The Destined Path of Water Chapter 19: Chapter 19: We Choose This

Read chapter 19 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae The gold light was changing. Not going out. Changing deepening, becoming something richer and more concentrated, pulling inward the way light pulls inward just before something shifts. The fish had stilled. The water had stilled. The whole world below the river was holding itself very quietly, the way everything holds itself when something that has not happened before is about to happen. The dragon was watching us. I looked at Rika. She was already looking at me. I had known her for I counted it without meaning to six weeks. Six weeks of flat stones and river paths and good eggs and Thursday at four thirty and silence that did not need filling. Six weeks of learning the way she listened and the way she said things she had not planned to say and the way the corner of her mouth moved before a smile arrived. Six weeks of knowing, in the way I knew things that came from below thinking, that whatever this was it was the realest thing that had happened to me since I was ten years old and something vast and warm caught me falling through autumn air. Six weeks. It felt like longer. It felt like the length of the hollow feeling, like the seven years of it had been pointing here all along and the six weeks were just when I finally arrived. I looked at her face in the gold light. She looked back. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say that the looking did not already say, and saying it would have made it smaller, and I did not want it smaller. I wanted it exactly the size it was, this moment, this room, these two people who had carried the same impossible thing in different villages for seven years and had found each other at a protest with mismatched signs and had sat by a dying river and had gone into the dark water together and had said yes when they did not have to. I wanted all of it exactly the size it was. I wanted to remember it. I knew I would not. Rika He was looking at me the way he had looked at me on the flat stones the day the necklaces had been visible between us. That same quality of seeing not performing seeing, actually doing it, looking at me like I was worth the full attention, like he intended to keep what he found. I thought about nine years old. The river and the dark and the light that came up to meet me. The air bubble and the fish like lanterns and the gold eyes and waking up in an unfamiliar room with a bird stain on the ceiling and a woman with a kind face saying you are awake. Ken making tea too strong and drinking it anyway. Riya at the corner of the lane every morning. The necklace warm against my collarbone through all of it, eight years of mornings, pointing at something I could not name. I thought about the gathering. His crooked sign. I thought about the eggs and the arguing about paying and walking home with the necklace warm in a new way. The flat stones. The afternoon that became evening that became night. His voice talking about the dam proposal while I was falling asleep, familiar already in the way some voices become familiar faster than makes sense. The day the necklaces had been visible between us and neither of us had spoken for a long time and the river had gone on between the stones and that had been enough, that had been completely enough. I looked at him. He looked at me. I thought about what I was about to not remember. I let myself think about it fully, completely, without looking away, the way you look at something you are about to lose and want to take the full measure of before it goes. All of it. The whole six weeks and the seven years before them and the necklace and the dragon and the world below the river and his hand in mine in the dark water and the way he said things he had not planned to say and the way it landed when he did. I took the full measure of it. Then I nodded. Sae She nodded. I nodded back. Not at the dragon. At her. At each other. We had made this decision together and we were marking it together and we did not need anyone else to witn