The First Nesting Confluence

Overview

The First Nesting Confluence is the oldest sacred spawning water of the Thaluren, an upriver meeting of living freshwater channels within The Tidebound Reaches. It was never the whole Thaluren homeland. It was the place where the sea-born return became holy and sworn: where clutches were accepted, their keepers answered to the run, and run-lines proved themselves.

No run has spawned there since egg blight closed it. The closed water still has its keepers and their spears, and a place nobody may enter still shapes much of what the Thaluren believe.

The Place

Several freshwater channels come together here and run on as one, high enough up the rivers that only the old ascent channels ever reached it. The nesting reaches where clutches were once laid still lie in the slack water of the meeting, and nothing has been laid in them since the closure. The blighted clutches left pearls in the silt, dull and lovely, and they are the treasure every poacher on the river has heard of. On the banks above the old nesting reaches stand the clutch-houses where the watch circles kept their vigils before the closure, roofless now and inside the closed line. Their offerings were never carried out, carved shell and river-gold laid at the water for clutches that would not hatch, because nobody could bring them past the line without breaking it.

Keepers and Users

• The Blightward custodians. The Blightward Keepers hold the confluence by the duty they grew out of: a sick holy water must still be guarded, studied, shut off, and mourned.
• The Concord's offices. The confluence remains a holy water of The Returning Concord.
• Pilgrims from the alternate waters. The runs of The Second Channel owe the confluence a memory-debt, and each season they send their elders to the Naming Reach to pay it aloud. The Open-Run Concords come with them, and argue there.

No one else comes but poachers. The confluence's blighted pearls fetch a high price downriver, and every few years some band slips past the guards by night to dig for them. Few come back down, and those who do tell of a friend who knelt at a still pool to drink and stayed kneeling. Downriver there are guides who sell the way past the guards, and buyers in the estuary markets who never ask where a pearl was dug; the custodians send their own young after both, and some of those hunts go as far as the sea.

The Medieval Present

The closure is now well over a hundred and sixty thousand years old, and it holds. Water still runs through most of the confluence, but no Sanctuary Custodian has judged it healed, so it stays shut. Most Thaluren never see it. They know it as the water every alternate run is measured against.

Out of season the custodians keep their rounds: tasting the water where it enters and leaves, checking the edges of each still pool against the marks of the last watch, and reciting the names of failed clutches at the water where they failed. They watch the still pools as closely as the blight, because they hold that stillness held the clutches as surely as sickness killed them. They hunt as well. Egg-takers still lie in the weed of the lower channels, as if the river had not heard that no clutches come any more, and the custodians kill every one they find; lampreys climb past the Naming Reach to spawn and die in the closed water, and the custodians loathe them for it.

History

Long before the Concord had named offices, Thaluren communities treated the confluence as a place where return had to be seen by all and the keepers of a clutch had to answer for it. Once the Concord hardened, its Run-Watchers, Sanctuary Custodians, Clutch-Watch Circles, and Sea-Settlement Speakers all looked to it as proof that sea life, estuary passage, and upriver spawning belonged to one rightful world, and to themselves.

The Second-Channel Feud (c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR) was fought out in blood along the channels, run-line against run-line, with custodians drowned at the mouths of the channels they guarded. The custom it left, that an alternate water carries a memory-debt towards the sick source, is why pilgrims still climb to the Naming Reach. On the Water and Who Keeps It thread, the confluence is the wound the Reaches' whole custom of living water grew around.

Tensions

• The pool that grew. A custodian reports that one of the still pools has spread past the marks of the last watch, and a custodian who went in after a speared egg-taker has not come out of it; she floats a spear's length inside the edge, eyes open, neither drowned nor living, and nobody dares go in after her.
• The question nobody asks. Only the Sanctuary Custodians may judge the water healed, and none has tried within living memory; the office is theirs, and they do not share it.
• Offerings from the clutch-houses. A Second Channel elder asks leave to carry the offerings of the clutch-houses down to her own water, so that the river-gold laid for the first clutches can be laid again for living ones.
• The pearl-thieves. A band of river-folk downriver has been selling blighted pearls that can only have come from the closed reaches, and the custodians have found a way through the reed above the Naming Reach that nobody guards.