The first thing that rose from the water was not a voice but a memory.
Mara felt it slide against her skin, cool and almost familiar, like fingers tracing a scar she had forgotten she carried. The river climbed her boots, its current snaring the worn leather laces, and then, without a splash, without a ripple, the world tilted.
The bank, the reed-choked path, her father's distant shout—these all drew away as though someone were pulling them down a long corridor.
Darkness closed in, soft and heavy and pulsing with a slow, underwater heartbeat.
She was eight again, and the air smelled of iron.
"Mara," her mother said, from somewhere behind her. "Not so close."
Stone under her hands, slick with moss. The bridge was low, the river thinner here, young and fast and easily angered. It roared against its own banks, throwing itself against boulders like an animal too long kept on a chain.
Mara leaned over, peering into its broken mirror. Her own face stared up, twisted by the current: wide eyes, a gap between her front teeth, a small pink mouth that had not yet learned to swallow its questions.
From the depths, something moved—a shimmer that was not light, a curve that was not stone.
"Mara." Closer now, her mother's voice, not yet frayed at the edges. "Come away."
But she could not. The water was speaking.
She could not yet understand it, but she felt the rhythm of its noise in her bones: the quicksilver grammar of rapids, the long vowels of slow pools, the hard stops of hidden rocks. It was a language, she knew that much, even before she could name her knowing.
Fingers closed around the back of her dress, tugging.
"Enough." Her mother's hand, stern and trembling. "The river doesn't love us back."
The memory shuddered, as though someone had touched the surface of it, and the image fragmented into a hundred bright shards.
Mara gasped.
Cold rushed into her lungs. The darkness peeled away and she was back: the present river all around her, waist-deep now, its chill a fierce, quiet ache in her bones. The opposite bank had disappeared into mist; the sky was a low ceiling of cloud the color of old bruises.
Something watched her.
Not from above, where the crows clipped their circles into the sky. Not from behind, where her father's voice had become nothing more than a weak echo, thin as smoke.
From below.
"Mara."
Her name rose like a bubble, distorting as it climbed. It wasn't the way her father said it, or her mother, or any villager who had dragged it through their teeth in warning or worry. It was slower, vowels pulled wide, consonants softened by water. Ma—ra. Two stones dropped into a deep place.
She swallowed. "You wanted me to listen."
"Yes." The word brushed her knees, her ribs, her throat. It was not one voice but many braided into one: children and elders, laughter and sobbing, all carried downstream and caught here in this single, patient throat.
"You've always listened," the river went on. "Even when you pretended not to."
She thought of the nights she had crept to the old well, when the house was tight with her father's silence. How she had leaned over its black mouth and strained to catch something—anything—beneath the drip of unseen water. Sometimes she fancied she heard words; sometimes only the mocking shadow of them.
"What are you?" she asked.
It gave a sound too large for a single meaning, a sound that might have been amusement.
"What are you, Mara?"
She flinched. The current pressed against her, not hard enough to knock her down, but firmly, like a hand on the small of her back, steering her toward an edge she could not see.
"That's not an answer."
"There are no answers," the river said, "that are not also questions."
The words circled her, weaving a low, insistent hum just beneath the skin of the world. Her heartbeat tried, and failed, to align with it.
"You called me," she said. "Or you've been calling me. Ever since—"
She could not say the word. Drowning. It lodged like a stone in her throat.
The river said it for her, but not aloud. The memory unfolded without her consent.
Her brother's hand slipping from hers on the slick rocks. His surprised cry, cut off. Her own body a frozen pillar on the bank as the current took him, small and flailing, then not flailing at all.
The village after, thick with the sour smell of grief. Her father's face emptied out from the inside, like a house with all the furniture burned.
"You took him," she whispered.
A wind passed over the water, making it shudder and cloud around her. "I keep what is given," it said. "I take only what falls."
"Liar." The word shocked her. It rang in the air like a struck bell.
"Do you blame the knife," the river asked quietly, "for the hand that drives it?"
Mara closed her eyes. Behind them, the dark pulsed red and gold. "You could have spared him."
"I could have," the river agreed.
Silence thickened. Water crept higher, up her ribs, brushing the underside of her arms with cold insistence. She tightened her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering.
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you asked me not to."
The world did something strange, tilting sideways, a floor dropping away from beneath a foot that expected it.
"I—what?"
"When you were eight," the river said. "On the bridge. Your mother's hand on your back, pulling you away. You leaned over anyway. You whispered into me."
Mara's lips felt numb. "I don't remember."
"Memory is a shoreline," the river murmured. "It shifts." Then, with a gentleness that made it worse: "You said: If you are real, prove it."
The water around her brightened, phosphorescent threads uncoiling from the depths. They wound around her wrists, her waist, not binding yet, only marking.
"You said: Take something. So I know you're there."
Her breath left her in a ragged sound, half laugh, half sob. "I didn't mean him."
"You meant nothing," the river said. "Children mean everything."
Mara staggered. There was nowhere to go—no bank, no shore, only the pale smudge of not-quite-sky above and the endless, black-throated water below.
"I've been punished," she said. "For a child's dare."
"Not punished." A slow swirl gathered around her knees, like someone walking in circles just out of sight. "Bound. There is a difference."
"To you."
"To you as well." The current brushed the inside of her elbows now, the hollow at the base of her throat. "You came when I called."
She almost said: I came because he told me to. My father. With his cracked hands and hollow eyes, his words—Go, then. If you're going to listen to ghosts, listen to all of them. The river, too. See if it answers you.
But that wasn't true, not entirely. The call had been there before his bitterness, before her brother's empty bed. A whisper under every other sound, an itch beneath every thought. Come, little stone. Come, little anchor. Come home.
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
The river hesitated. She felt it: a stillness at the center of its motion, the eye in a storm of liquid muscle.
"I want," it said slowly, "what you already carry."
Cold uncurled inside her. "I don't have anything."
"You have a mouth," it said. "You have ears. You have a body full of hollow places. I have stories with nowhere to go."
Somewhere, far away, thunder rolled, a tired giant turning over in its sleep.
"Stories," she repeated, flatly.
"Lives," the river corrected. "Memories thick as silt. I remember everything, Mara, and remembering is a heavy thing. There are names inside me that have forgotten themselves. Faces in the dark that no longer know they once belonged to light."
The glow around her wrists tightened. It no longer felt like illumination. It felt like thread.
"I am not a priest," she said. "I am not a grave."
"Exactly," the river said. Its voice softened, a slow eddy around her ribs. "Graves are for endings. I am asking you for middles."
She thought of her brother, his laugh like an untied rope. Of her father, standing in the doorway as she left, the word Stay trapped behind his teeth. Of her mother before them both, her warnings hollowed out by the years until they were nothing but echo.
"You want me to carry them," she said. "All of them. Everyone you've ever taken."
"Carrying is a choice," the river said. "Listening is not. You already hear me. I am offering…shape."
Her boots no longer touched anything solid. At some point, without her noticing, the last of the earth had fallen away. She was suspended, held up by nothing but depth.
"What if I refuse?" she whispered.
The water swelled, lifting her gently, like a breath.
"Then you will go back to your father," the river replied. "And you will still hear me. But it will be noise without words, pressure without meaning. A knocking you can never answer. You will be emptied by a story that keeps pouring into you with nowhere to rest."
A pause.
"And your brother will remain faceless."
The tears that burned her eyes were indistinguishable from the river's own wetness licking her cheeks.
"You said choice wasn't clean," the river murmured. "You were right."
"How—"
"You forget," it said, almost fond. "I have lived in your bones since you were eight and leaned over my mouth and asked me to prove I was real."
Her heart thrummed, a trapped bird.
"What do I become," she asked, "if I say yes?"
The river stirred. For a moment, beneath the metallic tang of water and silt, she smelled something startling: sun-warmed wheat, smoke, rain on dry earth. The scent of fields far from any flood.
"Not mine," it said. "Not entirely. And not human, in the ways you understand that word."
"Then what?"
"A bank," the river said. "A vessel. A place for the dead to set down their names. A bridge between this throat and the world above it."
The word bridge struck her with a strange, tender violence. She saw again her eight-year-old self on the stone span, peering down. She saw her mother's hand, pulling her back.
"Bridges break," Mara said.
"Everything breaks," the river replied. "That is not the point."
She hung there, her body a question mark suspended in black water, the past and future both pressing close, their faces hidden.
Somewhere behind her ribs, something old and long asleep shifted, stretched, opened an eye.
When she spoke, her voice was quieter than the whisper of foam on stone. "If I take your stories…do I get to ask my own questions?"
The river's laughter was a low roll, deeper than thunder, softer than breath. "Child," it said, "that is all stories are."
The glow at her wrists flared, then sank into her skin.
The water rose over her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes, sealing her from the sky.
Mara did not close them this time.
As the river moved through her and she through it, as voices like gravel and voices like birdsong tumbled into the hollow places of her bones, she realized, with a terrible and luminous clarity, that she had stepped into water at night and there was no bottom at all.
Only depth, and what waited in it.