What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

The god of ants (Ant) is angry because the goddess of rivers (River) divided a stream, and one of the new streams washed away a small anthill the god of ants liked. He approaches other gods and goddesses, such as love and vengeance, but they dismiss him, seeing the issue and the god himself as insignificant. For 500 years, Ant tries to get revenge—e.g., by adding dirt to slow the rivers. River just washes away his efforts and laughs, as she thinks these are just pranks.

After seeing one of his colonies’ queens stuck in the mud, Ant decides to send ants with pebbles to drop into her source river. It takes 1,000 years to alter the current, but River is too distracted by her new twins to notice. After all her well-wishers leave, River feels that her power has waned, so she leaves the twins in the care of her sister while she investigates the cause. She comes across the little dam, not knowing Ant created it, and sends a wave at it. The dam repels the wave back to River, pushing her over. Angered, River uses all her power to knock the wall over. This time she succeeds, but she ends up flooding half the world, which includes the largest of Ant’s colonies.

Enraged, Ant kidnaps River’s twin daughters. He hides one in a place he thinks she’ll never look and sends the other to a colony of army ants. When she discovers her twins are missing, River’s cry brings other gods to her. They don’t know who took the twins or where they are, but they feel that River set herself up for this situation by being so close to her half-divine sister. The other gods are preparing to punish her sister when a field spirit shows them evidence of Ant’s dam.

Unaware that the loss of the main colony has weakened his power to control ants, Ant returns to the army ant colony and sees that they have eaten the young goddess. He compacts her bones and his memory of where her sister is into a small blue stone and goes to live with humans. Learning of this from the army ants, River searches for hundreds of years and neglects the rivers of the world. The other gods send minor spirits to help her, but her sorrow infects them. For 100 years, these spirits unleash floods, earthquakes, torrential rain, and fires upon the world. They develop a network of spies to hunt down Ant’s whereabouts, torturing and killing people for scraps of information.

After 700 years, River believes she will never see her twins again. She stops where she is, along with her followers, and they all become part of the land. The only one who doesn’t cease searching is her sister, who is motivated by guilt. She becomes known as She Who Betrayed River, which is eventually shortened to Bereaver.

Knowing Bereaver will never give up, Ant decides to give up his godhood by putting his entire identity into the blue stone. He keeps only immortality for himself. However, he has difficulty figuring out what to do with the stone. He tries burying it, giving it to a boy, and staying with it in a cave. Bored of the cave, he goes out and sees a girl hauling water. He asks if she can keep a secret and hands her the stone, which sinks into her hand. She carries the secret, passing it down to another girl, who passes it along, forever keeping the secret. Bereaver keeps searching, and River keeps dreaming of her children. She hears the remaining twin when the girl cries from the volcano where Ant hid her.