The gods are selfish, you silly mortals. Why would anything above you view you as anything but a pest? You reproduce infinitely, you desperately cling to anything you find, and you are a pain to kill. Are those not the traits of a pest?And you even had the gall to reach for the fabric itself, sullying our holy mana with your dirty phalanges.

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A week of preparation left me feeling ready to attempt it. As I sat, small fire crackling in front of me, I focused inward, my eyes dully gazing at the mesmerizing fire. I felt for the very lifewater within me, the thumping pulse of that which gave life, running my mind through my bones and flesh. My sight found grand and terrifying things, things I was not ready to deal with. Strange shapes of meat lined the route between my two ends, each doing something despite not touching it. More strange organs sat elsewhere within me, their functions as foreign as their shapes. I sought the lifebringer itself, the pulsing organ deep within my chest. Even as I explored, it pumped away, bringing lifewater to all the fields it must go to.

Yes, fields. That analogy was good. Nature was the body made large, more alike than different.

I sought the other corner of my chest, then, seeking the brother to the lifebringer. As lifewater kept my body alive, soulwater must keep my being alive. With this belief, I searched, my senses swept the region, my focus sharp and my will unwavering.

The silver circles were high above when I finally found it. It was exactly where I thought, exactly across from my lifebringer’s pulsing certainty. Despite this, I barely found it. A withered, fragile seed of barest life greeted my senses, the dribble emerging from it nearly invisible.

What?

I didn’t understand. How could it be so withered? Was I not as alive as I could be, my mind as sound as my body? What did this mean?

A thought came to me. If this was the water of the world, then did this mean humans were removed from it?

I shivered. It made sense to me. Humans seemed to spit in the face of the order around them. We endlessly sought to escape that same rule that bound all the animals we hunted. That seemed natural to us – as if we were meant to escape the confines of the world.

But what if we rejected that? Was this the route to that harmony?

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Answers only seemed to bring more questions, so I simply decided on a path. As I worked my body to strengthen my lifewater, I must look to do the same to this soulwater. Whether it ties me to the world doesn’t matter, for even if it means the world’s soul, not mine, there is a piece in me somewhere. We were not always those who fought the natural order – that was certain to me in a way few things were. It was a deep certainty in my very bones, a knowledge from the lifewater rather than the mind.

We were of it and not of it, beings of both and neither.

I resolved my mind, seeking to study the soulwater as best as I could.

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Again, summers spun by. I began with touching the outer flows, like that which ran into the spring. I could not truly touch them, given their nature, but I could touch them with my seed’s soulwater, the sensation akin to pressing my hand against a rushing current, raw power and meaning flooding every moment of contact. Yet unlike water, this had no give, my soulwater unable to enter the stream no matter my efforts. Perhaps it was my seed’s weakness, but I felt that it was the wrong goal. With my seed’s energy – or the seed – in the flow, it would simply wash away, yes? So, my goal was the opposite: drawing from the flow into my seed, feeding it.

I tried many methods to draw the waters in, yet naught prevailed. I swirled it like a gyre, snaked it like a river, even rendering it solid like stone – a trick that took me many summers to perfect – yet to no avail. My final trick was one I had taught myself. In my pursuit of self-care, I had learned the skills of the weavers and the sculptors, seeking to make from clay and cloth that which I needed – clothing and containers. It was slow going, the art complex enough to fill many an idle span under the light’s gaze. I now wore cloth of woven reed, the oasis again providing what I needed to survive.

I hadn’t managed clay jugs yet.

It was the weaving that gave inspiration to my trial. I wove strings of my soulwater, treating it like cloth that must be spun to be strong. Patterns gave solidity to string, each web of thread stronger thanks to its interconnected nature. I mimicked this with soulwater, the tightly woven pattern emerging as I bent my mind to the task. I had long mastered moving what little soulwater I had; the action as easy as moving my arms. A thought made action, immediate and precise.

As I layered and layered my strings together, I wondered. Could I use this as a filter for the waters? Catching stray objects that might get stuck within?

A bad idea.

I knew what water could carry with it – sickness, strange animals, and even debris. I did not want to know what might be stuck flowing down the river of soulwater, not until I was sure I could handle it.

Whatever ‘handle it’ really meant.

My pattern grew and grew as I labored on it, light turning to dark as I did so. I held the shape as I took breaks, eating strange fruit I had managed to grow somewhat successfully and drinking from the spring. The animals ignored me, recognizing me as a regular here. In many ways, I was more of a regular than they were, my longevity meaning I was here even as they faded from life, their children now replacing them. I remained steadfast in age, now looking somewhere between thirty and forty summers if my memories of my tribesmen were correct.

I was less certain of that than I wished to be.