The Destined Path of Water Chapter 7: Chapter 7: The Festival Without Magic

Read chapter 7 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae | Age 13 I was still excited. That part had not changed. I woke up on festival morning the same way I always had, too early, already dressed before my mother called me, eating faster than necessary, out the gate before my father had finished his tea. Three years had not made me less excited. If anything being thirteen and still this excited about a festival felt like a personal commitment I had made and intended to keep. The difference was that now the excitement had a second layer underneath it, something older and quieter that had not been there when I was ten, a kind of searching quality that ran alongside the joy of the day like a river running parallel to a road, never quite meeting it. I was looking for him again. I was always looking. The road to the temple felt familiar in my bones now, every curve of it, every place where the trees thickened and the light changed, the exact spot where the waterfall first became visible through the hills. I had driven it enough times with my father that I could close my eyes on certain stretches and know exactly where we were by the quality of the air coming through the window. I did not close my eyes this time. I watched. The waterfall was thinner than last year. I noticed it immediately, the way you notice when something you have memorised has been changed without your permission. Still white, still catching the light, still beautiful, but less of it, the volume turned down slightly, the sound of it reaching us later than usual as we drove the last stretch to the temple. I did not say anything about it to my father. The crowd at the temple was different too, though this one was harder to name. Not smaller exactly, but with a different feeling to it, like a room where the furniture has been rearranged and you cannot immediately identify what has moved, only that something has. The older people were there as they always were, the women with their brass plates, the priests moving through with purpose. But there were gaps where there had not been gaps before, spaces in the crowd where families should have been standing. I heard the word dam for the first time that day. Two men talking near the bottom of the stairs, not quietly, the way people talk when they think the important part of the conversation happened already and this is just the aftermath. Something about a survey. Something about the river and a government project and what it would mean for the valley. I slowed down on the stairs to listen and my father put a hand on my shoulder to keep me moving and I went but I kept looking back at the two men until the crowd closed between us. The ritual felt different knowing the waterfall was thinner. I filled the vessel. I walked to the edge. I poured the water back slowly, watching it join the river, and I held the copper coin for a moment before I let it go. This year I did not just feel the gratitude the ritual was supposed to carry. I felt something else alongside it, something more like an apology. Like I was saying thank you and also I am sorry and also please still be there in roughly the same gesture. The coin hit the water and was gone. I stood at the edge of the ghat for a long time after. The valley was below me the same way it had always been below me, green and enormous, the river at the bottom catching the light. I looked at it and I thought about the fall three years ago, the way the air had rushed past, the way fear had simply not arrived. I thought about the warmth beneath me and the slow breathing and the colour of those scales, deep watery blue, every shade of it at once. And then, I thought: I could jump again. I looked down at the valley. The railing was right there. Same railing, same cold metal, same height. Last time it had been an accident, the crowd surging, no choice in the matter. But I knew now what was down there. I knew what had caught me. If I climbed over the railing and dropped myself off the edge of the ghat deliberately, in full knowledge of what I