User:Red Blizzard/Water Dancer

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." - Mahatma Gandhi

She woke up with a pain in her head so strong she wanted to scream. But when she opened her mouth, water rushed in; torrents of cold, thick, salty water that flooded her lungs, setting her entire body on fire. She snapped her mouth shut instantly, but the damage was done. Her muscles lurched involuntarily, jerking her about as she struggled to breathe, finding no air to sustain herself. Consciousness ebbed and flowed, bringing a faint ringing to her ears, and images rushed through her mind as, with eyes squeezed tight and mouth closed against the deluge, she waited for death. So this was drowning…

“You can breathe now, child.” Her eyes flew open in shock as a thousand things materialized before her. She was in some sort of underwater grotto, covered with sea stars and anemones that danced to the current. At the far end of the grotto was an entrance, opening up into a vast kelp forest that stretched out for as far as the eye could see in the clear blue water. She could tell they weren’t too far from the surface, for the sun was still visible, albeit barely, through the pulsing waves on the surface. Light streamed down in rivulets, scattering among the kelp leaves in little strings that highlighted the deep, olive green color of life here. Fish could be seen darting in and out of kelp branches, scales flashing with color. For a moment, she merely lay where she was, blissfully watching the scenery through the grotto entrance. Then it hit her. She was underwater. The realization drove her into a panic, and she began to struggle as the fire returned to her lungs.

“Stop thinking about that, you’re safe here.” She paused, letting the pulse of life return to her. Looking around, she saw a beautiful woman floating in one corner of the grotto, a serene look on her face. Dark hair floated about her face, and as sunlight rippled over her through the grotto entrance, she caught a tint of vivid red. Just like her own… She froze, and held a strand of her own hair up to the light. The familiar crimson red was gone, replaced by an electric blue. The hair itself was longer, and would have stretched passed her waist on land. This wasn’t her hair! She kicked off the bed of kelp leaves she had been lying on, banging her head against the ceiling, ignoring the pain as she looked around. The woman in the corner held up a hand-mirror for her benefit, and she gingerly picked it up, afraid of what she was about to see.

“I had to regrow everything. When I found you along the shore, your hair was gone and your skull was showing through your face. I thought you were dead at first.” She cringed as memory was restored to her. The man with the black wings… the chains and the mask… he had doused her with acid during their encounter on the desert beach. The last thing she could recall was collapsing on top of his dead remains, her spear still quivering where it had stuck into his head. She vaguely remembered someone telling her about this man, and her chances of survival against him. Given the odds, she should have been dead.

“In a way, you were dead when I reached you. The young man with you managed to bind your soul to your bones so that you wouldn’t leave this world so easily. It was all I could manage to reconstruct a body around your soul.” She smiled as she remembered her companion. So he made it after all, even if he couldn’t keep his promise to be there to fight along side with her. She would have to thank him for that the next time she saw him… if he still recognized her. She jumped back into the moment, eyes focusing on the image before her. Out of the mirror stared a face that might have been hers had she been born to a different mother, in a different place. Her nose was different, her ears more angular, her eyes a different shade of blue. She raised a hand to feel her features, almost wanting to cry at the stranger she had become.

“I modeled you after your father, with a little bit thrown in from myself. The hair I couldn’t do anything about, the seawater kept altering the red dye, so I had to settle with blue. Come now, your face may not be your own, but at least you aren’t dead, child. Your father didn’t give his life away fighting the Empire so that you could meet the same fate.” Her father… She turned to face the woman in the corner once more. If she knew her father, then she must be her grandmother…

“What, your father never told you about me?” She shook her head, but when she opened her mouth to explain, no words and a stream of bubbles issued from her mouth. The woman clicked her tongue.

“Never learned how to speak underwater, did you? Just let the water pour into your soul. Your body and the ocean around you share the same heart, surely you share the same voice as well?” She opened her mouth once more, stretching out her arms like she had done so many times on land, feeling for the tendrils of power that brought the current of magic to her fingertips so many times before. Only this time, the power came too readily, bursting forth too soon, and a whirlpool of water was stirred up inside the grotto, whipping her hair sideways. The other woman frowned and calmed the current down with a flick of her wrist.

“You clearly have some ways to go with control, and your method is a bit clumsy, but you have the power alright. Too much power. I doubt even my grandmother was as strong as you are now. But enough on that. Try speaking now.”

“Ummm…”

“Yes, very good…”

“You’re…my grandmother?”

“Yes, yes I am. How come Eric never spoke about me?”

“My father? He died before I was born.”

“Oh. I didn’t know he went so early. And your mother, Mae?”

“She didn’t tell me much about my family.”

“My dear child, you don’t even know your own family? Then again, I don’t blame you too much. With all the hardship your mother went through, she could hardly be expected to instruct you in your family tree. Well, to set things straight, I am a sea nymph.”

“Wait, so…”

“Yes, we are at my home, out in this part of the ocean we nymphs call Eira. We have come a long way from the shores of the Southern Desert where I found you. But I brought you here so that I can instruct you properly in the ways of water, of which I must admit you have been rather slovenly taught so far.”

“Well, I’ve been improvising most of the magic on my own to protect myself…”

“And that, my child, is a very very dangerous thing to attempt. Water magic without proper control can lead to disaster, but in the right hands, it is the most potent of all forms of magic!”

“But the elders said…”

“Those elders were fools. They only comprehended the power of human ice mages, and because they see water as but another form of ice, they wrongly assume that water magic is the same as ice magic, and weaker. That was the same mistake your father made when he went with my husband to study ice magic on land. He didn’t have the patience to spend a year studying the ways of water, so he spent three months with a mediocre ice mage and considered himself done.”

“A year?”

“Yes, child, I intend to teach you the magic your father should have learned, and after a year’s worth of instruction, you should be ready to go back to the land you came from and face down the dangers in motion there. Now, come with me, I have to show you something.”

The woman floated over to the grotto entrance and sailed out into the kelp forest. The girl tried to follow, swimming through the water, but a current pushed her back into the grotto. Her grandmother turned.

“Use magic and propel yourself forward, you should at least know that much, yes?” She concentrated, using magic to shift the water around her. An instant later, she blasted out of the grotto, swimming loops around stalks of kelp, the raw energy of magic coursing through her veins, exhilarating and endless. Her grandmother quickly caught up with her and motioned for her to follow. Together, they threaded their way through the kelp forest at breakneck speeds, heading deeper into the ocean. As they went, the girl spotted faces in the water, watching her with eyes that glinted with amusement. But her grandmother led her past these faces, and they disappeared altogether the deeper they went. At one point, dancing lines of sunlight no longer reached the seabed. Then, the sunlight ceased to dance altogether, becoming still and somber as the seabed fell away into the darkness and the kelp forest ended, revealing the yawning expanse of open ocean that stretched forever onwards, immense and endless. Here, her grandmother pointed to the surface, and they both rose upwards, breaking the surface. The girl looked around, unable to see any sign of land in any direction save one: a single, dark dot on the horizon to the east.

“That is one of the last pieces of land untouched by mankind.” She jumped, unable to recognize the wizened voice beside her. Turning, she was suddenly confronted by an old woman treading water, snowy white hair streaming down her back. The woman smiled at her discomfiture and submerged. When she went back under, she found her grandmother to be the beautiful, crimson-haired woman from before.

“The sea is rejuvenating, all-giving. Life sprang up from its depths, and life flourished within it long before the first creatures began to crawl on land. When humans first began learning to control magic, the ways of the sea were the ways they understood the least, and thus were least able to control. Even now, while humans live and die on land, struggling to prolong their miserable lifespan with magic, the ocean holds life that has lived forever, long beyond the knowledge of magic and the light of the moon. Coral lives and lives on in the great reefs of the world, while the mighty whales, lords of the ocean, live on beyond their deaths, keeping others alive with their bodies when their souls have joined the stars in the sky. You must learn to understand this before you are ready to control the magic in the palm of your hand. Follow me.” The grandmother dove straight downwards into the depths of the ocean, the girl following at a slightly slower pace, uncertain. She had entered the depths of a lake before, only to find horror and death down where the light never reached.

They swam for some time in silence, the ocean never still, but rarely speaking, calmly slumbering out in the concealed open under the rippling blue surface. Clear light became murky the deeper they went, then vanished altogether. In the dark, with only a helping hand to guide her, she felt a shudder run through her body. Then, far below, she saw twinkling lights, scattering here and there like sparks of fire on a dark night. But these sparks were a cold, ghostly blue, arranged in little lines that scurried through the darkness. The hand guided her towards the lights, which flared up as they approached, revealing the tiny, darting forms of lanternfish. By their glow, grandmother pointed out to her the seafloor. Embedded in the sand, hulking and skeletal, were the rotting remains of an entire fleet of ships. Here and there, masts stuck up like thunderstruck trees, crusted with barnacles. Below, the girl could see rotting timbers and more. Here and there, a boot or worse, an arm, surrounded by the wriggling bodies of eels searching for scraps of flesh.

“Remember that island?” The girl nodded in reply, too horrified to speak. “This is all that’s left of an armada sent by the Empire to capture the island. What they seek there, be it land or resources, I cannot say. What I can say is that an invisible hand is at work, and what they seek is not what the Empire seeks. Someone wants to secure that island and release the fifth seal.” The girl suddenly turned to her grandmother, alarmed. Someone before had told her that the five seals had been created as safeguards against another realm, the realm of…

“Father Time is behind those seals. Humans, in their quest for power and immortality, have grown foolhardy. Fortunately, a sudden storm destroyed these ships, but should another fleet come, the sea nymphs are likely to destroy it before the island is taken. Four seals have already been destroyed, and should the last one be broken, all life will be imperiled. Of course humans are too ignorant to understand what that implies, but look here!” She pointed to a half-eaten skeleton, fish swarming about it. “Even in death, there is life! Humans can only understand one arc of a greater cycle involving all living things. In trying to break out of that cycle, they threaten everything else that forms it. The day humans attain immortality, the rest of the world will be granted certain death. Of course, I did not bring you all the way here to lecture you on human fallacies. No, there is someone here I want you to meet, who should be here any moment now…”

Suddenly, a tentacle lazily rose out of the darkness, stretching towards them. Thicker than the trunk of a tree, and twice the length of one, it towered over the both of them in the watery depths. The girl recoiled in shock, suddenly a human again. Uncontrollable fear seemed to seize her by the limbs, guiding her actions. A sudden blast of magic erupted from the palm of one hand, sending a pulse of water crashing into the tentacle. It reacted instantly, curling about her, then coiling up in a grip of steel. Suction cups stuck to her body, and the tentacle began to squeeze the life out of her. Almost instinctively, the girl closed her eyes, wanting desperately for the tentacles to let go. Water went to work, prying the tentacle off her, ripping it to shreds. A tattered stump retreated back into the darkness, only to be rejoined a moment later by nine others, each as massive as the first one, two of them tipped in giant, oar-like paddles. They converged on the girl in a fury, attacking what they perceived to be a threat, ramming into her from all possible directions. The girl cushioned the first few blows, but one paddle wrapped around her head, suction cups clinging to her hear, to her face. She tried to resist, but was completely enclosed before she could so much as twitch. Then, the tentacles began crushing her from all sides, compacting her to the breaking point. Reaching out with the last strands of magic she had, she tried to find water…and found it inside the tentacles.

There! Grasping hold of anything that offered hope, even the ghost of hope, she reached out with her mind into the tentacles themselves, finding the water willing and ready. With a burst of magic driven by desperation, the tentacles swelled up, then burst, falling away dead and limp from her body. Looking around, the girl saw a bloated, squidlike body half-emerged from the wreckage of a ship, the stumps of its tentacles flailing. Then, the magic consumed it, and water burst out of its body in a messy explosion. The girl sighed with relief as she witnessed the monster’s destruction, but was suddenly jolted to her senses by a wail of dismay. Turning, she found her grandmother a short distance away, a look of mingled disbelief and despair etched into her face.

“You killed him!!!”

“What!?!?!?”

“You killed him, the one I was taking you to meet! He represented the life in Eira, the life of the ocean itself! How could you kill him?”

“He was attacking me…that tentacle…”

“That was his way of greeting, the way he always greets people!”

“How was I supposed to know? The giant squid in the lake did that to me, and he almost ate me…”

“Just because one animal does it doesn’t mean that all animals will do it! That’s the kind of human fallacy behind the way humans treat each other, the reason behind the Empire’s purge of magic! The reason your father died!” The girl’s heart was still thundering in the rush of the moment, her head still swirling with recent events. She couldn’t grasp the enormity of her actions, couldn’t realize the meaning of her grandmother taking her out into the deep ocean to visit a giant squad. “You…you’re just like all other humans, selfish, greedy, ignorant, impulsive…oh….” The grandmother stopped in the middle of her rant, arrested by the look on her granddaughter’s face. “What am I going to do with you…”

They floated there for a moment, with nothing but the sounds of the creature’s remains as it landed among the shipwrecks, water churning. A few fish darted passed them, alerted by the smell to the fresh meal awaiting them. In under a minute, the shipwrecks were a hive of activity as fish and other creatures swarmed in.

“In death, there is life…” The girl wanted to smile at the irony, but the sense of guilt, and her grandmother’s words, still weighed heavily upon her mind.

“Memorized that part of the lesson already, have you? The temporary life here doesn’t justify the death of the creature you have just caused.”

“But all life is equal, isn’t it?”

“Just like the life of your father is equal to the lives of the maggots that feasted on his body?”

“No, I didn’t mean that…”

“Of course you didn’t. And that is why you have so much to learn. The creature you killed lived for thousands of years, and even learned to communicate with others, like us. I was so sure it would have something to teach you…”

Silence. Life feasted on death. The cycle continued.

“Come now. There is much for you to learn, and we only have a year ahead of us to accomplish everything. Follow me.” The two of them swam off, following the tides.