path across. Seraphine watched, level. "You have the body," she said. "You do not yet have the reach."