The blue light filtered through the protective dome of Ithinil, the city of sages and safe ark for those who could better the lives of sentient races. A city that had once stood over the waters of the Sulvine Sea, it had once been bathed in sunlight that rebounded between the carefully constructed architectures, some of the energy stored to power the sun at night, a giant contraption rising high at Ithinil's very core.

  Now, it was plunged in darkness. The sunlight barely reached the bottom of the sea where they hid, and the contraptions unable to utilize such dim light, simply absorbed them. The sun at night, the iconic monument that had made them famous across the ten seas, was now still and black, like a void sucking in whatever contentment the inhabitants could have.

  Carmine stood on his high tower with hands crossed beneath his back. He sighed at the gloominess of the city he presided over, and his eyes shifted through it.

  The trees at the park shed their very last leaves, standing strong in their death, the benches of polished white oak once surrounded by beautiful, multi-hued birds, were now musty and covered in cobwebs. But the cobwebs were empty, and Carmine knew why.

  His eyes moved through the ruined monument to the Great Sage, whose crumbled shoulders couldn't bear the self-imposed burden of saving all knowledge in the world.

  The earth shook, and Carmine staggered. A fierce red filtered from above, crowning the silent buildings with a bloody wreath. The war outside still raged, as it had for the past ten years. His face hardened as the fire died, extinguished by the water.

  "How long will they continue like this...?"

  A memory surfaced, the day when he announced to the world that Ithinil would plunge to the deepest part of the oceans, shortly after the fire of war had consumed the largest library in the world, which unfortunately wasn't in their care.

  It was a time of tyrants, where dissident voices were put to the sword and their remains fed to the pigs, even if they were only peaceful peasants that longed for nothing but a calm life, or even advisors telling the ruler that the economy couldn't sustain such a large scale war.

  The scholars of the world came flooding to Ithinil, and hailed the name of the Great Sage, who had built it, and of Carmine, who constructed the dome with the help of the top hundred mages.

  With enough food for a hundred years, carefully smoked and preserved, Carmine thought he had nothing to fear.

  The image of that bright city and packed streets faded to give way to the present. What Carmine hadn't thought about was water. His dried lips formed a smirk. The curse of the wise, to create solutions to the greatest problems and then, as a flying dart to their heel, the commonest and most ordinary of the issues toppled their lives.

  He was surrounded by water, one of the largest seas in the entire world, but it was all behind the dome, unreachable.

  Once the reservoir was emptied, the joyous gaits and perennial smiles turned wary and concerned. Murmurs could be heard as, sanctioned by himself, all scholars entered the great library like a deluge searching for the knowledge that would give them the solution to their plight.

  Then, the final drop of water finally ran out, just a household wife trying to boil some rice to feed her child. The adults started to drink wine and mead, but the kids' parched throats cried with pain. The scholars had grabbed rats by the tail and snatched spiders off their webs, grinding them for liquid. Rocks were crushed and wastewater recycled, but the people went sick after drinking their concoctions.

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  Breaking his reveries, he noticed a mob starting to form at the gates of his tower. His aide knocked rapidly and entered without waiting for response, the ragged man, whose unwashed stench covered the entire room, shouted at Carmine:

  "Sir! The citizens they're gathering for revolt! They think you're hoarding water, and holding it in the tower!"

  He sighed again. It was something obvious, like the sun that rose in the morning, or the dawn's dew. He wished that the dome could be opened in a tiny section, to let the water in, but it was a total measure, and if they took it down, the entire sea would come rushing to crush them under tons of weight. He wished that the war would stop and that the enemy wasn't camping right next to their designated surface spot, waiting for them to come out. He wished to have been wiser, more intelligent, and devised a way to move the city through the sea depths, like a whale or an underwater monster. But he couldn't rehydrate the parted lips of his son with wishes, and what-ifs wouldn't summon a glass of water in front of him.

  "When has magic become so... mundane?" He muttered, almost to himself. His aide had heard him and stammered, "Pardon?"

  "Is it our fault, us mages writing down formulas and mechanizing the process. I remember the first mage, one with nature, discovering the first spell, almost, no, completely by accident. Nowadays, we're so busy with the method that we have forgotten about the true spirit of magic. Tell me, aide. Why can't we summon water? or rain? Such a simple thing..."

  The aide, a mage in his own right, mumbled about laws of physics, of principles, how things couldn't be created into the world and only be redirected. First law of thermodynamics, he said. Carmine's eyes sparkled at a sudden idea.

  The so-called sages, turned into brutes by the scarcity, fought their way into the tower. The guards defended their positions and shed their blood with cold steel. The rebels in their rage against Ithinil had looted and turned the books that failed to save them into fuel paper for their torches and bombs, that they readily tossed to the guards. The flames spread and soon the city was burning down, not prepared to be attacked from within. Carmine shut his ears and focused on the labored breathing of his son, the only family he had left. Years ago, his own wife had been butchered by some savages, accused of robbing their water. Carmine put his head on the boy's chest, the shallow breathing and dry, short coughing covering the screams in the background. The crackling noise of widespread fire covered the greedy cackling of the thirsty who licked their cracked mouths with a cotton-like tongue at the thought of vaults filled with water, stored in transparent ingots like gold.

  Eventually, the noise died down and Carmine walked down the tower. The heat was so intense he had to remove his robe, and the tears he had shed evaporated, absorbed by the tower he had proudly built. On the ground floor, a dozen men moaned in pain, and a hundred more lay on the ground dead, rivers of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets, dark as midnight running towards the fire.

  Grabbing the sword of one of the fallen guards, Carmine slit the throats of everyone, draining them of their blood, just like the ancient tribe of Rihildir had done to cattle for centuries. Dissociated, calculative, cold and distant to the present, as in a dream or rather, a nightmare, Carmine placed his two blood-smeared hands on the warm ground as he chanted an old spell. He couldn't hear his own voice, but his aide's sounded in his mind, reciting the law that stated that warmth made fluids run faster. Where was his aide, anyway? Had he run away, scared by the war they'd brought to themselves after going through so much effort to avoid the one above, or was he just another stain on his hand, terminated like an unnecessary process of an overworked computer?

  Then, something magical happened. With his closed eyes, Carmine felt something tiny hit him in the face, then again, and again. The round and warm raindrop fell on his mouth, and he opened it drinking like a little child who sees his first snowfall. Life, renewal. The fire died down and the happy cheering of those who had survived the tower massacre could be heard in the distance.

  Carmine imagined Ithinil living forever independent, while the war consumed the mundanes above. The purifying fire had burnt down the books and with them their dogma. He dreamt of a new era, unburdened by the above-world, unrestrained, wild, unbridled.

  Then he opened his eyes. The city had been plunged into a further darkness as the rain blocked the little light that came from above, and the screams he thought of happiness were those of terror. A thundering noise followed the collapse of the tower, and his son was somewhere underneath the wreckage. The flames had died down to give way to something more terrifying, as the new void-like divinity hovered over Ithinil, at its very core.

  Carmine fell to his knees. He didn't wonder what happened to his son, neither did he regret what he had done. Instead, he asked his new God:

  "Why is the rain black...?"