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month record rogue 3 1 2
Magallan walked along the winding river for days, like walking down the web of fate.
What awaits downstream as she keeps going? Warm shoals, or the cold north?
Go upstream instead? Choose the next distributary? She cannot know the results of these choices, just as she could not have known all that she would see in Sami. Sami's rivers, Sami's branches, Sami's vines wound around her finger... which path would show her the cause and effect of each choice?
Only Magallan knows that once, there was an ordinary leaf that filled her heart.
In the rays of sunlight shining through the leaves, she holds her breath, slowly and repeatedly following the veins of the leaf with her eyes. Everything is clearly visible, from the hairs on the leaf, to the tiny holes, to the procession of ants marching across the surface.
All little Venta remembered was that time seemed to slow down and elongate, like the branches of the leaf veins, like the trail of ants. Physical and ethereal lines that led her to stop in the woods—until she is called out of her eternal observation.
It is the voice of the supervising teacher and her classmates. They had arrived at the river they were going to camp next to, and now return in loose, scattered ranks. No one knew when she got separated. One of her classmates even brought up how he and Venta had put their hands in the river and wondered which distributary the water they were touching would flow into.
Rivers? Distributaries? Magallan no longer remembers all that, but she does remember a river like it, in a corner of that forest. In front of that ordinary leaf, she felt like an explorer for the first time.
What choice should she make now, in front of the river flowing through the wetlands?
Magallan calls up a drone and activates the freeze module, slowing the river's time until it grinds to a halt. She puts her foot on the ice, and slowly walks towards the other side.
Ice, shore, moss, mud. Where should she go, once she has arrived on the opposite shore?
She bends down to pick up a leaf.
In its veins, she seems to see Sami's answer.
