Bryn
Ihave not slept. The ground leaves bruises along my hip and shoulder.
The shirt under my head smells like his scales. I fold it into the pack.
I reach the river within the hour.
The water is lower than it was on the crossing with Vadh.
The center channel is visible, a line of faster current between the shallows.
I try the first stepping stone. My boot finds it.
My weight shifts. My knee gives. Not a stumble.
A collapse. The joint goes out from under me, and I land hard on the bank with my legs in the shallow water and my pack pulling me backward.
I am not crossing this river. Not today.
My body is done.
A fallen tree at the water’s edge. I put my back against the root fan.
The teal shimmer is visible on my wrists in the morning light.
His color written into my skin. It has not faded.
I turn my forearm in the light. The shimmer follows the veins on the inside of my wrist. It is deeper than it was a week ago.
It is not fading because it is not residue.
It is in my blood. Whatever river I cross, whatever coast I reach, this color is coming with me.
I am marked by a male whose name I said on the steps of his temple and whose name I will be saying for the rest of my life whether I see him again or not.
Two grooves. Both full. Clean venom flowing into channels that couldn’t take the pressure. The crack in the glyph. The cold.
I was supposed to be enough.
I reach into my pack. The channel sheet is folded behind the fragment. I open it on my knees.
Every junction. Every branch. Every overflow route I found while clearing debris in the first two weeks. Every bypass the original builders carved into the system as a redundancy. I drew all of it. I drew it because my mother taught me to draw every building I entered, and I did not stop.
I look at the drawing. I have been looking at this building for over three weeks with my fingers and my charcoal. I know every junction. I know where the calcification is thickest. I know which branches are sealed shut and which are narrowed but open. I know where the overflow routes are.
The overflow routes.
The bypasses the original builders carved. Clear channels that have never carried flow. Sitting behind the walls. Waiting.
We poured through the main channels. Full-strength venom through passages narrowed by decades of calcification. The pressure burst a junction and starved the seal.
But the main channels are not the only channels.
I trace the drawing with my finger. The secondary branches. The overflow routes. The bypasses. A path that avoids every calcified section. A route through clear stone.
We don’t need to fix the damaged channels.
We need to go around them.
I pull the charcoal from my pack. My hands are shaking. I press the charcoal to the channel sheet, and I hold it there until the tremor becomes a line.
I mark the route, junction by junction, bypass by bypass. A clean path from the paired grooves to the seal, through stone the decay never reached.
The lines find their way regardless. I drew this building. I know every inch of it. The answer was in my own work.
I stand up. My knees hold.
I turn around.