This is how it begins.

Or perhaps more accurately, this is how the story was told in our particular family when I was very young,

because since that time I've heard endless variations upon the tale across the face of the peninsula.

Truth takes many forms, it seems, although even the most quarrelsome of our scholars can agree between themselves

and a few base details. It always begins at dusk, in the mist and the cool, on the verge of the

falling darkness. And we're standing here upon the empty flats of the lower delta, with a promised bride, looking out across the endless water.

She's been warned all her life about coming here to the banks of the great nameless river, because the river, to the lifelong and generational enmity of the people who live in the broken village, will not obey.

During the harvest season, it floods its banks, drowning their fields in rich, sluggish silt.

During the planting season, it retreats sulkily out of sight, leaving behind

parched ditches of cracked mud for the farmers to pick over. Fish, when they do come up,

come up wrong. Either on the surface or when you split them open. Wicked children who dare to play in the shallows

usually come back safe and sound to the broken village.

But there are occasional days and nights when they don't.

And their grieving families will carry out a fruitless search among the reeds,

uncovering a complete absence of bodies,

or footprints, but stumbling across freshly discarded debris that seems to have come from another time and a place entirely. Old glass bottles, wheels of twisted black rubber, the coiled slippery bodies of

ancient eels and strange twitching crabs. All across the face of the peninsula, scattered and hidden,

are tenuous places, and this is a tenuous place, if ever there was one.

She should not be here, lingering upon the cusp of dark and impossible depths.

She's been forbidden against coming here alone, but today she needs to be alone, and this is the only place for miles that's lonely enough.

Because tomorrow is her wedding day, and her long white dress is waiting for her upon her bed,

and her relatives have flocked to town from all across the countryside, and she has nowhere else to go.

...