The water was not clear or muddy; it was something beyond color, holding all shades at once. When I looked into it, I did not see my reflection. Instead, I saw paths—some I had walked, some I had refused, and some that belonged to lives I had not yet touched.

I understood that this was the mother of every river I have known: the Jejeti, the streams of my childhood, even the hidden waters that run under cities. Each of them was a sentence spoken from this first, patient mouth. Here, the world’s thirst was already known and already answered.

The river began to speak without sound, the way deep things do. It showed me how every crossing I have made—every risk, every migration, every leaving and returning—had been recorded in its body. Not as fault or success, but as movement, as honest attempt.

I saw names fall into the water like stones, disappearing beneath the surface, yet sending ripples outward that never truly stopped. Some were ancestral names, taken by force and buried by history. Others were the quiet names we give ourselves in secret, trying to remember who we were before the world renamed us.

When I finally knelt and touched the surface, it did not feel wet. It felt like being recognized. A warmth rose through my hands and into my chest, as if the river was returning pieces of me I had left scattered along the way. I woke with a strange clarity: every river I meet from now on is not just water. It is a page of the Origin—still speaking, still remembering, still calling me home.

This was the last dream in the circle, but not an ending. It felt like the moment a book closes and the story continues quietly inside the reader. The Origin had remembered me. Now it was my turn to remember the Origin, with every step, every breath, every drop of water I meet.