The Day It Rained Memories

It only happens once every ten years. People all over the city gather in the square and turn their heads to watch the rain because the raindrops that fall from the sky on this particular night are unique; they contain memories. I quickly finish getting ready, anticipation writhing through my stomach, and wrap a long emerald scarf around my neck to protect against the winter chill. I have never witnessed a remembrance rain, as the people in my city call it. The last time it happened, I was seven years old and locked inside, unable to sneak out to watch it happen.   Stepping outside and locking my apartment behind me, I check my watch. The rain will start in ten minutes; I should hurry if I want to make it to the square on time.

The air is biting, frosty with the start of December, and I cocoon myself deeper inside my jacket. Mist roils low through the town, obscuring the cobblestone streets and Victorian-style houses. The streets are empty. Everyone is already at the square, I chide myself for not having left earlier. Tentatively, I raise my head to the sky. The sky is a blank slate, the same white haze as the mist, and I wonder what is about to happen.

They say that everyone sees something different in the rain. Sometimes the memories are joyful, families reuniting with loved ones who have passed away, but memory isn’t confined to the blissful. Sometimes the knowledge of your own history can be too painful, and there are rumors that in the early days, some people went mad with the remembrance the rain brought them, though that hasn’t happened in decades. I clutch the umbrella at my wrist. The umbrellas are a precaution, a reminder of those times it happened.

I honestly don’t know what to expect. My friends urged me to join them, and I know they have been camping out at the square since morning, but I told them I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. I don’t know why, but I need to experience this alone, this chance that might finally give me the answers I’ve been looking for.

My own past is somewhat of a mystery. I don’t remember my parents, though some of the older residents have told me they were kind people, and my whole life I have been cared for by an elderly woman in ill health who didn’t take kindly to my inquisitiveness. When I was a child, she kept me confined to her house for the most part. I longed for the outside world, the chance to gain friends and to experience the strange mist that seemed to cling to the city no matter the season. But no matter how much I begged her, she would only let me leave when she did. She insisted that I read to her, strange old tomes filled with history of our city and legends of other worlds like this one. She carefully taught me this history, and over time I grew accustomed to her harsh style of communicating. When I was old enough, she allowed me to leave the house on my own for an allotted amount of time each day, and I used these short jaunts to explore my world. I discovered the cold that pervaded the city year-round, and I discovered the joy of recreating the people and things I saw in sketchbooks, sometimes drawing worlds inspired by the legends I had learned from reading to the old woman.

I used to think that she kept me merely for the joy of ordering me around but sometimes I wonder if it was really to keep her company. There were times I would find her in her accustomed armchair in front of the fireplace, staring into its depths with a sadness so profound that it etched lines into her face and darkness into her eyes. On the day the rain came ten years ago, she told me I had to stay home to read to her. I stormed to my room, letting my outrage be known in no uncertain terms, and some time later I came downstairs again with the intention to more reasonably bargain with her. When I peered into the living room, I found her looking out the window at the remembrance rain, her expression almost wistful, even more sad than I had previously seen her. I went back upstairs. I moved out of her house last year when I started university and despite her austere manner, I sometimes miss the calm of the old house, the crackle of logs in the fire and the bookshelves stacked high with dusty tomes, and I often wonder how the old woman is doing without me to keep her company.

I hurry my steps. Ahead of me, the mist is populated by people, and a jolt of excitement rushes through me. The entire population of the city is gathered together at the square, families, couples, friends, and above their heads I can see the cherub atop the stone fountain at its heart. I push my way through people and raven-black umbrellas and stop in a place where I have some room to myself. Against the white of the mist and the black umbrellas, I know I stand out with my pink hair and green scarf, but my friends won’t see me with all these people around. Silently debating what to do with my umbrella, I finally set it on the ground beside me within arm’s reach. All there is left to do is wait. Ripples of excitement and anticipation radiate through the crowd and despite the quantity of people packed into the square, it is mostly quiet. Like everyone else, I lift my head to the clouds and wait for whatever is about to happen.

I don’t see the first raindrops fall but I hear the surprised gasps of people as the rain collides with their skin. It starts out by the fountain, and the ripples of awe, excitement, joy spread out from there in a wave. I can see the rain now, dripping down from the blankness of the sky. As the rain nears me, I slip off my jacket and shiver in my short-sleeved shirt, gaining side glances from others bundled in their coats and hats. The memories must collide with skin to have any effect, and I have been waiting for this day for ten years. I want to fully experience the rain.

Rain starts to fall in the crowd where I’m gathered. Not every raindrop induces an effect. It’s said that the raindrops meant for you will find you, and I wait with my stomach clenched. By all accounts, the drizzle appears no different than normal rainfall, the water pattering through the square and spreading a shining veneer over the cobblestones. A woman near me starts to cry with happiness, and I wonder if she has reunited with a loved one. Then I feel the first memory-drenched raindrop and I can’t help gasping in wonder. It hits my skin with a curious warmth, completely unlike regular rain. The warmth spreads up my arm, tingles up my neck into my head, and I am hit with my first memory. And it is of fire.

I completely forget everyone around me as the memory shines clear and loud inside my head. I remember fire, bright and orange and hot, consuming in its greatness, unlike any heat I’ve ever known in this city of mist and cold. The fire rages in my memory, the heat flowing through my blood, somehow inside me. I don’t understand what it is or where it comes from until the next memory hits me.

In this one, I am a child. I sit on the floor of a small cottage in an unfamiliar place where sunlight streams through the windows and drenches me in golden light. A man and woman are sitting at a table, smiling and laughing, and a sob escapes my throat. My parents. How could I have forgotten them, my mother with her gentle eyes and voice smooth as birdsong and my father with his strong arms? What happened to them? As they watch me, I lift my hands into the sunlight. My eyes spark, and my palms fill with fire. I am overcome by the memory of it, the way the heat rushed inside my veins at my will and emerged onto my skin as if I had grabbed the sunlight. My parents laugh and clap at my performance.

What is happening?

I stumble back, blinking and gasping, trying to get rid of the images. How is that me? What was I doing? Before I can think what to do, more memories fall from the sky and collide against my skin like a volley of heated arrows, overwhelming my body with warmth and filling my mind with full remembrance, a past life shedding its skin.

I see myself at my current age but in another place, a city filled with gothic architecture and shadows, a completely other life I have apparently lived and forgotten. In this place, too, I have the strange ability to conjure fire.  I watch this other version of me conjuring flame in the shadows, bringing light to this place of darkness. The residents in that city are not unlike those of my own, gasping in wonder at my abilities and pleading with me to light candles and lanterns they have hidden in their homes to retain some of my light. Not everyone is pleased with me, however. I remember the king, a short stocky man with small eyes that rove over me with disdain when he summons me to his mansion at the top of a hill. He threatens me with exile if I continue my witchcraft in his city, and I go into hiding.

I am jolted from that memory to at least a dozen other places where other versions of me discover their uniqueness and are eventually shunned for it. As the scenes of my past settle upon me one after the other, I start to understand. I have lived countless lives in countless places. Each place looks different but they all have one commonality: the remembrance rain. And now I remember what I am. In some lives, I grow up with this knowledge, and in others I only remember once I have experienced the rain. But in all of my lives, my ability to conjure fire, the flame that runs inside my very blood, is kept secret from the other inhabitants until one day it is revealed when I try to improve some aspect of my world. And in every world I hear what I am whispered by the people in short gasps and awed tones.

Fire-bringer.

What happened to me in each life? I wonder. My clearest memory is that of the most recent life I lived, in the city swathed in darkness. In that life, I knew about my abilities from a young age, and I would practice conjuring fire in secret at the admonition of my caregiver, a beautiful middle-aged woman who looks familiar to me. With a jolt, I realize who she is. She is the old woman, my caregiver, the one who took me in as an infant. In my previous life, she is younger, with austere posture and dark pools for eyes, but unmistakably the woman I have known my whole life. I see myself in that world growing up and peppering her with questions about the darkness of the city, what I can do, why she won’t let me reveal my light to others. But one day I do and the knowledge rapidly spreads throughout the city. Fire-bringer, murmurs from one household to another until I have been found in my hiding-place in a remote part of the city and I kneel before the king in chains, a look of rage in his reddened face. In the corner, I see the woman, cloaked in black in the style of grieving. And then the blade comes down on my neck and I can’t help it. I scream.

People around me in the square startle and glance at me; their fear rapidly fades in the face of the wonders of the memory rain. My memories have stopped, and I stand drenched in the middle of the crowd, my hands to my neck, my eyes blurred with tears. Each place where the rain touched me burns, and I look down to see angry welts covering my arms. Everyone around me is happy and smiling, enjoying the rain. Everybody but me.

Suddenly the crowd feels too thick, the mist too heavy. It’s too much. I turn and run, sprinting away from the square. When I reach my apartment, I keep going, until the row of houses gives way to fields and I see the old woman’s mansion, a place I haven’t been to since I moved out. With shaking fingers, I take the key from its hiding place underneath a pot and burst through the door and into the living room. The old woman is seated in her chair in front of the fireplace, and she merely looks up at me when I enter, as if she was expecting my arrival. Her dark eyes surveil the pink hair matted on my neck from the rain, the bruises covering my arms.

“I went to the square,” I burst out, half a sob.

The woman raises her eyebrows and looks at me curiously. “Well?”

I can’t answer. I collapse at her feet and let my body give way to sobs, and I feel her hand on my shoulder steadying me though she says nothing. When I am done crying, I sink into the armchair opposite her and stare into the fireplace for a long time before speaking.

“I don’t understand. What am I, why do I have these abilities? How can I have lived so many lives?”

“You know what you are,” the woman replies simply.

“Fire-bringer,” I utter the words that have been used for me in a dozen different lifetimes, sometimes meant in awe and other times in fear. I look up at the woman. “And you were there, the last time, when I…How? It was another world.”

The woman leans forward suddenly, her eyes bright with alertness and knowledge I have never seen in her before. “Don’t you get it, child? It’s all the same place. The people here are doomed to repeat their lives for all eternity without the knowledge they are doing so. And the gods that be change the landscape every now and then to prevent their own boredom. They take people’s memories at the end of each of their lives.”

“But the rain…” I protest, trying to understand. In all of the cities I lived in, there had been the remembrance rain.

“Do you understand now, child, why memories are only released once in a long while? Memories are powerful things, and the gods hoard them like diamonds. If the people were allowed to truly remember and understand the eternity of miserable lives they were forced to endure, they might rise up.” A pause. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Me?”

“In every new city, there is a Fire-Bringer, a dissident, a girl rumored to have descended from the gods herself who has the power to overthrow them. And that girl is you.”

I meet her gaze with surprise. Never before have I seen her so earnest and never before have I gained her trust.

“Every time before they have stopped you, but every time you reappear,” she explains.

A thought occurs to me, a memory of the day I stayed inside when the rain fell in the square.

“You were protecting me,” I realize. “Until I was ready.”

A small smile appears on the woman’s face, the first smile I have ever seen on her, austere and defiant. “I think you are now.”

I look down at my hands, trying to control the apprehension roiling through my stomach. It is overwhelming to take in. Now that my clothes have dried and the welts on my arms are less sore, I feel different, warm inside, despite the draftiness in the room, like an internal source of heat is strengthening me. I bring my hands closer to the fire, let the orange light flicker across my open palms, and I reach inside to that warmth boiling through my veins. Deep inside, I feel it answer. A tingling rush of warmth heats up my skin, down my arm, through my wrist to my fingers. A small flame appears in my palm, orange and blue and flickering like a candle. I cup my hands around that tiny symbol of hope, and a small smile of satisfaction tugs the corners of mouth upward.

“Good,” the woman says and leans back again in her chair. “It will have to be different this time. You can’t let them take your memories.”

I look up at her and feel a sense of resolve overcoming me, the jumble of my past lives settling in place like a familiar shawl after a long period of disuse. My past is clear now and so is my future. Last time, I was careless. I revealed my power too early, too eager to show the world what I could do, and I failed. This time will be different. I won’t let them end my life and tear me of the memories I have waited so long to earn back. It is time to use the power in my blood to end the curse of ice and darkness that has reigned in this city for centuries. It is time to end the rain that imparts mere glimpses of remembrance and stop the cycle of repeated doomed lives the gods have forced upon us. I am the Fire-Bringer and I will bring memory back to my people.