The River

Chapter 1

Logan was a mature masculine man in his early forties. He had lost both his parents many years ago in a war between his tribe and the centaurs that lived up the valley. The war was over a huge amount of Crickets that migrated to a field between the two tribes. But after a year the population of insects that were the main food source of every tribe increased and peace started again between them. In fact, one of Logan’s best friends was Hector who was a centaur himself.

The dry landscape around seemed never-ending. Although Logan has never been so far from his village, all the places he has been into were as dry as his own village and he has heard from others that there is no water to be found in the world except the underground sources that everybody would use as their main water resource.

There was one of these water reservoirs under the ground near Logan’s village and a water fairy was living in it. Logan has never met her in person but his closest friend Laura has seen her several times before. The water fairy’s name was Amphitrite and was one of the few mermaids left on earth. Logan’s people considered themselves lucky since a mermaid was living in their water reservoir and it was a sign of the depth and vastness of their reservoir.

As the older members of the village remember, they have heard from their fathers that once all the underground water reservoirs were connected with each other through underground water canals. Mermaids were living in those reservoirs and would travel from one to another through these canals.

As time passed by, the water resources became smaller and smaller and most of the canals dried out. Today nobody even knows where the canals are.

Most of the old people of the village have been killed during the war. In fact, more than two-thirds of their population died in those years due to famine and then the great war. Now only a memory of those people left for them.

Before the war, the village had a chief with a consul of five people in which Logan’s mother was one of the members too. Two of those five members were goblins and three of them were humans. They would decide most of the important decisions for the village and would solve the problems between people and their properties.

The central hall of the village was a place for everybody to get a consul. There were also four people trying to preserve their culture with books and objects from ancient times. Logan’s father was a member of this consul. They believed that people of this village are among the few people left on earth that still have direct roots in ancient times and can speak their language. They knew themselves as one of the few tribes left who could read and write in the language that was being spoken in ancient times.

But the war changed many things, they lost most of their important members, now there was no political or religious belief among them. Sometimes they would gather in the central hall of the village and talk over some problems with each other. It would almost always end up in chaos, but in the end they would compromise with each other. After all not many people were living there now. The population of the village was less than a hundred people. Most of them had died in the war and many had left the village in those times to find a better and more peaceful place for living. None of them has ever returned.

After Logan’s parents died, he felt alone for a while and since he was living alone, his childhood friend, Laura moved in with him. She was a thin goblin almost half his height with dark brown skin, long ears, and a pretty face. Laura had lost her mother when she was born and her father left the village before the war. He left with the wave of immigrant goblins who left the village in order to avoid the fight against the mighty centaurs, among the few that stayed in the village, Laura was the only one who has befriended with Logan and not long after the war she left her old small room in the southern part of the village and moved to the bigger house that Logan was living in, near the center of the village.

It was a one-floor house, there were two separate rooms in the back and a big living room with a small kitchen on the corner of it. There were a very small storage and a toilet attached to the home with doors from outside.

Logan was living in his small room from childhood and Laura has moved to his parent’s room, she was not comfortable at first, but Logan did not accept to change the rooms, and after a while, she got used to it. The room itself was bigger than the previous home that she used to live with her father and her little sister who left the town before the war.

Laura’s daily task was to bring water from the reservoir and fill the tank in the upper part of the village. It was the main source of the water people were using in their daily life. She also had changed her old home to a kitchen laboratory. She was testing new mixes of plants with the insects that she would gather from the fields herself. Laura always tried to make the food taste more delicious and last longer.

It was around the time that Laura moved in with Logan that he started to see water streaming on the ground. It seemed unbelievable for him to see a stream of water flowing freely on the surface when he brought Laura and Hector to the valley where he had found the water, they could not see anything there but dry land as it always has been.

Logan was the only person in his village who could see the river. Everybody thought he was lying to attract attention, but he didn’t care what others were thinking, he could see the stream of the water in the valley not far from the village, and he could not believe how others wouldn’t see it. He could even drink the water and wash his face with the water from the river. It was streaming from up the valley, the same valley that on its upper side lived the tribe of centaurs.

This valley has turned into a tourism attraction for the people of villages around. They have heard about the river and how Logan can see it. Some people were curious enough to check it out, but none of them could see the river. Of course, they were actually just visiting to see the famous crazy Logan, not the river.

Nobody except for Logan has ever seen a river, even the magical mermaid believed that Logan was crazy, though there was a myth that thousands of years ago, there was water streaming on the earth.  She knew about the myth of the river too, it was said that there was a vast body of water flowing freely on the earth, and those streams were named Rivers. And those rivers would end up in places like the sea or ocean that was a big body of water on the surface of the earth. Something like today’s underground water reservoirs, but on the surface and millions of times bigger.

In this myth, the earth was not just a big ball of soil, most of its surface was covered by water. but it was just a story, Nobody believed that water could just freely run upon the earth. It was very difficult for people to believe that there was something besides soil and sand on the horizon. Their world was just desert and hot shining sun. there was nothing to cover the sky day or night except the dust and sand in the stormy days.