The sway of the waves scooped Daysha from head to toe. Both immensely calm and mildly ill, she settled to release her limbs and float. But the glittering blackness surrounding her began to spin and funnel, drawing her with a quickening pace into its center.
Daysha’s stomach lurched and panic threatened just before the tumult dissipated and settled around her again as an expansive indigo sea. Breaching the surface just at her nose, Daysha’s body buoyed above an unfathomable depth.
She could barely make out land. The pocked beaches shone silver and a mist hung so thickly it could not be known whether it covered the trees or if any were there at all.
With a rush and a crash, Daysha slammed to the shores, having spanned an impossible distance she could not comprehend. Retracting waves sped from the silver-sand beach and abandoned Daysha, pressed into the rocks.
Neither cold nor sore, rather relieved, Daysha sat up. She squatted, sheltered in a large crescent alcove, with her back against a black-rock cliff. The indigo sea lapped calmly against the shore once again.
But waves don’t move like that. Waves crash and swirl. They don’t breathe.
And yet she saw them. As a single body of water, the sea inhaled into the shoreline, releasing with a steady rush and leaving not a droplet behind.
It was then that Daysha could feel the cliffside matching pace. In… and out…
The breaths turned shallow, and the water receded farther with every release. Daysha found that her own breathing kept time. With every exhale, she ached for a new draw of water to reach the shores. Soon the beaches dried and the horizon grew to be no shoreline at all. Daysha began to panic. She searched around for something… anything.
When she turned, a golden orb the size of Daysha’s head floated inches from her face. The amber corona slitted with onyx disappeared briefly beneath a molting black eyelid. Daysha stumbled back in fright.
An enormous serpent revealed itself to be the black-cliff alcove; its ebony scales, the rocks she’d crashed against.
Daysha stared long at the beast, finding it to be as immobile as she. From a crocodile snout, curls of white smoke lilted smoothly. Its waning breath no longer drew the ocean waves. The mist over the land steadily faded.
On the horizon, Daysha could see there were no trees. There was nothing. Only meager hills and valleys of silver desert.
The beast stretched. From neck to tail a shuddering wave trilled along the pointed fin that crested its entire back.
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Where a few scales shimmered like jade, more were dilapidated and scabbed over, showing no will to renew. Daysha felt no fear, only pity, as she looked again to the eye of the beast who stared intensely back at her.
As if assured to have Daysha’s attention, the beast finally averted her eye and looked down her long snout at the silver sand.
A beam of hot, red light shot past Daysha’s face, exploding against the beach. She stumbled back to see the serpent’s sides rippling and collapsing as a stream of fire roared from her mouth. It spattered and bubbled. A single column of white fire blasted into the sand. Spires of light stabbed at Daysha’s eyes, alleviated only by the growing clouds of billowing smoke.
From the singed and seething sandbar, an azure light pulsed. It radiated an orb of blue light that tinged the smoke escaping the serpent’s nostrils.
The serpent’s sides began to cave as the stream of fire grew in intensity and heat, glowing so white Daysha couldn’t bear to keep her eyes open.
The roar ceased. Huddled and shielding her face, Daysha questioned whether she could look.
A grief within her suddenly couldn’t face the truth. Not for loss of love, but for lack of it.
At the helpless cry of a newborn babe, Daysha snapped her eyes open to look.
She awoke to the quiet of the morning.
The stiffness in her head and neck could not urge her to move. Their ache was nothing. She drew a long breath into her nose and it puttered back out across her wavering bottom lip.
Seven cycles, she thought, recounting the number of times she had washed up on that shore to witness the death of the serpent. How many times she’d awoken to the cries of an infant. And how much longer it had truly been that her own hut remained void of a child’s call.
The dream had come recently. First when The Follower reached its fullness during High Harvest, as Daysha had been able to work out after its third occurrence. Every cycle, when The Follower’s spotted, round face showed most brightly in the night sky, Daysha dreamed this dream. The Sky-Cry season passed and cycle after cycle Daysha met the serpent on the shore. Was she meant to endure this throughout The Sprout? Would it continue until next Harvest? And on?
Seven cycles. One for each season of Sprout she and Maisen had seen come and go, leaving them fruitless. The Chased ran its course seven times across her mated life and now The Follower too seemed to mock her.
It was fitting in the Rite of Women, to wash at a cycle’s end. Groups of women who shared their time would go together to the river at midnight. Daysha found it a cruel irony that her time of washing came in the darkest of nights when The Follower went missing. As if she was meant to be thankful, only to have her thanks met with a bitter silence.
What about those haunting nights, when The Follower shone so brightly as to cast shadows, even at night? Was there a greater benefit of life to those who washed on those nights? When she drew up vessels of black water to pour over her unilluminated head, she fought to believe that nothing was stolen from her. After all, others who matched her time were not facing her same emptiness.
Seven courses she endured the other women who left the washing for higher rites. Daysha watched children turn to women and from women to mothers. And every dark cycle, she washed the signs of lifelessness from her again and again.