The River Denly

The river was gloomy.  
A rich field of bog and heather lay patiently beside a river grey with apathy, its eddies and creeks coiling endlessly through hills of East Lundria. Beside them, moss lined footpaths of pebble and shale formed their own channels, twisting and turning, converging towards the babbly burble of every watercourse that flowed its way towards the Lundrian coast.
For many, it wouldn’t seem all that strange that a Lundrian river had become gloomy. For as a nation that has known the rain as its closest friend since its infancy, the river network of the embattled nation was somewhat more overworked than most. Lashings of rain pelted and drizzled across Lundra, saturating the already sodden ground into rivulets and lakes. Sleet and shale drew interminably across the country, cascading down, settling and then flowing as all rain seems inclined to do, back towards the sea. 

Caught, between being balanced and half-stuck in a hedgerow, Drella watched the winding river with a frown of worry.  
Witches, bog witches being no exception, were seen as a natural barometer of meteorological inclination, and, either wrongly or rightly, were a common measure in matters regarding the weather forecast. There was an old knowledge to a witch’s actions. A memory that breathed deep within the wandering pathways of rainfall and wind. In Lundra, a good meteorologist may be able to guess when it might rain, while a witch always knew when it was best to bring the washing in. 

Drella was tired. 

Miserly in the best weather, the fog-laden beaches of East Lundria endlessly stretched off towards a curtain of pale greyness that bordered the wandering shoreline with a series of long, silent harbours. 
Widely spanned droplets covered the foam-peaked ocean in countless patterns, rippling outward with the wandering rain that drummed downward. It was a dispirited place, a stone-spotted line of sand that receded almost taciturnly down toward a fishing boat bobbing sea, known to the locals as being tidally despondent. The rain tumbled and the wind whipped in wailsome whirls, flinging up salt-ladened sand into the face of anyone mad enough to be gazing at the shoreline. 

It was all in all a rather dreary place to be out walking.

The free path between the bog she had called her home and Medow Loch was far muddier than Drella had expected it to be. She had clamoured and splashed through fields of half drowned sheep that morning and then slowly had paddled across fields where the sheep had taken to floating in the afternoon. 
Now, as the light had begun to fade from behind the veiling clouds, a faltering path had pushed the troubled witch towards the coast in search of a ground that was less inclined to steal a boot, sock, or leg.
Drella was no stranger to mud. Since her earthliest years the middlingly-aged bog witch had come to know as much of the bog as muck was to know a mire. She longed for the quiet glade of gorse and heather where her cottage had settled—courtesy of a miraculous landslip that couldn’t be legally attributed to witchcraft. 
There was a timelessness to her home: a stasis so welcoming that Drella could sit for a full day by the bog’s side and only come to a feeling of needing to move when the ground below her lost its ground-ly-ness and the sodden moss that was her perch had receded below the waterline. 
This was a different mud. The clags of the coast were a short-lived composite of clay and impatience that bogged a person down but scarcely knew what it meant to be a bog. It was a youthful kind of mud; a sludge of such temporary demeanour that Drella passed its existence from her mind for it as soon as she pulled herself away from the bramble-laden hedgerow and stumbled towards a shale lined path that wavered off into a horizon of dunes and ocean mist. 

“Gosford!” she yelped, surprising herself by swearing as she landed amongst the depths of a particularly brackish puddle. Meekly, the silt formed upwards and gently deposited her back onto the pathway as a kind of sympathetic gesture.
A witch never swore.
Words bearing meaning and meanings bearing curses, the taking of a town’s name in vain was seldom done in polite company and for even the most blue of wharf hands, the cursing that particular town was impolite enough to colour their cheeks.   
Clamouring back to her feet, Drella whispered a second curse and then set to draining the water from her boots. In her own bog, she knew the paths without thinking. She knew when it was fine to walk freely amongst the moors and when it was more sensible to run. But the coast was different; everything was over-mixed with silt. It was as though the land was a gradient of erosion instead one of layered history. There was a sense of eternal fading here and Drella wondered why a river should choose to end here.

Why should anything choose to end here?
Recently, the waters of her home had begun to rise, and it seemed that the River Denly had been slowing. 
A flood was a flood and every Lundrian knew that a river would sometimes explore less familiar options, but a river should never be seen to slow. 
Over the days that followed, Drella had been dropping sticks and counting the seconds as they travelled below the Acre bridge but had stopped bothering when they had begun to float toward the bank.

Being a bog witch, it was expected that Drella may be somewhat bohemian and the effects of living in a bog would leave her perpetually muddy. But in truth Drella found more joy in a tidy existence than becoming totally emersed by the wilds of nature—or going the full hag as she preferred to know it. Yes, as a bog witch she appreciated nature far more than she did a cobbled street, but Drella had always felt as though she was living with nature instead of living in it, and so it was that as she watched her favourite teapot floating from her cottage’s window that morning, the word with became more and more italised.

Why would it be that a river should slow? 
Drella had thought of some reasons as she stuffed a hastily made packed lunch into a haversack and fished a pair of gumboots from where they had taken to floating by her living room windowsill. 
Though it was old, the Denly River was reliable and Drella knew that its spring, somewhere in the hills that marked the beginnings of the Windy Ranges, was not to run dry so long as the rain fell, so it would be that the river would only slow at its end.    
But had it become blocked? Dispirited?  

Marching up a set of wooden steps that clung to a dune overrun with buckthorn and sea-holly, Drella had to quickly duck down as a gust of wind pulled westward and brought a sand-dotted mist to greet her arrival at the coast. 
She had never travelled much in her life and as the tendrils of night seemed to be herald an approaching stormfront beyond their horizon, Drella regreted not looking for shelter earlier.  
Horizons, being horizontally panoptic, were usually known to have a lingering storm or two somewhere beyond their edges in Lundra. But it was rare to feel like a storm was converging towards you. 
Gazing upon the circle of darkly coiling clouds, Drella felt the air fall windless for lack of a direction and she then noted the smell of ozone having built in the sudden silent gloaming. 
Cresting the dune, the rain had begun to fall in neat droplets of steady urgency as if bringing news of the countless more soon to follow. 
Drella hiked through marsh and dune for nearly eight hours now and the thought of even the floor of a dusty bothy seemed better than another meter of stumbling.
With a stumble she paused, caught for a moment by the sheer enormity of the waveless sea that reflected the dancing glow of momentary streaks of lighting across it’s fathomlessly dark surface. 

The light was almost faded now. 
In the distance a sweeping coastline was dotted with shimmering lamplight, huddling almost in shelter from the storm, sea, and boundless night beyond. 
At its side a lighthouse circled a dim glow lazily outward.  
She had been to Meadow Lough once as a child and never had it appeared so welcoming. Neat houses, shale topped and lined in terrace rows, wove through busy streets hemmed by terracotta drains that ran merrily down the sloping hill and into the Denly. She remembered a quiet town with sprawling gardens and greenhouses. A place where it was said every flower in the world was known to grow. 

She was close. 
One last stretch of coastline and she would reach the head of river. Once last stretch and she would find what had been causing this stagnancy that her home had been feeling recently.

A flash. Lighting cracked and lit the world in brilliant white as a headwind then arrived from on high and opened the sky along with it.
Rain cascaded down now and Drella began to run, not so much with panic but for the sheer feeling of being alive. Hammer-fall sized droplets of rain landed upon the sand around her as the bog witch danced amongst them. The dunes swept gently and became pockmarked as she skipped forward, the wind carrying her momentum and laughter towards the sea. Over stone and tightly packed sand she made her way, each puddle and bramble seeming to separate as if to make her way easier, the storm building ever angrier.                 
In time the path returned to the coastline and Drella soon lost her breath, self-consciously aware that she had been cackling with laughter at the head of a thunderstorm while running towards a town. 
Returning to less-haggish posture by cowering below the heavy downpour, she jogged up towards the lighthouse and then stood below its awning for a moment to collect her thoughts. 
Something had shifted as she had danced through the storm after that weary day of travel. She was drenched, she had no idea where she was, and as sure as a lake held water, she had no plan of where she was going to sleep tonight. Closing her eyes Drella reflected that she felt quite happy. 

‘Are you needing a towel, miss?’ 
A kindly voice much like first ember of woodsmoke suddenly asked from Drella’s side and woke her from her meditation. 
Looking upward, the bent figure of a grey-haired woman smiled as she held up a lantern and beckoned Drella towards the door. 
Taking a moment to notice where she had bustled into without care, the bog witch regarded a large hand carved sign bearing the words “Ye Mossy Inn” and couldn’t have praised the goddess Lenith’s name any higher.   

‘Sorry, I was caught in the storm. Well to meet you, would you have any rooms available?’

‘We do but only if you promise not to howl like a banshee though the night as you were just now. Our poor dog has gone to hiding somewhere and you owe ‘im an apology when he plucks back his muster. Would you prefer a view of the ocean or the river?’ 

Drella smiled,
‘River, if possible.’

‘Good. The old Denly’s been tired recently but should be back to its steady old self in the morning.’ 
Laughing, the old innkeeper then turned back into the flickering warmth of the lighthouse and the sounds of healthy conversation wafted out amongst the fragrance of baking bread.

Much later as the gathered few had departed into the mist covered blanket of night, Drella watched the rain pattered window fade darker and darker as rivulets of water ran down its side.
Why had she made for the coast this morning? Without warning she had marched off to solve a problem with a river far older than any memory and far more likely of flowing beyond any memory yet to come. 
She had travelled to the coast with nothing but a packed lunch and a pair of gumboots and within the generosity of existence had managed to find a place so welcoming.
Standing and making her way up to her room, she decided that tomorrow she would continue walking. She would greet the Denly’s end and then continue on to Medow Lough. She’d walk all the way to Sandulk if the weather was fair and then she may even walk further should she care to. 
Travel seemed to suit the bog witch for the moment. And it was far time that she set off to do it. 

J. McCray
2025