Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(42) Ande: What Came Before

Sar's words send a chill right through me. I'm not sure I can even describe it as a chill. It clenches every nerve and muscle in my body, closer to the pressure I felt when I was bitten by a shark. The water around me is suddenly cold.

They say it too easily. In my people's stories, the Kels are a permanent fixture of the ocean: tough and resilient, remarkably widespread, able to survive and persist through whatever the water can throw at them. Yet here is yet another instance of a whole Kel people being simply wiped off the map. Perhaps not as spectacularly as the eel Kels—I'm pretty sure no people could vanish as spectacularly as the eel Kels—but this now makes three who've either disappeared or are on their way out now. The eel Kels, this second nation who might also have been eel Kels, and the mid-water nomadic Shalda today. "Unsettling" is the only word I can put to the feeling, and that doesn't do it justice.

"No records?" signs Taiki.

"That's..." Sar lowers their hands a little. They throw a flicker of a glance over their shoulder, and I'm struck by a distinct sense that they're not supposed to be disclosing this information. "That's the scariest thing," they sign. "There aren't? The records just stop in the middle of peacetime, but not like people stopped writing. If you read the stories above the border, they switch straight to the first records of whatever people came next, but if you read below, not all the previous records are intact. A lot of them are missing their top halves."

"And what do the ones above say? About whoever came before them?"

"Nothing. They found the city abandoned. Except..." Another shoulder check. Sar now has the look of someone who's made a decision of necessity to tell us this, and they're visibly uncomfortable. "Except there wasn't a city. Don't spread this. Please? Most Kels in Rapal don't know."

"We won't," I sign immediately, and Taiki shakes his head several times. He's perched at the very edge of the rock shelf we've been sitting on, and the little fins on his tail practically vibrate with curiosity.

Sar takes our word for it. "There are three times in Rapal's past when the city has been completely destroyed. The scholars aren't entirely sure about the first one. It's... really old. Like, way down the pinnacle where the writing isn't even legible anymore. They just found the broken stories, all in a line, all the way around. The second one marks the end of the eel Kels. These other people were the third."

Taiki looks too stunned to even respond to that. The back of my mind begins to present me with pictures—memories—of the shorn-off top of Roshaska.

"So the destruction may not have happened in peacetime," I sign slowly. "But the records that did come right before it are gone."

"Exactly."

"Have you searched around the bottom of the pinnacle?"

"Yes. And the pieces are down there. We've found them. Well, some of them." They shake their head. "The writing on them is gone. A lot of it is smashed to pieces or buried under unwritten rock, and the fall didn't help. Neither has waste buildup from all the time Rapal has been inhabited. We can tell there is writing in some places, but it's unreadable."

That is nothing short of heartbreaking. To lose all that ancestral history, and to know that answers to questions like what wiped out the eel Kels might be right there, but just out of reach. Lost to the maw of time and the violence of whatever has destroyed an entire city the size of Rapal. We'll never be able to search those records for clues about how those people died, or whether the Shalda and everyone else disappearing now are another iteration of whatever has wiped out whole civilizations of Kels in the past. It's a thought as frightening as it is tragic.