[center][h2][colour=steelblue]Mamang.[/colour][/h2]
[h3]V[/h3][/center]

Coasts, rocks, silt and sand. Fish and kelp and coral, and the free voices of its distant kin. At last- shallow seas again. 

The whale shoved its snout into the mud.

Clouds of dust and silt kicked up around its face. The young whale filled its mouth with free-floating dirt and expelled silt and water through its bristles, swallowing a mouthful of shrimp and grit. This was not a dignified way for an animal of its great, sleek size to feed. It was not as restful as skimming the rich green surface as it travelled, nor as thrilling as the lunge of the herring-hunt. It only filled the belly a little in the absence of more nourishing prey.

The whale's mouth had bled profusely in the hours and days after the blast. In the time it took to recover, more fortunate whales had scooped up all the fish and fry that remained along the shore before the dust-darkened sky had choked out the green that sustained their forage. Whole shoals of the littler fish had been struck and slain outright by the waterborne sound, left to drift away, sink and rot in the claws of carrion-crabs. Now the sea was to taste only of dust.

(Little did the whale know that the wrath of the Eye had lifted up ores rich in the salt of the gods, and cast that powder far and wide into the hungry sea. There it would leaven the waves, and when the winds and the currents at last cleared of dust, there would reign twelve years of great plenty on the coast of Termina, in which many calves would wean. Would that the whale had known of such things!)

The whale had learned of such mudlarking by observing, in its hunger, a distant cousin; a hook-nosed and pockmarked cow whale encrusted with barnacles and rather smaller than itself, but content to observe and call curtly as the sleek and desperate youngster fumbled its way around the technique.

In time the blood cleared from its mouth and it learned to swim straight with its crippled hearing. The shock also did fade, but the whale no longer felt young. It had seen much that was strange and cold and harsh, and that it could not forget; the clean sweet joy of its early years was not to return in those waters. Its gut and innards now crawled with worms, blown on a foul wind into the mud of the injured sea, and horked down a hungry throat. An army of lice picked and carved at its delicate skin, around its eyes and in the pleats of its throat, clinging on with legs like fishhooks. The whale knew nothing of worms or lice, of course, but it felt the keen sharp edge of its strength dulled and sapped ever so faintly from its weathered body, and so it departed that place, its hunger half-sated, for the more peaceful shore of its birth.

[center][h3]VI[/h3][/center]

The whale passed familiar isles, and reunited with kin it had known; the sea grew cold and abundant, the fish ever larger. The path it had taken would in time grow, and come to be a common one in the forthcoming decade of prosperity. South once to mate, again to give birth in the warmth of the sun, and north to enjoy the long summers granted by the Shepherd between the dark months of his winter reign.

It regained its lost weight, and indeed returned far larger than when it had departed, almost as long now as the strong and lonesome bulls that sang loud through the blue from afar, warding their mates. No close company, then, was found for the whale; the mothers were quite occupied with their calves, while its uncles had no patience for bachelors, and the heifers swam under their wing. It was enough to hear the occasional beat of their voices, and far better so than the long, low melody of the most distant ice, where swam the still larger, still lonelier whales of the furthest north.

And yet the whale longed for touch. The chill of the north and the sweet taste of meltwater reminded it of its mother, whose milk had ever nurtured him, whose great flank had brought comfort amid the distant chittering of orcas, that wandering calfhood nightmare whose song was the wolf-whine of death. There was no she-whale here who would give it warmth, for it had yet to win such favour. Its flecked and pockmarked senior had remained in the south. The black, bow-headed songsters of the north shore were ever glad to call to it with their whistles and melodies, but their ways were their own, and they could not match pace with the rorqual.

So the whale nudged against driftwood, rubbing its throat and belly against clean gravel, prodding skates and flounders and sleepsharks and whatever else it found in the blue. It gained such a habit of poking about between feeding that it nearly breached in pure shock when something finally poked back.

It was a chunk of glacier-ice, washed down a fjord and polished glass-smooth by the waves. The whale rubbed it with its fin and listened closely with its good ear, but it could not see any trace of what was touching its skin, even as it dragged curious tendrils across the whale's face and around its eye, tracing the line of the whale's closed lips as if with a fingertip. When it opened its mouth it soon felt something tickle the bristle-brush of its baleen, wriggling between the plates with animal curiosity, stroking the fibres up and down. The whale circled, slowly, watching the iceberg rotate in unison.

They explored one another in total silence.

As the claws of the icy creature traced the pleats of the whale's throat, it relaxed, and felt something release like a shackle briefly lightened. The ice-being noticed, and repeated the gesture in another pleat, and another, harder this time. The whale rolled over onto its back, and the ice-being continued with a mussel-shell fingernail. 

At last- true relief. The ice-being carved off hundreds of lice at a stroke, casting them down helpless into the silt to be snapped up by cod. The chill against its skin reminded the whale of how things had been, long ago, in the cold, clean waters of its youth.

When at last the whale grew hungry and the ice-being too warm to continue, they departed, each to seek their own form of sustenance. Come autumn they would separate further still, seeking and fleeing the chill of the Shepherd. By winter they would be far gone, each to breed among its own kind. In spring they would remember, little wordless memories of touch, a poem of fingertips to be written anew in the clean and gentle hearts of giants.

And in the summer, once again, they would find each other.

[hider=friend!]
Mamang continues to deal with the fallout of the blast, then heads back to the Giantlands. 

It encounters a Nisshiniek, and they examine one another. The Nisshi learns that it can help clean the whale of recently-created parasites, and doesn't seem to mind, since these species were made by an unknown god in an unknown land. This interaction will probably spread and repeat in future years, as the Nisshiniek and whale territories overlap nicely in the summer season.

Man, this chapter is just maximum whaleposting. Mucho texto about types of whale, their movement and behaviour. I do not apologise.

0 Vigour gained.
0 Vigour spent.
1,118 whale points awarded.

[b]Total whale points: 3,229[/b]
[/hider]