A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 43

Soul Water

The rain had soaked into the land, but the notion that the Ravine had flooded stayed with me.

I had to see it for myself.

It was strange, that the Ravine had become such a constant in my life. No other place in the city had taken to calling me back to it on such numerous occasion. Truthfully, no other place could be counted on as a constant in the city, thanks to the shifts. But as everything else stirred about and re-patterned itself, the Ravine stayed the same. Intact, anyway.

The dry channel had simply finally been renewed.

As I traversed the city toward the landmark, something else mulled through my mind as well. What the Ambassador had said, at the doorstep of Manor Dorn, and the significance that it bore. Could bear.

She had called me Bridge-Builder, and of course – I knew I was. Knew that bridge over the Ravine had been strangely my doing. But what did it mean, entirely? A strange connection kept being made in my mind, as I thought about it. She had come to tell me my two months were up, and the only result-like sentiments she had truly voiced had been about the completion of the bridge, and my name. I had been the one to bow my head and admit I knew I failed.

But she had never confirmed it.

And the bridge... It seemed a large part of what she had come to tell me. I had built a bridge. The two things that really stuck in my mind about the exchange rang throughout my head like-so: Your time is up... The bridge is complete.

A small trickle of wayward, uncertain hope stirred within me. Could those two things really be connected in a way I hadn't considered before – connected in a way that would prove to overturn my assumptions of failure?

I hardly dared to hope so, after everything we had all been through, and the complicated, mixed emotions that had driven it all.

Yet there was a trickle.

When I reached the Ravine, and saw it, I stopped to stare – a certain sense of appeased wonder coming over me. Just in time to offer passage over the floodwaters that filled the channel, the bridge had completed itself. A symbol of significant, perfect timing. It made a sturdy, graceful arch, now – an enduring overpass of clean, new stone. The one perfect thing that could be seen for miles. The one whole, unbroken entity in a sea of brokenness.

I trailed forward again, treading to the water's edge. Where the Ravine had been, a glistening river now lay. A ribbon of liquid paradise running through the parched, crude city. I knelt by the water, watching the current glide by. I saw a leaf go past, old and soaked and drifting on to a new place of decay.

I had never seen so much water before. So much clean, glistening, beautiful water. An entire current of pureness, sweeping through our forsaken city. A small smile tugged at my jaded lips, and I reached out to touch it, to caress that liquid surface.

The water was cool, and fresh – like a drink to my very fingers. Ripples formed around the immersed digits. I could feel that there was a current of debris being whisked along the bottom of the river, tumbling on toward a new resting ground. How much of the stuff would be spirited out of the city via this currant? It would take a long time to make a difference, but this river seemed bent on steadily cleaning up what it could.

The water had a sweetness to it, and I wondered over it for a time trying to put my finger on precisely where I had tasted its like before. Then it came to me. It was harder to identify, in this form, because it was entirely more refined than where I had felt it before, but when I landed on my conclusion, it was unmistakable.

It was Ombri.

Wonder overcame me. I swept my hand back and forth through the water again, stirring it about, cupping hand-fulls and letting them run out of my fingers, back into the river. Her essence was here, permeating the current. It was alive with her.

It was satisfying, somehow, finding her in it. She lived on, in a way, her soul in the water, sweeping through the city as surely as it did, helping to clear Dar'on of its taint. And, she had always been one to ride the currents, hadn't she?

A smile played with my lips.

Keep riding the current of this city, Ombri, I encouraged, rooting for her. The name 'Shifter' took on somewhat of a new meaning, as I thought about it. She had fashioned it for herself because she rode the shifts, but now... She had become somewhat of a shape-shifter hadn't she? A spirit that shifted forms. In another way, that almost seemed fitting with her halfbreed heritage, as well.

Shifter. It was truly her namesake, in the same way I had been deemed Bridge Builder.

Which brought me back to the bridge itself. I glanced up from my place on the bank of the river, down its length to where the bridge stood. Perhaps it was time I tested it out, and ran my hand over its balustrade.

I withdrew from Ombri's lingering presence, letting my hand drip into the river as I rose and walked along its edge to the bridge. I gazed across its span, marveling over the fact that it existed because of me. It was smooth and inviting, promising safe passage and ease of crossing. I remembered the first time I had been charged with crossing this expanse – prodded out onto a ledge that failed to even span half of the gap. It had been an ordeal, then, to cross the thing. Now, all I had to do was walk across.

How things had changed since then.

Working up the irrational sense of courage that walking across my own bridge demanded, I treaded out onto the first length of stone. Nothing crumbled beneath me, or dipped down out of the heavens in a flash to fling me across. So I took another step, and rested my hand on the thick stone rail.

Through the series of essence-visions that ensued, my suspicions (at least in part) were confirmed. The entity that was the bridge was indeed a symbol of another kind of bridge-building – building bridges, making connections, between people. It seemed I had started the painstaking task of linking one side of the city with another, so to speak. Started the process of connecting the victims of discrimination to the proprietors of such a dynamic. It was hard to believe, that I had actually succeeded in doing such a thing – started it, in any case.

Bits of the essence of my journey – and that of those around me, in accordance with the things I had taken on as my cause – flitted through me as I ran my hand over the length of that balustrade. Flashes and tidbits and flurries of quintessence pertaining to everything I and those near me had been through over the course of these last few, momentous months. It was all mixed in with the paranormal cement of this structure, what made it strong and pitched it upright, a vital ingredient.

It was only when I reached the middle that something in it faltered. It took me a moment to distinguish that it was not something in the soul of the bridge itself, but rather something that had happened here, and left its mark on the overpass.

I could see the image of someone – someone other than me – being the first to cross the bridge. He had come to its arch as rain came down on the city, and crossed it without a second thought as the Ravine took to quickly filling up, its current rapid in the swell of the storm. Halfway across he had stopped all amid the rain to look length-wise down the river, taking in the stunning evolution from dry chasm to rapids that had transformed it in a day.

Then he turned to cross the remaining half of the bridge – but slipped, the well-worn tread of his boots failing on the rain-slick slope of the overpass. The railing that was hip-height on me went only to mid-thigh on him, low enough that it did nothing to catch him as he fell against it. If anything, in fact, it tripped his body additionally.

Halfway across that bridge on his way out of the city, one Tanen of Cathwade went headlong over the side, and fell into the roiling rapids below that had surely drowned a great many other whiteskins that day.