The Destined Path of Water Chapter 15: Chapter 15: The Night at the River

Read chapter 15 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae It started as an afternoon. That was the thing about that day nothing about it announced itself as anything other than ordinary. Four thirty, the flat stones, the river moving between them the way it always moved, slower than it used to, lower than it should have been. The hills were doing their late afternoon thing, the light going sideways and gold across the tops of them. She was already there when I arrived, coat on, hands around a cup of something she had brought from home, looking at the water with that particular quality of attention she had, the kind that was not passive, that was actually reading something. I sat on my stone and we talked about the latest news on the dam proposal. There had been a document released the previous week, a revised timeline, and I had gone through it line by line the night before and found three things that contradicted the original environmental assessment and I wanted to tell her about all three of them and she wanted to hear about all three of them, which was still something I found quietly remarkable about her the genuine wanting to know. We talked about the document and then about what came next and then about the village response and then about something she had read about similar cases in other valleys and then about something else entirely, I could not remember afterward how we got there, just that the conversation kept finding new rooms to move into and we kept following it. The light changed without us noticing. That was how it happened. Not a decision. Just the afternoon becoming evening the way afternoons do in autumn, faster than you expect, the gold going out of the light and the blue coming in, the hills darkening, the river losing its bright surface and becoming something darker and more internal. I looked up at some point and the sky above the hills was the colour of deep water and the first stars were coming through and I thought: we have been here for hours. She noticed at the same moment. I could tell by the way she looked up. Neither of us moved to leave. Rika The river was wrong. I had been feeling it all afternoon, underneath the conversation, underneath everything that wrongness, the altered rhythm, worse than last week, worse than the week before. The tiredness in it that I had been tracking for two years had deepened into something that felt less like tiredness and more like fading. Like something running low that did not know how to ask for help. The necklace had been warm all afternoon. The specific warm, the alert warm, the one that had been getting more insistent over the past weeks as the river got quieter. When the light went and we did not leave I looked at the water properly for the first time since I had arrived. It was almost still. Not completely. Still moving, still a river, still going where rivers go. But barely. The current that had always been visible from the bank, the way it pushed around the flat stones, the white at the edges where it moved fastest all of it reduced to almost nothing. The water lay between the stones like it was resting. Like it was exhausted. I stood up. He looked at me. I walked to the edge of the bank and crouched down and put my hand in. The cold was there. But the current barely pushed against my palm. And underneath the cold, that tiredness, deeper now than I had ever felt it, not just altered but diminished, the feeling of something that had been very large becoming small in a way that had no good end. "Sae," I said. He was already standing. He came to the edge and crouched beside me and put his hand in too. I watched his face change. Sae I felt it immediately. I had put my hand in this river before, plenty of times, enough to know what it felt like. The cold, the push of the current, the particular aliveness of moving water that you felt in your palm and your wrist. I knew what it was supposed to feel like. This was not that. The water was cold but flat. Quiet in a way that water was not supposed