River of Accusations

The bare, shrieking pain of the Weeping Stone figure had given way to a deep, resonant grief, and the barren plateau where Zen had knelt now felt oddly empty. Carefully clutching the little, glowing stone blossom in his hand, he stood up. The chilly emptiness of the Hill stood in sharp contrast to its subtle, resilient warmth. Even while the keening wind still groaned over the desolate slopes, it now carried a tired, aged lament rather than as much rage. A huge, agonizing silence had replaced the urgent, fierce strain on his mind.

He descended slowly due to the encounter's tremendous emotional weight as well as physical exhaustion. The weight of the witness he now carried made every stride on the sharp, weeping stones feel unique. The Hill was still a place of great suffering, but his journey through its center had changed its resonance—or maybe his own—in a tiny way.

After following an almost imperceptible psychic trail—a slight easing of the suffocating despair in one direction, a slight thinning in the bruised twilight—and comparing it with the most sinister, sparsely detailed portion of Icor's map that showed a "Boundary of Regret," Zen found himself getting closer to the hill's base. The scenery started to change once more here. Dark, swampy land replaced the burnt, flat rock, and the air became thick with the smell of stagnant water and something more, something bitter and caustic, like unshed tears converted to poison.

Then he saw it: the Judgment River. It was a slow, turgid current of what appeared to be viscous, black ink rather than a river of water. Its surface was abnormally smooth, reflecting the oppressive sky with a dead, obsidian sheen. Its immediate banks were devoid of life; the ground was a murky, slippery mud, and the few skeletal trees that stood close to its edge were covered in long, stringy moss that looked like rotting shrouds. All other sounds seemed to be drowned out by the thick, sticky lapping of the black river against the coast.

When Zen got closer to the riverbank, the "judging souls" appeared. They weren't separate characters like the Children of the Sunken Fields or the Weeping Stone. Rather, they were moving, amorphous shadows that formed from the darkness and the mist at the river's edge, their eyes like drab, accusing embers, their bodies vaguely humanoid but always swirling and reconstructing. They or the river itself may have produced a chorus of sibilant whispers, a torrent of accusations, recriminations, and scathing judgments instead of screams of sorrow.

"Trespasser..."

"You, too, carry the taint of the outside..."

"Look upon what your kind has wrought..."

"Every step an injury, every breath a theft..."

"Your 'understanding' is a hollow conceit..."

The murmurs attacked Zen with a more subtle, corrosive force that targeted his conscience, his purpose, and his very right to be there, rather than the raw, projected pain of the Hill's peak. These enigmatic accusations magnified and threw back at him his own prior misgivings, fears about the limitations of his profession, and the possibility of unintended injury.

This was a trial of a different sort. Even though it was overwhelming, the Weeping Stone figure's suffering had been a unique, horrible reality that he could see. A chorus of complaints and a diffuse miasma of blame attempted to engulf him in a sea of communal shame.

Instinctively, he gripped the stone blossom even more tightly. In response, its dim, melancholy light appeared to pulse, enclosing him in a little, hardly visible circle of silence that somehow kept the murmurs from penetrating his head too deeply. It seemed as though the recognition he had given to one severe affliction now provided a little measure of protection against the indifferent resentment of others.

He made no effort to defend himself or to counter the murmurs. The echoes of innumerable prior disappointments, betrayals, and injuries done upon the forest by those who came before him were the agony he recognized underlying their charges. To participate would be to get caught up in a never-ending, hopeless argument.

Zen turned his attention to the river itself instead. This "Boundary of Regret" had to be passed, or at least followed, according to Icor's map, in order to actually escape the Hill's direct effect and arrive at safer, if still contaminated, land. There was no ferry, no bridge. The river served as a judgmental barrier.

He moved cautiously along its edge, the dark shapes whirling about him, their murmurs a poisonous droning. Instead of being afraid, he watched them with the same critical empathy he had developed. He observed that when he stared straight at them or displayed any resistance or distress, their forms were most agitated and their accusations loudest. Even though their assessment of him was not totally fair, their anger subsided and their forms became somewhat less distinct when he only recognized their presence with a silent, inside nod of understanding, admitting their right to feel such resentment.

It was just another example of how dynamic the forest can be. These souls, these echoes of grievance, were looking to him for a validation of their long-standing pain rather than particularly for argument or revenge. He discovered that he could overcome their suffocating aura by not arguing, by not defending, by just accepting the validity of their resentment without internalizing it as a personal indictment.

Every step of the long and difficult journey along the riverbed was an intentional effort to keep his internal equilibrium against the flood of accusations. In contrast to the generalized, somewhat impersonal character of this communal judgment, the stone blossom in his hand—a testament to one soul's ultimate trauma—acted as a moving reminder of the particular of suffering.

The suffocating atmosphere finally started to dissipate after what seemed like an age. The dark, judgmental people along the banks of the black river began to fade, their murmurs fading into the background hiss of the wind, and the river itself began to narrow, its current becoming less viscous. He had crossed the River of Judgment by comprehending the nature of their long-standing, melancholy office rather than by overthrowing its guardians. After confronting their charges, he quietly provided a sort of testimony that aimed solely to understand the depth of the forest's memory of wrongs rather than to offer an explanation.