It rained in torrents on the day I departed from our glade. A good sign, I decided. A wet forest didn’t burn as easily and if there were no fires, an intelligent, pissed off swamp had no reason to break the creatures playing with tinder.

At least I hoped so.

Iris wanted to come with me of course. She didn’t insist on it though after I asked her to protect her siblings and keep them out of trouble. That surprised me a bit, honestly. Especially since most of my other children weren’t nearly as compliant.

But I wanted to travel fast and didn’t know what I should expect to encounter at the sea or on the way there. I couldn’t be sure I’d be able to keep even myself safe and I didn’t want to add baggage to that. It was one thing to let them travel around on their own. It was another to be there with them when they were in danger and I couldn’t do anything about it. A repeat of the final moments with Sanguine was the last thing I wanted.

It would have been different if my kids were a bit older, perhaps. With a better grasp of their magic. I imagined I’d welcome the help then. But at the moment, as they were now, they’d just be a liability.

I didn’t meet the swamp elemental on my way to Ripple’s little stream. Or if I did, I didn’t notice it at least. Since I didn’t have any affinity for heat though, it was entirely possible that it simply didn’t recognize me as a valid target for its ire.

I did find Cedar and Yew, two of my sons, though. Or what was left of them, I suppose. I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the nearly picked clean carcasses if I hadn’t been so familiar with their taste that was spread all over the drenched mud around them.

I… wasn’t sure how I felt about that, to be honest. They had been my children. So why couldn’t I be heartbroken? It felt much more like failure than grief. It stung of course, but my emotional reaction was so underwhelming that I was more upset about not being too distressed than I had been unsettled in the first place.

This is just so fucked up!

I wasn’t completely certain what had killed them originally. Before they were eaten by scavengers. Considering the signs of destruction in the area and the more lush than usual but mostly new vegetation around, I had my suspicions though.

We never should have let Trigger wander off into the swamp on its own.

I reached Ripple’s place a day after I buried them. There hadn’t been much ceremony to it. I just didn’t want to let them rot out in the open. All forgotten.

Ripple was waiting for me, it turned out. Or at least it had anticipated that I’d visit it soon. It had taught me quite a bit about water magic when we first met and I had dropped by a few times over the years.

It took to my initial language symbols quite a bit easier than even Vigil. My infrequent visits caused it to always forget a large number of them again though.

Still, I had to wonder sometimes. If I’d met Ripple before I ever made it to the volcano the first time, what would my first encounter with a proto-spirit have been like? Probably a lot less painful for one. If I’d ever noticed them in the first place.

Anyways, Ripple was expecting me. Meaning, when I arrived at its creek it was already awake, playing with the rain, splashing me with moderately sized bubbles as I came closer.

‘[Sweetie]’, it wrote in an overly elaborate version of my script. ‘[late]’ it continued as I caught another splash with my magic before it could hit me.

Ripple had taken the form of a very long eel made of water today, muddy and clear in different parts respectively. A few different colours of mud too, it seemed. It reminded me a lot of the serpent form I had seen Dancer in last. Very artistic.

‘[Sorry] [late]’ I answered. It wasn’t as if we ever set up an appointment or Ripple was impatient. On the contrary, the river elemental was usually patience incarnate. It had been nearly a year though.

‘[had] [babies]’, I continued, dodging yet another splash. ‘[babies] [grow] [long time]’

Ripple stopped what it was doing. A multitude of tiny ripples originated on its head and moved down the length of its body. A sign, I had learned, that it was excited. I might or might not have named it after this particular habit.

‘[?] [babies] [?]’, it wrote right in front of my face. Then it followed with a little water puppet play. A fish was laying eggs, another was fertilizing them. The eggs hatched and a swarm of tiny, very yummy looking baby fish was eating and growing.

‘[Yes] - [Sweetie] [babies]’, I clarified, creating my own little play of scalamander reproduction as a comparison. It wasn’t as beautiful as Ripple’s of course, being completely transparent and all. Well, it served its purpose. I wasn’t an artist and didn’t need to impress anyone. It would be pretty neat though. I huffed a sigh once again. Perhaps, if I someday was able to improve my earth affinity…

When I finished my little production, Ripple rippled again. ‘[?where] [babies]’

‘[home]’ I laughed a little. Well, not really. ‘[and] [in] [forest] - [journey] - [babies] [become] [adults] - [causing] [Sweetie] [visit] [late]’

The elemental needed a while to decipher that sentence. I needed to help with some words it had forgotten completely. Or maybe I hadn’t used them before in its company? I wasn’t sure.

After that, it wanted to know more about them. So I told it a bit about their abilities with fire since I wanted to get on with steering the conversation in the direction of the purpose of my visit sooner rather than later. I needn’t have worried about that, it turned out.

‘[fire] [?]’, Ripple picked out instantly. ‘[in] [forest] [?] - [very] [bad]’ It paused for a moment, searching for the right words. ‘[forest] [angry] [now] - [no] [fire]’

So the word has already spread. The river elemental appeared to be aware of the Swamp having enough of Trigger’s ‘fun’.

‘[yes]’, I confirmed. ‘[Swamp] [angry] - [need] [talk] - [but] - [Sweetie] [weak] - [need] [get] [strong] [first] - [Ripple] [help] [?]’

Again, it took a while. Eventually, the spirit got the meaning though and just wanted to know ‘[?how]’.

‘[go] [to] [sea] [together] [?] - [Ripple] [strong] - [make] [introduction]’, I finally gave my pitch.

‘[sea] [?]’, Ripple asked.

‘[big] [big] [water] - [that direction]’ I pointed towards the north.

The elemental recoiled at first. Then a myriad of new tiny ripples formed on its ‘skin’. ‘[yes] [yes] [yes] - [go] [there] [together] - [visit] - [much] [fun]’ It launched itself at me and started to happily spin around with me half enveloped inside of its body.

Seemed like I had my travel partner? I actually had been concerned that this could have been a problem. There had to be a reason that Ripple lived so far away from the sea after all.

I only hoped that what a water elemental understood as ‘much fun’ was a little bit less lethal than it was with my smouldering lava friends.

There really wasn’t much to say about our journey to the north. Meaning, other than that it was incredibly fast. So fast indeed that I got dizzy if I focused too much on the forest passing left and right of us.

Needless to say, Ripple was carrying me. Otherwise, I would have hit a riverbank or a boulder long before I’d have been able to accelerate to such speeds.

On the first day, I asked it a couple of times to maybe slow down a bit. I had to work actively against the magic it moved us with to get its attention first. But it only replied that it wanted to arrive as soon as possible, quite annoyed by my efforts. My need to sleep now and then was already enough of a waste of time in its opinion. I even ate while we zipped down the river.

I resolutely declined Ripples offer to teach me how to move up and down a river so fast by myself once we reached the sea.

In the end, it took only three and a half days. Three and a half days for nearly double the distance between the pond I was born in and the volcano. And we would have been even faster if I didn’t insist on some breaks and, eventually, a speed limit under the threat of vomiting all over my travel companion otherwise. I wasn’t sure if my body was even capable of throwing up, but Ripple didn’t need to know that, did it?

I was sure that the elemental on its own would have barely taken more than a day, maybe two if it wasn’t in a hurry.

Contrary to my trips into the mountains, there was barely any shift in vegetation when we got closer to the sea. Other than it being a bit more wet and lush in some places than in others, the plants didn’t change much. All ferns, vines and horsetails. Only those neat pillow-like fluffy sponge-things were getting more common the farther north we came.

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The river getting wider and wider prepared me for our imminent arrival nonetheless.

I still could smell it before I was able to see it. Salty but fresh and unmistakable even through the dulled memories of previous me. I would recognize this scent anywhere. I half-expected to hear seagulls for a moment.

Then I remembered that the only flyers around were insects. Well, there also were the storm elementals… and probably a few other variants of air spirits. Birds and even pterosaurs were still a thing of the far future though. Maybe this time around there would be some magical flying fish before that?

Eventually, we made it around the last river bend and it lay before us. stretching from horizon to horizon. If this wasn’t an ocean it was one big ass sea. There was so much water.

So much potential…

Potential that at least somebody must already have tapped into over the last hundred million years or so, right? Well, Memory said that proto-spirits only formed ‘recently’. Maybe it wasn’t quite that long after all. Still, there probably were all kinds of monsters in the depths.

And if Memory didn’t insist on her stupid fire I quite possibly could have raised my own little monsters on this shore. There had to be an ample supply of food in that sea.

Besides being salty, it tasted foreign, extremely diverse and - if my instincts were to be believed - dangerous.

Ripple was even more excited by all the water than I was. It just shot right through the estuary into the open sea. I had to manually extract myself from its grasp and swim to the beach on my own.

Sadly, said ‘beach’ consisted mostly of grey-brown gravel. Admittedly pretty fine gravel in some places, but there was no sand to find anywhere. Well, I wasn’t here on vacation. I had work to do. A Picture-Book beach would only entice me to play around and be lazy anyway. This was perfectly adequate.

Absolutely no reason to feel let down.

I didn’t! Okay?

I was a responsible adult… and a parent. Mustn’t forget I was a mother. Even if I didn’t exactly feel like one.

Now, where was I? Ah, right.

The first thing I did once I reached dry land was to lie down and wait for my stomach to settle. Three and a half days of Rollercoaster-Ride travel did upset it quite a bit. Ability to vomit or not. I did spot a few very appetizing looking crustaceans along the shore though. Soon. I licked my lips. Well, I actually flicked my tongue over my whole snout but that’s just anatomy, so… My front paws were hands and I licked my lips.

Ripple, still in its eel form, was whizzing through the deep blue water, leaping out now and then, shooting fountains up into the air and purposely making waves surge towards my position to break all over me.

Annoyed, I retreated further up until I reached the tree line. I’d let it have its fun for now. With all the ruckus it was making, I expected us to get attention soon enough regardless.

The sun was about to set soon too. The shoreline even curved far enough southwards in the west that I could watch a proper sunset over the ocean. If the weather was holding until then. Though I wouldn’t complain about more rain either.

After a quick visit to the all-you-can-eat rockcrab buffet - They tasted like salted crayfish! So awesome! - I finally decided to settle down and nap for a while to the calming sounds of the surf.

I woke up to the roar of giant waves crashing into each other. At first, I thought it was the nearby rumbling of thunder but it didn’t storm tonight. Then I saw the next two huge waves smashing together with a thundering boom.

I thought I could make out Ripple riding on one. The other wasn’t ridden at all though. It reshaped itself in its entirety and began to gather more water beneath itself, subsequently throwing it at the river elemental in highly pressurized streams.

I croaked to get Ripple’s attention, but the sea was far too loud for me to be heard. So I gathered as much water as I could manage in my tried and tested sphere, while the elementals were continuing to batter into each other.

Then I cut down a couple of scale trees and shot them into the sea, in a massively upscaled repeat of my second encounter with the volcano spirits.

What? I couldn’t exactly ‘fight’ on this scale. What else was I supposed to do?

The trees hit the water and the play(?)-fighting stopped instantly. Ripple waved excitedly with its tail and dove towards the beach.

The wave… the whole wave took on the form of something that could best be described as the love child between a hammerhead shark and a manta ray. A freaking huge elemental. Then it also formed tentacle-like limbs at its tail-end and my comparison was pretty much worthless. Nevertheless, it looked simply monstrous and now it glid slowly towards me!

Ripple leapt onto the beach next to me, rippling all over. ‘[found] [friend]’, it told me proudly.

‘[friend] [?]’, I asked, doubtful. ‘[old] [friend] [or] [new] [friend] [?]’

Ripple whirled around me, constantly moving. ‘[amusement] - [old] - [very] [old] - [most] [old] [Ripple] [know]’

How was I to interpret this? Something like a parent? A teacher? Or was the river spirit simply telling me that this ocean elemental was the oldest it ever met. I didn’t have much knowledge about how exactly proto-spirits related to each other, despite having spent the better part of my current life with some of them. Yes, I called the volcano spirits ‘siblings’, but I had no idea if they coincidentally formed near each other and just stayed together or not. Maybe I should ask Vigil about that once I returned?

First I had to return though.

‘[friend] [have] [name] [?]’ I asked tentatively.

‘[?how]’ Ripple asked me incredulously. ‘[names] [Sweetie] [thing] - [never] [met] [Sweetie] - [no] [name]’ It picked me up and swirled me around. ‘[fun] [fun] - [meet] - [Sweetie] [give] [name] - [then] [friend] [have] [name]’

Well, it had a point. I eyed the colossal sea monster now closing in on the beach. ‘[safe] [?]’ I only asked.

‘[of course] - [safe] [safe] - [friend]’ It rippled again.

How could I say ‘no’ to that? I mean, I came here together with Ripple in case I met another large spirit. A case exactly like this. It only looked scary. Ripple said it’s nice. No need to worry.

So I gathered all of my courage and… got carried to get introduced.

The interactions between the two proto-spirits were quite interesting. They had a similar ‘language’ amongst each other as my three hot-heads back home had. It wasn’t the same though. The signs and frequencies they used were more evenly distributed and not quite as fast. I probably could have actually followed this conversation if I knew a little bit more about their code. Well, I’d continue to develop and teach my own language first before I tried to learn another. I’d leave that to Junior. He seemed to have a knack for it.

Ripple suddenly splashed me lightly in the face. ‘[Sweetie] [focus] - [name]’

‘[Yes] [yes] - [must] [think]’ I hastily replied. I must have drifted away with my thoughts there. They wanted me to give a new name. Mhm. I was great with names! Practically genius! But I sincerely doubted that it would like ‘Monster’ or ‘Nightmare’ or ‘Abomination’.

I considered the sea around us for a while, pondering, watching the waves break at the beach. ‘[Tide]’, I finally decided.

The newly named ocean elemental moved closer to us now and lowered its head - front(?) - down to be on our level. Way too close if I’d have had any say in it, but Ripple was holding me quite securely. Once Tide nearly touched me, it started to form tiny symbols of murky water on the surface of its skin. ‘[good] - [name] - [thankful]’

I was baffled.

‘[?how]’ I turned to Ripple for an explanation.

‘[surprise]’, was the immediate answer. ‘[Sweetie] [not] [happy] [?]’

I gulped.

When did…? Why? Did it really pick up my symbols that fast or had Ripple been visiting here more often than it had let on? But this was a good thing, right? If they taught each other my language then I didn’t have to waste my time with pantomiming and puppet-plays. I just didn’t expect something like this after the reluctance to learn it, demonstrated by Dancer, and the inability to remember it right from Trigger.

But I could work with this. I really could work with this.

Tide turned out to be quite gentle. At least when it was not indulging Ripple and its water sports fun. And it learned faster than even the river spirit did. Was that something inherent to water elementals or had it to do with age? It really didn’t know much more than those three words when we met. By the end of the night, I was exhausted, but we already could have conversations on the level I had with Ripple. It just soaked it up like a sponge!

Still, when the sun came up I was ready to fall asleep where I stood… well, floated. So I conveyed my intention to go to sleep now.

The reaction I got was a little bit different than I had expected.

‘[meet] [scalamander] [friend] - [then] [sleep]’, Tide wrote.

I was confused. ‘[Sweetie] [meet] [Tide] - [now] [sleep] [?]’

Tide rumbled at that. I hoped that was its version of laughing. ‘[no] [Sweetie] [scalamander] - [Sweetie] [meet] - [Tide] [friend] [scalamander]’

Another scalamander? Here? Well, it was entirely possible that there were other groups that lived nearer to the ocean. Or it might be another species that looked a lot like mine. I wasn’t sure how well an elemental could differentiate here. But if Tide wanted to introduce me to another friend, I guess I could do that quickly before lying down. If it was anything like most of my previous encounters with kin, they only would acknowledge my presence in their territory anyway and then we’d each be doing our own thing.

So I let the ocean elemental carry me quite a bit eastwards along the shore until we reached a lagoon that clearly appeared to be artificially formed. Or at least as if someone had taken what was there naturally and adapted it. There was a low dam all around it that kept the water from flowing out during low tide. It also was fed by an unnaturally straight little canal from the south-west.

Inside the shallow water lay the largest scalamander I had ever seen. She was rust-red, heavily scarred on her left side and currently busy with devouring an enormous… fish? It looked like a fish. It must have been at least thrice my size though, when it still had all its parts. When she heard us getting closer, she raised her head to look in our direction.

Her eyes widened when she saw me.

It can’t be. How did she grow so much in not even half a year?

She was staring back at me, slack-jawed.

I must have looked pretty similar because Tide started to rumble again and Ripple was merrily rippling next to us.

‘[Sweetie] [know] [friend] [?]’, the ocean elemental asked me.

I nodded my head dumbly. Then I remembered that I didn’t teach the meaning of that gesture yet since it didn’t belong in the ‘writing’ category.

‘[yes]’, I replied. ‘[friend] [name] [Ferra]’

Ferra took in our exchange. Then she seemed to have made up her mind on how to react to my presence. Because she got up from her prey, swam over to us with definitely magic assisted speed and carefully bumped her head against mine.

Afterwards, she turned towards Tide with a look that obviously was a question.

Tide rumbled again. But it also produced a little water model of a sleeping scalamander. Then it let go of me completely and deposited me right in front of Ferra.

Ripple waved at me with its eel tail. And both elementals retreated towards the open sea.

I just shook my head, looked up at my cousin and let out a huff.

She met my eyes and huffed as well.

I took her regrown hand between mine and inspected it. It had healed nicely. She didn’t pull it back.

We both huffed again. Laughing together.

I eyed her meal.

She followed my gaze and without any further prompting, we both moved over to eat.

There would be time for questions later. I was hungry and tired now.

And this humongous fish looked delicious.