While the humans washed the gravel dust from their hands in the runnel below the grave bank, Pip walked slowly down to the rim of the Quiet Spring itself.
All day its mouth had been dry. Carrying the memory of the iron-banded Remembrance slate behind its eyes was like holding a mouthful of old copper nails; every time its heart beat hard on the climb, the compressed war treasury deep inside its seed-organ offered another scrap of Azhrak’s century—how to form a shield-wall in a narrow gorge, how to count rations for three hundred spears, how to make frightened soldiers march in step by taking their names into a single bell-tone.
Pip crouched on the white stone-crusted moss at the pool’s edge, made sure the original mouse was tucked safely high in its chest fold out of the wet, and lowered its sideways jaw into the clear water.
It drank three deep, cold swallows.
The water tasted of clean granite, snow-melt, and chalk that had never been touched by fire or iron. As the cold liquid slid down Pip’s scarred throat and settled against the heavy mineral core in its chest, the grounding current of the Return spring reached the seed.
