When I finally convinced Elyr to stop playing with Mouse the hoop-weasel we set out along the path that followed the line of the river.

Mouse scampered along beside us, possibly because Elyr was dropping little pieces of oatcake when they thought I wasn’t looking! I guess we have a hoop-weasel now.

The bear also shadowed us, walking further up the slopes or closer to the river, disappearing sometimes and reappearing, that is until the path forked and the main route turned away from the river up the valley slopes. The smaller path was so unused it had rocks almost hiding it completely, Elyr questioned whether it was a path at all.

We stopped at the junction, I was drawn to the small path, wanted to stay with the river a little bit longer, but I was also a little worried that I was keeping Elyr from getting home to their kith group. I seemed to be the only one worrying about this though, as I stood at the fork, Elyr took the opportunity to play with mouse again. It was this moment when the bear padded over to me blocking the larger path almost completely. That made up my mind, if the bear wanted me to go on the river path, I would go on the river path.

As we headed along the path, the bear stayed close to us for the first time since Brae Wood. He walked a little way ahead until we reached a bend in the river where a resonance stone lay half in half out of the water, at an odd angle and piles of fallen logs and branches were blocking the river.

I felt that familiar prickly feeling in the air and something else too, a heaviness, like the air was thicker. When I told Elyr they looked at me in that odd way again and said the resonance seemed tangled or blocked.

We approached the stone and started to investigate, there seemed to be some of the new synthetic resonance fibres trailing from the connections. I wondered if it was this that had caused the stone to fall. It also looked like the logs were catching on the stone and damming the river. I started to note all this down, it seemed like another piece to add to my increasingly complicated puzzle.

I was trying to figure out if I should try to repair the stone, when on the other side of the valley a herd of gold-backs swept into view. They seemed to pull up short as they reached the river, and one by one they stood, just looking at me. It felt like the decision had been made for me.

I got out my emergency tool kit and set about restoring the natural connections and bypassing or removing the synthetic fibres. The Ministry of Alignment is probably not going to be happy with me but they had not been joined in well. If they are going to try to do this standardisation they are going to have to find a better way.

Once I had fixed the connections and between us we had set the stone at a more upright angle, Elyr started trying to tune the resonance flows around the stone. They told me it was an ancient natural resonance marker stone. I had never heard of such a thing but as soon as it was back in place the the air felt lighter, and the logs blocking the river started to be washed on their way downstream. Ok, they started to be washed downstream after I had given them a bit of a nudge with my foot, but it somehow all felt less stagnant.

As we stood and watched the logs float off and the flow of the river started to return to normal, we were suddenly surrounded by a cascade of golden bodies as the gold-backs continued their migration around us as if we were not there.

I had hoped to see a gold-back migration, I never dreamed I would be in the middle of one. It was breath-taking.