I could never, not with all the years left of my life, forget what She sounded like. I can’t remember much of that day, but I know I was on the riverbank, gathering reeds for a basket. Her voice was heavy in the air, rhythmic and melodic, a cadence of notes and tunes; speech made Song. She was just how the stories described Her; the perfect melody of the Bond-Song, the Song that chose unbidden to build bridges and repair all the millions more torn by those who stand on their own riverbanks and shout of their might at the top of their lungs.

I can remember almost nothing else of that day when I heard Her, but that memory remains. When I think of it I can hear each and every gentle note of Her twining together; a constant flow that never stops or climbs or deepens. Each moment of Her is just as She always is: a series of notes, all special, unique, refusing to repeat and instead ongoing in seemingly infinite permutations. I remember how She slipped through the rushing river in my ears, the rustling leaves in the trees and the gentle churning of the dirt as my claws dug in the wet earth, effortlessly, unintrusively; She never demanded, never suggested, never even asked, not even of the river and the earth and the forest. She was in them too, Her notes not extensions, not recreations, of the rushing and the rustling and the churning, but more of them, more of all of it.

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And in the Song I could hear myself, as well, my breaths and the beating of my heart and the gentle thump of my tail as it hit the dirt, tapping to the beat of the song the old musician had played us the night before, still lazily adrift in my thoughts. In Her I could hear that song, too, one-two, one-two, a slow beat buried somewhere in Her depths, no different from a stone sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I heard that distant melody and then suddenly the old man himself, part of Her just like I was, the care with which he treated his young grandson and the garden he tended, the songs he wrote by firelight in the late hours of the evening, his talontips long since stained black from the ink he used to do so. And then I could hear the ink itself, could hear the slow spreading of the black liquid as it sank into the paper, the indentation of the writing claw as it pressed down to deliver it, the quick and decisive movement into the bottle and then out again.

I remember so little of the rest of that day. I cannot even remember how She came away from me, but finally She did, and when I found myself aware again, I was digging in the earth and cutting the reeds with my claws, just as I had done before.