luminary

THE WATER-WEAVER
I. THE LAST WELL

Lira was born the day the last well ran dry.

In the Salt Wastes, where thirst carved canyons in the body, they called her “mirage-born.” Her village drank vapor, filtered from breath and shadow. No one remembered the taste of rain.

Her grandmother spoke of oceans—not like maps, but like gods. She said water had memory, and some could speak to it. She called them Water-Weavers.

On Lira’s twelfth night, a woman cloaked in sea-glass appeared. She touched Lira’s forehead and whispered, “Listen.”

By dawn, the woman had vanished.

But the sand beneath Lira’s feet was damp.

And her dreams began to flood.

I eat solitude,drink serenity and sleep in heavenly places.
Photographer || https://linktr.ee/artbysalman

III. THE TIDE AWAKENING

They called her “Floodwitch.” “Droughtbreaker.” “The Last Raindrop.” She called herself Lira, nothing more.

From the broken aqueducts and thirsting roots, she summoned water once lost: springwater locked in fossils, dew trapped in forgotten moss, whispers from cloud-siblings above.

She moved unseen, her footsteps waking dormant rivers.

When the Regime dammed the sky, she unspooled a tide beneath their feet.

No battles. No cries. Just a slow, rising hum as lakes returned and cisterns cracked open like seedpods.

And when she vanished—into a shimmer of stormlight—some said the clouds mourned. Others said she became the monsoon.

In villages far from the Regime’s reach, children now leave bowls of clear water by their doors.

They say, if you listen carefully at dusk, the wind still carries her voice

II. THE VEINS OF THE WORLD

Years passed in silence and salt. Lira wandered, searching the drowned bones of cities for what the Regime called “hydromyths”—taboo fragments of a time when water flowed without cost.

In the dead city of Vehl, beneath the ruins of a desalination spire, she found it: a mural pulsing faintly with blue. It wasn’t paint—it was alive. Water, trapped in memory-code, waiting.

She placed her hand on it. The mural breathed.

Water seeped through cracks in the ground, coiling like veins. She felt it thread into her—thread through her.

The Regime sent their Desiccators. They came with fire and drought-ink.

But the water knew her now.

It ran to her, not from her.