Chương 80: Rivers of Time

Birth was warmth. Totality splintered, becoming Multitude. Its fathers were wind and cloud, its mothers mountains, themselves children of the grinding vastness of the earth. One trickle, two, three and more, waters rose and fell, making their way back to the sea to be born again. The earth shook often, mountains rose and fell, it died and it was born. Poisoned by the Beyond, cleansed by the sky. Little things, tiny things clung to its shores and drank of its waters, they hid in the caves it carved.

The shaking lessened, four pillars grew, holding up the sky, two lights grew in intensity, golden and fierce, soft and silver. The earth began to settle, water began to carve its beds. Continuity, one life, unhindered by little deaths.. Small things passed in their multitudes, drinking its waters. Among the small things, some grew large. They grew so large that their kin vanished underfoot, and the foundations of the earth itself shook.

Where the Beyond had retreated, titans made new battlefields, all that lay under the heavens were their playthings. The river, Five-Streams-Dreaming-Seas, Milk-of Mountains-Thundering-Eternal, and a hundred other names beside, was remade many times, losing and gaining names as the earth was shaped like clay. Continuity vanished, like a dream. But the big things which had been small things were not content with such mastery. One pillar of four fell. One was scarred, made cold.

Silver stone and molten iron blood rained. The small things died and died, in a land which began to return to fire and stone. The two lights above grew dim with the loss. And the World heaved and woke. The mothers of mountains, the skin and mantle of the earth were rent apart, some died, some drowned. No longer was there one ocean to which all waters returned, one land unseparated. The titans were chastised, reduced or unmade, those that remained forever unable to grow so large as their forebears.

The small things returned, and the waters were again drunk. The river remained in one bed, flowing from mountains to sea. In time, some among the small things grew large again. The small things of this age grew differently though, and never so crushingly huge. The small things grew in number, and some among them built as the titans had, in the earliest part of their age. They gathered on the banks, set twigs and stones across the river's span.

And they gave the river a name in their too fast tongue, and in turn shaped a new true name upon the river. Golden-Wending-Seeks-the-Sea became their name. The small things, humans as it came to know them, carved a thousand, thousand tiny veins, to thread through fields of gold, resplendent as the light above. They spoke, and by shades, the river came to understand. Small-selves formed, which could speak and be spoken too. In these small-selves, the river came to know the small things, the humans.

It understood their rejoicing as the world settled into shape, as the long released winds were given patterns, as the cycle of seasons came to be. They passed quickly, the small things, even the larger ones, flaring bright and guttering out like sparks of lightning. But it came to know and cherish what they built upon its banks. Collections of huts became lodges of earth and wood, became manors of stone. Sun blessed, they shaped the land, rolling grasslands rich and fertile, waters drawn from the river.

In the channels they dug into the earth, the river became aware of its siblings, some once part of a greater self, others new and young. Kin and community, the river learned, and the world slowed down. No longer it, but he. Resplendent, revered, second only to the great light, the sun in the people's esteem. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. But conflict came. It came down from the not-mountains, the great nexus of titans, jutting from the lands center.

A shadow of what came before, repetition of what was lost. Much burned, and though Golden-Wending did not allow the earth itself to char and ruin, many, many small things died again. The sun's children, the river's children lowered their heads rather than fight unto ruin, and all was well for a time. Golden Wending's humans lived on, as they had before, they lived and died and multiplied as they had before, only a little poorer for it.

But something called, young men left in numbers, great numbers and those left behind wept. In time graves came to be dug while men still lived, and little lanterns floated down Golden Wendings' currents in mourning for those who would never return. But to the river, this was distant, the priests spoke, the people offered, but the only power a river has over life and death is in watering the earth, and so even in sadness, his humans never knew hunger. It ended, the calling, with another shudder of the earth.

Death and birth throes in one. Some few returned, and with them they brought a poison. The humans grew bitter, their resentment soaked the land. But the river was no small spirit, driven to hunger by small things, and it flowed on, an age passed and though the scars of the poison never faded, they were only that, scars and not bleeding wounds. Golden Wending brought life, brought ease.

Resplendent ships sailed his span, and villages and manors grew into cities of glass and stone, beautiful and glittering under the sun. His waters filled reservoirs, into deep caverns opened for the purpose and the peoples joy and faith meant that his waters never ran dry, his wilder small-selves grew tame, gentled by levee and ritual, and even the worst of his moods grew sedate.

When war came again, it stayed in the lands around the center, and though many died, his humans returned this time in triumph, erasing the last of old scars. The land of the Golden Fields was rich beyond words, and it was his bounty which made it so. And then it came. Blood of the sun and river turned to poison. Resplendent light and color made gray as ash. It came from the east, beyond the kenning of Golden Wending, and it wore death as its mantle.

He spoke to his priests, whispered warning and danger, but it took so very long for his whole self to speak and be understood. The poison seeped into the earth, turned wind unto miasma, tainted the waters unto blight. Through the channels, the countless channels in the fertile black earth, Golden Wending felt a sister river die. Felt her live but not, a skin worn by the poisonous thing at the center. For the first time since the river had been introduced to such things, Golden Wending knew fear.

For though he was not the simple unthinking thing of the earliest ages, he knew in his core the tread of a titan. It dreamed itself Totality reborn, that which would end the mistake of Multitude. And when the not-dead marched upon his banks, and his humans fled their glittering cities and their art, their homes and foundations, Golden-Wending-Seeks-the Sea for the first and last time turned his self unto war, and the thundering waters descended the mountains to sweep away all who would try to pass.

Thousands of years of work vanished in instants, the water sweeping away the meticulous little channels, the spans and the towers. And still it would not be enough, the poison would seep into him as well, and the land around him died. Golden Wending did struggle unto the last, and when the searing heat of the Purifying Sun's Death, Thirdborn of Day, destroyed him, boiled his waters, flattened his banks, burned his headwaters, it was only a relief for the dying, poisoned river.

Ages have passed, and the small things still live, they huddle now, upon the banks of the waters that remain, bubbling up from the cavern reservoirs and springs built by their ancestors, though all but a few have forgotten that they were once built by human hands. And in the mountains, scoured by heat, trickles a spring, a little spring, disappearing swiftly into the dust and ash. It has died many times, and in many selves, but the river remains.