“Mm.”
“The waterfall. You said you’d been there before. Alone. When it was a quieter time.” I glanced up at him. “What changed?”
“Everything.” He stared down at me with a look that could only be described as reverence on his face. “You changed everything.”
I bit my lip. “It’s the same for me.”
“Neither of us is alone anymore, my heart.” He took my hand in his as we walked side by side.
“Never alone again.”
Berry chittered their agreement.
And we continued our journey to the falls, and whatever we’d find at the end of our quest.
10
The Magic of the Falls
Guruk
The falls, according to the elders, had been a sacred gathering space for the different species of Havenlore. Symbolizing peace and tranquility, it had been written about with awe in our texts. In modern days, it was considered with equal respect, but now as a pilgrimage of sorts, instead of an assembly spot. A place to be journeyed to alone or in small parties, as Sammy and I now did.
As the path descended toward the basin, a low, constant roar built. A vibration lit the air, buzzed in the ground underfoot, and stirred in one’s chest. Sammy’s grip on my hand tightened, not from fear as on the bridge. But from anticipation.
The trees thinned. The path curved around a last stand of old birches, their white bark gleaming in the late afternoon light. The canopy opened, and the falls appeared before us.
Sammy stopped, her mouth dropping open. I watched her with a grin.
The falls dropped from the ridge in a single, unbroken curtain from crest to pool, wide enough that the spray reached us where we stood at the path’s end. The water caught the late sun at an angle that broke it into light. Not a rainbow exactly, more like the suggestion of every color at once, shifting as the water moved, constant and never the same twice. The pool below was deep and clear, the basin worn smooth by years beyond counting, and at its edges where the water met the rock face, the light had a quality I had noticed and not named until now.
Amethyst. Just at the edges. Easy to attribute to refraction, to the mineral content of the stone.
I looked at it for a moment. Filed it away. Said nothing.
“Guruk,” Sammy breathed my name, and it stirred my blood.
Through a tight jaw, I said, “Yes?”
“This is—” She turned to look at me, spray catching in her hair. I had to keep my expression composed. She was radiant beyond words in her unguarded openness. “There aren’t words.”
“No,” I agreed, though she spoke of the falls, and I spoke of her. “There aren't.”
She looked back at the falls, and I watched her for a moment longer as time stood still.
I had been here once before.
It was not a memory I had shared with many people, as it did not have the shape of a story that was easily digestible. No event at its center, no resolution. I had simply come here, alone, in the third year of farming the land my family had helped me acquire. When the house was built and the fields planted and the animalssettled, and everything was as it should be, I had found that all of that rightness contained a silence I had not expected.
I had walked east until I heard water. I had crossed the bridge alone. Sitting at the edge of this pool for two days, I had lost myself in the stillness of my life. I was not quite thinking, certainly not arriving at conclusions. I was just being present with a heavy feeling, which was the orc way of handling things that did not have immediate solutions.
I had not known, sitting here those two days, that I was waiting for something. That would have required knowing what I was missing, which I did not.
Now I knew. It was her, my little human.
“Guruk,” she called as she explored the pool’s edge, crouching to trail her fingers in the water, then standing to follow the mist upward to the crest of the falls. She grinned with the delight that had been, from the first moment I saw it, one of the great privileges of my life. “Can we swim?”
“We can.” I set down our bags.
