Ibon is the primal rainmaker of the Lotuko, the first mortal to hold command over the rain. Tradition tells that at the end of his life he did not die as ordinary people do but dissolved and fell to the earth as water, his body returning to the land as rain. The stones he left behind became the rain-cult's most sacred objects, the implements through which the hereditary rain-chiefs continue to summon and restrain the storms. His story anchors the Lotuko institution of rainmaking, a hereditary ritual office of great political weight among the Otuho and their neighbours, and frames the human rainmaker as heir to a founder who himself became the rain.