The Destined Path of Water Chapter 23: Chapter 23: The Destined Path of Water

Read chapter 23 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Epilogue Sometime later. The spring festival came back to the valley the way things come back when they have been gone long enough that people had stopped expecting them not with announcement, not with ceremony, just with presence, the crowd larger than it had been in years, the drums louder, the hills green in the particular way they were green in spring when the rains had been good and the rivers were full. The rivers were full. Both of them. Running the way they had run before any of it, fast and clear and purposeful, the water bright where the light caught it and dark and deep where it did not. People stood on the banks and some of them wept and some of them did not and all of them poured the water back and let the coins go and said thank you in the way the ritual asked them to say it, and somewhere below the surface something ancient and restored received it and rested and was glad. The festival filled both villages. People came from further than usual, families who had not been in years, older people who remembered and younger ones who had only heard about it and had come to see for themselves. The paths between the villages were busy all day, people moving back and forth, the kind of easy crowd that happens when something good is occurring and everyone knows it. Sae I was on the path between the villages when it happened. I had been to the temple in the morning, performed the ritual, stood at the ghat and let the coin go and watched it turn over in the current until it was gone. My father had been beside me, and Suzume masi and Renchi masa, and the crowd had been the largest I had seen since I was a child, and I had felt the gladness of it, real and uncomplicated, the thing going right that I had wanted to go right. And underneath it, as always, the hollow feeling. It had not gone away. Months now and it had not gone away, had settled into something almost familiar, the new permanent shape of things, the after that had no before attached to it. I had stopped expecting it to resolve. I just carried it the way you carry things that do not have anywhere else to go. The path was busy with festival people. I was moving with the crowd, not going anywhere particular, just moving, when something made me slow. I did not know what. No sound, no sight, nothing I could have pointed to. Just a slowing. My feet making a decision before I made it, stepping to the side of the path, stopping. I stood there. People moved past me in both directions, festival colours, the sound of the drums still audible from the temple above, the river visible through the trees below, running full and loud and bright. I did not know why I had stopped. Then I turned around. Rika I had come with Ken and Hina and Riya and had spent the morning at the river near our village and the afternoon walking the festival path for the first time in years, since before everything, since the last time I had done this with my parents when I was very small. It was different now. Better, in some ways. The crowd was warm and the hills were very green and the rivers were loud on both sides of the path and I had people beside me who loved me and I was glad to be there, genuinely glad, the kind of gladness that does not need anything added to it. And underneath it, as always, the hollow feeling. Specific and patient. The shape of something I had been carrying for months without being able to name it. Hina had gone ahead with Riya and Ken had stopped to speak with someone he knew and I was walking alone for a stretch of path, the crowd moving around me, the drums in the distance, the river through the trees, when something made me stop. I stopped. Stood to the side of the path. I did not know why. The crowd moved past me in both directions. The light came through the trees in long diagonals and lay itself across the path in pieces. The river was loud below, full and running, the sound of something completely alive. I stood there and the hollow feeling was very present, larger th