The Forgotten Lotus

You are not as forgotten as you think.

There was, and there was not, a time when the river no longer sang.

The once-grand waterway had curled and coiled through the land like a silver ribbon, shaping stone, cradling root, and carrying stories downstream. But now it lay still. Cracked. Its bed split open like parched skin. Silt whispered where water once rushed. Pebbles lay bleached and bare.

The Raven flew low over the riverbed, drawn by silence. Drawn by something older than sound.

In the hollow of a shallow curve, she found it—a single lotus, clinging to life where no water remained. Its petals were paper-thin, its stem bowed, but in its center nestled a cluster of silken seedpods, tightly held.

The Raven landed nearby. Dust rose like ghosts around her feet.

The lotus spoke, its voice soft and brittle, like wind brushing old reeds.

“Once, fish passed beneath me like glittering thoughts. Birds paused on my leaves to sing stories to the sun. Now, no water flows. No creatures come. My time has reached its edge.”

The Raven bowed her head. “You are still beautiful,” she said.

The lotus did not smile. Flowers do not smile. But something in its posture softened.

“I have one last offering,” it whispered. “Take these seeds. Carry them. I do not know where water still flows, but perhaps you do.”

The Raven stepped forward, gently plucking the pod with her beak. She tucked it between her feathers, near her heart.

As she turned to leave, something caught her eye—pressed faintly in the riverbed clay. A single footprint. Wide, round, and unmistakably Bear’s. Weather-worn, nearly erased by time, but still there. A mark of passing. A sign that someone had come this way before.

The Raven looked back at the lotus.

“You are not as forgotten as you think,” she said.

The lotus fluttered faintly in the dry breeze.

“You are the last wind to touch me,” it said. “Will you carry what remains of me to the place where stories still grow?”

The Raven lifted her wings.

She did not know where she would leave the seeds. Perhaps in the basin of a half-remembered spring.
Perhaps in a pool cupped by rock and held by sky. Perhaps somewhere not yet born.

But she knew she would carry them— because to carry is sometimes all we can do.

And so, she flew, over the riverbed and the footprint, over cracked earth and forgotten water,
bearing life that did not yet know its next name.

© 2025 Sarah Dooley. Story and images by the author. All rights reserved.