27th Yunara, 992 NE
The night Tephel died was her last on the land for a long, long time.
She had tried her hand at healing, and passed the tests set by senior members of the Shining Circle, even if she didn’t quite make the grade for fixing head injuries. All spring and summer she’d been at it – the Magisterium took about eighty percent of what she made, but trade was brisk, and she had plenty aside for rent and disposable income. Her little shop on the wharf was a popular attraction for the townspeople with minor hurts and injuries – a trip down to the harbour, take the kids to see the boats and get the mother-in-law’s broken hip taken care of…
Imrye, for her part, got to sit with her feet up by her window, watching the surf as it went from pink to white to pink again, whiling away the hours from sunrise to sunset listening to the incomprehensible cries of foreign crewmen as they offloaded their shipments. Sometimes she visited the Battered Hog, saw her friends, had a cup of wine. It was, without a doubt, the most-perfect time of her life. She was supposed to charge more for worse maladies, for the energies expended in the healing – but she flouted the rules, assessing her clients on the basis of their wealth. A farmhand needing a full reworking of his inner organs might pay less than a gentleman wanting a tooth regrown. Her newfound freedom was everything she’d ever wanted, or so she’d thought.
She could fly, now – something which she knew should’ve enraptured her, thrilled her to the core – but once she’d gotten over the initial excitement, she went back to the docks, even sitting below them late at night, fearful of no robber-pirate or corrupt watchman, dangling her feet into the water. Biting her lip against the torturous ecstasy of indecision. Looking down into the darkness of the depths, wondering when she would do it, when she would try an aquatic shape. Most weren’t so different from snakes, she supposed, and she knew it wouldn’t take the blink of an eye for her to transform into a salmon, a hake, even an eel…
The trick to shape-shifting was relatively straightforward: study. For some creatures it took her minutes, even over an hour for her first insects – for others, less than five seconds. Once she knew the creature well-enough to imagine being it, inhabiting its skin (be it scaly, hairy, feathery or whatever) was as natural as inhabiting her own. Even if she could imagine being it, she had to be looking at it the first time, it seemed. Her initial foray into this strange new world was accidental; she’d changed into a sheepdog, and it took her by as much surprise as it did the poor animal. All she’d done was crouch down to pet it, feeling sorry for it tied up outside in the bitter evening air, and poof! there she was – gender aside, she’d transformed into an almost-identical sheepdog, as far as she could tell.
“Well I never!” the dog had woofed at her.
“You’re not alone, pal,” she’d growled back. She’d been doing her best not to wince and sneeze at the several million extra sounds and scents that assaulted her, overwhelming the part of her mind designed to process new information.
After the first time, it was simple. Even the strangest, tiniest critters made much more sense to her once she was a tiny critter herself; as a fly (such strange eyes!) she could observe a bee (so many strange senses!), and so on. She almost got gobbled-up at least a dozen times, which, as an invulnerable and almost certainly inedible animal, would probably result in the devourer’s death even if she didn’t change into something bigger. She certainly wasn’t opposed to eating things when she got hungry, especially annoying or immoral creatures, but killing things without cause she wished to avoid at all costs. She respected the weirdest, most-alien of the world’s inhabitants – except wasps. She could never get her head around them, how every single one of them was an evil git. They didn’t taste very nice, either.
But it was impossible to think of things as soulless, unworthy of personhood, when you could speak with them. And she so longed to enter that hidden realm beneath the surface, enter the smothering abyss of the Fish-Queen – converse with the entities she found there, understand their minds, their silent, instinctual impulses.
Yet there was a part of Imrye that was afraid. She’d never feared the water until now.
There was so much to see, so many places to go – she could swim to the ice-lands, and the fire-lands, head to the east and west, explore the unexplored edges of the world… and that wasn’t even to mention the idea of simply going down – finding the hidden cracks and crevasses in the foundations of the earth, and investigating the caverns in which no mere mortal could ever set their foot… places left untouched, unperceived except by the gods who made them, from the dawn of time until her visit…
As Kailost rolled into Lynara and Lynara rolled into Orovost, Imrye felt the change from summer into autumn much more vividly than she’d felt winter to spring, spring to summer. There was something different to it – the decay, the death that had to precede the world’s rebirth. On the first day of autumn when the priests of Illodin went on their procession down the streets chanting the Lay of Memory, swinging their censers pouring incense-smoke of sandalwood and cinnamon – on that day she could sense the grief in her heart, like a wound had been reopened there she couldn’t recall sustaining in the first place. Leaves fell, and her spirits fell with them. Suddenly her little shop, her visitors coming to gawp at the unusual archmage… it felt like a chore. A leftover of her humanity, or elvenness, or whatever. She felt she was in denial of what she was, what she’d become.
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As the nights lengthened and the days drew in, she spent more and more of the dark hours sitting by the water’s edge. And on one of those short, pointless days, the magisters visited her.
The reprimand was delivered by a sour-faced, tiny little woman, the ten spokes of the Magisterium wheel gilded gold upon her white-robed breast. The penalties were straightforward. The loss of the lease on her shop. The loss of her license to practise healing in the Realm. The opportunity to attend a six-week Magisterium-sponsored course which would permit her to earn a new license, provided she could demonstrate she’d learned her lesson, that she would no longer offer a cheap source of life to the poor.
She’d almost decided to fight them, but then she heard the cries of the gulls and she knew she had lost the battle anyway. Her heart was in it no longer. What did it matter? What did any of this petty human nonsense matter? Reality wasn’t money and shiny badges and shops and prestige.
She followed the path under the pier, put her feet in the freezing water, and all her worries melted away.
She whittled down her savings over the following months. Yearsend came again as it always did, her thirty-first-ish, and she went to Mund to purchase lavish gifts for those she knew. Hawk-shaped in the upper city, the district they called Hightown, she stared in wonder as a titanic raven flew overhead. She saw the citizens pointing and crying in Splinterwing’s wake, no less filled with awe than she.
But she didn’t feel the longing, the envy. Not yet.
She purchased her presents, and went home to the cove just east of Salnifast, where she’d been living since her lease was terminated.
The pull of the sea had never been stronger than it was after the Yearsend parties were over. Everyone had thanked her for the gifts, a little wildness in their eyes, and that was it. Done. There was no sensation of closeness. No special bonds were forged. She was still the strange stranger, the unchanging outsider, inscrutable to them, and the archmagery had only cemented-over the walls she’d spent years chipping away at. She didn’t even wear a mage-robe, did her best to pretend to be the same old Imrye. But the truth was that even the same old Imrye had never fit in, and now it came like a pulse, never-ending, a heartbeat originating in the heart of the world, thundering through her veins, clamouring in her ears:
Reject the land-dwellers. Become one with the water.
She knew it was inevitable, drawing her in as the whirlpool inexorably draws in the flotsam, and before the pull is felt for what it is, it is already too late…
She neared the Hog at two in the morning, a little later than usual, and far too late to secure a good seat. This was the time of day the place would be heaving, barely a square-foot of floor-space to stand in while actual heaving, mini-riots, insect-races and scenes from brothels would be going on in every corner.
She didn’t mind. She had her strength. She’d be at the bar before the guys in front of her knew what hit them, and Mairdae would serve her next as usual – whether such preference was borne out of fear of her, or out of a continuing friendliness, Imrye could not now ever be totally certain.
On the street she passed a stream of people leaving the Hog and hurried inside. She pushed through the punters flooding out into the roadway, and was amazed to find the room in near-silence.
Mairdae’s tear-streaked face raised from her hands as she knelt there, beside Tephel’s body.
“Where – were – you?” The young girl’s voice was deep and loud and cold, the words a hammer to set Imrye’s skull ringing.
Then came the shriek. “Where were you?”
Mairdae got to her feet, stumbled towards Imrye as though to attack her. The archmage took her in a brief, fierce embrace until the aggression faded out of her muscles and she was reduced to sobbing; then Imrye darted over to Tephel’s side and grasped his hand.
No. She’d known it already, from the moment she’d seen him, realised what was happening.
He was gone, gone by minutes at least.
If I had just arrived sooner… a little sooner…
“How?” she asked through her own tears.
“He – he just… He collapsed. Sh-shaking. Then… then this.”
The druid’s head was spinning. The remembrance of being here before, in this situation, a dead man under her hands – Dervim, that’s what his name had been… The guilt, arriving at the Hog when she did – it would’ve been better to have never come at all, never put Mairdae through the agony of knowing it’d been so close… The nameless Northman, whose messing-up of some guy’s drug trade had resulted in this, this change, this awful metamorphosis which she could no more forget or undo than she could cease breathing…
Cease breathing.
She gently lowered Tephel’s head to the floor, then reached into her pocket for her money.
She emptied it, everything she had, on the boards next to the dead man’s head.
“This… is for you. You, and Fjarni and the others. I’m going.”
Imrye stood up, moved to the door.
She heard the sharp inhalation, as Mairdae prepared some spiteful epithet, so she increased her pace and slammed the door behind her, cutting off whatever retort the girl wanted to make. Imrye didn’t want to hear it.
Didn’t have time to hear it.
There was somewhere she needed to be, somewhere she’d needed to be for so long that the aching, the longing was more than she could express to herself in words and pictures – it was an experience she sought, a thing that had to be lived to be understood. The urgency, that was the only thing that was real.
Leave it all behind.
And so she went to the water’s edge and embraced her fear. She left behind the storm-clouds of stinging hail and the blades of wind that chewed at her feathers. She became scaled, a cold thing, a creature whose blood the ocean’s wintry deeps would only warm.
There was no backward glance. There was no goodbye.
In that moment and all the moments down the years to follow, there was never any quaver, any instant of hesitation, any jarring of purpose.
Imrye meant never to return.
* * *