Sequel: Tundra
Status: On hold.

Ninety Days of Water

World of Mirrors

I found her by a paper beach. The sand was white and dry as parchment, and littered with the bleached, corkscrew cores of shells whose spirals had long since broken away. Fragments of armoured sea-urchins were also scattered around, faded from amethyst to palest lavender and from teal to chalky green. Scallops with worn and notched corrugations lay open like ribcages prised apart, their hearts picked clean by seagulls and their edges scrunched up and crinkled like old doilies exposed to a flame.

I had strayed up from the seafloor, where I had been sitting outside the Grotto, for no other reason than to assuage my disillusionment. I felt incredibly powerless, and so I wanted to be in the one place I had not felt so lonely. I even longed for it. It was a world designed for one, with a single-serving beach and palm trees with just enough shade for one body. It was a place I could fit, and where being just one person was not a disadvantage. Thus, even though I knew it was unwise, and even though I knew I should not make a difficult job for Tellesing by becoming a disobedient hostage, I had come back to the lagoon.

As soon as I arrived, I wished I had not. I wasn't sure what it was about Fletch's depression and Master Tellesing's quiet concern, but those feelings seemed to have infected me. As soon as I touched it, I found the beach was bare and parched, a desert surrounded by saltwater. It was a desert in other ways, too- a dry landscape where not even my feelings could take root. I had never felt so isolated.

Even before I noticed her, I looked upon the beach and let it instill me with a fresh longing- longing not for a place, but for a way of life that was now unattainable. The sand was white and smooth, and in that way, it was so very like an empty page. As an Adept of Runes, paper was my medium, and I was sorry to be reminded of how much I missed it. Oh, what parchment meant to me! What books and libraries meant! What I would have given in that moment for a quill and ink, to scrawl my heart out as I have the luxury of doing now...

I could not help but think about the sheer gravity of my loss. I had lost more than a means to express myself. I had lost the ability to create not just words, but worlds. Having suffered the lagoon's rebuff, I had forgotten how to find a home elsewhere than in my own creation. On parchment or vellum, or on delicate leaves so thin that each is an opaque window, and which make fat books in the same manner as raindrops make the ocean, I could carve universes out of ink. I could craft sentences and fill them with meaning, looping hopes and hooking hearts like a fisherman knots his lines and sets his lures afloat.

Runes are writing, but they are also aesthetic, and so I was a painter as much as a storyteller- indeed, I still am. I could draw a perfect circle, invoking the sun, the moon, smooth pebbles, pearls and all the other things that pine in a circle's likeness. I could make the planets themselves long for my artistry. I could make my rough parchment mimic dried leaves, or an open plain, or a wall of brick; even the void into which those things dismissed by runic power go. With just some canvas and a little ink, I could do anything.

That paper beach sparked up an aching in my chest, making my soul burn in the fast, curling way that only paper can. The tide foamed in and washed away my ink, so that it bled out of my wounds and ran into the sea...

Into the sea, where she sat, lonely as a lighthouse.

'Vaghiiss?'

She whipped around, her hair wind-tossed like a cloud of that ink of mine. 'You should not be here,' she said.

I hesitated, and chose the bolder of my options. 'Should you?'

She was crouched just below the tide line in a shallow pool of clear water, surrounded by rocks to which starfish and limpets clung in fear of suffocation. From behind, she might have been a mermaid- more exotic than alien. Her mane was a fractured emerald, an impossible spectrum of greens, and the skin of her back glimmered with a myriad of smaller rainbows. For a moment, my heart leapt, and then found an anchor in memory. Her face, I knew, would be of the same skin- beautiful, yet not warm. Hers were not coral cheeks, or eyes like shining pools holding captured handfuls of the blue sky. There was no softness about her.

Yet...

When she first noticed my presence, I thought she smiled in a way both subtler and more forceful than the placid ocean, where sunlight glimmered in contented arcs. The surge of the tide was intensified in that smile, making it compelling, but it was also sad. The many twists and turns of her shape reflected the turbulence of the sea when it knows the confines of its prison. She rested on her hands in the warm water, so that her bare chest was lifted to the sun and plastered with her seaweed curls. Her chest seemed designed to house a human heart, although the presence of her ribs was merely hinted at, like a skate lying beneath sand. Glistening muscles towed a sculpted line towards her waist, whereupon crystal sealed itself around her, splitting her into two halves.

Vaghiss was, I realised, at the centre of the strange place of opposites that was the ocean. She looked as lost there, at the sea's heart and with intimate knowledge of its secrets, as I felt looking in. She flicked her webbed feet in a mournful, playful way, flinging up rainbows to catch in her glimmering scales. With a splash, her foot broke the mirror that trapped her, and made those rainbows airborne. Then, her eyes found me where the water met the shore, and she faltered.

'I am not meant to be here,' she confirmed, 'and yet, I am. This is the Isle of the Drowned, where we each are converted, living and dead. It belongs to me just like I belong to it.'

She picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle from her hand. Her claws looked less deadly than usual, and more like fingernails. 'It is strange,' she said, 'but since watching you, I feel like I belong to it much more than it belongs to me. I should like to restore that balance.'

'How?' I asked, but she gazed out at the open waves, rather than in my direction. I got the impression that this wasn't something that could be articulated. Not even by the likes of me.

Without turning, she shrugged loosely. 'It saddens me to think that I do not have an immortal soul,' she confessed. 'It never used to, but it weighs on my mind, lately. I find myself longing, like the waves long for the shore.'

I thought immediately of Fletch, who would be in our cavern at that very moment, longing as well. I was longing, too, I supposed, even if I had been enjoying myself quite recently. Chiefly, I longed for answers.

'There is a reluctance in the tide lately,' Vaghiiss went on. 'Since about the time that you arrived, I felt it. I think my brothers and sisters feel it too. Deghazin has been more restless than usual. He dogs me like a shark hunts for fishes, seeking blood and promotion. This is partly why I wanted you to swim for yourself.'

She opened her mouth, but at the moment the sea rushed itself at the shore, breathing her sigh for her. She closed it again as though nothing more than disappointment had escaped.

'Why are you thinking about souls?' I asked, thoughtlessly, perhaps. 'Is it because of Fletch and I? I thought you chose to be... well, you? To live the way you do.'

'I did,' she said. 'Lately, the sadness is just infectious. It is a kind of emptiness, as though the sea suffers. I feel it rippling everywhere. The tide turns.'

I nodded, agreeing more than she could know.

'Do you want me to go away? I can leave you alone, if you would prefer.'

'No,' she said abruptly. 'I do not want that. I can't tell you what I mean, but I would rather you swam with me than left. Perhaps then, if I cannot tell you, then I can at least show you.'

Outwardly, I was agreeable, but secretly, I was concerned. I was not as strong a swimmer as the expert Vaghiiss. Would I get lost? Where were we going? I had had some glimpse of the dangers the sea contained, and even with my enhanced abilities, I was not that brave.

'Come,' she instructed me, slipping beneath the water so that she could transform. Then she flopped, in a graceful arc, into the pool she inhabited, slithering serpentine among the rocks as the tide swept in like a spill of polished glass. Two dimples dented her back where her muscles folded into her strong tail, and her waist curved out like a bell.

The swimming was like a dance.

Vaghiiss' arms trailed lightly over the limpets and starfish on the rocks as she glided, silvery, towards the reef. She took my wrist in a firm hand, her fingers snaked about it like those grasping arms of rubbery weed we had encountered after my capture. Invigorated by the water, her envy-coloured tendrils had come to life and were snaking about her body, practicing the mischief of kelp snagging nets and oars.

Following the path she set, I could see every grain of sand and every jigsaw piece of shell as we swept over a mosaic floor. The dappled light of the shore faded into the timeless aquamarine of the ocean, and we sank.

We sank, down past castles built for shrimp and clownfish, and past pink and purple coral antlers set like trophies on the rocks. We sank, and we dropped off the ledge that surrounded the lagoon. We sank until we were in free fall in the open ocean.

Dark caves loomed ahead, life-sized compared to the hiding holes the sea wrought for her fishes. I noticed then that there were other sounds beside the submarine rumbling of the sea being sucked through these underwater caverns. Vaghiiss was singing.

I could not tell at first whether her normal voice was gone, or whether it had merely been distorted. After a while, however, I gathered that the change had been deliberate. Her singing voice rendered syllables with heart-breaking musicality. They cleaved my heart a second time because they were unintelligible to me. She was not singing in her normal language, which was one that mimicked the sounds of the sea itself. This language was a haunting overlay, like a delicate filigree laid over the stained-glass ocean. As we wound through the caves and echoing chambers, our dance and the places we explored gave shape to her words, but still I could not comprehend their precise meaning. I could be sure only of a running theme:

This place is monstrous, it seemed to say. I am monstrous.

I thought I understood, then, what the point of the exercise was. I was supposed to encounter myself in the deep, seeing my reflection in the sea's fathomless wisdom. My eyes stared, huge and lantern-like, from the faces of fish with long fangs and heads pressed flat like Lightshale's dehydrated specimens. Surprised bubbles escaped their dislocated jaws and spiraled upwards, intertwining with my own exhaled air. They were monstrous indeed, and they thought me monstrous, too. Eventually, Vaghiiss led us out of the caves, and into an inky expanse where there were no beasts, nor any thrashing foam to churn my fears. There was only the drowning void, opening up like a pit. There was only everlasting, starless night and watery omnipotence. There was only emptiness and terror.

The abyss was both a sinkhole, possessing a kind gravity that made my soul lurch, and a mirror more perfectly reflective in its blackness than any looking-glass. It was a mirror, and so it showed me my face, but it also showed what was behind my face. Then, I realised, I had not just been peering into my own thoughts all this time- I had been privy to Vaghiiss'. These were her fears, and I was sharing her introspection. I only thought they were mine because, in patches, they were so alike.

We both feared the unfamiliar, but whereas I feared loneliness and obscurity, she feared the extinguishment that would claim her in place of death. Thus, her alienation was greater than mine.

We surfaced. I clambered, coughing and spluttering, onto the blissfully dry shore, like something that the sea had expelled, just as I was then expelling small chunks of the sea. Vaghiiss, meanwhile, slithered back into her wallowing pool. Her tail vanished, and her twinkling, silver scales became fresh sand as they were shed. The precious metal underneath them ran out in veins of mercury to where the blue was deepest; washed where the legged could not follow. She watched this part of her body dissolve into the water while she breathed air again. She wore the water like a blanket, letting it lap comfortingly around her.

'You're not monstrous,' I said.

Throughout our brief but various acquaintances, she had always seemed so steely and driven, but the sadness of the water had infected even her. Folded up the way she was, she looked not just unintimidating, but small. I wholly regretted my first impression of her.

'It can't be true,' I stammered. 'You do have a soul. Nobody can tell you otherwise if you won't let them.' It sounded simplistic, even to my own ears.

Without speaking, she turned to me, and I saw in each of those eyes the abyss in miniature. By forcing me to reflect on the final moments before we returned from the deep, they offered up all the answers I needed. I thought of the oppressive depth, and of my heart hammering in my throat, beating at my ribs as though trapped in a cage. I had surfaced with my chest carrying me forward, buoyed up on fear and reprehension. My legs had struggled to keep up, kicking against the weight of knowledge that clawed me back like an anchor.

I shuddered, recalling the sensation as I crawled coldly back onto dry land, only to see just how much time had passed. We must have been underwater for hours, until the afternoon had become evening. Daylight faded around us like the last embers in a stove, no longer warm or comforting. Vaghiiss combed her hands through her hair, driving the water out of it in rivulets. The water lapped blackly around her, congealing with dusk's chill. Whenever she twisted or trembled, it rippled out in sheets.

I watched the shadows in the water, and thought of my own, bargained away. It was possible to bargain a shadow, perhaps, but to bargain away oneself... I was reminded of Tellesing's tale about the old Trials. What did a soulless person look like? Not this, surely.

'You must have a soul.'

She only shook her head, looking all the more forlorn as she stared out to see- a siren in her silence.

I thought of the things I had set out to achieve that day. I had failed to find any of the answers I needed, and had only succeeded in discovering new questions. As the sunset fires died out and the ocean became coal-black, I couldn't help but think that we were marooned on that paper beach, and me without any ink.

*


Evenings, it seemed, were hardest for Fletch. The longer he was awake, the more reality ground on him, until it wore him out.

Something had definitely affected the atmosphere of our prison. Time was becoming more onerous, as though a deadline approached through that fog, and I would have little warning of it. I could not tell how much longer my friend would be able to endure his suffering, nor how long it would be until I was so thoroughly infected as to be useless to him. Already, I found myself staring out to sea more often. It was easy to picture, and I could almost feel, a look in my eyes that I had only ever seen in the eyes of one other person before- Iyetta, the Drowned.

I wondered, silently, when Tellesing would come back. Fletch wouldn't believe that he had ever been around to begin with, and as the days crept by, his case became more convincing. I started to doubt what I had seen.

Yet, I still hoped.

I hoped as I grew tired of eating fish, and turned my back on swimming. I hoped as I traced runes in the sand, willing them to lift themselves from stillbirth in a watery grave. I hoped as I came to know my custodian, and realised that she was not my captor.

It was all I could do to keep myself afloat.

*


When I finally understood that Blackmouth really, truly didn't want me, and neither did Lightshale, I used to pass the time by wondering where my Master could be. It was better than thinking about what might happen to me if the sea-people's negotiations with the mages fell through. It was better by far than wondering whether they already had.

Perhaps, I thought, Tellesing had gone to seek the help of his allies, who were scattered all over the continent. He might have gone to Firepeak, where the earth was too hot to walk on barefoot, and every living thing was scaled. There, he might have persuaded the men and women who spoke with tongues of flame to lend their whispering torches to his cause. They might have been flying on dragon back to Tyrian City, to confront the Table of Eight, or to Lightshale, to force negotiations. I hoped they would not go the Blackmouth, where fierce Master Ulrik was a formidable opponent for any kind of magic, and had no heart to be manipulated. I hoped, instead, that they would come directly back to the ocean, for me, bringing green and purple fire to sear the water away, so that they never even had to get wet.

Or, maybe, my old Master had gone to the fortified hills, where the trees were practically people. He could also have gone to the Evergreen, from whence Lady Morganna came. That place was like an underwater garden upside down, on its outskirts, where it sprinkled a pretty trap of dangling willow trees, sprawling oaks to dapple the light on the water of the Moat, and pink water lilies to float on its surface. The Moat was a wide ring of creeks that no horse could cross, and nobody knew what lay on the other side. Lady Morganna had few words for all but the few female pupils she took. If they shared her secrets, they were not telling.

Nevertheless, I thought, Tellesing might know. He seemed to know everything, and have friends everywhere. I would not have been surprised if he returned with an army of elves, though they were allegedly extinct.

Thus, I passed my time in wondering. I wouldn't learn where Tellesing truly was until I saw him again.