The umbrellas were the first thing anyone noticed about Harlan’s Hollow. Not the people, not the crooked brick buildings sagging under the weight of the waterlogged years—just the umbrellas. Black ones, striped ones, polka-dotted monstrosities that had somehow survived three generations of downpour. They clustered above doorways like mushrooms, bloomed open in the streets like mechanical flowers, and most of all, they broke. Constantly. The gutter outside Mrs. Elswick’s boarding house was a graveyard of snapped ribs and frayed nylon.

The rain wasn't the kind that drummed—it was the kind that lived. It slid between the cobblestones like liquid shadows, pooled in the hollows of rooftops until the beams groaned, and seeped into the bones of every resident until they stopped noticing the dampness in their socks. You could measure time in Harlan’s Hollow by the watermarks climbing the sides of buildings, each new line a year older, a year heavier. The church spire had six; the pharmacy had twenty-three.

The rain never stopped, but sometimes it changed its mind about how it wanted to fall. Some days it came in lazy, silver threads, the kind that made you forget it was there until your sleeves stuck cold to your wrists. Other days it hurled itself sideways, rattling shutters and sending umbrellas inside-out like startled bats. Tonight, it was the kind of rain that didn’t so much fall as swarm, a murmuration of droplets shifting in unison, as if directed by some unseen choreographer in the bruised clouds overhead.

You weren’t holding an umbrella. You never did. There was something about the weight of the water in your hair, the way it traced the curve of your spine like a lover’s fingernail, that felt more honest than hiding. Mrs. Elswick had called you “soft in the head” for it once, right before she’d slammed her window shut, but you’d seen the way she pressed her palm to the glass when she thought no one was looking—like she was afraid the rain might forget her if she didn’t touch it first.

That was when you felt him before you saw him—a shift in the air, the way the rain seemed to hesitate mid-fall around his silhouette. Taven Sadetta didn’t walk so much as occur, materializing between one blink and the next at the edge of your peripheral vision. His boots made no sound on the slick cobblestones, but the puddles rippled away from him as if repelled. He was holding an umbrella, of course. Black, with a handle carved from something that looked suspiciously like bone.

The umbrella tilted just enough for you to see his face—pale as the underbelly of a fish, lips slightly parted like he’d been caught mid-breath. His storm-blue eyes tracked the path of a raindrop sliding down your collarbone. “You’ll rust,” he said, voice smoother than the rain-slick stones underfoot.