“Wait, the chief is your father?” Standing in the Eastern Basin beside the merling’s heartbeast Imyra, Erin couldn’t make sense of it. When they’d met face to face, Coyrifan had instantly appeared so angelic to her, while her current mental picture of Fair was exactly the opposite.
“You are, in fact, speaking to the infamous Coyrifan Mor Donen Mivusa, widely renowned for his luck, or lack thereof, in being the progeny of the calamity that is Chief Ferrifan.”
“Wh—wait—your name sounds just like his!” Duh, Erin! The similarity in their first names alone was so stupidly obvious now, but most people didn’t name their kids that way on Earth. It hadn't even registered before she heard them spoken one right after the other.
“I know. Pretentious, isn’t it?”
Erin was too stunned to appreciate his grinning, self-deprecating inflection. The boys had been right not to trust him all along! “But you never told us your whole name. You were purposely trying to hide it so we would believe you.”
“Actually, no—I just vastly prefer going by a somewhat less grandiose title. Prince Koben is well aware of my predicament in far greater detail than what was shared in the caves.” His off-handed tone suggested a shrug. “The latter was according to his request, of course. Something about trust and captains...”
“Oh my gosh, I hate him!” the girl yelped, dropping her necklace and pounding her fists into the cloudy pond water in front of her. “He’s such a sneaky slimeball!”
"You all right?" Arlis' voice rang out from the shore.
"Fine," she called back, squinting her annoyance at the heart-shaped moonstone and honestly considering turning snitch on Coyrifan. Ultimately, fear of losing her mother's treasured necklace won out. "You'd better hurry up and get to the point if you want to finish your little story before the boys come over here," she warned.
Neither Arlis nor Leslyn were moving toward her yet, but tall Kaleit rose to his feet, craning his head to gain that last sliver of height with which to look out across the water at Erin. If he decided to come over, and at any pace faster than a walk, there was zero chance of her outrunning him while wading through the pond.
“Right, I’ll hurry then,” Coy easily agreed. “I’ll skip the rest of our perilous journey to the northwestern shallows. The others were deep in the midst of hunting those delectable sweetcrabs when I found my chance to slip away…”
COYRIFAN
A little less than three months ago…
During the Dry, almost any stretch of shallows was a dangerous place. Oceanic populations tended to diminish as one dove deeper and deeper or moved further from the shore, but the chains of prey versus predator grew dramatically longer and more complicated along the warm, fertile shores of Emerrane.
Tiny coral-tenders crawled over the reefs in droves, feeding off of minuscule floating algae and bits of soft corals while meticulously cleaning the hard corals and herding the even tinier creatures that made up those same corals. In the manner of a manling pruning and shaping a vine to teach it how to grow, the tenders guided the living polyps to build their calcareous shells into the walls of existing tunnels and spirals of many, many generations before, expanding the tenders’ colonies slowly and by infinitesimal amounts.
Over hundreds, if not thousands of years, some of those colonies’ lairs had grown large enough for other creatures to enter, including merlings… and sweetcrabs. If a likely-looking colony was located whose home was too small for a merling to breach, that was where the razorbeaks were loosed. As long as one of the gelatinous creatures’ hard beaks could fit through an opening, it was guaranteed that the entire razorbeak could follow.
Fydiro, now well-recovered from his illness after passing the boiling jets, was still looking a bit off-kilter from the party’s stint near the terrible Howlith. Luckily, his razorbeak’s memory was not so long and the animal was excited to hunt, its shivering tentacles already taut and reaching for the skull-sized entrance to the tunnel long before its master lifted its clacking mouth to the opening.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The razorbeak threaded about half of its tentacles into the entrance, bracing them around the opening in order to pull its long, tubular head inside. The head caved in upon itself as the razorbeak slowly oozed its way through, miraculously fitting into the hole that was only half its own width. Once that was done, the trailing tentacles were drawn in so quickly that Coyrifan would have missed it if he’d blinked.
“Two pearls says he’ll bring us three crabs,” Fydiro said, his confident grin openly inviting the entire party to challenge him.
Vasadax shook his fair head. “Lair’s hardly big enough for one, let alone three. I say it’ll be one—and a small one, at that.”
“I’ll throw my pearls in with Fy,” Coyrifan laughed. Father’s here with his moonstone, after all.”
“Good point,” his broad friend said with a grimace. “Though a wager isn’t much of a wager if we all make the same bet.”
“Let’s spice it up,” another hunter broke in. “I’ll put three pearls on two big crabs.”
That was enough to goad the entire thirteen-man party, including Chief Ferrifan, into speaking over each other, placing bets and arguing over who was most likely to win.
That was when Coyrifan slowly drifted away from the group, slipping into a patch of tall white fan-shaped weeds that swayed in the current. Swimming past Vasa’s patrolling northern lash, the merling gave it a fleeting pat under the chin and continued on toward the secret place that he’d set his heart upon.
He went on for a short while until he reached a trench that sliced through the reef. It was only half a dozen tail-lengths deep, but it created a distinct overhang of coral and weeds that had grown beyond its edge. A few hunting trips before, Coyrifan had explored that trench and discovered a hollow area beneath a part of the reef, reached by a secret hole under the overhang. It had been full of silt and old shells, clearly unused for a long time.
It would be a perfect place for Imyra to hide, once he’d cleared it out with a few stiff tail flicks and stocked it with enough mussels and clams for her to eat until the next hunt. There were enough of those in clumps close enough that their gathering would be a simple matter of a minute or two. After that, a few rocks or chunks of broken coral wedged just inside the entrance would be enough to protect the infant heartbeast from dangerous intruders.
By the time he was able to return, he would have another, larger place prepared to move her to. It would be a difficult matter to sneak her there for sure, but he would work that out later.
For now, he squeezed through the hidden opening and part of the way down the tunnel inside. It became dark very quickly, so Coy slowed to avoid bruising his tail against the walls. He went a bit further and paused as he felt a slight movement in the water flow over his forward-stretched arms.
Imyra seemed to sense something also, for she gave Coyrifan the impression of cheerfully looking forward to meeting a new friend. Without allowing her to know of his suspicion, the merling bid his little darling to offer her little light so that he might locate this “friend.”
At the mouth of her travel shell, the fingerling guardian-to-be gladly pulsed with the brightest yellow she could, just enough to faintly illuminate the tunnel about two arm lengths away.
Outlined just on the edge of the light was a narrow face made almost entirely of a long snout and needle-like teeth. That was all Coyrifan needed to see to recognize the blinder—a far distant cousin of the heartbeast with no level of intelligence or skill worth an attempt to tame them. They were poisonous from birth, with the exact effect that they were named for. That, of course, was only the first symptom of their venom.
With this particular blinder staring him down, Coyrifan did the only thing he could just then. That was to very slowly, very carefully touch his hands to the walls on either side and ease himself backward down the tunnel, keeping as still as possible. He made his way back to the entrance, firmly but warmly entreating Imyra to remain in her shell as he went. Their new friend was far too busy to play, just then.
It wasn’t until they were safe in the open water again that the full brunt of failure crashed over Coyrifan. He slipped in his theretofore conscientious curation of Imyra’s innocent existence, a sudden wild rage shooting through his body like a bolt of lighting. He expelled it through his tail with a vicious blow to the nearest edge of the reef, shattering the coral to powdery chunks that wafted up into a foggy cloud.
Coy regretted it instantly when the little heartbeast cried out with a piercing shriek, her audible voice echoing off the stone walls of the trench below them. He was at a loss at first, his thoughts fumbling incomprehensibly as he tried to reign his own emotions in.
Just as he was getting a proper hold of himself and beginning to comfort Imyra, several of his hunting companions crested over the reef’s edge with two of the sharks, spotted him in the trench, and swam down.
“Are you all right?” one of them asked.
“We heard your beast call out,” another said. “What happened?”
Coy didn’t even have time to say a word.
Chief Ferrifan had already appeared at the edge of the trench, his large hands clenching and crushing where they touched the coral and his shoulders hunched as if he were a hulking beast about to pounce. His eyes, feral and furious, were locked on the shell that hung from his wayward son’s neck.
“Explain yourself, Coyrifan.”