Where Our Oceans Meet

My Old Friend

The ocean and I used to be friends. But now, I seek love in the riverbeds and comfort in what the sky has to offer. I suppose our friendship ended like all good ones do, in war and tragedy, insults burning each other until there was nothing left, the last of the burning embers destroyed by her villainous cerulean waves. The wind pulls my hair behind my back, and salt spits in my eyes, begging me to leave. But after every bit of suffering she caused, I still stand at her edge with a smile on my face.

I think we've always known a pull toward each other that we both had to deny. But it wasn't me that caught her eye, it was the world around me tumbling to shambles, my brother the brave warrior that danced between its fights. My life began when I was nine years old, the day that our worlds collided. I was born into a world of forced normality, of a gorgeous story that did everything in its power not to be seen.

I was born to the arms of a woman that did not want me; my lip curled and my nose crooked. She feared being a traitor, a cheat. A sentence of time bestowed upon her if found out, believing me to be centdae. For that, I am grateful, the universe placing me into the arms of my family, the one of pure earth that grows around me and keeps me safe as if I am their glorious creation.

Not a time within my life did I feel out of place in their gardens, even though nothing of ours matched but the language we dance and sing. My brother, despite his crippling age, was brought into the picture after I was; he was six when I was three. Debates were brought upon us all our lives about who was really the oldest. It makes so much sense that he found a home in philosophy and study, a natural scholar. In my world, I paint him as the chosen one and I as his trusty sidekick, but I wonder how he would paint me as.

He met the sky and found a home in everything, a fascination with every inch of the world, dark and light, high and low. He always believed that when you were going down, the only way left was to go up, even if that meant surrendering yourself to the clouds. It was him who started my life, I like to think. It began when we were out to the woods one day, the ones just behind our home that seemed to be feared by all, the whistles and hums that flowed from them, green shadows, and glittering dust left on the bottoms of our boots.

Our mother, with a natural immunity that often had her, feared to be a fairy; she taught us not to fear what does not give us a reason. And as most often, she was correct. Kisses stained our foreheads, and our family rings on our dirt-covered hands as we used our fingers as shovels, pulling wild plants from their places beneath the ground, ignoring the sounds of fae and the strange dots before our eyes. I pride myself in the fact that my family is one of the magic embracers, something we really had to be as most of us were constantly accused of being a part of the new world, all except for my father, who, in the lense of the world was entirely normal.

We tried our best to use everything in our resources, to learn, to make mistakes that we could move on from and learn from, find out what we could eat and what we could not, recording the information. My mother would sketch each of our findings, big and small, whether a leaf or a skeleton, showing us that everything mattered no matter what. And when we couldn't figure out what to do with our findings, she'd find a way to think out of the box by peeling, breaking, boiling, and burning. On this day, we were in search of traditional herbs, fruits, and something of the water if we were lucky.

But one stroll in the wrong direction and our world would come down in shambles, and I, young and naive, fell into the sounds of the woods, the beauty of it all, the creatures moving past my head. They were calling to me, I was sure of it, running with all I could to keep up as Tashi had crouched to retrieve a particularly difficult plant.

His head was turned in a way that made it hard to hear from my direction, impossible to hear the crunching of leaves. I will never know what he was doing as I was gone, only that I was in a euphoric world, time slowing to a nothingness, my body finally stopping as I reached something of a wall of mist.

It was like a distorted mirror, a misted glass, some strange existence. My hands pressed against it, hearing its defeat, feeling its breath, the vibrations spread through my body, impossible to let go of. The longer it held me, the clearer things became- a separation between me and a whole other life, pools and strong waterfalls, ripping tides, and glowing plants, a short frame of a human body so far away that I could only make out its short silhouette, hands above its head.

The longer I stayed there, locked in time and trapped in light, the more evident it began to feel that this figure was of a feminine energy, holding the sun in her hands, flashing it to the sky, hair long and cascading across the forest floor. She had no eyes; from as far as my memory goes, the only light came from her, and it seemed that her world was bending to her will, kneeling to her as their queen. And somehow, as if placed in my mind, I knew what she was. Sairene.

The infamous rulers of the old world- wielders of magic, shifting their forms, shifting their homes, ruling the seas and nations. An extreme rarity in any world, one to be reported immediately as they held unspeakable magic, assumed to be the reason for the loss of magic all of these years. The story goes that they became selfish, feeding off more magic, wanting more than the seas and the land, wanting to take humanity as their own, to tear the faeries from the sky.

United, the magic of the world decided they'd rather lock themselves all away than allow them to take over. Where the tale comes from, we do not know, as the witches and sorcerers never came back. And as for the other creatures baring mouths and teeth, they could not speak our tongue, our language far too recent to coexist with them. I think that was the day that I knew the danger I would get into for that brief moment when our worlds crossed. I'd like to think she thought so too, but even my youthful self knew that I was just a speck of dust in her world of wonders.

In addition to this teaser- I will be posting the official first chapter. If you would like to purchase this book, you can do so by going to my Etsy: Hannaslatibule. Or, if it is easier- simply go into Etsy and search "Where Our Oceans Meet" and it should come up. All copies come with an authors signature and a bracelet as well as a thank you card.