Chapter 9The water burned like ice and flowed like ribbons. The pebbles dug into his back, small and hard. Sprawled in a stream, over stones, Lorre let the rush of mountain river pour through him and open him up and dissolve him into itself. He’d left his clothing on a boulder on the bank.
He liked being water. He could bend and ripple and splash and leap; he knew the pulse of himself up from a deep far-off spring, and the sensation of rocks being worn down bit by bit beneath his running across them, and the dance of silvery darting fish inside the liquid tumbling world that he was. He’d always fit into rivers easily: maybe his heritage, or maybe just because he also had been restless and flecked with sunlight and dappled with rain, running onward.
The sky above the Mountain Marches grew
