Someday, Somemonth, 997(?) NE

She didn’t entirely forget her past, those snarls of memories from when she breathed the poison air that seethed and sliced above the world. She knew that she was dreaming: dreams of coral wreathed as cathedrals, dreams of tactile darkness and bitterness and crunching bone, of hot geysers like mountains about which the cities gathered, a million shells carpeting the ground, a million shadows schooling across the sky.

She knew it would have to end. She encountered naga and mermen and sea-spirits and she avoided them, everything that was like her. The ruins of forgotten civilisations lost in unremembered ages held no interest for her; she never sought out Assilqarith or Ghendundre. Wyrda’s sense of architecture and skill at crafting far outstripped those of any mere man in scope and glory.

No, she was a dreamer, and she wanted no reminder of what it was to be awake. The pain of waking after years of the dream would be unendurable.

Yet awaken she would.

She had taken the form of a monstrous orca, a whale-killer, which was unusual for her, it being a poison-breathing shape. It was an awkward thing, really, closer to person than fish in many ways, and the very act of breathing was difficult, swiftly emptying and refilling the massive lungs more a chore than a relief. Nonetheless she enjoyed the speeds she could achieve, riding the line between ocean and void like a beautiful, dreadful avatar of the Fish-Queen; her magic had allowed her to subtly adjust the inhalation process, leveraging her strength to move even faster, breathe more easily.

She had no land-dweller tongue in her mind any longer; she thought and spoke in fish. But if her thoughts were to be translated, the word for her mindset would’ve been satisfied. The satisfaction was complete – there was nothing above her save Wyrda. She owned the sea in which she swam; she had no competitor, feared no predator. She was alone, but that was okay. There was no other way.

Soon the mood would come upon her again, and she would descend into the eternal night once more, but for now she almost enjoyed the grey skies – blue skies – green skies… The water here was warm, too warm for her kind, but she wasn’t a normal one. She knew these seas. These seas were close to a place she’d once lived. In the before-times. A place of marble floors extending out over the water’s surface, a place of lanterns swinging in the night.

Blood in the water.

Informed by her druidic insight, she knew it to be of humanoid origin, even here in the open water, days from land.

Avoid. Avoid!

She crested a wave, preparing to leverage her tremendous weight and make a turn, gulping in air through her blow-hole –

Then she heard it.

Screaming. High-pitched warbling roars that bespoke true terror. The terror that bares its teeth when something is making incisions, when the blood wasn’t just pumping but flowing.

Humans…

For a moment, just a moment, she imagined joining in, crushing those wailing bodies with her own immense teeth, feeling ribcages and organs pop alike…

She decided to go. Just to see.

Her speed was prodigious; in under a minute she’d espied her target. But she couldn’t have expected what she’d found, couldn’t wrap her mind, her animal instincts around it – she took several long looks, from both sides of the water’s surface.

The longship, adrift, shattered. The passengers and crew, freezing, flailing. And the thing that had turned the vessel into a scum of torn-apart timbers, still thrashing, still rending.

Two of its arms were wrapped about the two main pieces of the boat, the tendril-like appendages coiling ever-tighter, bursting cured lumber like kindling sticks. Two more arms were holding aloft several howling humanoids, subjecting them to the same pressures, simultaneously skinning and constricting them. And what seemed to be the final two arms extended rigidly beneath the surface, going down, down into darkness, as if planted in the sea-bed to hold the monster’s body firmly twenty feet above the waves – even though the sea-floor was surely thousands of feet away.

As for its body – she’d never seen nor heard of its like, not even in all her years beneath the waves.

A greenish blob of amorphous substance, she would’ve mistaken it for a dire jellyfish or something were it not for the two, very human-looking eyes buried in its centre-mass, and the huge maw, showing two rows of gigantic human teeth.

Its eyes were true-blue, she could see, even from this distance – each had to be the size of a giant turtle’s shell. And its too-human mouth was smiling, its lips parted in a smirk that could only bespeak the presence of a cruel, if crude, intellect.

She drew closer. She could discern the renewed screams and high-pitched prayers as some of the crewmen spotted her. She could still pick out and comprehend the name of Wyrda as spoken in the Mundic tongue, it appeared. The first human speech to intelligibly reach her ears in… she had no idea how long. She would have been able to track the passage of years with her powers, even when she’d been in the deeps – but she’d simply stopped caring, long ago.

But there was one, just one sailor, whose voice was different. He was bobbing up and down, clinging to a chunk of hull, and when he cried out to the others it was not in alarm. Or even acceptance, resignation. No, this was hope that she could hear.

The blue eyes of the abomination had focussed on her, and she felt liberated in the moment of confrontation.

She continued to pick up speed as she advanced, diving first, heading at her enemy’s legs and screaming her dolphin-call. At almost twenty yards in length, she weighed perhaps a hundred tons, and she displaced a lot of water. When she leapt, she would hit the survivors with a wave. She hoped none of them would die from her actions, but all of them would be in mortal peril until she acted. She had to act.

No paralysis this time.

Just hope.

That was the essential part of humanity she’d missed. The thing she’d forgotten, even when she’d been a poison-breather, a land-dweller full-time. The nature of risk. What really made life worth living. What made it precious. Why she had to protect it.

Yune.

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The thought made its way through the orca-brain she inhabited – such a tremor of emotion quaked the strange ocean-going flesh that she felt like she’d been touched by lightning.

She was growing, still moving faster, as she stopped diving and thrust herself at the surface.

What she felt, what she’d always wanted to feel – the sense of belonging, the ocean – it was an escape to nowhere, to nothing. The fish treated her no better than the land-dwellers, because she was the same thing here she was there. She hadn’t changed. What had she learned in the deeps? What great insight had the caverns of crystal offered? Nothing. The beauty was wasted on her, because she was satisfied. There was nothing to feel, nowhere to grow except on the most mundane level, the physical – the change of shape, nothing but a futile attempt to escape herself.

The floor of the drinking-house where two bodies had lain. Two failures. And this, her third. Her desperate, idiotic, childish tantrum.

She had the power, the gift, to bring life. To meet that cry of hope with a smile and a nod. To bring answers and peace where before there was only petition and anguish. And she’d done it, only she’d – what? – gotten bored? A lonely romantic with no outlet for her bitterness but to drown it in a billion gallons of saltwater and pretend it was just the way of things.

N-n-o l-l-l-o-n-g-e-r-r-r!

She had wasted so much time.

Feeling almost herself again, she wondered just what the thing was. A magical sea-creature she’d never heard of? Not likely. A demon? Possibly.

The result of an archmage like her, who sank deeper into the despair and mated?

Whatever it was, she felt no compunction to let it live.

She launched herself out of the water, jaws wide apart – the abomination only smiled and let her come, its four arms spread.

The moment her teeth closed on the jelly-flesh, mid-leap, she understood. A sense of imbalance, dizziness, struck her for the first time in a very long time.

Its green, fluorescent ichor was poison, and it went pouring by the pint into her mouth, and spraying high into the air. She’d only come into contact with poisons a few times amongst those she’d healed, or at least that was what her recently-defunct, still-hazy memories were telling her. This was a special kind – the magical, kill-you-in-a-heartbeat-even-though-you’re-a-hundred-ton-orca kind.

Yune!

As she lost the momentum of her leap and she tipped towards the surface once more, she spoke the goddess’s name to herself, clenching the jaws even tighter on the monster’s blubber, letting it happen, letting go of her destiny. If she gave her life here, so be it.

It might’ve been a weird, powerful creature, but it had nowhere near the physical strength or leverage to support itself with her attached to its face. She bore it down under the waves, covering them in vivid green oil as she pirouetted, diving and rising and chewing and butting.

She heard more than one of the watching onlookers screaming now in gratitude to Wyrda, spotted their fists raised up to the sky.

But her foe released its grip on its victims, seeming to still be smiling as it allowed her to toss it around. Bit by bit, it wrapped her in all six arms, its suckers affixing themselves to almost every inch of her smooth skin.

Now it was her with no leverage, no way to improve on her angle. She was stuck chewing at the same bit of jelly-flesh, stuck ingesting poison.

It might’ve been a dangerous monster, but it was clear to her by now that she had a magic of her own that far outstripped whatever this entity possessed. The poison in her bloodstream would almost certainly kill her in an instant if she changed shape back – unless she purged it first. But that would take time. She could perceive it there within her, like nausea, a nausea that burned, that rose up into her chest – but it was already lessening. The dizziness that had infected her mind began to pass.

However, the six thin arms tightened yet further, squeezing her incessantly. It seemed that the appendages were extendable and retractable, and the thing reeled them in now that they were locked down, rooted to her, drawing her in and tightening its hold.

The tendrils went rending right through her skin, tearing into her blubber – it sloughed away by the ton as though she were being put through a grater, and she couldn’t replace the lost mass – the creature only got closer and closer, coiling itself tighter and tighter, wriggling, burying itself inside her.

Agony. Agony such as she’d never before experienced, every inch of her exposed inner surfaces like a nerve left naked to a surgeon’s drill.

She drew in every iota of awareness, studying the poison in her. She could visualise the spread of the foul substance, the webs of blood inside her changing colour as it stretched out its venomous roots for her heart. She could visualise it changing back again – changing back –

She gave forth the dolphin-cry once more, sensing death nearing – and this time she felt the response, detecting the other life out there in the water, the creatures heeding her call. Swordfish and sunfish, hake and bass, tuna and turtles, sharks and seals, even starfish –

No, she thought, and the denial reached out to them, halting them in their tracks.

Orcas were social creatures, but she swam alone even when she met others of her kind, drawing any number of comments. Now, at last, she would accept her responsibility.

I a-am n-not one of y-you.

She wouldn’t let them die in their droves to save her; they wouldn’t be able to kill this abhorrent amalgam of man and jellyfish for her anyway. But if she didn’t kill it – if she died – it would likely return to its pleasure… to the longship and its sea-stranded complement of screamers…

It didn’t matter. Even with her dying thought, she would not call the sea-dwellers back to fight this fight for her.

Because that was not going to happen. She would not fail. Not while Yune watched over the world.

She’d lost her fins, and it was starting to slice the layers protecting her spine, crunching at her bones all over her body –

She’d visualised her system flushed, fully cleansed of the putrid ichor –

She held to the thought, and shifted shape.

It was convenient, the way the abomination’s tightly-coiled arms knotted themselves about her, increasing the tightness of their hold in the sudden disappearance of her gigantic form – she became a pufferfish, smaller but still huge, with a few thousand extra-tough, extra-long spines as a coat, her own inherently magical toxins.

She skewered the suckers with her barbs, and expanded, a balloon of blades.

Ribbons of tendrils floated through fluorescent water. She caught a glimpse of the abomination’s eyeless, pale face, drifting down on the current like a tattered and torn sail.

When she climbed from the surface of the sea in her birth-form, she was still wearing the vest and pants she’d been wearing out of self-spite all those years ago, when Tephel had died and she’d thrown herself into the sea in grief.

Grief. That was what’d tipped her over the edge, wasn’t it?

She felt it now. She sat on a piece of flotsam, bobbing up and down on the gentle afternoon waves, and cried. It felt good, now, to cry, shut her eyes against the colours of this world.

Even the sweetness of the air she drew in with each breath was itself an echo, a reverberation of her mistake: thinking of it as ‘poison’, forcing herself, cramming herself inside that thing, pretending she was nothing, no one…

She no longer had a choice. She’d made it already.

Once she’d taken a minute to get her breath back, she could put up with the silent stares no longer. She dove back into the water, then came up near the most-hurt of the survivors. It wasn’t until she’d healed three of the maimed and one of those who’d ingested some of the fluorescent water that they even started speaking to her.

“What are you?” one of the passengers, an extremely put-out-looking woman, cried out incredulously.

She looked at the lady and smiled.

I’m u-u-used to it n-now.

“No,” called the sailor who’d looked at her with hope in his eyes, when she’d been a hundred-ton monster. He’d drifted away from the others following her tremendous leap from the water, but swiftly paddled back after she surfaced in her humanoid form. “Not what – who. You’re an archmage, aren’t you? Who are you?” He regarded her plainly, seemingly mostly unperturbed by this turn of events. “Listen lady, if you help us get home to Mund, or even to Karamar, the guild can –”

She stopped listening.

Mund.

“G-Glimmermere,” she said, cutting him off, speaking the first word that came to her mind. The first proper, difficult word she’d ever learned to pronounce.

The name of the lake beside which the fishing village stood, her first home.

“I am… Glimmermere.”

She turned her face to the south-east, staring unblinking into the breeze.

Mund. Of course.

She could smell it. Not the city itself, of course. No – it was her destiny she could scent on the wind.

“And y-yes. Yes. Of course I can help you get there. It’s – it’s time.

“Time to go home.”

* * *