By 3:42, the sky released everything—a brief, impossible downpour that soaked only the faithful and the forgotten. When dawn rose, the thunder was gone, but the ground steamed with a fragrance no weather service could name.

It was not a storm. It was a chord.

At 3:41, the first drop fell. Not on the cracked fields, but on the forehead of a sleepless elder who had been praying for a sign. The drop was warm. It tasted of cedar and distant seas.