Puberty arrived in Drizzle the same way mold arrived in bread—gradually, unwelcome, and with an odor no one could quite place. Derrin, who had no official birthday and no real sense of calendar time, didn’t recognize the transition for what it was. His voice cracked in strange new places, his limbs lengthened without consulting the rest of his body, and he began experiencing intense emotions about clouds, forgotten things, and metaphysical silence. He assumed this was what all prophets felt, though he’d never met one and suspected the job title wasn’t taken seriously in towns with under thirty people and a sacred puddle.

  Though barely tolerated before, Derrin’s presence now began to provoke a new and uneasy energy among the villagers. His rituals had grown stranger—longer, louder, and more elaborate. If the earlier years had been play-acting at reverence, these were something else entirely. He no longer whispered vague prayers into the wind with a crayon drawing in his hand; now he rose with the fog, prayed with intensity, and tried to build the divine from spare parts and barnyard scraps.

  The altar in the barn was his crowning achievement, or would have been, had it not immediately begun to collapse under its own absurdity. Constructed from chicken bones, melted wax, driftwood, and what he believed was sacred hay (it wasn’t), the structure resembled the halfway point between a failed sculpture and a barn fire waiting to happen. The chickens were understandably offended by the desecration of their ancestors. Several took to pecking near the altar with pointed determination, as if exorcising it from the floor one cluck at a time.

  Still, Derrin prayed beside it every morning and night. His rituals were improvised from fragments of liturgy pulled from soggy books and half-legible scrolls, combined with wild guesses and the occasional insult to his own literacy. He lit stubs of candles found in the temple ruins and murmured to the shadows, hoping they might murmur back. He even placed Morinxandar—the still-unbitten muffin and spiritual advisor of dubious qualifications—atop the altar each time, perched like a saint of silence and dry crumbs.

  What the prayers lacked in clarity, they made up for in sheer volume. Derrin had decided that perhaps the gods required auditory commitment. When words failed him, which was often, he sang instead. The melodies were rarely consistent and usually off-key, composed in the moment with enthusiasm rather than intention. Morinxandar listened dutifully, or at least endured with stoic quiet. Had the muffin possessed eyebrows, it likely would have furrowed them often.

  By the time he turned what he guessed was twelve, Derrin came to a startling theological insight: perhaps Voherin hadn’t responded because he hadn’t received the messages. After all, Drizzle lacked any real postal system, unless one counted the angry geese and a notice board that hadn’t been updated since the plague of fainting pigs. Maybe Voherin wasn’t indifferent—just unreachable.

  Thus began the letter campaign.

  The first letter, written with charcoal on scrap parchment, began with "Dear Voherin (I hope I spelled that right—there are at least three versions in the scrolls)" and included a series of updates on his latest altar repairs, a personal anecdote about losing a sock in the river, and a button he thought resembled a planet. The letter was then tied to a goat. The goat, after chewing on it briefly, wandered in a circle and laid down.

  Undeterred, Derrin tried again. He buried letters beneath specific rocks he believed to be spiritually resonant. He stuffed others into jars and floated them downstream. One was tied to the leg of a particularly judgmental duck, who was last seen waddling toward the main road and scowling at passing caravans. Another was launched from the roof using a slingshot he dubbed "The Divine Correspondence Deliverer." That one knocked over a flowerpot and was never recovered.

  Each missive was long, rambling, and entirely heartfelt. Some included poorly sketched diagrams of potential temples. Others listed minor complaints, like the mold in his right boot, or existential questions such as “Do you prefer silence because you’re sad or because everything else is just so loud?” More than a few ended with, “I hope I’m doing this right. Please let me know. Or don’t. I understand if you're tired.”

  The villagers, who had once been mildly baffled by Derrin’s behavior, now reached the edge of open concern. Whispers passed between them like spoons through soup. People who hadn’t spoken of Derrin in months suddenly remembered he existed, and remembered it with apprehension. Some blamed the decline in cheese quality on his rituals. Others claimed the temple’s bell had begun to ring at odd hours—possibly in protest.

  By now, the food offerings left for him, such as they were, had shrunk to cold crusts, bruised fruit, and the occasional half-potato. No one said it aloud, but most agreed it was best not to encourage him further. Still, he didn’t seem to notice. Or perhaps he simply refused to care.

  Derrin was too busy. He had candles to light, bones to rearrange, letters to write, ducks to bribe, and a god to reach. Though no divine sign had yet come, and the system remained conspicuously silent, Derrin found strength in his persistence. To him, devotion meant continuing—even when the altar collapsed, even when the scrolls smeared into gibberish, even when no one wrote back. Especially then.

  Somewhere deep in his heart, in a quiet corner he didn’t visit too often, he carried a hope that one day, he might receive a message in return. Not a sign, not a miracle—just something small. A whisper. A feeling. A flicker. Anything. Until then, he had Morinxandar, a crumbling altar, a barn that leaked at all the wrong angles, and the steadfast certainty that he was going to outlast the silence, even if it took the rest of his life.

  ****

  By anyone’s best guess—including Derrin’s own—he had recently turned fourteen. Or close enough that the baker’s son asked him why he looked taller and the temple goat tried to headbutt him slightly more respectfully than usual. The truth was, no one actually knew when Derrin was born, not even Derrin, and the village of Drizzle wasn’t known for recordkeeping. Its only ledger had once been used to squash a particularly daring spider and hadn’t recovered since.

  But Derrin knew one thing for certain: he was ready. He’d been writing letters, building altars, and launching theological inquiries into rivers, geese, and one spectacularly unlucky squirrel for nearly four years. His prayers had become more articulate—though still wildly theologically unsound—and he’d almost mastered reading. He had learned the names of dozens of gods, even the obscure ones with terrible portfolios like “God of Excessive Dust” and “Patron of Mild Regret.” None had replied.

  Except maybe Voherin. Who also hadn’t replied. But hadn’t smited him either. Which, in Drizzle, practically qualified as divine approval. And so Derrin declared a spiritual escalation. A final, desperate act of holy persistence.

  He called it: The Great Vigil of Unbroken Petition.

  Which, when translated into more practical terms, meant: stay awake for three straight days praying, chanting, singing, and generally flinging devotion skyward like wet spaghetti in hopes that something, somewhere, would finally stick. The vigil began with optimism and a poorly tuned lute he’d borrowed from the back of the temple—without permission, but with what he insisted was divine purpose. Standing atop his weather-warped altar platform (which had once been a goat-feeding trough), he raised his arms dramatically.

  “Voherin the Begrudged,” he intoned, “Watcher of Dust, Patron of Obscurity, Lord of That Which Is Generally Ignored—your servant Derrin, son of No One in Particular, stands before you. Or rather, on something before you. And sings this prayer with mouth and muffin alike!”

  He held Morinxandar aloft in one hand like a sacred relic. The muffin, slightly crumbier than usual and speckled with lint, took its moment in the drizzle-dimmed light with the gravity of a crumbling biscuit that had seen too much.

  Then Derrin launched into his first hymn. It was titled “O Lord of Long Pauses and Strange Silences,” and consisted of a single melody repeated four hundred times in various wrong keys. Around verse eleven, a nearby pigeon fell off the temple roof. By midday of the first day, a small crowd of villagers had gathered, standing just far enough away to pretend they weren’t watching. Greela Cobb, flour-smudged and frowning, leaned on her broom as she observed him.

  “He’ll drop by sunrise,” she muttered, chewing thoughtfully on what might have been a cinnamon stick or possibly just a stick.

  “Nah,” said Old Varn from beside her. “Boy’s got that twitchy look. He’ll last till midday tomorrow. Puts him just past the priest’s record from the Great Sobriety Fast.”

  There was a grunt of general agreement, followed by several quiet wagers. The economy of Drizzle had always leaned heavily on rain, goats, and speculative collapse. That night, as drizzle turned to determined mist, Derrin paced in front of the altar, whispering backwards prayers from memory.

  “...thgir eb sgniht lla yam, tsuj wonk ot hguone si sihT...”

  He paused, brow furrowed. “Morin, did I just wish for everything to be left-handed?”

  From his perch beside a wax-smeared candle, Morinxandar offered his usual stoic silence. Derrin stared at the muffin, sighed, then sat cross-legged on the muddy ground.

  “You know, I thought this would feel more… transcendent. So far it’s just cold.”

  Morinxandar, crumbling slightly at the edges, slid half an inch down the stone from accumulated damp. Derrin reached out, righted him gently, and nodded.

  “Yeah, you’re right. It’s probably part of the trial.”

  By the end of day two, his eyes were red-rimmed, and he was mostly communicating in mutters and devotional fragments. His songs became slower, looser, drifting into long humming sessions punctuated by the occasional phrase like “You there?” or “Still trying.” One goose wandered into the vigil circle during the second night, stared at him for twenty minutes, then sat down beside him in what may have been sympathy or anticipation of a collapse.

  Villagers continued their betting from a safe distance. Someone passed around stale biscuits. When asked if this was disrespectful to the boy's efforts, Greela responded, “Well, he’s praying for divine attention, right? What better way to test the gods than snacks during sacred idiocy?”

  On the morning of the third day, the vigil had ceased to be performative and become something else entirely. Derrin stood barefoot in the muddy square, arms slack at his sides, eyes half-closed. His voice rasped like dry parchment as he murmured his petitions—not grand anymore, but plain. Honest.

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  “I don’t even care if you talk. Just… blink. Nudge a goat. Anything. If you’re out there and you’ve been waiting for the right moment, this is probably it. Unless you’re very into irony. In which case… respect.”

  He blinked hard, wobbled, and caught himself on the altar. Morinxandar watched from atop it like a baked, crumbling crown. He made it nearly to sunset before his legs finally gave out. He collapsed sideways, not dramatically, just… folded like laundry that had given up. The villagers, caught somewhere between impressed and disturbed, drifted off slowly, bets settled, curiosity spent.

  No fire fell.

  No lightning struck.

  No gods boomed from the heavens.

  There was just the usual damp, the soft patter of drizzle on stone, and the faint snore of a boy who had quite literally loved a god into the dirt. But far, far above, beyond mortal comprehension and beneath divine bureaucracy, something stirred. Something very old, very tired, and very annoyed. A system node blinked awake for the first time in decades.

  A cursor flickered.

  And somewhere—just for a moment—the smell of burnt cinnamon and damp parchment hung in the air. The world did not end when Derrin collapsed beside his altar, though by the look on his face, he had been hoping for something at least mildly apocalyptic. Perhaps a small tremor. A celestial whisper. A bird-shaped miracle. Something.

  Instead, he woke in the mud some hours later with his legs asleep, his lips cracked, and Morinxandar half-buried under a layer of holy compost. The muffled light of early morning filtered through the low clouds like a lantern running out of spite, and the Temple of Dampened Spirits loomed in the distance, no more lively than it had ever pretended to be.

  Groaning softly, Derrin sat up, rubbed his head, and whispered, “Well, Morin... either we failed spectacularly or I accidentally summoned the god of migraines.”

  He retrieved the muffin with reverence and mild apology, brushing moss from its sacred nooks. Morinxandar did not respond, which Derrin took as spiritual neutrality. He stood, bones aching and soul just shy of crumbling, and opened his mouth to resume the final stanza of the sixty-sixth verse of “O Lord of Awkward Silences, Hear My Wheeze.” He had made it halfway through the first line when it happened.

  The sky glitched.

  Not in a metaphorical, poetic sense. No, the actual sky—the firmament, the heavens, the whole twinkling mess—hiccupped. The stars jolted like a broken marionette. Clouds staggered sideways. A breeze reversed course, changed its mind, then stopped entirely.

  And then the voice came.

  Low.

  Dry.

  Cosmic.

  Audibly done with everything.

  “FINE. HERE. TAKE SOME POWER. JUST STOP.”

  There was no thunderclap. No radiant light. No soaring music.

  Just a cough. A system cough. Like a very old machine booting up after someone kicked it and said, “Try now.” The air shimmered. A soft digital wheeze slunk through the ether. And then, in the space just behind Derrin’s eyes, text scrolled across existence:

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  > System Trigger Event:

  > Divine Attention: [Passive Event] Triggered!

  > Voherin the Begrudged has acknowledged your existence.

  > Divine Boon Granted: [Annoyance Slot – Tier 0]

  > You have acquired [Cleric: Level 1]

  > Note: Voherin is watching you. Begrudgingly.

  The popup lingered just long enough to be legible, then flickered as though embarrassed by its own enthusiasm. Somewhere deep in the background of the world, a barely audible chime dinged and immediately apologized. Derrin gasped. He clutched Morinxandar to his chest like the holy muffin he was and fell to his knees in the wet earth, which accepted him with a familiar squish. His lips trembled as he looked to the sky, arms spread in unearned triumph.

  “I knew it!” he croaked. “I knew if I just kept asking, kept praying, kept—”

  The world rumbled again.

  “I SAID SHUT UP.”

  It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. The words were embedded directly into the air like mold in bread—deep, pervasive, and unmistakably personal. And with that, silence descended.

  Not metaphorical silence.

  Not poetic stillness.

  Literal, magical, divine silence.

  A wide bubble of soundlessness expanded from the Temple of Dampened Spirits like an unimpressed shrug. Birds opened their beaks in protest but made no sound. The temple goat bleated silently, then gave a vaguely approving nod as if to say, finally.

  Derrin blinked. He clapped his hands together. Nothing. He stomped. Still nothing. He mouthed something desperately toward Morinxandar—possibly “He noticed us!” or “Help, I’m cursed again!”—but no sound followed. The silence spell was absolute. Even his heartbeat sounded like it had taken the rest of the day off. Derrin slumped against the altar. His expression drifted between elation and confusion, the kind of look typically reserved for people being handed a cake and then immediately slapped with it. He pulled Morinxandar close, stared at the sky—now settled back into its usual drizzle—and mouthed the words very slowly, We did it.

  The muffin offered no reply. But somehow, in that dense, holy hush, Derrin believed it had finally started listening. The silence lasted long enough for Derrin to grow worried that maybe he’d gone deaf from holiness. He tried humming, clapping, even accidentally stubbing his toe on the altar, but the world remained eerily soundless, like reality had been wrapped in wool and politely asked to go away. The system message had faded from his vision, but he could still feel it pulsing faintly in the back of his mind, like a hungover oracle.

  “Annoyance Slot – Tier Zero,” he mouthed, pacing in a slow circle. “That sounds like a title, right? Like I’ve been officially appointed as a… divinely sanctioned irritant? That’s a thing, isn’t it?”

  He glanced at Morinxandar for support. The muffin was shedding crumbs again. Derrin dropped to his knees and studied them with reverence, drawing shapes in the dirt around the crumbles.

  “These… look like runes. Or a map. Or no, wait—don’t move—I think that one’s a goat.”

  Morinxandar, balanced precariously on the corner of the altar, remained stoically unhelpful. Derrin squinted up at the sky. “System?” he asked carefully. “Oh, blessed interface of divine wisdom and minor tutorials, what exactly is the Annoyance Slot?”

  The clouds shifted slightly. A breeze flinched. Then:

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  > Invalid query.

  > Define: “Annoyance Slot” – [Tier 0]

  > Error: User inquiry exceeds allowed enthusiasm threshold.

  > Processing…

  > …Stop poking me.

  “Well that was rude,” Derrin said aloud, still whispering thanks under his breath. “I’m trying to learn here.”

  Another message flickered:

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  > Tip: Cleric designation confirmed.

  > Usage of abilities is not advised until emotional maturity improves.

  > You have been warned.

  “Maturity?” Derrin scoffed, turning to Morinxandar and mouthed. “I fasted for three days and sang myself hoarse in six different keys. If that’s not spiritual growth, I don’t know what is.”

  The muffin tilted. A crumb fell. Derrin nodded solemnly. “Exactly. Let the signs fall where they may.” He said silently.

  That’s when the silence bubble expanded. It started as a ripple around the temple grounds, slowly rolling outward like someone had tossed a particularly passive-aggressive rock into the air itself. The trees quieted. The birds stopped mid-chirp. A passing breeze attempted to make a noise and then gave up halfway through a rustle.

  Then it hit the village.

  Greela Cobb, mid-grumble about someone rearranging her stale loaf display, opened her mouth to curse and found only breath. Her eyes went wide. She pointed at her throat, then at the temple, then at a loaf of bread as if that was to blame.

  Old Varn dropped his hammer. It hit the ground with an impressive amount of silence. His lips moved in what might have been “I told you so,” but the only sound was the dull thud of a distant spiritual sigh—a cosmic, contented exhale.

  The villagers, collectively, began to panic as quietly as possible. This involved wild gesturing, throwing of objects (mostly ineffective bread), and one man attempting to mime a very complex conspiracy involving Derrin, a duck, and old gods waking up too early. Derrin, meanwhile, was still at the altar, twirling joyfully beneath the hush.

  “It’s working!” he shouted, or at least tried to. The silence swallowed it whole.

  That’s when he sneezed.

  Hard. Loud. Gloriously unsanctioned.

  And the magic responded like a startled cat.

  A sudden warmth surged through his chest, down his arms, into his fingertips. His vision blurred, twisted, and in the corner of his sight a divine notification appeared, flickering like an exasperated eyelid:

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  > Spell Activated: Grumble of Healing

  > Target: ????

  > Modifier: +1d8 (and an audible sigh)

  A soft boomph echoed—not aloud, but inside the soul. Something nearby bleated. A goat, previously minding its own business near the puddle shrine, reared back and exploded in a burst of shimmering health energy. It levitated six inches off the ground, bleated in triumphant confusion, and sprinted across the square, now glowing faintly and inexplicably wearing a garland of turnip blossoms.

  Derrin blinked, wiped his nose, and looked at his hands. “...Did I just heal a goat into sainthood?” He tried to say into the silence. Morinxandar did not object.

  Ecstatic, and utterly unconcerned about how he might be smited for the unauthorized goat enhancement, Derrin turned toward the village well. His eyes shone with zeal. His hair, damp from drizzle and destiny, stuck out in six different directions. He raised both hands high, wobbling slightly from exhaustion, and whispered the sacred phrase:

  “Bless this mess.” He touched the stone rim of the well.

  The world hiccupped.

  Water surged up—not gently, not with grace, but as if someone had flipped the setting from “divine mercy” to “vengeful plumbing.” A great belch of lukewarm, slightly foamy liquid erupted skyward, geysering straight into the center of Drizzle.

  The smell hit first. Onions. Musty. Blessed.

  Then the foam.

  It cascaded over the square, knocked over chairs, washed out laundry, and sent several ducks spinning in slow, confused spirals. The villagers, soaked and soundless, stared with the wide-eyed horror of people who had just watched a miracle go deeply wrong. Derrin stood in the middle of it all, dripping with foam and triumph, laughing as if the world had just told him its greatest secret.

  “I knew you were real,” he whispered to the sky, arms outstretched, soaked to the bone, beaming through a veil of onion-scented glory.

  The system pinged softly.

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  > Achievement Unlocked: Blessed Mess

  > Congratulations! You have mildly inconvenienced your deity.

  > Voherin’s Reaction: “...You were quieter when you were desperate.”

  And with that, the foam kept foaming. The village kept silently seething. The goat glowed faintly in the distance. And Derrin, newest, and only, cleric of Voherin the Begrudged, stood ankle-deep in divine plumbing, utterly convinced he had finally found his purpose.

  ****

  The goat, formerly known as “Muncher” and known to some as “That One That Ate My Laundry,” was not, by any historical measure, holy. It had once broken into the temple’s vegetable shed and consumed half a bag of communion onions, then vomited them in a perfect circle around the altar. No one had thought much of it since.

  But on the day of Derrin’s sneeze-induced miracle, Muncher changed.

  After the accidental casting of Grumble of Healing, the goat began to exhibit several inexplicable traits. It glowed faintly at dusk. It began staring meaningfully at people—really staring, as if evaluating their moral standing. It refused to eat turnips, which in Drizzle was considered the surest sign of divine transformation.

  Soon, locals began leaving offerings near it. Not large ones—mostly pebbles, questionable flowers, and once a particularly smooth potato—but still, it was something. Children whispered stories about how the goat had once blessed a well-worn pair of socks simply by walking across them, rendering them forever dry, if slightly itchy.

  By the following week, a shrine had been constructed in the corner of the square. It was made from two broken crates, a nail shaped like a fish, and one of Derrin’s old drawings of a smiling sun with goat horns. The creature lay there most afternoons, basking in its newfound reverence, blinking with deep cosmic patience, and occasionally sneezing glitter.

  Whether the goat was truly divine or just caught in the divine crossfire remained hotly debated.

  But in Drizzle, that counted as theology.