Something stirred me up.

  I did not sleep. From the state that occupied the interval between wakefulness and something else — neither sleep nor the full engagement of consciousness. The state where the body was still, the eyes open, the seeing unfocused. The closest approximation of rest available.

  Something had changed.

  Ten paces away, you slept. Your breathing even, deep, efficient. The fire burnt down to embers. The clearing was dark. The stars in their late-hour positions, confirmed by the temperature dropping and the moisture thickening. The quality of darkness that marked three hours before dawn.

  Everything external was unchanged.

  But internally, something was different.

  There was an impulse. The same pre-verbal, pre-thought event from the bramble wall — the one that existed before language, before decision. The one that should.

  I had been listening to the river. It was beyond our clearing, forty paces east, audible as water-over-stone, the sound that rivers made when the bed was shallow and the current was persistent. The river smelled of mud and mineral and the coldness that moving water released at night.

  The river was in the wrong place.

  Wrong differently than the branches or shadows had been wrong. Wrong in the way only millennia of traversing geography could detect. Rivers in this terrain followed north-south valleys. This one flowed east-west. Geographically inconsistent.

  The impulse demanded to move it.

  A tingling-pressure arrived in in the fingertips of my hands. Warmth under the skin. The quiet gathering of qi that meant power was awake.

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  But the direction it wanted was neither martial nor defensive. It was shift.

  I caught myself.

  Like waking inside a dream. Like the jolt that interrupted falling. I caught the impulse mid-formation, in the space between wanting and the action — the only space where catching was still possible.

  What was the action? If I had not caught the impulse, if the qi had moved, if the direction had been followed — would the river have moved? Would I tomorrow see a river that had always flowed north-south, with riverbanks showing decades of erosion in the new direction, with stones polished by centuries of current that had existed for one night?

  The question was not theoretical. The paths had happened. The cairn had happened. Reality had been edited and it was tied to my frustration, which was a close neighbor of the impulse. And the impulse —

  Had felt right.

  The impossibility was irrelevant. I had abandoned it as a category long ago.

  The worst part was simpler. The impulse to reshape reality had felt correct. As ordinary as breathing. As if the world had always been something my hands could adjust.

  It felt familiar.

  I had enough of those already. The last thing the world needed was more of what I could do.

  I clenched my fists. The qi receded. The tingling stopped. The impulse dissolved. Like a sound fading.

  The river continued flowing east-west. Wrong and real.

  The following not-sleeping for the rest of the night was different — vigilant. Watching myself and monitoring the internal terrain for the return of the impulse that had felt so right. Its rightness was the most frightening thing I had encountered in centuries.

  The river murmured its wrong direction. The frogs upstream had stopped when I noticed the wrongness. They hadn't started again.

  Morning came. You woke. You opened the notebook.

  I watched you write the date, the weather, the first observations.

  "Something happened," you said, without looking up. The perception of someone who had learned to read shifts in the subject's baseline without requiring the subject's cooperation. "You're different this morning."

  "Nothing happened."

  "Mm." You wrote that down.

  "Your handwriting is getting smaller," I said.

  You looked up. The compression-face — surprised, recalibrating. "That's — observational."

  "I've been staring at your notebook for weeks. It was inevitable."

  We moved. I moved ahead. You followed. The ten paces. The arrangement.

  The space where the impulse had been was empty for now, keeping me watchful. Waiting for the next time the fingertips would tingle and the should-be would arrive feeling like remembering.

  The river remained wrong behind us. The river remained real.

  So did I.