The Destined Path of Water Chapter 16: Chapter 16: Below

Read chapter 16 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae The light was everywhere. Not blinding. Not harsh. The kind of light that has no single source, that comes from the water itself, from the fish moving through it, from the riverbed below us, from the walls of the world we had entered, soft and gold and ancient, the light of something that had been here long before anyone thought to name it. We were still holding hands. I became aware of the air around us, that impossible bubble, the same one Rika had described from when she was nine, the same one I had felt briefly when I was ten in the valley below the temple. Breathable. Warm at the edges. The water pressed in from every side but did not enter and I did not question it because there was too much else to take in and questioning it felt beside the point. The riverbed below us was not what I had expected. Not mud, not stones the way the surface river had stones. Something softer, darker, that shifted slowly with a current I could not feel, moving in patterns the way clouds move, unhurried and without apparent cause. The fish moved through it, each one trailing its own pale light, and where they moved the patterns shifted and reformed. Rika's hand tightened in mine. I looked where she was looking. Rika He was there. Further down, in the deeper dark where the gold light thinned, a shape that was too large to take in all at once. I had to look at parts of him the long curve of his back, the slow movement of his tail, the way the water around him behaved differently than the water everywhere else, deferential, making room, the way everything makes room for the thing it belongs to. He was smaller than I remembered. I had been nine and everything had seemed large when I was nine, so I had told myself that, had factored it in, had assumed that memory had made him larger than he was. But it was not that. He was smaller. Not small still enormous, still the largest living thing I had ever been near, the scale of him beyond ordinary comparison. But there was less of him than there should have been. I could feel it the way I felt the river's tiredness through the water, not with my eyes exactly but with something underneath sight, that sense of a thing running low. He turned. Slowly. The whole long length of him reorienting in the water, that unhurried movement that was not slow so much as it was simply not rushed, the movement of something that had existed for so long that urgency had become beside the point. His eyes found us. Gold. Exactly as I remembered. Old in a way that had no number attached to it, old the way the hills were old, old the way water was old, old in the way of things that were present before anyone arrived to observe them. He looked at us for a long moment. Then he sent us an image. Sae It arrived the way memory arrives, from inside rather than outside, already present before I knew it was coming. Two rivers. The valley from above, the way I had seen it falling from the temple ghat when I was ten, except larger, clearer, the whole watershed visible at once the two rivers running through the hills, branching and joining and branching again, the village around them, the temple above, the whole system alive and moving, bright with something that was not just water. Then the same image again. Dimmer. The rivers thinner. The bright thing in them reduced. Then dimmer again. The image faded and I was back in the gold light with Rika's hand in mine and the dragon's gold eyes on us, patient and ancient and completely without accusation. "You came back," he said. His voice was not a sound exactly. It arrived in my chest before it arrived in my ears, felt before heard, the way the lowest notes of a drum feel in your ribcage. But it was words. Clear and unhurried, the same quality as his movement, as his eyes. "We both came back," Rika said beside me. He looked at her. Something in his expression if you could call it an expression, that ancient face, those gold eyes shifted. The way a light shifts when a c