‹ Prequel: Ninety Days of Water
Status: Active.
Tundra
Chapter XXI – Embers – Part III
‘It wasn’t like this last time.’ Eiron stood braced, ready for the plunge. What lay below him seemed to be the impossible maw of a broken ocean. Foam churned hungrily as the waves gnashed back and forth, creating an unruly vortex. For once, the warrior found himself saying, ‘This can’t be safe.’
‘The elder is drawing the tides to itself,’ Aais explained, his webbed fingers outstretched to measure something in the air.
Together, Hackley and I chanted the words to bring a bubble out of the moisture that surrounded us, stretching the dampness thin and taut. The globe expanded until we were a world unto ourselves, just three human beings with Aais looking on, bemused. Together, we sank like a pearl cast to the bottom of the sea, round and shiny. We rolled inside the tide and under it, diving towards the ocean floor. Monstrous things chased us, the kind of sea monsters that would have done an atlas proud. They were drawn in ink in the murky depths, penned with long, sabre-toothed grins gilt in moonlight filtered down from the surface of the ocean, or else with gleaming eyes filled with gold leaf, and dislocated jaws set with serrated ivory. Their luminous eyes rose up like hundreds of dawning planets, each a reality away from the world we were used to– well, the world most of us were used to. Aais swum freely, rolling and floating languidly in the current, relishing the feeling of fresh seawater on his fins and in his gills. He alone was not pursued by the inky and translucent demons in a sailor’s hell, although he was wary of additional coloured corals as they appeared.
Taking my cue from a particularly bloated beast, over whose locked jaws, so like a loaded trap, a buoyant light dangled, I traced the rune for a basic will-o-wisp in front of me, and sent more false glow worms as bait into the liquid night. This distracted our bubble’s would-be predators just long enough for us to reach the silent cavern where Aais and Eiron had met, and emerge dripping onto its stony shore. A pool shimmered in the middle of the void, as crystal clear as if the thing inside it, entombed under the water like a huge and prehistoric specimen trapped under ice, was our reflection, the thing we had been searching for stowed inside us all along. I could just make out the iris of its enormous eye, subtly curved like the earth when viewed from high up in the sky, flecked with every shade of blue and copper imaginable. In its centre, unmistakably, was a dilated pupil, wide and black as a well.
‘Do you remember, Aais,’ Eiron said, ‘when I asked you if your elder was aware of us?’
‘Yes,’ said Aais, simply.
Eiron drew himself up to his full height, as if he could rival the behemoth, as if he stood of hope of being anything but swallowed by the gravity of that glare. The confidence he put on was an air, I knew, because what he was about to say shook him to his core. He cleared his throat, and made the announcement.
‘It is now.’
‘The elder is drawing the tides to itself,’ Aais explained, his webbed fingers outstretched to measure something in the air.
Together, Hackley and I chanted the words to bring a bubble out of the moisture that surrounded us, stretching the dampness thin and taut. The globe expanded until we were a world unto ourselves, just three human beings with Aais looking on, bemused. Together, we sank like a pearl cast to the bottom of the sea, round and shiny. We rolled inside the tide and under it, diving towards the ocean floor. Monstrous things chased us, the kind of sea monsters that would have done an atlas proud. They were drawn in ink in the murky depths, penned with long, sabre-toothed grins gilt in moonlight filtered down from the surface of the ocean, or else with gleaming eyes filled with gold leaf, and dislocated jaws set with serrated ivory. Their luminous eyes rose up like hundreds of dawning planets, each a reality away from the world we were used to– well, the world most of us were used to. Aais swum freely, rolling and floating languidly in the current, relishing the feeling of fresh seawater on his fins and in his gills. He alone was not pursued by the inky and translucent demons in a sailor’s hell, although he was wary of additional coloured corals as they appeared.
Taking my cue from a particularly bloated beast, over whose locked jaws, so like a loaded trap, a buoyant light dangled, I traced the rune for a basic will-o-wisp in front of me, and sent more false glow worms as bait into the liquid night. This distracted our bubble’s would-be predators just long enough for us to reach the silent cavern where Aais and Eiron had met, and emerge dripping onto its stony shore. A pool shimmered in the middle of the void, as crystal clear as if the thing inside it, entombed under the water like a huge and prehistoric specimen trapped under ice, was our reflection, the thing we had been searching for stowed inside us all along. I could just make out the iris of its enormous eye, subtly curved like the earth when viewed from high up in the sky, flecked with every shade of blue and copper imaginable. In its centre, unmistakably, was a dilated pupil, wide and black as a well.
‘Do you remember, Aais,’ Eiron said, ‘when I asked you if your elder was aware of us?’
‘Yes,’ said Aais, simply.
Eiron drew himself up to his full height, as if he could rival the behemoth, as if he stood of hope of being anything but swallowed by the gravity of that glare. The confidence he put on was an air, I knew, because what he was about to say shook him to his core. He cleared his throat, and made the announcement.
‘It is now.’