There is something about water that translates into many descriptions: more than waterfalls, and rivers; simple shores and lakes. Water flows, and anything that does the same can be connected in a way. Like time, the passing of it like a river that follows over and along the slopes and pitfalls of the mountain side.
So it would stand true to say that a River God, a spirit made of water and whose very being relies on the motion of flow, sees many things — that he is many things.
He sees, in a way, time. It's turned pages, the words read now, and the chapters still ahead, and so when he tells Sen — when he tells Chihiro — 'well done,' it is not for the deed she has just completed, no, but for the one that began the minute she stepped pink shoe'd feet onto the concrete tunnel; the minute she heard the groaning of the tall red building whose clock face shed tears for a reason she couldn't understand.
Because of this he gives her not gold but medicine; because of this, and the innocence she held inside. He sees in the reflection of her eyes bits of her future — a cursed dragon, first bloody and then clean, who spits blood in anger and who struggles against medicine paired with love; whose scales scatter about her as they fall through the sky.
Train tracks moving under flowing water, and her, as night falls, at the beginning of a forest whose light guards the entrance and yet welcomes her with a bow of it's lantern as it leads her to a home that is small and peaceful, a port in a storm. He sees rain, brief droplets falling up among the sky; and then, two different pale hands, young, grasped together at their sides.
Her future is a journey that flows well but whose turns are sometimes against the tide, and as a River God he sees them all. He laughs as he twines himself around corridors and around surprised patrons on his path to the main gate. This bathhouse knows nothing of what is to come and even less of what is along the riverbed, the secrets beneath the surface.
Or of the courage of a young girl who changes many things. He laughs, and laughs, and flies off to his home free of human pollution and the stink of his burdens. They may not know any of these things —
— but they will learn.
