To reach a fabled confluence of grandeur, a stream carved stubbornly through rock, chasing the horizon ahead.

Through its long and tumultuous rush, it gathered too much silt, growing heavier with each passing mile. Slowly, the water that seemed to carry the world turned murky, no longer able to mirror the sky.

Until a deep valley caught all its weight. There, it flowed into a hollow with no way out, forced to sheath its edge and surrender its course.

The wind passing by mourned for it, sighing that it had lost forever the vastness that lay beyond.

But the wind did not know — when the silt finally settled in absolute stillness, this pool of water, too weary to flow on, received on one silent night, with perfect clarity, a sky full of stars that even the ocean could never claim alone.