Soliton

Where the Water Comes From

In the valley they tell it to the children who ask why the river shines at night.

Long ago, or perhaps not yet, a mountain let go of the earth. No one saw it happen. It hangs now above the ocean of stars, point downward, like a seed that chose the sky instead. Why it floats, the story does not say. Mountains explain nothing.

You will not find it by looking. The living are not shown it. No clear midnight, no high pass, no ladder of cloud will give it to your eyes. Only the telling has ever stood where you are standing now.

The finished souls of the valley do not know the way. They are not meant to. She knows it for them.

On still nights, when the moon is worn to a paring, she comes down for the newly finished. The eldest soul there is, the first of us ever to finish, from the time when the world was still learning how to lose things. The matriarch of all the dead. She gathers them from the sleeping houses the way older children gather the younger ones at dusk, and they follow her up into the dark. The valley sleeps through every leaving. Those who swear to keep watch sleep deepest of all.

Somewhere on that climb they stop being shaped like us, and take the shape she has worn since the first walk: great grey walkers, gentle as weather, with ears like sails and a limb that is hand and breath at once. No one in the valley has ever seen such beasts alive. Everyone will see them once, and no one has come back to describe them.

She leads, vast beyond all of them, for she carries the remembering of every soul she has ever brought this way, and remembering is heavy. Behind her the new ones follow, each smaller than the one before, down to the last, hardly bigger than a lantern. Their hides are written all over with light, every kindness a thread, every sorrow a knot, a whole life worked into lace. That is why they glow. A finished life is a bright thing, worn on the outside at last.

Where they step, blue flowers open that no gardener planted, and close again once they have passed. Bones lie among the flowers. Whose bones, the story does not say, and the children who ask are given more soup.

At the end of the path stands a gate made of ribs, the ribcage of something older than the mountain, arched as if it still held a breath. Within it burns a small white sun, no bigger than a rose. What lies beyond, the valley calls the everwater. It is the only name this story keeps.

One by one the walkers pass through. None comes out the other side. She herself does not go through. She never has. She turns at the threshold, every time, and goes back down into the dark for the rest of us. How she found the way the first time, with no one walking ahead of her, the story does not say. Some walks are made alone.

Some say that one day the last soul of all will be her own, and that she will cross the way she came the first time, with no one ahead and no one behind. The grandmothers do not tell that part to the children.

But under the mountain, the spring quickens.

What enters the gate as a walker, the mountain gives back as water. It falls in one long thread of light, down into the ocean of stars, and the ocean receives it in slow rings, the way deep water receives rain. Where it carries them after that, the story grows quiet. The sky is wide, and tells no one its errands.

From below, on such nights, the valley sees only itself: its own windows burning small and gold, and the river running bright between the dark fields. The water is busy tonight, the old ones say, and they bank their fires and go to bed. They do not look up. The night above the valley looks like every other night.

Only this much is allowed. Nothing poured into the sky is kept. When a star falls, they say, it is the ocean brimming over. And the river, the one that shines, runs down from no glacier anyone has ever found.

And if a child asks how the story can know all this, when no living eye has seen it, the answer is the same. Stories are water too. They come down from no glacier anyone has ever found.

So when the children ask who the bones belonged to, and why the mountain floats, and how the first of us found the way, the grandmothers do what grandmothers do. They smile, and stir the pot, and say: drink your water.




PS : I don't know who I owe this DD to, but thank you to everyone who gave it strength and visibility, take care of yourselves! 🐻❤️