Shimmering Point

Fish-catcher felt it punch into his foot, wedging through the soft flesh of his arch to be stopped by one of the cuneiform bones behind his middle toes. Pain licked up his calf, like fire on the tendons. He tripped, crashing forward mid-sprint towards the riverbed below. In a glimpse, he saw his quarry, a silver perch, shoot away into the reeds, then his head connected with a stone.

Fish-catcher licked his lips, still half-submerged under the gently flowing stream. The water tasted metallic. Blood was seeping from his wound and it smeared the river around his body translucent iron-red. Pain still gnawed at his leg, but it was less serrated, more a dulled throbbing in the bone. He rolled, and with both hands pulled his foot up towards his face by the ankle. Unlike the others, Fish-catcher’s sole was soft and pink, owing to the hours spent wading across the water-rounded stones of the valley streams. Cleaned by the river, the wound sparkled in the pale flesh. A thin stream of blood pulsed from the gash, rounding his heel like cherry juice from a greedy chin. Fish-catcher frowned, focusing on the bizarre object which had punctured him mid-hunt.

It shone, the color of honey, and like honey, it reflected a yellowed, slightly warped reflection of himself and the towers around him. But this wasn’t honey, it was hard and sharp, sharp enough to pierce the layers of hard skin underfoot! Fish-catcher, still holding his ankle with one hand, gripped the strange stone, for what could it be but a riverbed stone, and pulled. With a wet pop, it slid out of his foot. Fish-catcher grunted, tendons bulging in his neck. In shaking hands he brought the stone up into the light. The end he held rounded in two humps, like the petals of clover. The end that had cut into his foot was a sharp point. Blood still clung to this end and, held upright, it began to drip down the sides, filling and flowing around little knobs and grooves which ran around the stone's entire circumference. Fish-catcher stared, then smiled. This was honey made hard, like how the streams turn when the cold time rides in on dark clouds and hollow winds. When the sun turns pale and the valley people, shivering, descend into the bowels of the half-submerged towers to huddle together in the warm dark. Fish-catcher grimaced, swallowing the bile of that horrible time, then refocused on the rock of honey. Practically salivating, Fish-catcher brought hungered jaws down on the little hunk. It was neither soft nor sweet, repelling his little teeth with a dull clang. Fish-catcher snarled, then pulled his mouth away. As he did so, the thing sprung open like a startled butterfly! Fish-catcher lept back, sending it arching back into the river.

He could see it there, glinting in the sun, which by now was high enough to illuminate the vegetated ravines that ran between the great towers. Fish-catcher approached, crawling forward like it was going to explode. It didn’t, and now Fish-catcher was close enough to look down its open core, which he gently cupped to raise out of the water. In one half of the object, Fish-catcher saw another valley person, backlit by morning glow. Soft, brown eyes set into a sinewy head, half lost in a tussle of black hair which fell about it like a curtain of vines. Fish-catcher gawked. This was him! A perfect reflection in the most still of puddles. Fish-catcher tapped the surface and was astounded to find it didn’t ripple, in fact, it was as hard as the stone in which it pooled. To the other half, Fish-catcher now focused his attention. There, he saw another person. This one, he knew, definitely wasn’t his reflection. It was a woman, with hair like golden reeds and the brightest teeth Fish-catcher had ever seen. She stood in a pile of …snow? It looked like snow, bursting from her head and gripping her body in rivulets the way it clings to the crags of distant mountains. Fish-catcher held the little shiny rock, the frozen pool, and the little woman at arm’s length. There he was, standing next to her, locked in the heart of this dangerous stone. A pressure began to mount in Fish-catcher’s head, heavy as air before a storm. Something was roaring inside his skull as he shared this space with the golden-haired woman. His eyes flicked between his own face and hers, then, gingerly, Fish-catcher ran his fingers up through his hair, pushing it over his forehead in the way the woman’s fell. He smiled, running a pointer over his dulled and gummy teeth. By now his head throbbed, weighted by vague questions, pillars looming from fog. Fish-catcher had felt this before; It came after staring too long at the colossal towers, which brushed the sky and the roots of the earth alike, or standing over the knotted corpse of another valley-person, lost to a fall, or the cold, or tooth and nail. Usually, he would look away - he wanted to look away but right now, he couldn’t. In fact, this was the longest Fish-catcher had ever held his focus on one thing in his entire life, and the effort of it threatened to split his skull.

A frenzied hoot sounded from upstream, snapping the trance. Fish-catcher, without a second thought, dropped the locket and wandered off in the opposite direction, vaguely fearing the potential confrontation. The locket returned to the bed of the river. There, it would’ve sunk back to the dark, borne on whatever force of sedimentation had, that day, wrest it to the surface, if, moments later, Fish-catcher had not returned, and with furtive hands, pulled the shimmering point from the depths, and carried it off back into the world of the human.