The Iguanodon Who Found a River of Pure Light and Time
Iggy the Iguanodon was, by nature, practical. He knew the best ferns, understood the tidal patterns of the swamp, and could tell a genuine Tyrannosaur growl from a wind-induced tremor. Yet, Iggy harboured an impossible dream: to find a river that flowed not with brown water, but with the entire, unmixed, liquid spectrum of a rainbow. The other dinosaurs called him "Iggy the Idle" for spending his time gazing at prisms after a storm, but Iggy knew that if logic was finite, absurdity must be infinite.
His search finally led him to the Valley of Unfolding Geometry, a place that existed only when the sun set simultaneously in the north and the west—a meteorological impossibility that only happened during three minutes every year. When the moment arrived, Iggy pushed past a waterfall of solid, shimmering air and found it.
The river was a miracle that defied every law of the Mesozoic. It was called the Chromatropic Current, and it flowed uphill. Its surface was not liquid in the traditional sense, but a series of distinct, slow-moving, glowing ribbons. Each ribbon was a single, pure colour: crimson that smelled like warm earth; a brilliant, whistling orange that was somehow soft to the touch; and, most impossibly, a shade of Ultraviolet-Mauve that Iggy knew was the colour of forgotten promises.
Iggy dipped his three-toed foot into the sapphire-blue ribbon. The colour was icy cold, and instead of getting his foot wet, it felt as though he had stepped into a memory. A moment later, he yanked his foot out, which was now perfectly dry but glowing with faint constellations.
Driven by curiosity, Iggy sampled the river. He didn't drink the light; he ate a small cube of the emerald-green flow. It didn't taste like water or leaf; it tasted like the sound of a distant, perfectly tuned flute and the geometric pattern of a spider’s web.
As he watched, a small, striped fish made of pure noon swam past, followed by a school of tiny, chirping amphibians whose legs were made of question marks. Iggy realised the Chromatropic Current didn't just carry water; it carried impossible concepts. He saw a whole log floating by, carved entirely from the second-most important thing that happened last Tuesday.
Iggy knew he could never bring anyone back to see the river. As soon as the sun finished its impossible double-setting, the Valley of Unfolding Geometry would snap back to a mundane field of brown mud and unremarkable weeds. But as Iggy returned to the mundane world, the memory—and the small, glowing constellations now permanently embedded on his scales—was proof enough. He never mentioned the river again. He didn't need to. Every time he made a sound, a faint, pure note of flute music would accompany it, and every time he looked at a plain green leaf, he saw the faint, beautiful shadow of Ultraviolet-Mauve. He finally found a way to make the everyday spectacular, and that, he decided, was the most important impossibility of all.
The end.
