Tisis

Origin of Fire (S)

The scorching sound of fire falling from the sky continues a little while longer, until large, thick and black clouds move in overhead and little droplets of water start coming down.

The sizzling sound of the flames feasting on the ground quickly gets replaced with an almost pained sound, as the initial raindrops turn into a downpour, quickly doing away with the fires that had threatened us.

The smell of burnt ground gets replaced with the refreshing smell of rain, as the nature around us begins to recover from the fiery onslaught of the past hours.

From that day on, we always keep a watchful eye to the skies.
Every morning, I check extra carefully, whether the plants we are growing decided to open to the sun and whenever Sera acts up, we are quick to search out cover.

But the fire rain does not come back.

Also it feels like the air is at long last starting to cool down again, though I'm not entirely sure.
I guess pretty much everything feels a lot cooler after you've seen the world around you burn.
But Nym seems to think I'm on to something she calls 'solstice'...whatever that is.

When I ask, she tells me all sorts of things, about a pendulum movement of the sun in the sky, as the summer shifts to winter, but I'm not sure if I even get half of what she is saying.

She also starts building stuff again.
She builds something she calls a 'sundial', which casts a shadow on a marked plate of wood, depending on the time of day and something she calls a 'compass' from a piece of metal we retrieve from the remains of the rescue capsule, a piece of bark and a bowl of water she had me carve.
Each day, every time the sundial shadow points straight ahead, she marks the tip of the shadow of a stick she planted into the ground on a tree and after about seven days of observation, she triumphantly declares, that she was right and that Tisis was on its way towards winter.

And while I'm not entirely sure what that means, something about the way she's been acting since that devastating rain came pouring down irks me.

I've only known her for a short while now, but I don't think I've ever seen her go about something quite this focused...it's almost as if she's trying to block out something else by plunging herself into her work.

One evening, during dinner, I decide to be upfront about it and ask, "Hey Nym?"
"Hmm?"
"...what's on your mind? You seem...kinda out of it as of late."
"I have no idea what you might be talking about, Sirus."
"Ah yeah? You have been obsessing over this whole 'passage of time' thing for all of last week, Nym. You hardly ate anything, just drank what you absolutely had to and all in all I must say that you look downright terrible. So what's eating you? It's about that fire rain, isn't it?"

Nym glares at me, but it's not her usual angry glare.
It's more along the lines of a worried, if not even sorrowful look.
And that worries me even more.

I take a deep breath, then exhale and finally say, "Look...you can talk to me. I won't tell anyone, I promise."
The last sentence at least fetches me a wry smile.
A start, if nothing else.

She shakes her head and finally asks, "It's...related. You...remember that fire from block D, right? Of course you do...such a silly question."
"Just barely, but yeah...now that I think about it, things have been really going downhill from there on. I mean, an Asmodea running into the fire to save a human? Kinda hard to imagine these days."
"Yes, my...my father never got over the loss of my mother. In his grief, he taught me to hate and fear the humans, who had killed her...and you were treated like...like animals. And the saddest part is, that I actually believed it all, when my mother loved your kind more than her own life."