The Watchers of the Sacred Spring
By Bob Hembree
In a valley where time moves like honey through amber, there existed a spring whose waters possessed an inconvenient virtue: they reflected not what people wished to see, but what was actually there. The Watchers, robed in simple gray cloth, had guarded this spring for generations beyond counting, reading its depths each morning as their ancestors had read the flight patterns of birds.
When the waters ran clear as mountain air, they would ring the silver chimes that hung from the ancient oak. When sediment clouded the depths, or when the taste turned bitter with minerals drawn from some deeper disturbance, they would sound the bronze bell, warning the people to seek other sources until the spring healed itself.
This was the way of things, and the valley prospered under such honest counsel, its people growing strong on truth as much as on pure water.
But in the season when the pears hung heavy on the branches, a merchant prince arrived with wagons full of promises. He had, he announced, purchased the rights to the spring from a distant king, and he intended to bottle its waters for sale in golden cities beyond the mountains. The profits, he assured the valley dwellers, would make them all wealthy beyond imagining.
Yet each morning, the Watchers continued their ancient ritual, and their reports remained stubbornly factual. When the spring ran muddy from the merchant's excavations, they rang the bronze bell. When his workers dumped their refuse upstream, they warned of contamination. When he diverted the flow to fill his endless bottles, they reported the diminishing levels.
"These gloomy Watchers spread fear like a plague," the merchant prince declared, his voice honeyed with manufactured concern. "They care nothing for your prosperity, only for their own importance. Why should you trust these relic-keepers when I offer you gold?"
He was clever, this merchant prince. He knew that doubt, once planted, grows like fungus in the dark. He whispered to the baker that the Watchers had always favored the miller. He suggested to the miller that they secretly served the interests of the next valley over. To the young, he offered wages to mock the old ceremonies as backward superstition. To the old, he promised that their grandchildren would thank them for choosing progress over tradition.
And slowly, like water seeping through limestone, mistrust began to poison the valley's heart.
When the Watchers warned that the spring had grown dangerously polluted, the merchant prince's followers jeered. "More lies from the fear-mongers!" they cried. "Look how clear the bottled water appears!" Though of course, they had learned to filter it through silk and charcoal before sealing it in glass.
The merchant prince dismissed the Watchers entirely, replacing them with his own employees—young men who had never learned to read the language of water, but who understood very well which truths their wages depended upon. Each morning, they announced that the spring flowed purer than ever, though they had never bothered to taste it.
"Drink deeply!" the merchant prince proclaimed. "Prosperity flows as freely as our sacred waters!"
And the people did drink, for they had been taught to distrust their own ancient guides. They drank from the spring, and from the bottles, and from the new channels the merchant prince had carved. They drank until their children began to sicken, until their livestock grew thin, until their crops withered despite abundant rainfall.
But by then, the merchant prince had loaded his wagons with gold and departed for those distant cities, his bottles filled from springs in other, untainted valleys. He left behind him a people who had forgotten how to distinguish between the sound of silver chimes and bronze bells, between the taste of pure water and sweet poison.
The spring itself remained, as springs do, patient as stone, waiting for someone to remember that water speaks only one language—the language of what is, rather than what we wish to be. The gray-robed Watchers had vanished like morning mist, and with them, the accumulated wisdom of generations who had learned that the most precious truths are often the ones we least want to hear.
In the end, the valley learned what valleys have always learned, though the lesson comes dear: that those who profit from deception will always find ways to make honesty seem like the enemy, until the people can no longer tell the difference between the voice of the spring and the echo of their own desires.