We were cliffs once, clawed by eagles, pinned by roots of slanted trees. Lashed by wind, rain, and time — ever so slowly, we crumbled. Feldspar was the first to go, leaving behind the sharp angles of quartz, to make our way down rivulets and streams, coursing between fish and fowl, growing lighter, smoother, slighter.

We marveled at our speed. How quickly we could travel, now that we were small. We moved in whorls and bursts, rested, at times, in dark hollows beside slippery moss. Some of us tumbled into crevices and cracks, destined to lay in quiet for decades to come. Others were scooped by the beaks of large birds, taken to the air once more, deposited in strange and new locales. Most of us went down the streams, down, down, down, until the water turned cold and enormous, and we felt a loneliness unlike ever before.

Here we settled, bathed in salt, even smaller, sharper, for all the distance we have traveled. There are others who have been here far longer than us, entities of particle and bone, the remains of coral as old as the mountain we once were. Fragments of shell and skeleton, ground down as we were, by water and time.

We hear them whispering at night. They sing songs of times past, when great finned beings roamed the seas and islands of ice cast huge, slow shadows overhead. They mourn the beings they once were, the flesh that clothed their bones, the beating blood that coursed through their skin.

What is skin, what is blood? This we have never known. Perhaps it is why we are never sad, unlike those grains made from brittle bone. They think us cold and unfeeling, pointed and a little cruel. The eagles that once landed on our jagged face thought the same; the wolves whose tender paws warmed our spines might have cursed us too. But mountains do not hurt. And though we are small now, we are still strong, a million tiny mountains in our own right.

There are times, though, when the sweep of a particular current, or a specific swirl of plankton eddying in the dim light, reminds us of the gusting wind, the raging sun. We dream of being large again, our shoulders reaching high into damp clouds, our flanks immovable in storms, our cheeks hard against the thin caress of air.