Call of the Water (COMPLETE)

26. STORM OF THOUGHTS

"She came looking for a friend," I said to myself more than to anyone else. "About forty years ago. Decades have passed since then."

At that moment, new pieces filled the blank spots in my mind.

Although Mathias never confirmed my suspicion, I still hoped there might be a chance that Professor Cyan was an Aquantien. After all, my story made her cry. No matter what everyone else said, in my heart I believed it was so. She cried when I first read it and she cried when I tried to talk to her about it later.

The story had to be more than just a legend. Like the old Storyteller used to say; There's a grain of truth in every story. The truth here had to be the Princess. She had to be real. And if she did go missing like the story suggested, I could think of only one person who never gave up hope of finding her.

Sanda.

Maybe Ms. Cyan never met the Princess. Maybe Sanda was the one she met.

Or maybe, another thought surfaced in my mind, maybe Ms. Cyan was Sanda.

"A pebble for your thoughts." Opal's voice interrupted my pondering. "What's going on in that brain of yours? Who came looking for a friend?"

"The Princess," Ardea joined in with her own hypothesis. "Someone came looking for the Princess. That's what you're thinking about, right?"

Her insight was sometimes frightening. How was I to keep anything from her?

"It isn't completely impossible," I replied and looked away.

"Azora," Ardea stepped up to me and placed the palm of her hand on my shoulder, "don't burden yourself with something that is most likely just a figment of someone's imagination."

"Is that something you can find in that book?" Opal asked. She walked up to me to look at the picture again. "Are the reasons why any Aquantien chose to come live on land listed there?"

I turned the pages further. The end of the chapter was only six pages away. There was no personal information of any member of my race, just medical stuff, most of it incomprehensible to me. I shook my head left and right.

"Do you think whoever came to look for the Princess is still alive?" Opal's thirst for information sometimes seemed insatiable.

"I don't know. Probably not," I replied, hoping she won't spot a lie. "I suppose it doesn't really matter, it happened a long time ago."

"So you do agree with me after all!" Opal smiled proudly.

I avoided Ardea's eyes. The fact that Opal believed me didn't mean that Ardea would too. Sometimes I had the feeling that she could read me like an open book. Right now, I had a lot on my mind, and I feared that it showed on my face.

I was thankful when Opal changed the subject. "So, this someone decided to live among humans to find a friend," she said tilting her head as she looked in Ardea's direction. "I'm gonna live among them because my father got a job at a human mining company, Azora is here because her new parents are human. What about you, Ardea? Why did you decide to live among humans?"

"For the same reason most of the students of our school decided it," she answered. "We want to make a difference."

"What difference?" Opal asked further. She still stared at Ardea, her forehead furrowed.

"The number of humans is constantly increasing," she begun explaining. "It is more and more challenging for the hidden races to remain hidden. The world is not the same as it once was. The air we breathe is polluted, the water we drink is no longer clean, and our food is no longer healthy. But for some reason, people don't seem to care. And those who do care are outnumbered by those who only chase profit."