The Rains

Farming is Fun

Matt rode his little cart into the village of Rest and tried to ignore the empty windows and unused benches in front of the Inn.

When he was a child he would wonder at all the people walking the wooden walkways and the amount of things in the windows.  Now a silence covered the town in a eerie gloom.

The Inn closed two seasons before, it was a blow Rest did not know how to recover from. Made worse was that the Inn was also the local gossip spot so now folk met at the blacksmiths to exchange what little news they had about life and the coming Rains.

For Matt this was not good, for he and the smithy were not on friendly terms.  It was from childhood and Matt refused to talk about it.

A mutual friend of the two men walked to close to a large puddle and a aqua demon had pulled him in, to never be seen again.

Harris the smithy blamed Matt saying that he had dared the friend to do it. It had not rained in days and up to then the alien and twisted creatures that seemed to only appear out of the larger puddles had not been seen without some rain.

The boy must have thought the same as Matt, for he laughed and went right to the edge of the wide puddle.

Blocking the memory Matt looked for anyone walking on the streets. Only near the trading house did he begin to see townsfolk.

A trading house was the place were goods went to be distributed to the local stores. That is in good times.
Only two stores stubbornly held on to their place in Rest. So they had worked out that goods that came in the morn time went to one and goods that came in after noon went to the other, The Owl Merchantile

This was why Matt was coming into town after the noon rest. He wanted his goods to go to the smaller store owned by the widow Owl.

He truly liked widow Owl and wanted her to keep her store open. That and she had a daughter that would soon be of marriage age. Sally was not a pretty girl and she was known to be a bad cook, but what could Matt do. Rest was empty now and with the puddles never really drying up, travel was becoming limited.

The aqua demons were becoming more and more a problem so that no one could or would deal with. They were to far from the big cities for the guard to come and no one had enough coin to hire a puddle jumper.
Matt wondered if it was one Aqua demon or many that dwelled in the local puddles. So far from civilization Rest was not privy to such information and gossiping.
Matt has tried to talk about it to others but most around these parts thought that it was bad luck to talk about the strange creatures that could somehow live in puddles and attack from seemingly calm water.

Matt's father believed that the creatures were not of this world at all and used the clear puddles to come into our world somehow.  It was his father's belief that the monsters used the small pools to see a potential victim which was why they never seemed to be far from a puddle in a road or pathway.

What was unsure was if they used magic or some other means to cross into the world. What was sure was that whomever was pulled into a puddle was never seen again.
Reaching Widow Owls trading house he was surprised to see a small line forming up. Of late Matt had been the only one to come this early to Widow Owls place.

In the line where other young men like himself that had inherited small farms from their families. Catching Sam's eye Matt nodded and touched his forehead with his thumb. It was an old Knights greeting the two had been giving each other since childhood.

Where they had learned it neither could remember but it stuck and each was unwilling to stop, even though they were not as close anymore.
"Good morn and clear sky to you, Mathew." Sam said with a hint of a smile in his eyes.