Morning arrived with a bruise along the western sky. Oakwatch blinked once from its glass eye; the river sulked past Glass Isle with a fuller hip; the horn cairns along Founders' Way hummed the same note when Jory tapped them—each a syllable in the language of ready. 🙂
— Morning Brief — Novaterra• Weather: squall line building W→E (gusts, heavy rain; risk of wadi flash)• Cordon: adjust posts to high ground; pull low caltrops/whipline before flood• Storm Drill: bell-code inside; horn net waterproofing; lantern hoods; sandbags• Glass Isle: bank fires; shutter bench; cover cullet; latrine lids on• After-Sight: Ready (0/1)• Morale: Work-bright, sky-wary 🙂
"Rain will test the nails," Aiden said.
Elara's mouth did its small, satisfied tilt. "We nailed the boards."
Mara handed out oilcloths and opinions. "Soup doesn't mind rain; people do. Eat before you get clever." 🍲😑
Kessa and Ansel jogged to Oakwatch with a crate of gaskets; Jory met them with a fistful of mouthpieces that glinted like polite teeth. "Gourds hate water," he said. "We give them hats." He snugged oiled leather caps over each gourd lip, poked drain slits, and tied them with a knot even a storm would respect.
On Glass Isle, Émile banked the dragon's breath to a long, patient sigh. Kessa shuttered the bench with wool blankets and a sheet of tin that had started life as arrogance and become a lid. Latrine pits got lids and a ring of pebbles like a moat. "Glass catches colds," Mara reminded, pleased the kiln looked tucked in. 🍲
Hadrik ran a line of linseed over scorpion rails; Thorn and Bramble rolled deeper into their sheds; toolrolls were counted like sins and forgiven. Rinna tapped the painted NO GREEDY SHOT letters with two knuckles—habit, not superstition.
Pathfinders moved with weather in their heads. "Pull the knee teeth," Bryn said. Ras scooped caltrops from the cut-bank curl and dropped them in a bucket with a sound like small regrets. "Whipline comes up," Hale added, coiling rope that had learned meanness and now got a bath.
Venn chalked flood lines at low doors, set sandbags with the zeal of a man who likes seeing gravity do what it's told. Calder shifted the clinic cots in and hung dry strips where splatter couldn't touch. Lia's cousin posted a child-sun by the clinic door and tried very hard to look official. She succeeded. 🫡
— Storm Prep — Checklists• Gourds capped; mouthpieces oiled; cairn drains cleared• Low-lane caltrops/whiplines pulled; flags moved to high posts• Glass Isle shuttered; latrines covered; fuel stacked under tarps• Scorpions stowed; toolrolls packed; rails oiled• Clinic: cot path cleared; wet cloths staged; bandage dry zone marked
By noon the western bruise was a jaw. Wind found edges; dust learned to leave. The first fat drops hit like polite warnings. Then the sky pulled the sheet.
Rain.
Bells did not ring. That was law. Horns spoke softly—2 short through capped gourds—make way for carts into sheds, for sheep into byres, for children into the space between parents' knees. The town walked.
Elara's voice threaded the water without shouting. "Standards to the east arc. We'll be heavier there in the dark."
Garran planted his semicolon where earth tilted; Orla checked her sling-hanger and smiled at the rain like an equal; Fen became a stone under skin; Reeve Piet vanished into the seam between reserve and sense.
Aiden climbed Oakwatch in oil and care and thumbed After-Sight once—before the sky made lies of distances. The world admitted a new geometry: the wadi at West Run had pulled a fresh finger through the clay—a slick, tempting cut that would turn feet into arguments. Down at the ford, a shallow bar had become a deeper opinion; a crossing that was hourglass-safe yesterday would eat a flank today.
He sent numbers to Elara, to Bryn, to Jory's mouth. "Wadi finger at West Run—skip it. Ford deepens center; push to upstream stones." Nobody asked how he knew; the rain would have said it if they'd waited. They didn't wait.
— After-Sight• Used: 1/1 (storm geometry)• Cooldown: 12h (risk mitigation)• Notes: Wadi finger (avoid); ford center deep (shift upstream)
The first boom of thunder made bowls trembling in cupboards admit they were bowls. Stand Tall settled shoulders that wanted to hunch. Jory reached for the mirror shelf and then thought better—light was a summer language. Today belonged to sound.
He lifted the horn. 1 long (spine), 7 steady (stakes), and the cairns answered like stones with manners even under rain hats. The caps worked. Water ran off the slits and left the notes clear.
"Bryn," Elara said. "Eyes to the ford."
Bryn ghosted, Hale at her elbow, Ras with a loop of rope slung like a lazy thought. Rain made everything glitter without liking anyone.
At the ford, two Riversong carts had tried to be brave and made mud instead. Wheels sulked into clay. A child stared at water the way children do before it becomes a story that someone else writes.
"Two short," Hale called, soft. The scene made way—space for rope, space for tomorrow. Ras tied a bowline on a beam with a smile he didn't notice, and Bryn set the rope over her shoulder like a new spine. They pulled with the indignity of rain in their boots, and the cart remembered it was a cart, not a pond.
"Wadi finger's showing teeth," Hale said, pointing where After-Sight had named it. The water there butchered polite eddies into quick malice. They set a flag white—don't—tied to a war-bent willow that, in another life, might have been a story problem. People believed the flag. That was new.
— Ford Log (Storm)• Carts: 2 pulled; 0 lost• Wadi finger flagged; no entries• Courtesy compliance: high (2 short)*
The Fort noticed weather the way a man with a grudge notices a closed door. Under the rain's applause, drums tried to be maps. The captured shaman, under a dripline, cocked his head and frowned at the cadence. "They say four and left, but the water says no," he muttered to nobody in particular. Mara gave him a cup. ✅🍲
Elara looked at the east arc and saw brush moving like it didn't think it was being watched. Twenty… then thirty… then forty shapes, low, carrying mats that wanted to be boats. Paint streaks glistened on forearms—smears of courage someone had taught them to wear like rain.
"4 broken, east," Jory blew, clear through water.
The line arranged itself to be line. Garran's semicolon stood; Orla's pennon did not ripple where other flags would; Fen's stone-ness made ankles confess; Reeve Piet put reserve behind sense. Skirmishers held one stone apiece and remembered not to love the sound their hands could make.
The brush mats hit the curl where knee teeth used to live. The ground offered a new joke: clay that sucked pride down half an inch and then refused to make a drama about it. Hale had pulled the whipline; he had, however, left a polite line of sand three paces back where After-Sight had whispered the tilt would betray balance. The first rank stepped to it and discovered physics helpful for a change.
"5 rising, green—Left correction," Jory translated Ras's pegs into horn, then Elara's chin into motion. The wall gave a half-mouth and no invitation. The brush slid off board and into work.
A drum tried a stutter—three, left bank—but the bank had become a river that had changed its mind. The stick landed on a peg that wasn't and the drummer made a noise that said someone had moved his front door.
Skirmish stones popped once—not twice. Lightning found humor in a lonely tree behind the Fort, and everyone involved decided it was a sign they did not want to interpret today.
The push broke without anyone yelling about it. Eight falling—NO chase—lived in heels before it reached mouths.
Rowan's Three Slashes were not here for once; this was not their weather. The garrison slunk back under a curtain of water and discovered the palisade did not prevent wet.
— Contact Log — East Arc (Storm)• Enemy: ~40 (brush/mats; 1 drum)• Our actions: aura hold; sand line placed; horn translation (5 rising) applied; no pursuit• Casualties: 0 (ours); enemy: 2 knee turns, 1 drummer confused by missing peg; dignity soaked• Outcome: raid unmade; standards upright; panic 0 🙂
Wind pushed west; Oakwatch took it and did not complain. The mirror shelf loved sun, not sheets of rain; it settled for being silent and strong.
At Glass Isle, a gust pulled at the tin lid like a bad thought. Émile planted both hands and glared in French at physics until it remembered manners. Kessa shoved a wedge in with her heel and swore in gearwright. The bench stayed covered; cullet stayed honest.
Hadrik found a small leak in the scorpion shed roof and killed it with a patch like an apology. Rinna watched the sheets on Thorn and Bramble and kept her hands off the triggers because competence is also not doing the cool thing.
Calder dealt in quiet heroics: he took three men with sprained pride and one with a toe that had met a log badly; he taught a child how not to cough mud; he made a little sign for a bucket that said NOT FOR DRINKING and everyone obeyed.
At the ford again, a boy slipped where men had been careful ten minutes earlier. Ras's rope caught him. The boy cried and then laughed in the indignant way children do when terror has been charged a small toll. Bryn said nothing and tightened a knot.
Mara, who can be in three places when it rains, set Night Soup in the east shed where a drip hit a pan like a percussion section trying out their scales. "Soup is weatherproof," she told the room. 🍲🙂
Clove arrived under a too-small cloak and without irony. "Your nails held," he said, pleased to be right about something others had done. He watched the horns speak through rain hats and nodded to himself, a connoisseur of systems. "Sound travels kindly when you teach it manners."
"Tell your employer to invest in umbrellas," Mara advised, and refilled his bowl to a line that meant don't be dramatic.
Dusk eased the rain's hand. The storm remembered tomorrow existed and left enough water behind to be an argument but not a complaint. The gourds dripped through their slits like civilized throats. Flags breathed.
Jory tried a gentle sequence to check ears and patience: 1 long (spine) → 2 short (compress) → 7 steady (stakes) → 4 spaced (drill only), all at half-volume. It was like hearing a town read itself in the dark and decide it understood. 🫡
Riversong Fort pushed one last smoke, thought about bravery, and discovered that mud offers debates it doesn't often lose. The palisade kept rain off a few heads; the rest found a love for under they hadn't felt before.
The captured shaman watched the standards through the shed slats and touched his wrist where linen would go in some other life. He murmured a number nobody knew the word for yet. Mara tucked a blanket around his shoulders and pretended it was policy. 🍲
Aiden stood at Oakwatch with water on his nose and the smell of wet oak in his throat. He had spent After-Sight on mud and gotten tomorrow back from it. That felt like a trade a grown man makes.
Elara bumped his shoulder with her gauntlet. "Boards held," she said.
"Nailed," he answered.
"Good arithmetic."
"Novaterra," Aiden told the cairns and the tower and the little island that had learned to hold fire without gossiping, "we taught rain our grammar. We moved pegs the storm couldn't see, planted wait; and where pride would slip, and let horns talk softly through water. We kept glass warm and feet honest. No heroics. Just work." 🙂
The wind, kinder now, ran down a gourd and came out as two short—make way. People stepped aside for sleep and did not charge it a coin.
— Evening Summary — Novaterra• Storm passed; horn net waterproofed (caps/slits), cairns drained; mirror idle• Cordon held; east raid (~40) unmade; no pursuit; 0 casualties• After-Sight used (storm geometry → ford/wadi reroutes)• Glass Isle secure (no flare; bench covered; latrines tight)• Ford: 2 carts pulled; 1 child caught by rope; zero losses• Standards steady; Don't-Chase aura visibly effective in poor visibility• Morale: Damp-proud; tired in the right muscles 🙂