Work Text:
The sun shone. The river rolled. The stones stood.
One stone in particular stood more deliberately than the others. The sun prickled on her skin. Did stones have skin? This stone did. This stone was a strange stone.
The water lapped at her ankles, like chains. That was the fate of a stone, after all. They were bound. Stones could not walk, only roll when they were pushed.
The water was cold. Its embrace was not warm and inviting, but icy and uncaring. Like death. The stone recognised this feeling. Recognised this coldness. It had always been with her. She had been in this water since she was born.
She remembered that. Should she remember? She did. The water had been cold then, too. But the red had been warm. It was not a pleasant warmth, though. It hurt. It had not been her pain, but she felt it. It had been someone else’s pain. The sins of the mother and the father. She had come from a wrong thing, and she had become a wrong thing.
She was a wrong thing, so she had to go. She had been put in the water. She floated. Did stones float? She had not been a stone then. She had no form. She was a leech.
She floated, and she floated a long time. How long? She did not know. There was no way to tell. She had been alone. There was no-one except her and the water. But, eventually the water changed, and she washed ashore. She changed then, too. She became more solid. She became a stone, but a strange stone.
A strange stone was still just a stone, though. A stone on the edge of a cold river, in a place where no-one ventured except stones.
But that was just it, wasn’t it? There was not much here, but there were stones. A single stone was not much of a thing, but there were many stones here. Thousands of them, along the shore. Enough to make whole stacks of them.
And between the stacks, she saw them. The other things that washed ashore here. They were like her, she thought. They had been born, but they had not been born. They had also been wrong things. They had also floated. And they had also been alone. But now they were here.
They saw her, and they looked up to her. She was the biggest of the stones. They had all come from the red, but her red had been the brightest of all the reds. The red of the gods. So, she was the biggest, and they looked up to her. They had been alone, but now they had her, and they had each other, and they were not alone. And neither was she.
There were thousands of stones here. They would never be alone again.
The sun shone. The river rolled. And the stones smiled.