Excerpt: Bringing Back the Rain

For more than one hundred years, not a drop of rain fell. The plants felt it first, and withered, and died. Then the soil was scorched into dust that the wind blew away, revealing the ground shriveled and cracked beneath. The animals fell last, sun-struck and thirsting where they stood.
But the people - the people survived. They dug wells and diverted the paths of rivers borne from springs out of the mountains. They cultivated new plants that would grow with sustenance from very little water. On the dusty great desert, the people found a way, and they survived. It was not a life to boast of, a life to be enjoyed or loved, but it was indeed life.
And little by little the memory of rain seeped away, 'til all that remained were half-forgotten fragments of memory splintered into ancient and dying minds.
This was a cursed land, the land without rain.