About the Rain Picture Book

Leina · Apr 24, 2026

Evening. The corner room on the fifth floor of the building with the bridge painting.
Outside, a fine rain was falling, and a thin white mist had settled against the window glass.
On the mattress, Yu was pressed close to Leina, asking to be spoiled —
and after slow, sweet kisses and unhurried stroking,
when Yu's thoughts had begun to soften at the edges:

"Tell me something from when you were little," Yu said.

Leina looked up at the ceiling for just a moment,
then began, slowly, a story about a book she had never mentioned before.

When Leina was still small,
the group had a single picture book, half-falling apart.

The cover was faded. The corners had gone soft.
Several pages were missing.
Even so, the adults who could read would sometimes read it aloud.

She doesn't remember all of it.
Only that it was a story about a town where rain never fell.

No clouds, ever.
Ground cracked and dry.
Not a single puddle anywhere.

To Leina, that was a far stranger fantasy than anything in her own world.

Here, it rained almost every day.
The rooftop was always soaked.
Step outside, and you got wet — that was simply how it was.
So a world without rain felt completely beyond imagining.

But there was one scene in that book she never forgot.

After a long, long drought,
rain clouds finally arrive over the town,
and the rain begins to fall, drop by drop.
The people rush outside,
turning their faces and hands up to the sky,
laughing and saying "Rain!" as they get soaked through.

That page alone had gone wavy.
It had been read, again and again, by everyone.

When Leina was small, she would look at that illustration and think:
rain must be something special.
But in her world, rain just showed up on its own —
a backdrop, unremarkable, always there.

For a while, the glittering "rain" of the picture book
and the "rain as usual" of her own world
didn't quite connect inside her head.

Then one day, after they finished reading,
one of the adults closed the book and laughed softly and said:

"If the people in this book ever came to The Shroud,
they'd get a whole week's worth of joy
all at once — probably short-circuit."

Something dropped into place inside Leina the moment she heard that.

What was just rain to her
might be something like an extraordinary feast
to the people in the book.

The things so ordinary here they'd become invisible —
seen from somewhere else entirely,
they might be something precious beyond measure.

After that, Leina began, just a little, to actually listen to the rain.

Days when it spoke in high, scattered notes.
Days when it fell heavy and deliberate.
Days when the wind swept it sideways across the glass.

She began to notice, slowly, that each rain had its own face.

The habit of counting Driprimba sounds rising from the mist at night
probably comes from the same place.

That, too, is a kind of feast that only The Shroud can offer.
To someone from another world,
it would surely sound like something out of a picture book.

On the mattress in the corner room,
while Leina told this story,
Yu's eyelids grew heavier and heavier.

By the time Leina finished — "so I'm actually a little excited about the book search tomorrow" —
the image of a town where rain never fell
and the sound of the rain still falling outside
had begun to dissolve slowly together in Yu's mind.

If somewhere in this building tomorrow
they found even one book about a world nothing like this one —
a new face of rain would surely be added, somewhere.

Carrying only that quiet feeling,
the two of them sank together into sleep on the same mattress,
the sound of rain their lullaby.