"And then one day, they suddenly discovered that many of the big fish in the pond were dying, and much of the vegetation was withering. They panicked, especially the big fish that had lived long enough. They thought the waterfall had come, because every time it descended, it dealt them a tremendous blow, and many fish would die."
"But slowly, after the first group of big fish had all died, they realized they were wrong. What had come wasn't the waterfall, but a deadly poison that was spreading. And it wasn't only them that died, but every creature that touched that poison. It spread little by little from the surface into the deeper waters, until the entire pond gradually became uninhabitable."
Sir Awen took a deep breath and looked up toward the mountaintop.
"So they banded together and fought back, but soon they failed. Their bodies sank to the bottom, covering the pond bed with their remains. Some fish had foreseen the poison's arrival, so they dove into the deepest reaches of the pond early on, hoping to find a chance of survival among the bones."
"But there were other fish that refused to accept that fate. They chose to surge upward, hoping to leap out of the pond and call upon the waterfall that hadn't descended in so long, begging it to breathe life into the pond."
At that point in his story.
He slowly closed his eyes, as though weariness threaded through every part of him.
Lynn quietly watched the pond, where fish kept leaping out of the water, and said:
"But they couldn't summon the waterfall, could they?"
Sir Awen looked up with a smile and said, "That's right. As you can see, some fish spend their whole lives unable to leap out of this pond. Others