The ancient glacier gleamed with an icy-blue pride of permanence, and boasted in frozen silence of its longevity.  It left behind the evidence of its strength on a scoured landscape that was void of any good thing.  With each snowstorm the glacier grew, its life blessed, its mass nurtured for eons by the frigid northern air.  And then almost imperceptibly, the frequency of storms began to diminish, and the air warmed, gnawing at the giant’s surface.  As the millenniums crawled across the earth, becoming ever gentler in terms of climate, the glacier reluctantly gave birth in the glaring light of midday to a crystalline trickle of bright melt water.  From low on the ice-mountain’s southern slope, the tinkling tears widened into a silver flow that fell with others of its kind toward a distant sea it would never reach.  This seemingly innocuous gathering of small streams spilling freely from the vast and frozen desolation of Artinus soon became part of a thousand similar miniscule eruptions of murmuring and gurgling cascades.  In the lower latitudes, that medley of moving sound melded into a crescendo, only to cease its music and become the silent aquamarine depths of the cold and living Fallon River.  Now having descended across four hundred miles of barren ice and stone, the Fallon flowed into an inhabited valley of the same name.  There, the river forked, and forked again, and yet again, until its five nourishing arms reached to embrace the scattered villages that lay along its courses.