At first, the stories came as fragments.
Colors before shapes. Notes before songs.
A blue so deep it was almost sound, the pressure of it against her ribs. The scrape of gravel in a riverbed as seasons ground stone into sand. The sour tang of iron in spring floods. She felt them rush through her, impressions slamming against bone and soft tissue, as if she were both riverbank and current, both stone and the thing that wore stone away.
"Too much," Mara gasped, though her mouth was full of water and not-water, voice and not-voice.
The river dimmed, like a lantern hooded by a careful hand. The roar receded to something like breathing.
It did not withdraw entirely. It pulsed, steady as a second heart.
"You are not a cup to be filled," it murmured in her. "You are a channel. Let it move."
"How?" Her question shivered in the dark like a tossed pebble, making ripples she could not see.
"You are already doing it."
The dark softened. It was no longer bottomless; it had texture: silt and memory. Within it, stories began to rise again, slower now, the way the river climbed its banks in patient flood.
She felt the first story like a hand closing around her wrist.
A child, knees muddy, leaning over water. Not Mara. Her skin was a shade darker, her hair cropped close. The child's reflection quivered—two eyes, two nostrils, an open mouth bent around a word Mara did not know. Behind the child, smoke curled from houses with thatched roofs that were not her village's roofs. Men walked past with spears not shaped like her people's spears. The air tasted of a coming storm and unfamiliar cooking fires.
The child dropped a bone into the river, grinning as it bobbed once and spun away. "Take her across," she whispered. "Don't let her walk alone."
Mara followed the bone as it tumbled in murk, brushing against weeds and small silver fish. The bone knew nothing of the child's sister, who lay on a mat with fever. It knew only that it was turning, turning, that water had replaced air in its porous hollows. Still, something in it held the curve of a life, and the river carried that curve onward, attended.
The image dissolved, leaving behind a residue of ache, of fierce childish faith that help could be petitioned, bargained with, trusted.
"Did you…" Mara started.
"No," the river said. "She died at dawn. I carried her afterward. But I carried the asking too."
The next story rose quicker, urgent as a flash flood.
A man with a rope around his wrist, slipping from a shattered boat in black water. This river was wider, its banks lined with trees whose leaves shone like wet copper. The sky was full of smoke and winged shadows. Someone screamed a name that cut off mid-syllable, swallowed by thunder.
Cold knocked the air from the man's lungs. He sank. Light broke apart above him into blond shards and vanished.
Mara felt his panic claw at her throat. His heart thudded against her sternum: a trapped animal. His limbs jerked, heavy as logs. He swallowed once, then again; his body tried to cough, but water rushed in, merciless.
He did not pray. He had never learned the words for asking.
"Did he—"
"Yes," the river replied, simple as gravity. "He became part of a calmer place."
Mara wanted to pull back, but there was nowhere to go that was not water. The man's last muddled thoughts snagged at her like reeds: I should have said goodbye, I should have tied the rope better, I should have—I should have—
She felt them slowing. Dissolving. Not erased, but unknotted.
"You hold so much," she whispered, throat burning with borrowed breathlessness.
"Not hold," the river corrected. "Move. Holding is what hurts you."
Mara tried to imagine moving like that, forever in motion, never keeping anything. Her mind balked at it. Her people told stories to keep them, pinned like bright scraps to the walls of winter huts, recited until they were smooth from handling.
"What is a story that isn't kept?" she asked.
The river answered by showing her.
A woman stood knee-deep at a ford, skirt hitched, calves streaked with mud. Sunlight turned every droplet on her skin into a flicker. She was old, older than Mara's grandmother, with a back that curved like a question mark. Beside her, balanced against a rock, lay a bundle wrapped in cloth.
The bundle moved once, weakly.
"Easy," the woman crooned, fingers tracing patterns in the water. "Easy now. It isn't far."
Mara waited for grief. For the breaking.
Instead, she felt something she could not name at first: a steady, rooted sorrow that did not flail. The old woman unwrapped the bundle. A baby, mouth slack, chest still. Lips blue as bruise.
The water around the woman's knees hummed, the way Mara now heard everything hum. The woman did not ask aloud. She did not bargain. She dipped her hands, cupping and pouring river over the child's still face, over the limp fingers.
"Remember this weight," she whispered. "Remember that I carried it."
Mara felt the baby's weight pass into the current—not the small body, which stayed where the woman laid it, on the bank among the yellow reeds—but the exact heaviness of it, the way grief had mass. She felt the river receive that weight, the way a shoulder receives a leaning head.
"I remember," the river said, its voice overlapping with the woman's until they were one. "I remember and I go on."
The old woman straightened with a groan. She did not scream. She did not shatter. Her knees shook as she stepped out of the river. Mara could feel the place where something had been cut from her, leaving a humming absence.
The story ebbed.
"You… you don't save them," Mara said. It was not an accusation. It was bewilderment wearing the rough hide of anger.
"I am not what you want me to be," the river replied. "I do not choose who falls in, or who is taken by fever, or whose rope snaps. I am path and solvent. I am how things go from one shape to another."
"But you talk," Mara said. "You knew her weight. You knew his thoughts. You knew the child's asking. You knew my name."
"For those who listen," the river said, "I answer. For those who offer their burdens, I bear. For those who fall, I receive. For those who dam me, I press." A faint, wry curl moved through Mara's chest, like low laughter around stones. "You are not the first to ask me to be god."
"What are you, then?" The question had been building inside her since she first put her feet in the current as a child and felt something watchful in the flow. It leapt out now, sharp as a trout's flash.
Silence. The kind that made her skin prickle.
Then: "I am the story of falling," the river said at last. "And the story of getting carried."
Mara thought of the village, of the way they stepped back from what they could not name. Of her father's face, turned away, jaw locked. Of children playing at the edge of the shallows, daring one another to step where the sand slipped away.
"What am I, then?" she whispered.
"You are the one who hears me," the river answered. "And the one I hear."
"That can't be all."
"It is not all," the river agreed. "It is where you must begin."
The darkness around her shifted. It lifted, not entirely, but enough that she felt the hint of air on her cheeks, the awareness of a body again. Her limbs were heavy, as if filled with wet sand. Her lungs stung. Her eyelids burned, grit lodged under them.
"You would know the rest?" the river asked.
Mara wanted to say no. She wanted, suddenly, fiercely, to claw her way back to the certainty of ignorance, to the smallness of a life bounded by fields and the echo of her own steps between huts. A life where the river was just water and not a memory that reached everywhere.
But beneath that wanting, something else had taken root, thin as a seedling and just as relentless.
"Yes," she said.
"Then come higher."
The world tilted. The rush in her ears changed pitch, from the low thunder of deep water to the bright chatter of shallows. Sensation flooded back: cold cloth clinging to her skin, the ache of joints held in one position too long, the sting of pebbles under her knees.
Mara lurched, hands flailing for balance. They met stone, wet and slick, but solid. She coughed, retching river, sunlight striking her eyes like a thrown knife.
She was on the bank. The canyon walls rose around her, red and gold and bone-white, their layers stacked like the pages of a buried book. The river flowed past within arm's reach, unremarkable and immense.
It laughed, very softly, in the back of her throat.
"You have gone nowhere," it said. "You have gone everywhere. Stand up."
Her legs trembled, but they held. She pushed herself upright, swaying, every muscle a complaint. There was mud on her palms, under her nails. Her braid had come half undone, hair hanging in damp ropes around her face.
Somehow, the sky was different. Wider, though it had not changed. The clouds' shadows on the canyon walls seemed like slow hands moving.
"Look," the river murmured.
Mara did. Not just with her eyes. She let the hum she had felt in the dark unfurl again, like a net cast over the world.
She felt the tiny trickles that fed the river from cracks in the stone, each one carrying a speck of some distant hill. She felt the slow seep of water into the roots of scrub trees clinging to the cliffs, the way they drank, the way they whispered up their trunks. She felt a bird dip its beak in, quick and nervous, then fling itself skyward, heart drumming like a drumskin.
She felt, faintly, a village upstream where women stooped with buckets and men cursed at a broken wheel. She felt, further still, snow thick on high peaks, held in elegant silence until the right kind of warmth called it to descend.
All of it moving. All of it being moved.
"It is too much," she said again, but the words had changed. They were wonder now, not protest.
"It is exactly as much as there is," the river replied. "You will learn what to touch and what to let pass. I will teach you, if you keep listening."
"And if I stop?"
The sun caught the water just right then, and the surface became a sheet of hammered light, impossible to look at directly.
"Then the stories will go on without you," the river said. "They have always gone on without you. Without any one of you."
Mara thought of the bone, spinning away. Of the rope slipping from a drowning man's fingers. Of the old woman's cupped hands. Of herself, kneeling at this river as a child, thinking only of coolness on her ankles and the pleasure of throwing stones.
She understood, with a clarity that made her shiver, that she could walk away. She could patch herself closed and pretend that the humming was only her blood.
The river would not drag her back.
The thought should have comforted her. Instead, it felt like standing at the lip of a cliff with the wind at her back, the vastness below both terror and invitation.
"Then I won't stop," she said.
Her voice, this time, did not get lost in the canyon. The river caught it and wove it into the murmur of currents on rock, into the tiny, constant collisions of water with water.
"Good," it said. "Then listen: this is how floods begin. This is how banks break. This is how a path changes its shape. This is how you will break, and how you will not be broken."
The stories rose again, not as separate flashes but braided, a thousand thin threads pulling taut.
Mara closed her eyes—not to shut anything out, but to make more room—and let them in.