…rain, rain, red rain, scarlet rain, ochre rain, incarnadine rain, rain driving in torrents unseen in millennia, pounding the desiccated earth in a frenzy of hydration...
I... I never dared hope to see this. In the last days... let me see now... this is so difficult that even my recollection grows dim...
In the Last Days, Council met and planned. We exhorted the brightest, challenged the greatest minds. We sifted through aeons of knowledge and philosophy, searching for the key to our salvation. Plans were made and discarded. Theories expounded... and proved false. In time, we came to the inescapable conclusion.
Our seed had grown thin. Hundreds of generations of advancement, fine-tuning, and engineering had taken its toll on our people. We had become threadbare; the canvas of our soul stretched beyond the limit of its frame. We had become a doomed race.
(...rain from pole to pole, reaving nature through force of Will, rain into rivulets, rivers cascading into falls, scouring terrified hillsides, on an unstoppable charge to the lowlands...)
The inevitable demonstrated beyond doubt, some lost all reason. Others chose their own end; marching calmly, in ones and twos, or in families, into the hopeless portals of Ra’k Tanar. A few of us chose to carry on, in the hope that something might be salvaged.
(...rain like the fury of a spent people, a whirlwind railing against futility, rain coursing and surging, hungrily rediscovering its soil, its flood-plains, its oceans, rain urging defiance, blood-red rain on blood-red clay, a million screams and a million years out of time...)
And in a way, we forged a kind of victory. Ruined as we were, we were not without Craft. Our best we gathered to the Hall of Treasures, under the icon you have only just uncovered. We laboured hard, so that even with our passing, the land would not forever wither. The seeds of your future were planted long in our past. You are coming into your inheritance: now, under the deluge...
(...rain like a thunderstrike echoing through the centuries, life-giving rain, angry rain, rain like the tumult and violence of all the wronged and lost, breathing, raging life into possibility all around, and with one last, weary, sigh, I leap into the heavens, rise up, become one with the sky, one with the rain, and fall in a billion crimson teardrops