After I finished reading the treatise on bryozoans, I visited Dariel and Orphela a last time.
“What do you mean you are going on a journey?” Orphela asked in a rather impolite tone, hitting the table with both hands. “Are you going to disappear again?”
“I am going to the sea. I will search for bryozoans. I need to see their beauty in person,” I calmly explained, contemplating the skeleton of a grape bunch that they had left in a platter in the center of the table.
“Can we go to the beach? Uncle Terus is going to the beach. I want to go to the beach. Can we go to the beach, can we, can we, can we?” Sihea, sitting by her mother’s side, did as she was wont to do.
“I am sure this is a temporal absence, love,” Dariel tried to calm Orphela, ignoring their daughter.
“Can we, can we, can we, can we?” Sihea kept on enthusiastically making her proposal.
“We cannot!” Orphela finally said, covering the mouth of her daughter with both hands.
“An fuie,” she insisted despite the gag.
Dariel looked at her with a serious face on, and Sihea finally desisted. “Ow,” she said after her mother let her speak again. “I have only seen the beach in books. I want to see it in person, like Terus wants with the briesohands”
“Bryozoans.” I corrected her. Then I addressed both of her parents. “I plan on going away for a month or so. Orphela would need to read myths and poems about birds to pay Mardhaka for the weekly illusions for Dusk. We cannot put all the stress for the payments on Sihea, and she has… enough of her drawings already, or so she told me.”
I winked, and they seemed to instantly understand what it meant.
“Do you have something in your eye, uncle Terus?” Sihea asked, placing her elbows over the table. She was genuinely concerned.
“No, Sihea. My eyes do deceiving things sometimes.”
She seemed to accept the explanation without further questioning.
“Why so much interest about these animals in particular, Terus?” Dariel made the one important question.
“Well, they latch into stone and grow beautiful patterns, much like corals. Yet I find their soft anatomy more interesting. How they organize their colonies, the shape of their bodies. The crowns of tentacles. It’s like a beautiful thing built upon another beautiful thing.” I tried to think about what, in my knowledge, appealed human men. “Like grafting a boob upon your loved wife’s face to enhance the look of both face and boob.”
Silence settled like a mantle upon us as the whole family put on horrified and concerned faces.
“Terus that… that is not how attraction works on humans.” Dariel finally explained.
“Okay, but did you get my meaning. “
“Somehow, yes.” stated Orphela, incapable of looking at me in the eyes.
“Mommy, is grafting what I think it is?” Sihea asked, pulling from Orphela’s sundress.
“Maybe, Sihea, Maybe. Go enjoy your dog while he lasts,” She said, absentmindedly, and then she covered her mouth. “Look at the things you make me say, Terus!”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“I think I overstayed my welcome today. See you in a week, in a fortnight or in a month.”
As I sat up, Dariel extended a friendly hand and I stretched it out of habit.
“Come whenever, Terus, you know you are always welcome here, despite your… shortcomings.”
Sihea sat up and, without blinking, she went up to the backdoor, opened it, and exited the house to, presumably, play with Dusk.
I wished I had bid them farewell.
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The seagulls gathered around me out of their own volition, unlike Mardhaka’s birds. They bit me, inspecting this strange man that had sat on their beach, admiring the crystalline blue of the North Sea. Salt gathered on the same rocks the mussels held onto with unexpected strength. I had reached that beach in just two days of travel, and now I could will myself there anytime I wanted, if I were to fade due to Cirruin waking up.
From this shore of sand like the albino raven I watched the tide run away from me as the morning unraveled. The marks of the bubbles upon the sand were soon erased by the coming waves, victims of time, remainders that I was trading my days with them for this journey. Yet, there was a certain solace in giving my friends their space. Dariel had expressed it clearly: My recurrent presence had become somewhat choking to them. Mardhaka would deal with the family just fine, she had always been a reasonable and relatively humble one, when of dragons we talk about.
I stepped forward, free from the stares of people, and so I moved unrestrained, according to my nature. A step by the agonizing stranded jellyfish. One by the stone covered in mussels. Another by an abandoned pier whose support beams had become a feast for shipworms. Each one submerging me deeper into the tepid waters.
The salty water entered my mouth and my useless lungs. I sunk to the bottom, even willed me there to anchor my presence into the sands and avoid being washed away, back to the shore. The sea presented certain resistance as I advanced towards the offshore. The further I got from Cirruin, the harder it would be to advance in an environment as unnatural as underwater. But I couldn’t search in any part of the ocean closer to Ludlun: most bryozoans inhabit tropical waters. The variety to be found in colder seas was bound to be lacking. I was already searching for a needle, and there was no need to double the size of the haystack.
It was not the underside of the waves crashing on my body, but the water itself that rejected me. Soon, maybe, a new pulse of magic would renew my existence, and make it easier to advance. But until then, I had to weather the ontological storm, to trudge deeper into the dark.
Seemingly contemptuous schools of fish swam by, inadvertently ridiculing Cirruin’s dearest dream. The sea urchins crawled through the bottom, and a lone starfish tried to pry the life away from a bivalve with her strong arms.
Another step, another few hundreds of palms traversed. Further down into the blue, closer to a reef about which I had read in the encyclopedia. From it, three of the studied species had been extracted.
The sun set, and I saw the dusk from underwater. To admire how the blue turned to orange turned to black. Not long afterwards one, then two, then a tide of little torches ignited around and above me. Like fireflies on the plains, luminescent invertebrates turned the sea into a boiling mirror of a clear sky in the night.
Through the light spectacle I kept on advancing. A shark no bigger than a pig inspected me, bit one of my arms and then swam away frightened, losing himself in the dark. The wound didn’t last a blink of the waning moon. I had to shift suddenly and unexpectedly when a lobster got in my way, just to avoid crushing her.
As the sun rose in the sky and tinted the waters once again, as the mirror of the sky vanished back to the depths it belonged to, the barrier reef got revealed before me.
A carnival of gradually revealing colors in the distance, with schools of fish dancing above the dendritic and rounded shapes like birds over the canopies of a deranged forest.
Some ahermatypic corals, shy and scared of their light-dwelling brothers, inhabited the shadow projected by the reef. Even a mound of calcite and aragonite was granted that which I so desired, but it wasn’t no reason to desist, to let my self disperse until Cirruin decided to give me another chance. I climbed like a man, heaving myself with arms and legs as I grabbed onto the sharp limestone. It dug onto my fingers and my palms, destroyed my footwear. My blood colored the water there where I touched.
I grasped into a cave’s entrance, and a moray confused my ring finger for a prey, devouring it on the spot. My blood formed a red cloud as the finger got torn from my hand, and, when the cloud dissipated, I had a new one and one less moray to worry about: she had been scared to death by the shifting of my flesh and fluids.
Immediately after, I saw my skin fickle in and out of existence. Until there I had reached that morning. I would need to wait until I was dreamed again to continue.