The Destined Path of Water Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Is There Anything We Can Do

Read chapter 18 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae He did not answer for a long time. The water moved around us, that slow patient movement, and the fish drifted through their patterns and the gold light held steady and the dragon looked at us with those ancient eyes and said nothing. Not evasively. Just taking the full weight of the question before deciding what to do with it. Then he said, "Go back." "No," I said. He looked at me. Not surprised. Not angry. Just looking, with the particular quality of something very old looking at something very young and recognising in it something it did not expect. "There is nothing" he began. "Is there or isn't there," Rika said beside me. Her voice was quiet and completely certain. "That is all we are asking. Yes or no." He was silent again. The current pressed upward, gently, that same patient pressure. We did not move. Rika I had not planned what I was going to say. I never planned these things. They arrived when they arrived and I said them and found out if they were right by how they felt once they were out. This felt right. I looked at him at this vast ancient tired thing that had saved me when I was nine years old, that had held me in a bubble of air at the bottom of a river and given me a necklace and sent me to people who would love me, that had never once in eight years asked for anything in return, that was now standing at the edge of ceasing to exist and was trying to send us away so we would not have to watch it And I felt something that was beyond gratitude and beyond grief, something that had no clean name, something that simply said: no. Not without trying. Not without asking. "You saved me," I said. "When I was nine. You did not have to. I was not your responsibility. You just did it. Because you could." He looked at me. Those gold eyes. "This is not the same," he said. Gently. "It is exactly the same," I said. "You saw someone who needed help and you helped them. That is what we are doing." "What you are doing," he said, "and what I did are not comparable. What I did cost me nothing." "And what we are asking to do," Sae said, "is our choice to make. Not yours." The dragon was quiet. The water moved. Sae He sent us an image. Not the valley this time. Not the rivers. Just darkness. Not frightening darkness, not the darkness of bad things, just the darkness of absence. Of something that had been present no longer being present. Of a space where something used to be. I understood what he was showing us. This was what it would cost. Whatever it was he had not said yet, had not named it, was still trying not to name it this was the shape of the cost. An absence. Something gone that would not come back. "Show us what it is," I said. "Not what it costs. What it is. What we would have to do." He looked at me for a long time. "Please," Rika said. The word landed in the water and the water held it and the dragon closed his eyes, which I had not seen him do before, and when he opened them again something in them had shifted, some last resistance considering whether to remain. "There is a way," he said finally. Slowly. Like each word cost him something. "The rivers can be restored. The faith can be not rebuilt, that takes generations but anchored. Reminded of itself. There is something that can be given back to the water that would sustain it. That would sustain me. Long enough for the dam to fail. Long enough for the valley to remember." "What," I said. He looked at us. Both of us, together, one long look. "You," he said. "What you carry. The memory of this. The knowing. Everything that has been yours since the night each of you came to the water." He paused. "It would go back into the river. The faith, the connection, the seven years of coming back all of it returned to the water that gave it. And the river would run again." The gold light was very still. "And us," Rika said. Not a question exactly. More like completing the sentence she already knew the end of. "You would not remember," he said. "Any of it.