...

Author's note: This is a faithful account of my illiterate companion Huarvaa's arrival to my home at the Spire, based on their memory of the events.

There was an awful kind of certainty about it, the knowledge that Huarvaa had been sent out of the safe confines of !Uamaa in the Spiral to die. Delinquent greenback phocids didn’t command enough respect for anyone to care to mount a search party, and Huarvaa, outsider in perpetuity, would likely not be noticed. 

The All-Bearer’s command, however, was not to be disobeyed, even for an outsider who’d never personally known their caring touch.

“Find me a sprouting urchin,” the All-Bearer had said, with an unspoken implication lying behind their words like the ugly jaws of a fish trap - do this for me, and I might accept you as a fosterling. There was no space for refusal, even if Huarvaa had wanted to, so they’d merely clicked an assent and set off to fulfil the challenge.

Sprouting urchins lined the edge of the drop-off point before the Abyss, an underwater cliff edge. That was outside the Spiral. Huarvaa made good time, stuck to the currents that would carry them faster and further, always on the look out for the creeping shadow of a predator behind them, or the shape of an adult sipho that might come crashing down through the weed-choked surface on top of them. But it was still several days of swimming, even at a relatively fast pace. And Huarvaa was not the fastest swimmer, affected by the drag of the weeds around their head.

Huarvaa brought their spear, play-acting being a hunter of !Uamaa village, though their spear was crooked and badly made, their best efforts at aping what the trained crafters could produce. It felt good to hold, anyway, as they wound through sunken forests and twisted spires of rock, patches of water so turbid brown that they had to cruise with their eyes closed and their whiskers pricked.

Water was cooler outside the Spiral, though not uncomfortable; it was a tingling caress and a burst of clear green as they emerged from the cloudy brown-black. The open sea heaved with rafts of debris at the interface between water and sky but under the surface toil was a clean and clear jungle, the bottom dropping away into the darkness.

Huarvaa touched air at the surface in a cloud of spray and hauled in a diving breath, then clamped their nostrils shut and plunged to the bottom. They followed it as it sloped down for thirty minutes, searching for that cliff’s edge, where the slope would terminate in a sheer drop. There should have been signs near here, guiding people back to the village - had they overshot them? - Huarvaa flicked their tail up and turned back on themself, just to make sure. As they did so, something pale at the edge of the darkness caught their eye.

A sprouting urchin. Huarvaa was, frankly, quite shocked. They hadn’t expected to find one at all, suspecting that the task was futile make-work, a coded dismissal and request for them to die where they couldn't inconvenience anyone. The All-bearer would never exile anyone openly; one was supposed to simply understand that they were to swim away and never return. 

The urchin was a spiny corona on the bottom, right against the cliff. Huarvaa drifted closer and reached out to steady themself against the bottom, driving their spear point into the soft mud. The urchin’s jaws were working furiously, crunching through the remains of what looked like quite a large scalefish.

Must have gotten lucky. The urchin couldn’t kill something that big, so the scalefish had likely drifted down from above, already dead. Huarvaa let it eat; it seemed cruel to kidnap it in the middle of such a good meal. Instead, they swam in a circle around it, trying to judge how far down that cliff dropped. A single searching click had their whiskers buzzing far faster than anticipated; the drop was surprisingly shallow. They felt the bottom perhaps two body-lengths down. Curious, they dived into the darkness and reached out.

Their hand touched the curving side of an animal suspended by the cliff wall, a surface their whiskers had mistaken for the bottom of the sea. The cliff continued to drop, but Huarvaa was no longer concerned with it. Wriggling scalefish and spikeworms made the body twitch, but it was certainly dead, and it didn’t feel like any of the fish in the sea.

Huarvaa found a wrist and pulled it up, back into visibility by the urchin, and saw what they towed; a selkie with a weed-gathering sack stuffed full of leaves still green and fresh. The body was stiff, and had not begun to swell. And although the scalefish had eaten out the eyes, Huarvaa saw that the selkie had died very recently. Perhaps within the hour.

They felt sick. After a long, paralysed moment, they shooed away some of the scavengers and examined the weaving on the bag. It was familiar - they’d seen that design before, recently. The selkie was a local to the area and not some traveller who didn’t know how to spot danger. And the cause of death… Huarvaa couldn’t bear to look closer at that empty face to find out, repelled by the frilly rags of torn flesh floating around it. They released the bag strap and let the body drift away.

Somebody had to tell the selkie’s home. Huarvaa moved up to the urchin again. The diffusing columns of light around it were patchy, strangely warped, and when Huarvaa finally looked up they understood what had happened, and that the mission truly had been futile after all.

The water above looked no different to the layer they currently occupied, aside from the slightest change in how the light refracted through it. But that wasn’t what alerted them. It was the other bodies - scalefish, worms, siphos, all floating on a horizontal plane as if they were on the surface of the sea, only there was still a vast block of water above them which was now empty of all swimming things.

Huarvaa had been sent out to die in it.

The breath of Tel!am filled that water. Some deadly current had sent it here, where it had killed everything that dared swim through it. The water-breathing fish would suffocate in there as easily as an air-breathing creature would in normal water. As for Huarvaa, and the hapless selkie, the danger was twofold.

Huarvaa surged up, hoping that speed and momentum would help them cross it, only to find that the moment they reached the deadly water their forward progress rapidly slowed, then reversed. Normal water was a thick, heavy embrace, something that generously gave purchase against the flick of a tail fluke. This deadly water was light and insubstantial, like air, and attempting to swim through it felt more like trying to fly without wings. They penetrated the layer from below and made it a whole body length before their strength flagged and they dropped, back down into the smooth caress of the normal water.

Huarvaa had perhaps thirty minutes of breath left in them. Reaching the surface should have been a five minute swim, barely worth worrying over. They worried now. Selkies might not have had the same lung capacity as phocids but Huarvaa could drown like any air-breather, and die in just the same way - searching desperately for an opening to the surface through the deadly breath of Tel!am, trapped within arm’s reach of the blessed air.

It was time to be smart, but the sudden threat of drowning was enough to make Huarvaa try again, desperately, to go straight up. The attempt was much the same as the first, and the exertion was such that it surely ate into their remaining breath.

Smart. Be smart, idiot. Calm. Huarvaa drifted down. They remembered hovering on the edge of a lesson, watching the All-Bearer teach kids younger than themself about how to appropriately react to dwindling breath, how to slow their hearts and minds, how to find the clarity of thought that would be their lifeline to follow to their next breath. Huarvaa remembered their fascination with the lesson, which was not one they had ever had as an outsider not raised by the All-Bearer. They remembered the All-Bearer sending them out of the creche, the angry barbed words against their whiskers - “My knowledge is for fosterlings only!”

It was easy to cultivate a persona of carefree relaxation, a phocid who lazed about in the shallows and grew green around their head from exposure to air and Odr, free from the demands of fosterling life in !Uamaa village. Huarvaa had been called useless too many times for it to hold any more sting, but they regretted not being allowed to participate in the harsh lessons and worklife of the village.

Perhaps everyone else their age knew exactly how to deal with this, like there was some trick, some simple technique that the All-Bearer had passed on. Huarvaa, barred from those lessons, could only guess at how to approach this issue. Perhaps it was a test, even. If they got back, they’d prove their capability at dealing with deadly water, and the All-Bearer might-

No, that would never happen. Huarvaa struck out sideways, trying to guess how far the deadly water extended. If they swam towards its source, would they meet its edge faster? Or would that just put them in more danger? If they went perpendicular to it, would it simply extend the time they’d spend under it before they reached the edge?

They couldn’t visualise its shape, it was too vast and its edges too ill-defined - if it was circular, spreading like a puddle on land, there was surely escape in any direction. But if it was long, shaped like a current stream, they could swim forever and never find the edge if they picked the wrong direction. And the depth - who was to say there weren’t patches which were shallower, which might let them burst through to normal water above?

They had been swimming for an undeterminable period of time. Their moments of panic had sharpened their heartbeat, and they’d never learned any other way of telling time when the sun was not visible. The sea floor was peaceful and endless, the edge of the cliff to their right peppered with urchins all delightedly taking advantage of the bodies raining from above.

Too late, Huarvaa remembered the selkie, abandoned by the first urchin, but they weren’t going back to retrieve the bag now. Huarvaa’s vision narrowed to a single point of self-preservation and they sped up, daring to burn more breath if it meant escaping faster.

The first stab of pain slipped between their ribs. Muscle cramps; too much exertion, not enough air. Huarvaa slowed, barely daring to move their tail more than once every few body lengths, their arms and legs clamped hard against their trunk and tail to reduce drag. The first whisperings of instinct had begun to fill the back of their mind, a murmur warning them to rise, to go up. One that became increasingly loud as they swam.

Above them, the weeds that grew up from the bottom were resting in crooked tangles at the interface between deadly water and safe. Only the balloon plants with their gas bladders could continue to float in Tel!am’s breath, but the balloons looked tired, the bladders sagging low and not proudly upright as usual. As a child, Huarvaa had always wanted to find out if breathing in the balloon gas would make them high, and had experimented with it at length. Not only was it not breathable, it had never made Huarvaa high, either. What a waste.

Another, more urgent pang gripped Huarvaa’s abdomen, their diaphragm. Balloons bobbed and spun lazily over their head, floating through Tel!am’s breath. Huarvaa’s instincts began to scream - go up! Go up!

They darted up, with the most powerful stroke of their tail they could manage, and again came crashing down, now tangled with weeds and tendrils. Stupid! Why did you do that? Their thoughts were thick and slow. The surface glimmered between thick mats of circular leaves. It felt so close - maybe if they went up they’d reach it - and before common sense kicked in to stop a second desperate ascent, they were again falling back, repelled by the insubstantial water. But they needed to go up.

A baby’s first instinct is to go up, to take their first breath at the surface, and Huarvaa could not fight that instinct, their confused mind refusing to confront the truth of what lay between them and the air. When they had taken their first breath, did their birth-giver help them up? Did the All-Bearer banish Huarvaa then? Had there been a sliver of life, between birth and breath, during which Huarvaa had been a true part of their village?

GO UP. 

GO UP. 

GO UP.

The pains were constant now, but muffled by a sleepy layer of oxygen deprivation. It didn’t hurt too much. Huarvaa gazed at the surface, at the bobbing balloons and flickering leaves, the shafts of sunlight. It did feel like getting high, mildly, so at least one wish had been answered.

The rippling sunlight was beautiful on the leaves.

A wall of solid carapace smashed into Huarvaa with the force of a meteor. The leviathan, an adult giant sipho, had not even noticed Huarvaa’s weed-tangled presence in its rush to the surface. Armour plates battered Huarvaa and they felt the spear in their hand jerk suddenly, as it found a crack between scales, and all Huarvaa could do then was cling on in the second before the giant sipho breached air. Huarvaa’s breath was instinctive, the deep, searching gasp of a newborn, and they inhaled a noseful of blood from the harsh collision with their new best friend.

The sipho was truly enormous, its flanks bristling with spears from past failed hunts, and it was more than strong enough to raise its body from the water with Huarvaa still clinging on, caught by the spear and shielded under a raised scale. The sipho dipped its wingfins into the water and lashed its tail for propulsion and began to pick up speed, all but its tail and fins steady in the water while it skimmed over the surface. Huarvaa saw more siphos breaching around it, smaller types now fleeing their predator, and but the giant wasn’t in the mood to hunt. It was moving with a purpose - travelling? Migrating?

Huarvaa’s head hurt so much that even now, in the bare and scouring sunlight, they felt dazed and unwell. All they could do was hunker down and try to wait it out, acutely aware that they hung off the side of an animal which could kill them with one snap of its jaws.

Hours passed. The dark arrived and enclosed Huarvaa and the giant sipho. The creature finally relaxed its fins and slowly sank into the water again, whereupon Huarvaa escaped, battered and bruised, with the tip of their spear still caught between the scales. It plunged deep, Huarvaa stayed high, and somehow they escaped notice entirely. Or perhaps they didn’t, and the sipho simply did not care. Either way, Huarvaa was free, and swimming through water which was beautifully dense, supporting their body like the embrace of an old friend.

They swam blindly, not knowing the direction, only that it was probably best to get away from all the other siphos now zipping through the water around them. One was opportunistic enough to take a swipe at Huarvaa, only to be beaten back by the broken spear handle Huarvaa still inexplicably clutched. It was useless now, outside of clubbing attackers, but they they owed it their life, and would have felt strange and ungrateful to abandon it.

Wherever they were, it wasn’t anywhere they recognised. They didn’t dare dive too far below the surface, and came up for air far more frequently than was strictly necessary. Their probing downwards clicks returned no answering buzz in their whiskers which might have hinted at how far down the bottom lay. There could have been any number of leviathans down there and Huarvaa wouldn’t have known. So they couldn’t stop to rest, they had to swim, cruising until their battered and bruised body protested at being forced to continue at all costs.

Above the surface, they saw nothing at all, only distant wheeling moons in the blackness. Cherta was out that night, the dark red moon that leapt erratically across the sky, in its endless dance with great white Ishmael. The other moons were well-spread; no incoming tide. And no way to know which direction was home.

Finally, one of their clicks returned a buzz that told of a surface under them. They dived and found a pillar of rock with some large bore-holes; the perfect shelter for some rest and recuperation. But as they surfaced for a diving breath, filling their lungs with hours of air, they struggled to force themself down far enough to sleep in the caves. The memory of that deadly water was too fresh, and the fear of never knowing when it might sweep in over them made them shake. So they slept exposed in the open water just under the surface instead, the top of the rock pillar safely beneath them so that if any deadly water flooded in, they could drop onto the pillar, and not all the way down to the bottom.

The probing bite of a scalefish at their tail fluke woke them. A single lash of the tail sent the creature fleeing into water turning green from dawn light. The rock pillar was just deep enough that it couldn’t be used as a lookout over the surface, so they had to make do with poking their head out and trying to see over the rafts of leaves that floated around them. The leaves were unfamiliar; small and more blue-green than the big, arrow-shaped brown ones they were used to. There was no visible land, which did not surprise Huarvaa.

They dared to dive just to the sides of the pillar, where swarms of scalefish nymphs used the bore-holes as refugia. Huarvaa had never been the most accomplished fisher, having been denied the requisite lessons, but after four or five strikes they managed to snatch up two nymphs in their jaws. They ate them raw, crunching through the scales to get to the wriggling black flesh beneath.

Two scalefish nymphs weren’t likely to sustain a grown phocid for very long, but they didn’t want to stay by the spire. In fact, they wanted to find land as soon as possible. For a creature so perfectly designed for aquatic life, this was a new and alien need, but how else were they to be safe? They would recover in time, maybe, but for now they saw no need to put themself at risk in the water which had betrayed them.

They set off again. The open sea surely wasn’t endless, no matter how it seemed that way. Phocids were fast swimmers, outpaced only by adult siphos and certain leviathans, but even at their fastest sustained pace, Huarvaa felt that they were going nowhere at all, and there wasn’t much in the way of landmarks or distinguishing features which might have helped them judge distances. They just swam, right at the surface, for as long as they could, for several days straight.

When land did appear, it was sudden, and unexpected. A yellow blot on the horizon, it looked close enough to a mirage that they didn’t pay attention at first. But it got bigger, and bigger, and more land unfolded around it. Ridges around sea, like the Spiral.

They were home! Huarvaa’s exhausted tail doubled the pace and kicked them into a blazing sprint, into a flying forward breach to get a better look. Air scoured across the raw patches in their skin and the eye of Odr scorched at them, and for a span of several seconds they were arching through the sky, hurtling forwards.

What they saw confused them. There was a tall cluster of something on the top of the ridge, brightly coloured and complex, too complex to take in during a single breach. Ropes or flags or something, they couldn’t tell, but a tangled network of it extended down the side of the ridge, too, almost to the water, and there was a maze of floating pontoons lashed together around it.

This was not the Spiral.

Not only was it not the Spiral, but the waters were crowded with ropes and docks and rafts, more than they had ever seen before, and Huarvaa was coming down from a full-body breach right into the chaos. It had all looked like random surface debris and plants before, and now it was all so sharp and urgent, a maelstrom of shapes and colour and sound unmuffled by kind water.

They heard a shocked yell, a burst of clattering wings, and by the time they saw the raft directly in their path it was far, far too late. Tiny harpies spiralled out of the way a second before Huarvaa crashed down onto the raft, smashing the hardened reed structure and sending several barrels spilling their contents out over the waves that spread in their wake.

Brightly coloured fruit bobbed among the leaves and shattered reeds. And the bottom of the sea had swooped up, far faster than anticipated, and there was no space to come down from the breach as there might have been at the Spiral, this close to land.

Huarvaa hit the sea floor face-first and was knocked out cold.

The dull and harsh quality of sound overwater was what dragged them awake, they thought, though the powerful smelling herbs tucked into their mouth probably provided the energy for it. The voices around them were mumbling and flat, struggling to bypass the unfeeling air, and the weight of gravity sucked at Huarvaa's body, pinning them to the skin of the land, under the judgement of Odr. Trails of dried bloody slime cracked between their nostrils and mouth as they gagged and spat up the wad of herbs. The taste lingered. It was like needles on their tongue.

Water splashed against their side, then hit their tail. They grunted and raised their head. It was so heavy, rocks in their brain. A light, frantic poking against their neck increased, along with one of those harsh voices, low and textureless in the air. In the water, sounds had a shape Huarvaa could feel with their eyes closed. Here, their whiskers didn’t so much as twitch. But it took the voice rising dramatically in volume for them to realise that the reason they didn’t understand the words wasn’t the inefficiencies of overland speech, but because it was a language they had never heard before.

They opened one eye a crack. The other was swollen shut, and hurt ferociously. After an age the warped and vibrating image resolved, becoming the interior of a woven cloth structure, harsh orange, and a tiny jewel-green harpy perched on a reed mat with wet herbs still sliding off his wings.

“Sorry,” Huarvaa mumbled, and tried to turn. This proved too much for their concussed state, and the sight of a claw of sunlight slanting across their side made their eye burn and water. Their head sank back down again, and the green harpy had to leap away to avoid being crushed. Huarvaa lay there again, and more water splashed on their skin. Slowly, it occurred to them that the poking by their neck was actually the feet of another harpy, as he strode and hopped onto Huarvaa’s back and prodding into one of the abraded gashes in their skin.

A loud, fierce chittering turned the atmosphere of pained diligence into chaos. Two more small harpies - shortwings, weren’t they called? - allegedly located somewhere by Huarvaa’s midsection had begun to argue. Their voices made Huarvaa’s head ring. All the harpies sounded too sharp, loud and grating. Just as it sounded like the two had come to blows, a low, deep voice intruded. It was like a wash of calm water over churned mud, smoothing over the hard edges of Huarvaa’s headache; the voice of a phocid.

They spoke the same language as the harpies, and it was enough to end the fight, or at least move it somewhere out of earshot. Huarvaa glanced around, desperate to see a familiar face, the striking grey, black, and white of a Spiral villager’s markings, a phocid just like Huarvaa. For one painful moment they almost expected to see the All-Bearer, ready to exile Huarvaa for good for failing the challenge. But the All-Bearer hadn’t set foot on land in Huarvaa’s lifetime, and this phocid was certainly standing, not floating or swimming, and they were not familiar at all.

The phocid was a tan-browny colour, with darker ripples and stripes which tapered and wavered, nothing like the bold ribbons and curves of a Spiral villager. Slung across their shoulders was another length of woven cloth, a land-cape with the inner surface packed with mosses which would keep the skin cool and damp.

Most Spiral villagers were not greenbacks, like Huarvaa, and neither was this phocid either; their hair was free of entangling weeds and leaves, a neat black strip that left their face bare. It was narrower than the phocid faces Huarvaa had grown up around. In fact, the whole phocid was narrower, looking, to Huarvaa’s eyes, remarkably underfed. They could see the edges of bones in the brown one's physique, around the elbows and jaw.

Huarvaa shuddered. Was the food here so bad? Or was this phocid sick, and their blubber deficiency cause for them to be on land, where no sane phocid would ever venture? Even just lying there like a dead thing, Huarvaa had begun to overheat.

The other phocid couldn’t fit in the cloth tunnel alongside Huarvaa, and had circled around to the front opening, by Huarvaa’s head. They lowered themself onto their weirdly bony elbows, a careful and neat approximation of Huarvaa’s weak stance.

“I am Kemi-amv,” the phocid said, and this time they used Spiral air-speech, though with a thick accent. “This language good? I visit north Spiral, see people like you.”

That explained why it didn’t sound good. North Spiral tongue was mutually intelligible with Huarvaa’s polar language, but it always sounded dirtier, as if spoken through a mouthful of mud.

“I’m Huarvaa. Where am I?” Huarvaa mumbled, providing their air-speech name, flat of any clicks.

Somewhere not too far away, the harpies were arguing shrilly again. That grating noise, accompanied by the ringing in their head and the terrific weight of the sunlight on their bare skin, set a pounding off behind Huarvaa’s swollen eye so severe that their stomach heaved in response. They retched, bringing up strings of bile that chained their mouth to the reed mat, snapping as Huarvaa coughed. No food came up; they’d eaten so little since the start of their ordeal that their stomach was empty.

Kemi-amv muttered something to the green harpy, who had just returned after cleaning off the smelling herbs. He stared in horror at the new mess to clean up and cast Huarvaa a withering look.

“Sorry, he is not happy,” Kemi-amv said. “He is Ikki-el-amv, herb doctor, but his medicine is spoiled wet. You spill it when you breach. All in the water, the docks, everywhere.” They indicated over their shoulder. Outside the tent the world was just too bright and garish to make out anything more than a throbbing mass of blurry detail. Huarvaa took it to be the docks, and the harpy’s complaint to involve the barrels of goods that had broken and scattered under Huarvaa’s bulk.

The harpy, Ikki-el-amv, dragged a bare foot through the bile and stamped it down onto a pale sheet of paper. It left behind a green-yellow mark. This clearly meant something to the herb doctor, because he snapped out new orders at the harpies still fighting over Huarvaa’s back.

“You are in Spire Intun,” Kemi-amv said. “Him herb doctor, me, I am Kemi-avan-amv, that is, in our language, Kemi-who-is-meat-doctor. I cut…” The phocid made a sawing gesture and raised their brows significantly.

Spire Intun? Huarvaa could only take so much. They simply stared blankly, then let themself sink back to the reed mat again. Gravity was too much to bear in this state.

“You are very hurt,” Kemi-amv said. “Your broken weapon. Here.” They nudged something closer to Huarvaa; the black shaft of their spear. “Leviathan hunter? I seen Spiral villagers hunt deep scalefish.” They looked, and sounded, very impressed. “This marks, here, on your back-” they went on, indicating some part of Huarvaa they hadn’t a hope of viewing without raising their head, which was not going to happen, “-from leviathan? Infected. Ikki-amv works on it.”

Huarvaa felt like heaving up more bile. But somewhere, deep down, a part of them chafed. Leviathan hunter? No way, that was too dangerous, too scary, and - most importantly - they wouldn’t have been allowed to learn how anyway. So maybe it was a good thing they had been an outsider, because hunting leviathans was whisker-raisingly scary. But… there was a sheen of honour to it, too, of respectability, triumph in combat. Kemi-amv clearly felt it, judging by the poorly-concealed look of awe on their features. They must have been younger than Huarvaa had realised. Perhaps their own age.

If Huarvaa’s medical care at Intun Spire was reliant on everyone thinking they were some sort of hero, then let them. Huarvaa was not foolish enough to think the harpies whose raft he’d broken would let them get away with it for long, but if they thought Huarvaa was sick, injured, a leviathan hunter stranded and lost following a deadly struggle with a giant sipho, they might think twice about any punishments.

So Huarvaa only nodded, not trusting their weakened state to pull off a decent sob story. “Giant sipho,” they mumbled.

Kemi-amv’s eyes gleamed and they called something over at the harpies. One of the fights stopped dead. Huarvaa supposed that any leviathan large enough to fit a Spiral villager phocid in its jaws must have been unfathomably huge to one of the tiny harpies. And compared to Kemi-amv, who was smaller than the average Spiral villager, too.

“Giant sipho! Well, you a giant phocid, me and three big selkies had to pull you out of the water so you don’t drown,” Kemi-amv went on excitedly. “We get a good, uh, language-speaker for you. Then you tell us about sipho. Now you rest - go sleep. I cut and sew your back. Ikki-el-amv puts numbing herbs.”

Sure enough, a tingling numbness had started to spread between Huarvaa’s shoulder blades. A harpy nurse had mopped up the bile, this time regarding Huarvaa with quite a bit more respect than before. It was so bizarre and unexpected that Huarvaa did not recognise the expression, at first, and assumed they had done something else to displease him. But no - that was deferral, respect. Something no person had ever shown Huarvaa back home.

They let their exhausted eye slide shut. Sleep chased them quickly after that, punctuated by a rhythmic tugging at their numb skin that must have been the meat doctor cutting and closing Huarvaa’s wounds.

“Huarvaa-aal-an,” a chirpy harpy voice said in their ear. “Would you kindly lift your tail? I’m so sorry to bother you, but it’s quite urgent.”

Huarvaa blinked awake - still only one eye - and saw one of those small harpies standing inches from their nose. He was an iridescent violet, with a white underside and dark greyish skin. A green reed silk necktie cut into the fluffy feathers beneath his chin.

“What was that?” Huarvaa said blankly. The harpy was so gaudy that the sight of him had erased all memories of what he’d actually said.

“Your tail, my friend, please lift your tail,” the harpy said, a shade of urgency in his perfectly-accented voice.

Huarvaa did so, though it was an effort overland, with gravity sucking and dragging every movement. They turned to look, to make sure their tail had made it in one piece, and saw a blur of blue feathers; one of those little harpies trapped under Huarvaa’s fluke. It must have moved in their sleep. Now the harpy fluttered free, shooting to one of the perches near the patchwork roof of the triage tent with half of his feathers crushed and bent.

“Wonderful, that is fine,” the violet harpy said. “You may lower it now. Good. My name is Tektei-var, though in your tongue that is simply Tektei. I will be your interpreter while you are here. I am a language scholar at Intun, with a specialty in Western tongues, and it is always my pleasure to practise Spiral speech. And, of course, to venture outside the Spire for some practical work. I do rarely have an opportunity to.” There was something odd about his phrasing, it was too formal and weirdly old fashioned. But perfectly legible.

“Where’s the phocid?” Huarvaa said.

“Your surgeon has other patients. But they have left instructions, which I will convey to you. Unfortunately your presence has resulted in some logistical problems for the operation of these docks, so it is advised that you move to the nursery pool as soon as you can be confident that you will not drown in it.”

Nursery pool sounded good. Something nice and shallow, where Huarvaa could sit on the bottom with their head over the surface but their body completely immersed. “I can go now,” they said.

“Excellent. I am sure the dockmaster will appreciate the full use of the beach again.” Tektei glanced around as the herb doctor called something over to him and chirped out a quick response. To Huarvaa, he said, “The herbalist wishes to know when you have last eaten.”

“Tw- Three days,” Huarvaa said. Although Tektei was intimidatingly well spoken and clearly smart, he presented an amazing opportunity to Huarvaa - by becoming Huarvaa’s voice, Tektei could add another layer of respectability to Huarvaa’s tall tales. And if Huarvaa could convince the herbalist that they were starving, maybe there was some free food in it for them.

As Tektei relayed this news to the herbalist, Ikki-el-amv bristled and marched over, his green feathers raised in funny-looking lines. He said something sharply, which the interpreter translated - “You should have mentioned it sooner. If you were a shortwing I could have a meal here in ten minutes, but feeding a phocid is another matter. I’ll have to consult with Kemi-amv to see what can be done.”

Huarvaa got a strong impression that Tektei was cleaning up some of Ikki-el-amv’s speech, because the interpreter’s polite tone jarred badly with Ikki-el-amv’s agitated manner. Then again, it did seem like the people here emoted very openly and without shame. Kemi-amv, too, had been very easy to read. Intun culture was disorienting already; Huarvaa could remember countless incidents of the All-Bearer shushing a child for crying, extolling the virtue of quiet, restful contemplation.

There was none of that here. The herbalist flew from the tent in search of Kemi-amv, and all was hustle and bustle around Huarvaa even as Tektei relayed a message of rest and relaxation from the healers. And when Huarvaa made to stand, ready to move off the skin of the land and back into the water, things only got worse. They had not stood - properly stood, with their body off the ground - on land in weeks, perhaps months. 

Huarvaa was a greenback and a beach-dweller, infamous for lazing in the shallows, but that did not mean they were keen on actually moving around on land. This was like trying to tow a barge full of rocks, and the weakness that came with near-starvation didn’t make it much easier.

Slowly, they pushed up off the ground. First with their arms, then their legs. Their hips and knees twinged. The reed mats under them began to dip, slowly, under their weight; there was nothing but yellow beach mud and moss beneath, and it had already formed somewhat of a hollow depression in the shape of Huarvaa’s sleeping body. 

For the first time, they had a good look around. The treatment tent was a tube comprised of the canopy fabric stretched between hoops of hardened reed stem, the ends buried in the sand. Although it was large enough to house the likes of Kemi-amv, or a couple of selkies lying nose to tail, it was not long enough for Huarvaa, which was why they had felt that hot sunlight on their tail. Their flukes lay in a puddle on the reed mat; the harpy nursemaids had been throwing buckets of water over Huarvaa’s skin, to keep it from drying and cracking.

The tube was closed at the head end, affording some privacy, but at the tail end Huarvaa saw a straight path out to the sea. Dense fog filled the beach, and the shapes of rafts and pontoons and ropes loomed in and out of visibility, ghostly in the uniform white glow of the sky. At least there was no direct sunlight today, though the sheer amount of stuff choking the water was still so strange, and made Huarvaa doubt if they would be able to swim out even if they tried.

The front panel of the tube came down. Ikki-el-amv, via Tektei, instructed Huarvaa to walk parallel to the water, along the mossy beach. 

Elevated walkways stretched between the cliff and the docks, with the beach acting as a narrow strip over which a constant stream of workers travelled. Selkies carrying fishing nets and barrels of knotted seagrass passed by overhead, some stopping to stare openly. Shortwing harpies flew through the air like sipho nymphs, tiny bursts and pops of colour that faded in and out of the fog. 

Once, the huge raked shadow of a longwing harpy appeared high overhead, only to vanish as quickly as it had appeared. And there was a third type of harpy on the walkways that Huarvaa first mistook for skinny, bouncy selkies - no, those were landstriders, harpies which did not fly but hopped gracefully on powerful, long legs, their tiny wings tucked neatly at their sides.

Huarvaa had never met a landstrider before and for a moment forgot the task at hand and stared, with equal curiosity, at the people staring at them. The shock and panic of the past few days seemed a little more distant, as Huarvaa saw again that strange look in the onlookers’ eyes. Respect, even admiration. Some concern, too. 

Huarvaa felt that some gesture was expected, even if they probably couldn’t speak to anyone without Tektei’s help. So they smiled at the gathering crowd, hesitantly at first, gauging the reaction.

The people smiled back. A selkie child waved. They didn’t turn away, or stare blankly, as the !Uamaa villagers might have done. Could it be cultural? Did they just grin at everybody like this? But they weren’t smiling at each other. Huarvaa’s own smile grew in size and strength, until it made their swollen-shut eye twinge and revealed the raw pit where they had lost an upper canine to their head-on collision with the sea floor. But still, it was hard to stop.

Until one of the harpy nursemaids prodded irritably at Huarvaa’s neck. Two of them had perched in the ragged green stems woven through Huarvaa’s hair.

“If you could move along, please,” Tektei’s voice said in Huarvaa’s ear.

Huarvaa turned away from the onlookers, still buzzing with wonder, and set off. It was a miserable trudge, as any walk on land was bound to be, but they felt energised, capable of doing anything. And at the end of the walk was an enviable goal; a nursery pool formed by fencing in a section of sea, the floor dredged to be the same depth throughout the pool aside from where it lowered like a ramp into the water. Weed and surface greenery had been cleared away, so that any attending nursery workers could keep a close eye on the children learning to swim.

In Huarvaa’s village, the nursery pool had been similar, though far deeper, and the bottom made of the same fine black sand that filled the Spiral. It had been colder, too; the first thing Huarvaa noticed, as they slid into the water at Intun, was its warmth. 

The shallow bottom was thatched with rippling grasses which flashed and gleamed. Huarvaa sank gratefully to the bottom and lay there, only their head above the water. With their body stretched out, their tail tip butted up against one of the fences, but it could hardly be described as uncomfortable. In the rippling embrace of the water, again, Huarvaa was supported and caressed. They felt so much more vital, rejuvenated to a comfortable state and not smashed flat on land and cracking in the sun like a washed-up length of weed.

The healer retinue fussed around them for a few moments, the shortwings perching on Huarvaa’s head, and their tail after Tektei conveyed instructions to raise it so that the flukes breached the surface. The harpies didn’t fear the water, but clearly had no desire for an impromptu swim.

“There, they’ve told me now that you will have a meal soon,” Tektei said. He had sat down among Huarvaa’s ferns, his weight a barely noticeable addition to the sopping plants. Huarvaa had been dry long enough that they feared having to pull dying brown leaves out of their hair; hopefully most of it would survive. It took years to cultivate a greenback mane as flagrant as this.

“Thanks,” Huarvaa said. “You guys are nice. Back home they wouldn’t give you shit if you didn’t work for it.”

“Yes,” Tektei said thoughtfully. “When studying there, I observed the asceticism of the polar Spiral people. There is no time for excess, or unearned keep, where life is so much harder than it is here in the land of plenty. But I enjoyed it, too. The close bonds in each village, the network of support. In all my time there, I never observed your people fighting amongst themselves.”

Huarvaa had a lot to say about that. No fighting? Maybe to you. The Spiral was a place of subtlety, where you could be shunned, excluded, shown the cold shoulder, denied food, board, and education, and it was still not considered a fight until anyone dared raise their tongue against the All-Bearer. The people at the Spire seemed to argue all the time, but at least arguing was allowed. At least there was no permanent risk, it seemed, if two of the shortwing nurses got into a scuffle over who got to mop up.

But Huarvaa couldn’t say any of it, because they spoke from the point of view of an outsider, and nobody could know that. As far as Tektei was aware, Huarvaa was a celebrated, heroic leviathan hunter. The All-Bearer’s favourite.

“It’s a pretty different place,” they said quietly, raising their mouth above the surface to speak. “Hey, little guy, where did you visit? You bin all the way to the polar villages?”

“I’ve been to the ice caps in the north and south,” Tektei said, a proud chirr in his voice. “Before I came to Intun to write my thesis I travelled the length and breadth of West. The polar pelagic villages were the hardest to reach, of course, since they are so far from land, fully underwater, and I, of course, cannot swim, and yet the people were were some of the kindest and most fascinating I have met.”

“And if you didn’t swim, how’d’ya go there?” Huarvaa asked. They had seen harpies trade with the pelagic villages, sure, but that had been on the coast, and the villagers had had to swim their goods out to land for the deal.

“By raft, of course,” Tektei said proudly. “I was permitted to anchor to one of the submarine dwellings. I spent weeks confined to that raft, learning the language and customs from the villagers. More than once, icebergs almost sank me. But this is how we suffer for our craft.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” Huarvaa’s tail lowered into the water again with a splash. The press of water around them had appreciably slowed their heart, and proper, comfortable tiredness groped at them again. “Love my craft, suffered for it too. Did you learn when the food is coming?”

“Ah, yes, about that,” Tektei said. “Your provisions today are a gift from the council of the Spire, as an expression of formal welcome. And it was lucky, too, given that the other option was to find a fisher to give up their catch for free. As we mentioned, getting enough food will be a matter of logistics, and it takes time to gather it all. So I have been told - roughly two hours.”

“Sweet,” Huarvaa said, their voice cut off as their head dipped lower in the water again. “I’m gonna catch some sleep.” As their words expired in bubbles around their mouth, Tektei chirped an assent and lifted off their head, along with the other lingering harpies. With no more passengers to worry about, Huarvaa was able to fully submerge. They lay on their back, baring their underside to the dancing bars of muted light slanting in from above, and drifted off to sleep.

The warmth followed them into their dreams. It was constant, pressing in on all sides, as if they had dipped their finger into a cooking pot. 

They dreamed that they were in the main hall of !Uamaa, the vast underwater construction made of transparent scalefish plates lashed to the sea floor with ropes. On a platform inside, elevating it above the shoulder-high water so that it sat in the air bubble trapped by the hall’s roof, was the huge cauldron of stew that never ran out. 

Every villager had to contribute to it, every day, tossing in their catch or some tasty weeds or bones to thicken it up. The flavour changed by the seasons, shifting gradually to reflect what the villagers caught, growing thick and tasty in times of hunting success, thin and watery when fishing was scarce. It camped out over a vent in the sea floor that kept it bubbling year round and Huarvaa had always wanted to try it properly, to grab a cup and dip it in. 

But only real villagers were entitled to take from the cauldron. Huarvaa had only ever tasted the stew on the rare occasions they’d been in the hall alone, able to sneak a mouthful or two. They tried to contribute, they brought food, but nobody ever let them add what they caught, because no one had ever taught Huarvaa the correct ways to treat food out at sea, and they did not want to risk Huarvaa’s ignorance. And since Huarvaa couldn’t contribute, they couldn’t drink from it.

Huarvaa dreamed about the stew now. Gelatinous and salty from the scalefish bones, swirling with long rope-like weeds that had been tied into neat knots around sipho eggs and blooming urchin hearts. Huarvaa ducked their whole head in and lapped it up, filling the aching void of their stomach, drinking it all down but failing to find satiation from it. 

And at that point, the first gentle twinge in their ribs that should have served as a well-timed reminder to surface and breathe sent them bursting awake in blind panic.

The horror of the deadly water filled their mouth and lungs, chasing away the taste of stew with the faint tang of iron and strange, bitter water. 

Huarvaa forgot everything but that overwhelming need to rise and breathe, and came to their senses as their tail flukes slammed hard on the pool bottom, jarring their whole body. It was a stroke that would have easily propelled them into a breach, if the pool had been deep enough to make room for it. Instead, pain shocked up Huarvaa’s tail and they surfaced in a churning froth of bubbles and spume, like a pathetic baby who’d never swum before. The clear water was cloudy and dark from the substrate their flukes had kicked up, and they had gouged the bottom so badly that the careful dredging work that had gone into the pool had been all but erased.

There was nobody around to see Huarvaa’s shame. They sat on the ramp, where even if they lay flat down their head would remain above the water, and tried to breathe.

The food arrived soon after that. Tektei perched on the corner of a raft that drifted close to the sea wall of the pool, then called out for attention. Huarvaa turned, and saw a pile of black scalefish taller than the little harpy heaped up on the raft. It was pulled by a dark-furred selkie who seemed less than thrilled about the affair.

Tektei announced, “We made our best guesses about your preferences; forgive us, you were sound asleep when we tried to ask. If the quantity is insufficient, let us know. Iuniti-vay-or expresses his welcome and hopes you accept the gift.”

Huarvaa, whose mouth was already full, nodded enthusiastically. They were a large phocid, they knew that, it came from having polar parentage. They required a lot of food, accordingly, but they had never once seen so much all in a pile, all for Huarvaa. 

Back home,their food was taken piece by piece, as soon as it was caught or stolen, and heavily augmented by charity, dried knotted weeds from the few phocids who cared, and almost anything else Huarvaa could fit in their mouth. Grazing for the whole day was a necessity, because nobody had ever served them a whole day of food in one go.

The scalefish were soft, cooked through so that the flesh was flaky and smoky. They weren’t as large as Spiral scalefish but each one was still roughly half the length of Huarvaa’s arm. They ate five of them before bothering to talk to Tektei again. With the worst of the hunger blunted, Huarvaa surfaced again and ate in the air, actually chewing their food instead of cramming it down whole.

“It’s good,” they said, because Tektei and the selkie looked very expectant. “Like the cooking, s’really good stuff. So generous.”

“And the quantity?” Tektei said, translating the selkie’s murmured question.

Huarvaa almost laughed. Didn’t those two have eyes? It was a massive meal and would take quite some time to get through. But, well, if there was more to be had…. “It’ll do for a meal. You got more? We eat two meals. Takes a lot to go hunting.”

“Naturally,” Tektei said. “I’ll send for more. Iuniti-vay-or - excuse me, that is, Iuinti-who-rules-the-Spire - has judged that you must do no more than recover, and has offered his assistance in the matter. Food is part of that. You are very welcome at the Spire."