Very clean clear pebbles in a variety of colors - it'd be cool if they were beautiful stones and crystals, suggests Rúmil, and then they are - and lots of flashy tiny fish, which appear undisturbed by all the water-changing going on around them - They probably have a very strong preference that it stay breathable and healthy for them.

The fish do? I don't sense minds from them...

I'm not sure minds are the relevant thing. It'd be bad if the river changed in ways that killed the fish, so how the fish need the river is just - persistently part of its character. He shrugs, splashing water everywhere.

Oh. She goes and rummages through the rocks as long as she can hold her breath. ...She wonders if the water can be breathable for her and fish at the same time, if that's a thing you can do by changing the water instead of by wearing a magic thing...

That one doesn't seem to work.

Oh well. Maybe she'll just spend a hundred years reinventing wizardry and make herself a ring of water breathing. In the meantime, she pops up for air.

A few people have crawled out to sunbathe (treebathe?) on the shore.

She floats.

Rúmil is munching flowers again. You look happy.

I am!

Is that what Lórien asked about? What he asked me was whether we were doing right by you in assuming you'd stay here.

Um, he was asking me sort of similar things. About whether I wanted to stay. Apparently there are humans or something close somewhere else? But he was asking sort of vaguely and it made me anxious.

I'm sorry. Hopefully when he asks again in a decade he'll have learned how to ask more clearly.

Maybe.

They've improved significantly even just since we arrived here. They reliably look like us, instead of like shining rips in the fabric of the universe!

She giggles. Were they pretty shining rips in the fabric of the universe?

Honestly they were horrifying. I was shielded by only seeing it secondhand, but people were very alarmed.

Oh dear.

It should be encouraging. Think how quickly they've improved!

I might have unusual standards for 'quickly', she reminds him.

Oh, right. Well, if it takes him a century, you'll be impatient, and perhaps have already invented the means to fly, but you'll still be alive and that's what matters.

I will be! I find that really comforting!

Seeing you happy is like reliving the first moments of safety and peace all over again. It's very soothing.

Aww.

We should probably dry off and head back in.