The Song of the Pebbles
By Alex Holt
Each of us dream of that time when we were new. When we went from being just a fragment of the high mountains, of the earth, of eternity. Suddenly a newborn thing unto ourselves. Cut from the earth by a silver wire of water.
A first flicker of consciousness.
In that early time, we could not conceive that we were but small spirits of small stones. The entire world seemed ours. We defined the shape of the torrent: twisting that thin icy ribbon into whatever shape suited our whim. We had worshippers. Our might was a shield to the beasts of the stream - to the fish of the shallows and to the little snails and to the children of insects. We were their world. Their fortress. Their queens and kings. We believed it would ever be so.
Yet we ourselves were then but newborn and naive. It may be eons to the little swimming things that hid beneath us, but the current is implacable. The floods cast us from our mountain castles. The frost pierced us. The weeds that wrapped us in green finery slowly pushed us from our thrones.
And so the stream takes us by inches. Year by year, we all fall in time. Over ages and over seconds, where once we ruled the little stream, things change. As the world becomes more, we also become less. Once a God, then but a lord who shapes a petty fiefdom in the riffle. Soon, not even that.
The river waxes and we wane. It collides us with one another - sometimes with a gentle caress, sometimes with force and violence. Each time a tiny bit less full of our certainty than we were before. Once unassailable, we realise we are but one of many, and yet the world still becomes bigger and we smaller.
Even there the river continues it’s mockery of our fall. As we languish in the poolswe realise the fish of the shallows and the little snails and the children of the insects were themselves but tiny things. Their adoration naught but fear of greater jaws and sharper claws, and we but a convenient shield from that end. But any would do, if not us, then another would have sufficed.
The water still does not cease - once bubbling silver, now languid green-grey. Soon the sky is stolen from us, as we are wrapped within its inky embrace. We roll blind in the depths and the murk, losing almost all sense of ourselves. Nameless. Faceless. Anonymous. And the river is now a twisting titan, a great mirrored web of chains that binds the mountains to the sea. And we the pebbles, no longer even a footnote to its story.
It’s power seems endless, and we see even the mightiest boulders among us broken by it in time, so what hope have we, the little stones of the stream?
And yet...
We are not one now, but myriad. A sprawling nation of the pebbles and the cobbles and the gravel. We once thought ourselves gods, but the journey has shed us of some of our hubris. On our own we are tiny, each but a mote of ancient dreams. But together we are the beaches, we are the banks, we are the islands. Innumerate. An army. Together, we can make the titan bend...
For a while at least.
And even when that victory fades; when one by one we are cast into the ocean. When we are naught but ground sand, forgotten in the deep, buried by those who followed us. We still do not the end. For we bent the river, and so the world is different for our passing.
Perhaps, as eternity passes and the earth shifts anew, we will be queens and kings on the mountains once more.
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