The first story did not arrive as words.
It came as cold.
Not the simple cold of winter air, or a stone left in shade. This was older, full of memory: a glacier's patience, a mountain's slow surrender. It rushed down her arms, her spine, the insides of her bones, the place behind her eyes. It wore the shape of breath she had never taken, and yet it fit the hollows of her throat like a forgotten song.
Mara tried to gasp, but the river was everywhere, filling mouth, lungs, veins. There was no room left for air. Something in her flinched.
The river felt the flinch.
"Do not clutch," it murmured—not in her ears, for those were full of humming dark, but inside the long corridor of her body. "You are not drowning. You are listening."
The cold sharpened, became distinct. It separated into fragments and then into scenes that were not quite images, not quite feelings, but some third thing.
A boy kneeling beside a spring, cupping his hands. He is so small the water nearly pulls him in; he leans forward, hair hanging in his face, the crown of his head catching the first light of a sun he'll never see this close again. When he drinks, he does not know he is drinking himself thinner, pouring all his bright years into the ground below.
A woman standing in a floodplain as the river thickens, rises, unhooks its banks and takes the path it wanted all along. She has a child slung at her hip, another tugging at her skirt, a house behind her that thinks it is safe. She knows better. Her bare feet are already mud to the ankle. She stays until the water reaches the threshold, then the door, then the windows, and she says to the watchers perched on the higher hill: "Now." It is not fear in her voice. It is timing.
A stone—only a stone—rolled and rolled and rolled along the riverbed until its sharp tongue became a round silence, until its hard certainties smoothed into something the water could hold without catching.
The visions moved through her like fish, like light, like the shadows light leaves when it is gone. They stirred silt she'd thought was bedrock. Her heart beat, or the river did, or both.
"Why show me them?" Her thought was slow, thick, the edges blunted by the weight around her. Speaking felt like trying to carve letters into the current with her fingertip.
"Because they are you," said the river. "Because you asked for questions."
The answer shivered through the lattice of her ribs. It felt wrong. It felt right. It felt like standing in a doorway with one foot in the house and one in the dark, and knowing you could not stay halfway forever.
"I am not a boy, or a stone, or—"
"You are not yet what you will be," the river interrupted, with no particular kindness and no particular cruelty. "Do you think you jumped into me only once? Do you think your blood forgot?"
Something inside her chest—the old, waking thing behind her ribs—turned its face toward that voice. Its eye, if it had one, opened a little wider.
Images thickened, then slipped.
She was on a raft made of reeds and bone, drifting between canyon walls so high the sky was only a thread. The current was slow, viscous, like oil. On either side, the rock was etched with lines and circles and spirals, stories carved by hands that did not know her name and never would. Yet when her gaze moved over them, they shifted, turned in their grooves.
Mara.
Her name, spelled out in spirals. Her face, drawn with the blunt certainty of children. Her hands, open, cupped, empty.
She tried to reach out. Her fingers met neither rock nor reed; they met only the sense of reaching, spread through a hundred rivers in a thousand springs.
"You said stories were questions," she thought at the water. "Then what are these?"
"Reminders. Warnings. Wishes. We do not often bother with answers."
The raft bumped against a hidden stone. She stumbled, though she had no feet here, no legs. The motion was conceptual, a stutter in the flow of pictures, a skip in the record. Something fell overboard—she felt the loss like a cold wind in the hollow of her sternum.
"What was that?"
"A certainty," the river said. "You won't need it. It would only slow you."
Her first impulse was to scrabble for it, to dive after the vanishing weight. Clawing at the dark, she found only more dark. It was not like misplacing an object; it was like forgetting the shape of a word mid-sentence and realizing, with a flare of animal panic, that the word was your own.
"I want it back." The thought cracked. There was a child's demand in it: fierce, irrational.
"And if you had it," the river asked, amused, "would you jump at all?"
The question hung between them, and in that hanging she saw it: a narrow bridge of stone over a chasm, herself at ten years old, staring down at the thin rope railings, the space between each board. Her father's hand heavy on her shoulder, his voice saying, Just go, it will hold. The certainty then had been a single, rigid thing. I will not fall. It had carried her to the other side.
But she had fallen anyway, years later, in a different place, for a different reason. Certainty had not prevented that. It had only made the impact more surprising.
"No," she admitted. "If I knew—if I was sure—I probably wouldn't have."
"There." The river's currents purred, pleased. "You are not a stone. Stones are certain. They have to be broken to learn."
The cold inside her softened, warmed. Other stories flowed in: a child in a drought village scraping at dry earth until her fingernails bent back, whispering apologies to ground and sky; a fisherman who refused to speak the river's name and so learned all its moods by silence alone; a city building its walls higher and higher against imagined floods until the people inside forgot what it was they feared.
Mara floated at the center of that strange constellation, stories streaming through her, leaving sediment in their wake. Each one passed and did not pass, gone and not gone, lodged somewhere in the new geography of her.
"This is too much," she thought, certain of that at least. "I'm too small for this."
"Small things carry you, every day," the river replied. "Capillaries, synapses, the tilt of one stone on another. Do you think vastness is made of anything else?"
The darkness brightened, not with light but with proximity, as if the river had drawn its attention narrower. She felt its gaze like pressure on the surface of her skin, though she had none here, only a sense of outline.
"Ask, child."
She almost said I don't know what to ask. The old habit rose, ready to apologize for existing, for needing, for wanting. But the glow at her wrists—no, not on her wrists anymore, in them—flickered, recalled her. For a moment she felt her own weight again, the drag of her hair in actual water, the ache in her shoulders from holding her arms out before the river took her.
She remembered the cliff path above, the village lights like constellations scattered by unsure hands. She remembered the faces turned away when she had tried to speak of what she heard under the bridge at night, of voices in the current, of names that did not belong to anyone they knew.
Something hard and naked in her rose to the surface.
"Why me?" she asked.
Not whispered, not thought with careful diplomacy, but pushed out with all the air she did not have, with all the old and new fear scraping its way up her throat. The question hurt. It lodged in the flow, created an eddy, a pause.
The river did not answer at once.
In the pause, she felt it spread through itself, searching—backwards along time, sideways along tributaries, downward into black silt. It tasted the beds of dry rivers, the places where something had once moved and then stopped. It touched old bargains, older than language, made between beings that did not think of themselves as beings at all, just currents, just tendencies.
"Because you jumped," it said finally.
"That's not an answer," she fired back, surprised by her own boldness.
"It is the only one that does not lie."
The river's voice was different now: less distant, less diffuse. There was something like fatigue in it, and something like relief.
"Others have stood on the bank and listened. Others have fallen in. You chose, Mara. You stepped into a night you knew had no bottom. Did you think that choice was small?"
She thought of the moment at the water's edge, toes gripping mud, the wind at her back, the old waking thing inside her saying now with a voice that was nothing like her own. She had not thought, then. She had only moved.
"I didn't know what I was doing."
"You knew enough." A curl of current, warm as breath, slid along what might be her cheek. "Questions are doors. Stepping through is the only part that matters."
The stories shifted again, reorienting around that. They did not become clearer; they did not suddenly arrange themselves into a map. But she saw, faintly, that they had edges, and that the edges touched.
"Will I—" The next question snagged on fear. She swallowed it, tried again. "What happens to me now?"
The river laughed, but quietly, so as not to bruise her.
"Now?" it said. "Now you learn to ask that question yourself, and to bear not knowing the answer."
Her wrists burned suddenly, bright as if twin suns had risen beneath the skin. Lines shot from them, thin and luminous, branching like tributaries, like nerves, like cracks in ice. They ran up her arms, across her chest, along her throat. Everywhere they went, they left a humming behind, a small, insistent note.
It was not the river's sound. It was hers.
She realized then, with a clarity that almost broke her, that she would not leave the water the same as she had entered. Something had been unhooked, unmoored. The stories were not decorations; they were weight. They would drag on her, shape her, pull her toward things she did not yet know to fear or want.
"Can I stop?" she asked, smaller now.
"Yes," said the river. "You can always stop. You can close your eyes. You can forget as much as flesh allows."
She tasted the truth in that: birds forgetting migration paths when the sky changed; people forgetting the names of their own dead. Forgetting was a kind of mercy. Also a kind of death.
"And if I don't?"
"Then you will not be able to unknow," the river said. "You will hear questions in every silence. You will not walk anywhere alone again."
There it was, the cost, laid out without ornament.
The old thing in her chest opened its eye all the way. If it had hands, it would have taken hers. It did not tell her what to do. It only watched.
Mara hovered in the bottomless dark, filled with voices that were not hers, with futures that had not yet chosen her, with pasts tugging at the edges of her name. She thought of going back to the village, to the same path, the same faces, the same refusal to hear. She imagined trying to sleep with the river murmuring in her blood, unacknowledged.
She did not know how to live with this.
She did not know how to live without it.
The not-knowing stretched out inside her, wide as the river's mouth, as the sky above the canyon walls. It did not break her. It did not comfort her. It simply was.
She did not close her eyes.
"Then don't stop," she said.
The river surged—not around her, but through her—with something like satisfaction, something like sorrow, something like the moment a bank finally gives way and collapse becomes flow.
"Good," it said. "Now: listen."
The stories came, wave after wave, and Mara, questions flickering like lanterns in the currents of her blood, let them.