The River-Given

Overview

Every spring the whole basin's water arrives at once in the Serath, and the rise drowns landings, closes crossings, and takes people: bargemen, ferry folk, children at the bank, whole households where an embankment sent the flood somewhere new. Many are never found and never given their rites. When the water falls, some come back. The River-Given are the drowned who walk out of the river onto a landing, and the corridor towns of the Lower Serath meet them with a rite.

Appearance

A River-Given comes out of the water at dawn or dusk, slowly, as the river drops: a sodden figure walking up the ferry ramp or standing on a new sandbar, hair and clothes heavy with silt, skin grey-white and wrinkled from the water. It is solid, and that is what frightens people most: it leaves wet footprints and silt on the quay. Its eyes are clouded. It walks towards the town and the house it came from, and it does not speak, though water runs from its mouth when it tries. It smells of river mud and cold.

Habitat and Range

They come out of the Serath along the corridor and up the joining rivers of the Confluence Basins, at ferry landings, quays, and the sandbars a falling river leaves. They come only in the weeks after the rise, and most in a year when the rise was hard.

Behaviour and Temperament

A River-Given wants to go home and does not know it is dead. It walks to its old door and tries to go in. Turned away, it grows angry; brought in, it sits by the hearth and the hearth goes cold, and those in the house sicken. A River-Given left to wander a town draws the warmth out of whatever it passes, and drags at those who try to stop it, with the strength of the river behind it.

Abilities

It is a remnant strong enough to move its own drowned body, as some unrited dead do. It is hard to stop, being heavy and cold and caring nothing for wounds, and its grip is the river's grip. It cannot go far from the water for long; by the second night, if nothing is done, it walks back into the river.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing, and it is a danger mostly to its own kin, who open the door to it. The towns' answer is the rite: when a River-Given comes ashore, the landing is cleared, its name is asked at the shrine, and if anyone knows it, its death is sworn there and written down. Then it is given the rites it never had, there on the landing, and laid in the ground. Most lie still after that. One no one can name is given the rites under the name "River-Given", and is buried facing the water.

Lore and Belief

Corridor folk say the river gives back what it does not want, and that the River-Given are the drowned the river refused. Reedfolk say the river gives back those it was made to take, the drowned of altered water, and that every River-Given is a charge against whoever moved the channel. Both peoples keep the rite, and each thinks the other does it wrongly.

River songs tell of the murderer who drowned his rival in a flood year and saw him walk up the ferry ramp the next spring, and of the whole town that watched the River-Given walk past every door to his.

Where It Appears

• The Lower Serath
• Overview: The Risen Dead