For three weeks, it rained every hour and every minute of every day. Shel had known it was the rainy season, but there had never been a rainy season like this one. Even Samuel, who let things like this usually slide off his back was astonished. The people in town seemed to walk more bent over each day, as if the rain grew heavier each day. At the end of three weeks, in the middle of the day, it stopped. Shel was talking to Neal under the back awning of the Pretty Beak tavern when the rain stopped. The silence was almost more painful than the noise.

At first, Shel did not know what had happened. He looked to Neal who shrugged back at him. Shel had almost forgotten about the rain—at least as long as he was not trudging through it. Shel leaned his head out to glance past the awning and looked at the sky. Gray cloaked clouds still loomed across the sky, but nothing fell from them.

“Amazing,” Shel said, reaching his hands further out from the awning to test the reality of what he saw. “Three weeks of rain, and now this. It just stopped, like the bucket ran out of water or something.”

Neal stuck his head up and out of the porch, his sharp triangular nose leading the way. “Who would think so much rain can fall from such a small sky.”

Shel looked at Neal strangely. His pronouncements had gotten stranger over the last three weeks. He seemed to be changing, becoming more introverted in his discussions. When he spoke to Shel, Shel felt that sometimes Neal did not even know that Shel was around, that he was talking more to himself than to Shel.

“Such a small sky,” Neal continued, still looking up at the heavens, his head tilted and twisted as if to catch the last raindrops falling from the dry sky. “The end of the rains: I see the heavens failing, Shel. I see brilliant fire quenching the fire, rising and sweeping across the nations. We’re going to pray for the rains to return but they will not answer our prayers. They’re looking for him now. He is their hope and their salvation. And when they find him, we don’t want them to find him, Shel.”

“What are you talking about, Neal? Snap out of it.” Shel was worried. While Neal did tend to babble, his babbles were usually relevant to something that was going around him. He sounded madder now, and that was not something Shel wanted to deal with. He put his hand on Neal’s shoulder and shook him. “Are you there, Neal?”

Neal’s face remained to the sky and he watched it with great interested as if he was watching something unfold. “The fires are hot there, Shel. They’re preparing for us and we’re not going to be ready unless we start soon. We need to find him before it is too late. It is almost too late now. Why doesn’t she start preparing? She knows its coming but she is so old and she doesn’t know when it’s too late for her, when she has to let her son take over.”

Shel was becoming more concerned with Neal’s words. “Are you messing with me again, Neal? What are you talking about? What’s too late, who is preparing, what are they preparing for? Who is she? Did you get into your grandmother’s alcohol again? I told you that you shouldn’t drink without me. Audrel will kill you if she found you sneaking drinks—not that she doesn’t sneak enough drinks to drive your grandmother to lose her tavern, but that’s different. Is it the mushrooms we found those years ago? Did you find another crop of them? What’s going on, Neal? Please, tell me.”

Shel continued to shake Neal until Neal threatened to topple off the porch. Neal came to with a start and fell backwards. Shel caught him and turned him around. “What is it, Neal? What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, Shel. Just a bit of a spell. Bad cheese or something, I’ll be okay in a minute.” Neal was still babbling a bit, his words coming out and sounding like him but not as if he was here at the same place as Shel. Shel was worried and decided he would ask Samuel about it tonight. He was afraid Neal might need to visit the medicine man to get checked out. The rainy season always brought out the worst in sicknesses, and Shel had heard of many times when healthy children would wake up one day with something loose in their heads and three days later not wake up. He would not let that happen to Neal.

“It’s over. The rainy season is done with.” Shel pointed to the streets which looked more like rivers than dirt. “I wish the end of the rain took with it the rivers in the streets. This will take days to drain. I don’t even remember what it’s like to not be muddy and wet and cold. The sun is going to bring a change in Varis, Neal. You watch. The tension that’s been building over the last couple of weeks, it’ll vanish. It happens every year, and I don’t think this one will be different.”

Samuel walked out of the house and looked up at the sky. He smiled and waved to Shel and Neal. They waved back. He gave them a shooing motion and walked toward the Central District where he would meet Audrel to finish the week’s shopping.

“They’re both gone,” Neal whispered when Samuel was out of view. “What do you say we take a look in that chest you’re always talking about.”

The chest. Ever since the day in the district, Shel felt the largest weight on his neck and shoulders when he was around it. He stayed out of the house more often now because he did not want to be around it. But even so, he wanted to know what was inside, why it made him feel ill when he got too close to it, and why he felt that terrible weight on his back and neck when in the house.

Shel walked across the road to his house, not bothering to look down since one spot was as wet as any other spot along the muddy road. He crossed to his house and opened the door. He wiped down his legs as best as he could and entered the darkened house. Embers still burned inside the stove, with the smoke carrying up through the chimney. He heard Neal enter behind him. Shel went over to the chest and removed the canvas covering on it.

Neal closed the door behind them. The afternoon sun beat through the windows into the room, bathing it in ambient light. The room was silent. After the rain, even the noise of the wagons and the people on the street might as well as not been there. The stove crackled and Neal jumped. Shel saw it from the side of his vision, but he had not heard the crackle and was not wondering at why his friend was startled. He was too busy touching the chest for the first time.

The chest was made of a dark wood stained until it shone almost like a mirror. It was carved with intricate symbols, which Shel did not recognize from his disciplines of words. They were symbols he did not recognize, but they looked familiar. He though about taking out Audrel’s book, but he had read and studied it so many times, he would have remembered if the symbols were somewhere in the book.

These symbols were not in the book and he had seen them somewhere before. Nobody he knew except Audrel owned a book. Then he remembered Peula. She owned a copy of the Church’s book, which she had let Shel read when he visited her over the past few weeks. Peula had not seemed surprised that Shel could read. For reasons that Shel did not understand, he felt comfortable confiding in her. He told her about the disciplines Audrel had taught him, including the disciplines of words. Peula nodded when he told him about each discipline, and provided her own insights into the disciplines. Or he thought she did. His conversations with Peula always seemed fuzzy, like his reasons for visiting her. He never planned to go to her house, but he somehow made his way there every day, ditching Neal and heading to her place. Shel shook his head to clear it of these thoughts and returned to the chest.

Besides the intricate symbols, the chest is smooth wood. Large gold-colored metal hinges attach the back of the chest to the top. Even the hinges are intricately carved with swirling patterns and more symbols, which Shel does not recognize. On the front of the chest is a gold-covered metal hinge with a lock. Shel had never seen a lock before, but he had heard it described and knew what it was when he saw it. Whatever was in the chest, he would not be able to find out with the lock.

“It’s locked,” Neal said. While Shel had been examining the chest, he had come up behind him. “That’s an expensive looking chest. Where do you think Audrel bought it?”

“I’m not sure,” Shel said. “Samuel asked her to sell it once, and she almost attacked him. Where ever she bought it, there must be something very interesting inside or she wouldn’t have locked it.” Shel continued to run his hands over the symbols, trying to piece together where he had seen them before.

“This one almost looks like the Church’s symbol,” Neal said, rubbing his hands along the side of the chest. Shel went over to look at what Neal had found. There was a triangular symbol along the side of the chest with stars at each of the three edges. The Church’s symbol only had a star on the top angle, or at least that’s what Shel remembered of the Church’s symbol from Peula’s book. He must have seen the symbol on one of the Church’s priest at one time or another, but his thoughts of the priest were fuzzy, and when he thought of them, his mind oozed slowly, as if he was trying to piece together a large puzzle in the dark.

“I’m not sure. Maybe Audrel bought the chest but didn’t know who the owners were. They probably sell these things in the big cities. These chests are probably real cheap over there, everybody probably has one to keep their socks in.”

Neal looked as doubtful as Shel felt. For whatever it was like in the big cities, he doubted it was much different than in Varis, and a chest with this type of carving was probably worth more than most of the goods sold in the Central District, without even knowing what’s inside or taking into consideration the metal work involved in creating a lock.

When Shel was close to the chest, he felt the weight increase. He experimented by walking around the chest and realized that when he was close to the lock on the front of the chest, the weight was at its heaviest.

“What are you doing? Do you know what’s in it?” Neal asked. He was still tracing the triangle on the side of the chest, and while he had been excited when Shel had first uncovered the chest, he now seemed to be getting bored, the mystery still unsolved with no other clues. Neal’s interest wandered at times. He would become very excited at the prospect of something new, and when he received it, his interest would move onto the next shiny object. His grandmother did not help this by buying him as much as she could afford during to strong parts of her season.

“I don’t know,” Shel admitted. “Whatever it is, it must be important to be hidden away in a chest like this one.”

Word count: 2,015

Words remaining: 28,234

Caffeination: 1 Advil. It was very difficult concentrating on more than a hundred or so words at a time. I should have had my fix today, but my headache and tiredness scared me of from it.

Feeling: Into the double-digit days (finally). I know, I’m telling more than showing—but I figure it just gives me a chance to go back and fill in lots of holes. I’m just glad my headache left long enough for me to get this writing done today. I’m looking forward to the weekend, when I can take bookish walks and figure out where this story is going and how I’m going to get it over the hump. And, yes, I know, I’m barely making the goal each day. My strong days of destroying the 2k boundary are long behind me. I guess as long as I keep up even this small accomplishment, I’ll get around to the real Goal.