A small stone was slowly swept along by a long river, the churning waters buffeting it with passing flecks of dust and sedement.

Every time the stone hit an obstacle, it would become slightly rounder, small imperfections slowly chipping away.

The river’s purpose was to clean, to purify the waters it was built of. Impure waters would flow into the river full of grit and grime, and be drawn from the river downstream as pure and clear. Everything impure would sink to and settle at the riverbed, slowly becoming a part of the soil. Everything except the stone.

Too large to settle on the riverbed easily, the stone would be swept away long before it could be absorbed. It clung to the notion thbat perhaps somewhere downriver it could gain an opportunity to rise above the water’s surface, to rejoin the land it was once a part of. But such an opportunity never came

After ages of polishing, the stone was reduced to a small shiny sphere, identical in appearance to a small violet drop of oil, mimicking a type of impurity which could be found suspended in the water.

The shiny drops of oil were a rare impurity, and a troublesome one at that. Some of the oils would attempt to float on the surface, away from the lakebed, and the rivers would grow violent as a countermesure. Churning and boiling, the waters would attempt to drag the oils down, to smother them in the depths and bury them in the soil.

These drops of oil varied in colour and size; red, grey, yellow, and more, and some colours were much rarer than others. And the shade of violet the stone bore was an exceedingly rare one indeed. 

On occasion, the stone would bump into a drop of oil of a different shade, only to bounce off, the violet oil too uncommon to be encountered often.

Every few hundreds of encounters with oil, the stone would find a drop of the same violet as itself, which would bind to it and harden.

Every time the stone met it’s oily counterpart, the stone would briefly liquify, before re-hardening to encoporate the the oil into itself.

Every drop the stone gained would darken its colour and increase it’s density. 

As the stone grew, the violet oil would be encountered more and more often, seemingly drawn to it by some unseen force. Eventually, all the violet oil that fell into the river would find its way to the stone, which grew ever darker in the proccess.

As the stone grew heavier and heavier, it would linger for longer and longer on the riverbed, the waters slowly becoming less and less able to push it along. And eventually it was too much.

As the stone drew in the last of the oil in the river, it finally lost all reflectiveness entirely. There was no difference in the stone’s makeup between violet and black, the stone being a perfect shade of both at once.

But to an outsider, it would only look like a void, a missing space, as if exactly nothing was there at all. 

Too dense now to be driven the the river’s current, the stone finally settled into the sediment of the riverbed, and was slowly drawn into the earth below.

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From now on, the violet oil would float no more, sinking to the riverbed willingly, as if drawn in by the stone below.