Downpour

She crinkles her eyes as her stern companion steeples her fingers before her lips, letting her head loll towards the chilled window pane, eyes focused on the darkness and the rolling droplets outside, made visible by their refraction in the flicker of the candlelight. Her own fingers drum on the tabletop in a quiet rhythm, her feet swinging idly below the surface where her legs hang from the high stool, chest rising and falling in gentle ebbs of breath as she waits for the reply that does not come.

"You're brooding," she says to the other finally, to break a silence now bookended by her words and hers alone, a space created by her own question.

The other, slowly, like the shifting of a mountain, turns her head.

"What?" she asks, blinking once, twice behind the lenses of her half-moon spectacles.

She has let her hair down this evening. She often does when they are alone, so it is curious that she has yet to remove the gold-rimmed frames of her spectacles. They are not in the classroom or the workshop. There is nothing to be measured but the distance that seems to grow between them despite that they are within arms' length. There are no symbols to read but the unseen sigils painted in the air before their eyes, spelling out histories they have long since forgotten to study, though they still have yet to be written.

Her heart flutters for an anxious moment before she presses the question again, willing a half-formed smile onto her lips.

"I was only asking if you thought you needed to set out more basins, for the rain." She finally pulls her cooling tea closer to herself, and adds, "but it seems that you're already out there."

The other's painted lips fall open gently as she blinks again. A puff of air condenses in the chill from the glass.

"No," she says, "the pages took care of it." She pauses, and leans her face down, massaging her temples with the knuckles of her thumbs. "Sorry, I..."

"Was elsewhere," finishes the one with the tea cup. "I understand, it's alright."

"Do you ever wonder if," asks the other, blush locks cascading over the backs of her hands, "You've made the right choices?"

"In life?" asks the first one, sipping chilled chamomile. "Constantly."

"Mm."

A moment of warm silence passes between them. The other speaks in weary tones.

"Sometimes it feels like it knows, the rain. As if something somewhere in that swirling, condensing mist has its own mind, and it's calling to me, answering questions that I never meant to ask, making inquiries to which I'd never give reply. But it begs me, and it waits."

Finally, a bleak smile begins to crack across her face.

"Do you know why I prefer to use rain water?" she asks.

The one now setting tea cup onto saucer cocks her head, and replies, "I thought it was because rain water is the purest source, so as not to cause any adverse reactions with the other ingredients."

"That's partly correct. But there's no such thing as truly pure water, unless, well unless someone like you were to make it. Water from the sky comes from our atmosphere, it has traveled from maybe near, maybe far away to come here, and wherever it goes, it carries part of wherever it travels with it. Traces of minerals, of condensed fume. Transverse energies. Stories. Songs. The water of the rain has an essence, has a will." She smiles, and the candlelight glints off her polished glass lenses. "The water of the rain has power. A natural sort of power, that we can never truly create, only harness. The rain is the purest conduit to the center of our world."

Her partner pauses, halts, and looks deeply into her lover's face. "My dear," she says, concern in her voice only half in mocking, "you're sounding like a naturalist."

"Does it not suit me?"

"Not at all." Puzzlement fades into softness. "But I like it when you surprise me."

"Well," says the other, "I'm glad that someone can find amusement in my distress."

"Here," says she with the hand now draped gently over the rim of her cup. Her eyes fall shut, her breathing at equilibrium. She feels a cyclone form beneath her palm, and the candle between them shudders. She imagines the light of the sun falling on a field in spring, the wind rolling over a speckled, landbound sea. She opens her eyes, and slides the cup forward. "For my capricious dryad."

The one called the name wrinkles her nose, but the look falls away with warmth as the beauty across the table pulls her hand away from the cup.

Inside, a chamomile blossom, beaming up from the bottom of the vessel, where droplets of the consumed tea still hang like morning dew.

Her brows knit together, even as another smile takes her lips.

"And what am I to do with this?" she asks, voice failing to mask a bemused laughter.

Her lover smiles. "Nothing," she says. "Sometimes a gift is just a gift. A flower just a flower, a pretty thing without meaning. The rain is... just the rain."

Her hand slides back across the table, and wraps around the other's.

"Or maybe... It's a reminder. Of what comes after the rain."

Slender fingers, light and dark, intertwine. The rain drops glint like prisms on the outside of the pane.

"You're a devil," says the potionsmaster. "You play my heart just like a fiddle."

"A devil and a dryad," says the conjurer. "My how the fanatics would fear us."

"Such a fussy bunch. Perhaps if they stopped turning from the old ways they would have more fun."

"That's alright." She gives a squeeze. "We have fun enough for us."

She glances out the window. The sounds beyond the stone walls are softening. The trickling streams seem to narrow.

"Seems your mysterious will is running out of questions to ask." She squeezes her hand again. "Let's go to bed. You can think of the answers for next time."

The woman with the rosy hair nods slowly, and allows herself to be led away.

A single chamomile blossom sits in the bottom of a teacup, unwilting. The rain softens outside of a window pane. A candle's ebbing flame flickers at an empty table.

In a darkened sky, a storm breathes its last sigh, and pulls away.