The rose waters.

Back before the borning of each baby, boy or girl, the storymen whisper them alive.  They sit, hunched over over their little baskets full of babes and murmur softly the parts of the soul.  They tell tales of bravery and of cowardice, of love and hate, and the little babies know them in their heart.  Their small unborn minds are pulled each way by the storymen's long hooked noses and the speckles of stars awash across the mirror sky.  With a little push, the baskets of gurgles and giggles are off into the river of neth, floating toward the lifestream and mortality.  Inside their eyes the colors flow out from porus holes not yet closed.  The sounds in their ears pool up, some sloshing out into the river from which the storymen drink deep.

The riverbank of the storymen grows rivergrass tall and rustling, shushing out the murmer further than the stretch of their hands.  They weave their baskets out of the stuff, letting the lush green fade to layers of golden yellow with pricks of holes to let the color-tears drain through.  They are constantly weaving and whispering, long thin fingers stained green, darkest at the tips and lighter on the right hand that they dip into the waters to quench their ever-cracking lips.  Their eyes have never seen the sun but in reflection, looking down in the mirrored eyes of babies and water that are their life.

Underneath the mirrored waters grow the bulbes of the pre-unborn, pink and plump with little baby shadows playing upon their surface.  They grow upwards and the supple pod-skin brittles in the red sunlight of eternal dawn.  The storymen pull them out and basket them while whispering in their ears.

Down the river, crowded with the floating basket-boats, the river widens into a lagoon, little whirlpools scattered across the surface sucking up the golden baskets and their pink passengers.  They sink, twirling down and deep into the world, swallowed up to be spat out into the world.