Lord Zee
MarshalSolgriev
urukhai
Alby47
Crispy OctopusMamang.
II
A young whale sang as it traced the coast south, passing island after island, following the passage of its prey. Forage fish bloomed in abundance, released from the shores of the Giantlands like a drop of milk in clean water. Every year brought them further south. Bright seeds had fallen from the robes of the Queen of Life, and the clear green waters they had sown nourished shoals without number, heavy with herring and anchovies and sprats. Year after year their bodies grew smaller as their numbers ballooned, and calf after calf was weaned on the rich milk of that bounty.
The young bull was not yet grown, but had departed from its mother all the same, and a certain boldness followed it in its youth. Further and further it travelled, thrilled in its gentle heart as much by the open expanse of the ocean as by each new turn and curve of the rough-hewn continents. So swift it was already that the ceaseless conquest of the scale-armoured herring felt like a crawl, and again and again it struck out, far from shore, far from food, into the ocean, seeking something, something new.
It pulsed its beating song as it cut through the seas, night after night, in sunlight and moon: mmam, mmang. mmam, mmang. mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam...
The light came upon it like a warm breeze, a light unseen, unfelt, subtler than a heartbeat, an expanding glow called from the very fingers of the Lord of Souls. The light washed over it, left its seed- and was forever gone.
III
After weeks of travel, with no company, and nothing for its eyes to gaze upon but the clean light of the untarnished moon, the whale was ready to turn back. Only then, as the thin edge of exhaustion began to creep upon its heart, did it hear the sound of its voice reflected back.
The whale called again, high and low, short and fast, slapping its tail, hearing again. It was not a mirror for sound, no, nor a simple echo from an oncoming island, no- something quite strange, something it had never heard before. All the whale knew was that it was coming closer.
And, finally, there it was.
The whale slowed, sank, drifted. Confused. Dizzy. It puffed its breath at the surface of the black night water and submerged. The sky, above- the depths, below- and then- this?
The whale drifted closer. It could hear the sounds of its voice, cast back by something like- air. It was air, yes, and the water around it tasted of surface- yet the sky was up above- the depths below- and this air, this not-sky ahead, stretching out forever to the one side and to the other, like the stone of a wave-beaten cliff-
It was an island of air.
Unhampered by the dark of the night, but ill rested from its journey, the whale followed the wall of the air a little way. Air- fit for breathing- breaching, even. Air- a surface- it could turn its body, just so, and- crash! The whale lifted its tail out and into the island of air, feeling cold dryness upon it, and slapped back down, pounding a one-beat note out into the empty sea. So queer to slap the ocean sideways! What sensation!
A sound echoed in answer to the slap, and cut through the whale's curiosity.
F l w i in s...
Paused, for a moment, by the unnatural voice, the whale flexed. It flexed, and flapped its tail, but something was deeply, terribly wrong.
A g n me I el s...
It couldn't move. The whale's tail was hanging freely in the cold air of the un-land. The great flukes and muscle that propelled it were trapped in the un-sky, with no gravity to pull them back, restfully, easily into the comforting water- only down, down into the cliff of air, parallel the wall of stayed ocean but not into it, this hideous imposter gravity that did not pull waterward. It was dragging the whale with it.
Y d el...
The forward bulk of the whale's body was supported by water, and as its tail sank in the air, it began to lever the whale's head upwards, backwards, threatening to pull its whole body in line with the demented vertical surface. There it would have no grip on mother ocean at all, and would find no mercy from the air- miles of empty air that turned the softness of depth into a horrible, horrible height.
I w l ot b ...
Heart pounding boatloads of blood through its panicked veins, the whale twisted with all its power and steered. The sleek blades of its fins halted and guided the water, balancing the animal on the edge of the fall, curving its descent just so...
...a p wn n e ga s of a oth r.
Finally, at the peak of its desperation, the whale threw open its great maw. The force of the displaced water pushed it just enough for its fins to take hold of its slide through the water and it sank back into the sea, the whole of its back almost touching the cursed unland. Its tail beat the blessed, blessed ocean, and it departed that place for the whole and unbroken waters of the shores from which it came.
A deity watched it go.
Something had changed, for the whale. A certain innocence was now lost. Guided until now by blind animal instinct, guided gently through the safe repeating shapes of a world it had known before it was born, a seed of fear had been sown in the whale, a seed of lacking. It departed that place holding a deep and painful thorn of terrible knowledge. Knowledge of what would happen if it were to breach through that cursed wall of air, knowledge that would save it from ever again touching the far unlands, where lay already the mummified carcass of its cousin, drying for eternity under a merciless sun...
IV
A pulse. A voice. The whale sang back. A friend- the shallow seas were surely up ahead.
The whale surfaced and breathed (pfasht! fwush!). Somewhere distant, it heard a crash- a slap, or a breach? Perhaps its cousin was close enough to see. It flapped its tail and erected itself, pushing its snout and eye up above the rippled surface, scanning the horizon in the light of the dawn and the clean yellow moon.
No, no whale. Not much of any-
KRAK
A great and sudden noise split the water, shaking the very bones of the beast. The frightened whale's eye rolled back and forth through the air, only now noticing a glow-
B O O M.
The shock of the storm ripped through the whale's delicate eardrum, striking its lifted head like a slap. Ear screaming, face blazing with pain, the whale threw itself into the blue and dived, torn arteries filling its eye with blood. Instinct forced it straight down into the dark, its brain spinning from the force of the blow as the ocean heaved around it. The force of the Eye's almighty storm threw a wave through the waters that would traverse the Galbar whole, and rock the whale like a fly on a breeze.
Then there was a new light, a golden fire that pierced the darkness of the waters, outshining the heavens and the dull heat of broken stone alike.
After a while, as long as it could manage, the whale rose up for air. Its ear still whined, its face still burned, and its eye remained dulled with blood, its once-vast field of hearing now terribly lopsided. The golden fire had been replaced by a clear candle of ruby red. There was sound, again, not the crushing rumble of stone but a sound, nonetheless. It was a queer sound. Stranger than any whale, yet the young bull knew it was song; a voice from above, like the acid green voice of the cursed unland, yet pained, gentle, comforting.
Twisting its body left and right, struggling to listen with its broken ear, the whale called back, wordless, a hurt, steady bass to the dance of the Arbiter.
There were things in the water, now, mostly dust. Some other materials- driftwood, yes. The other whale had gone silent. And among it all, the limp and battered body of some long-legged animal, cold and thin and dead and lost in the waters were it did not belong. The whale nudged it, but it did not swim. It remembered the sound of the blast.
That sound was gone now. As the last echoes of the Eye's murderous power faded from the Galbar, the whale lifted its head once more, carefully, and saw something in the distance where nothing had been before, something like a tall stone.
It sank back down.
In the comforting shadow of Keltra's keep, the whale drifted, aimless, and rested in the fading light of the scarred and shattered moon.
