The Destined Path of Water Chapter 10: Chapter 10: The River is Different

Read chapter 10 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Rika | Age 15 I noticed it the way you notice something that has been changing slowly for a long time, not all at once, but in a moment when everything that had been accumulating quietly suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. I was sitting on the bank after school, shoes off, feet not quite in the water, and I looked at the river and thought: it is slower than it was. Not dramatically slower. Not stopped. But slower in the way that a person's breathing changes when something is wrong, that small alteration in rhythm that you would not catch if you were not paying attention but that is unmistakable once you see it. The water moved between the stones with less urgency than I remembered. The sound of it was lower, the pitch changed, less of that bright rushing quality and more of something heavier, like the river was working harder to do the same thing. I put my hand in. The cold of it was the same. The current pushed against my palm the way it always had, reading my hand the way water reads everything it touches. But underneath the familiar cold there was something else, something I felt more than identified, a kind of tiredness in it that had not been there before. I sat with my hand in the water for a long time. The necklace was doing the thing it did sometimes, that low insistent pulling, more direction than feeling, pointing at something I still did not have a name for after six years of carrying it. Today it was stronger than usual. Today it felt almost urgent. I went home and looked it up. It did not take long. The dam project was not hidden, it was just in the kind of places you did not look unless you were looking- government websites, regional news articles, a proposal document that had been sitting in circulation long enough to have gathered responses and counter-responses and then a long administrative silence. I read through what I could find with the focused attention I used for things that mattered. A reservoir. A dam across the upper valley. Water management and electricity generation and development for the region. The survey had already been done. The proposal was past the discussion stage and into something that sounded more like a plan. I read about what happened to rivers downstream of dams. I read about flow reduction and sedimentation and how a river's character changed when you interrupted it, how the things that lived in it and around it and depended on its particular rhythms adjusted or did not adjust. I read about other rivers in other places that had been dammed and what those rivers looked like now. I closed the laptop and sat in the quiet of my room. The bird stain on the ceiling looked back at me. After six years I knew every edge of it, the way the wings tilted slightly left, the roundness of the body, the small companion shape near the window that was definitely a fish if you looked at it in morning light and possibly a leaf if you looked at it in the evening. I had spent a lot of time looking at this ceiling. A lot of things had become clear to me while looking at it. This felt like one of those moments. The dragon lived in the rivers. Not near them, not beside them - in them, the way the hills lived in the earth, the same thing in a different form. I had read that in the old books in the school library two years ago and it had settled into me the way true things settled, without argument. And if the rivers changed, if they slowed, if they were redirected, if their character was altered by something upstream, then whatever he was made of changed too. The waterfall at the hill temple. I had heard people mention it in passing, older people, the ones who remembered it from decades ago and compared it now to then. Thinner, they said. Not what it was. I had not thought much about it before. I thought about it now. I went back to the river the next day and the day after that. Riya came with me on the second day and sat beside me and looked at the water with the patient attention she gave to things she