Prologue: One Morning
Slowly at first, then with a speed that will go unmatched for an age, the black night of the sea falls away and I rise into the shallows, warm, azure, and dappled with sunlight. Air escapes my behemoth lungs in anticipation. The denizens around me, my kin, jet and dart from my shadow as it prepares to surface. They know better than to trespass on my path, this long road that has seen me from ruin to ruin, from one end of the lonesome world to the other, to here, right here, beneath the waves. For all my power I am utterly spent. Only the very last reserves of my strength carry me along. I propel myself up and up, breaching, sending spray raining down as far as any eye can see, thrashing myself into the sky because I can feel her near. After so long she is here. I have found her.
I have sent a wave towards the coast, heralding me. I take in the barren stretch of coastline as seawater rolls off my titan frame: a narrow band even at low tide, the remains of seaweed and jellies and crabs stranded on the sand, easy pickings for the swarms of gulls and petrels now wheeling to inspect me. A tumble of burnt gray and umber rocks marches inland towards a line of green on the horizon. Warm thoughts return to me, of how she had lamented never seeing the sea. Warm thoughts turn bittersweet.
My immensity carries me to her. I wade towering through the surf. I am dimly aware of life nearby, down the coast: a dingy, weather-worn fishing boat, the unbelieving eyes of her crew locked on me, their usual bickering and cajoling silenced. I pay them no mind.
As I walk to shore I begin to change, knowing in my gut this will be my last transformation, whatever years remain to me doomed to be spent apart from what I am now. It is already too late to turn back. I become smaller, adjusting myself so as to not risk drowning on this final stretch of my journey, my stride affixing itself to legs more accustomed to my new weight, my arms terminating in soft hands, my hair unkempt and long where before there had been hard chitin. By the time the last wave departs my heels I am human again, naked again, free of claw and tail and strength and size, the sun warming my bare skin and tickling my scalp, and she is before me at last.
She lies in a tangled heap of herself, the sand clinging wetly to her arms and legs, the roughspun clothes dissolving where they lay on her. The thoughtful tenderness of her face is obscured by her long black grass hair, so inviting to touch and braid. It looks to have been recently pulled into the loosest of ponytails, tied off a hand up from the bottom, which has grown nearly to her thighs, now frozen in the process of being wrenched free, tangled in jetsam. I can see her lips, parted and dry, a single fish bone stuck in the sand near them like a tooth she’s spat out. Dried blood cakes the knife wound in her ribs and the sand where it has spilled, and her wings are twisted and broken, the feathers fluttering in the stray breeze. I bend down to stroke them and find myself keeping time with the waves as they slough against the shore. Her feathers are hard and brittle from hours among the salt spray and I realize how much she has changed, once so dutiful in her maintenance of herself, much of it my doing. The woman I knew would think better of flying so close to the coast where her wings were most vulnerable.
I crouch and feel where the heat of her body used to be.
Just a few paces away lies the other woman. I remember her cold countenance well, how she would run her gloved hand through her short crop of hair, gone to a withered gray so early. She wears something of her old uniform, loose-fitting now. Her ragged breathing, half-choked on her own blood, falls easily on my ears as I approach. She casts the last light of her eyes up at me and chuckles, an awful sound, a death rattle, footsteps falling farther and farther away from peace.
“Couldn’t stay away,” she wheezes. “Could you?”
I sink to one knee and find the ceramic knife where her fist still feebly grips it. Tenderly I pry her fingers apart, taking the hilt in my own, and even as she struggles, reaching with her remaining hand towards me in defiance, she does not avert her gaze from mine, and I sink the blade in her neck, through her windpipe, until the tip touches bone. Her sputtering chokes die spelling out her fear. She still wears that smile.
“What did you think,” I ask. “That I was going to eat you?”
Only the wind answers. I sigh, shaking, since it has been some years of peace, of quiet enormity, of reprieve from bathing in the steaming blood of others, and I am unused to killing someone whose eyes I can see as they fade into slick gray glass. A quiet hope flutters to life within me and I glance over my shoulder, hoping the gift of fresh crimson death to the earth will stir the hunger nested deep in her heart, awakening her as it once did, bringing at least some brutal shade of her back to me so I can weep out the burden of my grief and watch it crash onto her instead.
But she is still dead. At her side kneels a child. They’re small, cavernously small, almost nothing against the endless backdrop of the ocean and the sky. They’re so young, and barefoot, wearing only an oversized green tunic. One of hers. I fear the whole world may swallow them, just as it swallowed me. They do not move. They do not touch her. They just sit there, watching me.
I move to stand and they scurry backwards, almost on instinct, behind her corpse. I freeze. I remember the blood-wet knife in my hand, the colossal form of me shrinking down into something believably human, like a demon from a story transforming to trick small children into trusting its beguiling new guise. They are cowering at her feet. Huge brown eyes swallow me whole. I try to speak and choke while a gull laughs overhead. The world is threatening to tumble away from me. There is really nothing I can say. Only—
Kneeling down I toss the knife towards the rocks, away from where the restless waves can catch it and carry it back to me. The child is still and watchful. In the sand my finger begins to trace the shape, her shape, our shape, the shape of our lives. The child watches. When I am finished I stand and take slow steps backwards, past the fresh corpse I’ve made, not deigning to look down, as if there were nothing wrong with the world or the beach upon which the bodies of two dead women lie cold. My retreat ends when the child, curiosity overcoming their dread, stands and takes cautious, trembling steps towards the shape in the sand.
The wind tussles their hair lovingly. They look so much like her I cannot convince the tears not to fall. I watch them reading the shape, craning their neck, stepping around to view it from a different angle. The child is still for a moment longer before they reach down the collar of their tunic. I know the shell will be there before they pull it all the way out, letting it dangle by the ends of the cord it is suspended by, looped twice around their neck to account for its original wearer. They look again towards me, suspicious, perhaps, that I had spied the necklace down their tunic earlier. It does not last. I am not so far away that I cannot hear the beginnings of their hitched sobs, standing on the beach in the morning haze, alone, but for me. When I reach them and take their impossibly small hands in mine the shape in the sand sits between us: a seashell, upon which a five-pointed star has been etched, in the exact fashion as on the real shell.
“I first drew that shape a long time ago,” I say in the end, after minutes of the child’s despondent wailing. They look up at me through their tangle of dark hair and wipe their eyes with their forearm, still sniffling. “I marked it on the shell and gave it to her as a gift. Each of the points represents someone special. Two were for us.” I am unsure if my words reach them. I sniffle, too, and tell them my name. They nod when they hear it and tell me theirs back. We’re quiet together for a moment before I speak again. “You look so much like her. Did you know her name?”
The child shakes their head. I nod.
“That’s okay. Not a lot of people do. I’m really glad I found her, and that you were with her. I’ve been looking for her for a long time. I suppose I’ve been looking for you, too.” I reach for one last sliver of hope. “Did she ever mention me?”
The child shrugs. I smile.
“That’s okay.” I say it quieter this time. I try not to look at her as I stand up, reaching my hand out to the child’s. They take it quicker than I expect. Down the coast I can hear shouting just above the waves. Something resembling my old life paints the edge of my smile, warming me a little, and I look down at the child and ask: “Have you ever been on a boat before?”