When the burning stopped, it was raining again. It wasn't unusual, this rain. It seemed like it'd been falling on me since the burning began, since the beginning of time. Sometimes the rain came hard in icy sharp drops that hurt my face and were useless against the fire that consumed me; other times it was soft, barely a mist on my flesh, chilling my skin while I burned from the inside out. But when the fire stopped, when I realized there was more to life than the burning that consumed my soul, the rain was altogether different. I couldn't feel the chill on my skin. Heck, I couldn't even feel it falling on my face at all. But I could hear it. I could hear it rolling off the leaves of the trees in the canopy above, droplets combining to add heft before gravity pulled them to the ground. I could hear the heavy drops and the light ones hitting the forest floor and I could tell which were which and were they'd landed. I could hear the water hitting my skin, tapping out its unsteady rhythm on my flesh. And while I knew I should be dissatisfied with the water on my face, it didn't bother me one bit. I could barely feel a thing.

For some reason that didn't seem right, and I furrowed my brow in a frown, changing the song of the rain with my movements.

They'd tortured me forever, those tiny drops of water. For eternity I was frozen in place, shrieking, writhing, burning. And for all eternity the rain tapped on my skin, freezing me, hurting me, making me just a little more miserable if being more miserable was a possibility. So why did it feel different now that the fire was out? Why didn't the rain hurt anymore?

I opened my eyes and gazed at the sky through the branches of the trees, watching the rain fall. It only took me a moment to realize I could track the path of the rainfall from the sky to the ground and another to realize each droplet of water contained a tiny rainbow I could see when it emerged from the clouds. The view was breathtaking and I was mesmerized. It was beautiful.

I watched the rain fall until it stopped, forgetting how it'd tortured me before it became hypnotizing. I don't know how long I stayed. It may have been a second, a minute, an hour. All I knew was that I watched until I finished, and then I didn't watch anymore. It was that simple.

I sat up after the rain and took in my surroundings. Everything was green, lush. It was clear it never stopped raining where I was, wherever that happened to be. I could feel a fragment of a thought on the edge of my consciousness, a tiny feeling that told me there were other places, places that weren't so green and drown in water, but I didn't try to capture it. The thought wasn't important. It was green where I was and that was all that mattered.

I was on my feet before I fully realized I wanted to stand and breathed deeply. Air felt strange in my lungs, almost as if it didn't belong, but the movement felt familiar, comfortable, so I breathed in again.

It was on the second breath that I caught the smells. How I knew what they were, I had no idea. Trees, moss, birds, earth – my brain knew them and categorized them effortlessly. It felt like I knew them, like I'd experienced them before. Did I believe in reincarnation? Did I believe in past lives? If I did, I would have believed these things were memories from the past, from a life I'd lived before I came to this place through the fire. If I didn't, it didn't matter. My brain knew these things and that's all that mattered.

I breathed deeply again, raising my face to the sky, and captured a smell that brought back the fire.

I was off, running through the forest, before I'd decided to move. I couldn't tell whether I was moving toward the flame or away from it, but I knew I needed to run. I knew my salvation was wherever I was headed.

My body moved like it was made to run, dodging branches, jumping logs, and gliding through underbrush like it wasn't even there. Running felt amazing, the forest whipping past my face, and I pushed myself faster, more eager every second to get wherever the hell I was going. After half of forever, I finally, finally I saw the thing that went with smell that set my throat on fire. And oh my, was she ever pretty.

She was small, brunette, and I was on her in a second, my teeth tearing into her before I knew what I was going to do. Her blood flowed freely with my bite and filled my mouth. It was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted.

I held her body flush against mine and drank for all I was worth, letting her blood to extinguish the fire in my throat. It worked, her blood, to keep down the flames, and I wished for a wild moment that the sky would bleed. Maybe if it could weep blood instead of water I wouldn't have had to burn for eternity.

Her blood stopped pumping into my mouth long before I'd had enough and I dropped her where I stood, letting her body crumple to the ground. I watched her fall and felt odd for a moment, though I couldn't figure out why. It felt strange to see her in a heap on the forest floor and felt almost wrong to leave her there, but I had no idea what I should do with her. Now that she was empty and the blood was gone I didn't need her any more.

I puzzled over her body for the briefest of moments before breathing in again, feeling my chest expand and my throat burn as I took in air, and smelled something my brain now knew, something it'd learned in this life. Blood. Food. Life.

I was off through the wood again before I knew it.