I didn't have a fish tail when I fell asleep. Then again, I don't remember falling asleep, so I guess my memory was a little suspect by the time I reached the fish-tail part. The blue above me is murky, filtered to a greenish tint like the predawn light is trying to struggle down through fog—but not a clear, mountain fog like any sane person would be breathing. More like the ghastly swamp-breath that sometimes rises off the wet patches of the island when the weather gets steamy. I would check the sky to gauge the time of day, except that there is no sky and no horizon, and most people back home would draw a goddess crescent on their chests if they ever saw this much water over their heads.
Water isn't air, but my aching lungs don't seem to have made the distinction yet. I take a careful breath. The exhale whooshes around my neck and pillows my shoulders in a cloud of silt. I'm stalling on looking down at my feet again, so I move an arm and startle myself with how fast it rises. My hand feels like it's floating. That's kind of neat, so I do it again. It's more fun than it should be, which means I'm either still in shock or have even less of a survival instinct than people say I do. Maybe I should focus on breathing in case it's the former?
I take another breath and nearly choke as I feel it flowing through slits in my neck. I have gills, too.
I sink my fingers back into the ground beneath me. Mud softer than bird's down flurries about my hands. The seafloor is less solid than I'd hoped for, which is my first clue that the in-shock hypothesis has more backing than the alternative. It almost makes me glad there's nobody here to see me. If I am to slowly lose my composure over the fact that I just woke up on an empty, grey hill under the sea, with a Rashi-forsaken fish tail and more new holes around my jugular than a sacrificial jungle fowl, I would rather do so alone.
If someone could come find me after that, though, that would be fantastic.
I lie back and spend the next hundred heartbeats hopelessly distracted by the fact that I can feel every breath along my collarbone. My hands have started shaking, so I remove them from the mud and sink them into my hair instead. It's as soft as feathers. I preen a little, hopeful that one of my favorite activities will take my mind off of literally everything else, but it doesn't take the bait. My hair, unbraided yesterday—or at least, I think it was yesterday—has risen to a luxurious cloud made soft by the water. My mind gleefully fills in the number of things it could now be hiding. Horns or fins, or any one of an abundance of other protrusions that goma Tashagi, the oldest village elder, brings up in her stories to scare the skirts off the village children on thundering wet-season nights.
Those stories tap at the edges of my consciousness, just out of reach. They're a world away: sea gods and demigods, caverns beneath the waves where the island god Rashi's sun doesn't shine, and the fish-tailed Luasa that roam the waters, looking for islanders who stray too close to their domain. They have upper bodies like humans, goma Tashagi says. Humans long ago lost beneath the water, cursed by the sea.
If I'm a Luasa now, Rashi help me, I had better not be an ugly one.
This thought at least diverts my attention, so I probe every part of my scalp in search of evidence to the contrary. There is a merciful absence of fishy embellishments. I have nearly gotten my hopes up when I withdraw my hands. The skin on the backs of them is glossed like a fresh burn, near-black against my already ebony complexion. I tilt them, and they turn grey. The patches are mirrored, with a silvery, scale-like base that reflects my hair or the silt or the water or the sky, depending on which way they face. My nails are black, and there are silvery freckles spattered up my arms.
This is, truthfully, better than I expected. I feel my face just to be sure, but my top half seems normal aside from some suspiciously pointy teeth. And I'm covered, at least. A material something like seaweed hugs my ribcage in a comfortably wide band from armpits to baby ribs. It is... flat. I guess being bare-chested makes Luasa better swimmers, but I definitely feel cheated.
Actually, I feel cheated about a lot of things right now.
I drop my hands and watch the distant, sea-green glimmer of what I can only assume is the sun rise over what I can only assume are the waves. Not to pass judgment on my village, but this looks an awful lot like I was sacrificed to the sea goddess Andalua: tied to the rock in the bay like a wandering drunk. The fact that they chose to send me, a Rashi-blessed and the village sun-dancer, is an affront in itself. The fact that they don't do this without reason is something I'm not willing to confront just yet.
But even that aside, I've spent my life more obedient to the First Rule than most people I know. Less than some, granted, but the last time I snuck out at night and went down to the sea was when I was twelve. Either someone found out and chose to punish me for a violation seven years stale, or they were desperate enough that only someone of my status would appease the sea goddess. Which is flattering in a conceptual kind of way, but not when I'm the one it's supposed to be flattering.
I feel like one of goma Tashagi's stories to spook the village kids into heeding the First Rule. Ande, tragically given up for Andalua to curse in return for safety and forgiveness for whatever trespass some witless villager made on the ocean. Or maybe a whole horde of witless villagers? If this is what it took to preserve the island, they'd better thank me.
Even that bit of venting makes me feel better in a sorry-for-myself kind of way, which I think I'm entitled to, given the situation. I kind of wish Naina was here so I could ask her how to get out of this, but more because Naina being here would open up the possibility of her failing and me being punished for it, rather than me being the one to blame here. Naina has always been lacking in the competence department. I'm astounded our childhood friendship lasted as long as it did before she broke my trust and became my unwanted handmaid instead.
I also wish Naina was here because I am genuinely starving, and the ocean clearly does not have the respect to send me something to eat. I might have negated my right to that by turning into a Luasa, but still.
Nobody has come for me yet. The first twinge of loneliness eats its way into my chest alongside the shivering feeling that I'm trying to keep down. I look around for any sign of life on the desolate hill. There is only a humped trail in the mud where some tiny thing tunneled away. I'm almost tempted to unearth it to keep me company, but I don't know if it bites. Also, that would be mean, and I'm only mean to things that deserve it.
If I'm not rescued by the time the now-risen sun sets, I'm going to dig myself into the mud like whatever made that trail, and spend the night waiting. I still find it hard to believe my village would sacrifice me, and maybe some deep part of me wants to think it was a mistake. Maybe I was framed, and they've since realized their error. The question, of course, is whether they will refrain from pointing spears at me in this form, let alone take me back.
I take a deep breath—somehow that retains its familiarity, even underwater—and look down at what used to be my feet.
The tail is, at first glance, beautiful. Which is bonus points in my book, and a small consolation in the face of adversity. Like the freckles on my arms and shoulders, it is brilliantly silver, flecked along the top—bottom?—with small, round lenses. These bear the same mirror-like quality as the ones on my hands. One fin rises like a sail on the tail's lower half, and another digs into the mud around my tailbone as I shift. The final fin, the actual tail, is oriented up-and-down. It's decidedly unassuming: a simple, forked shape with rounded ends.
The whole tail is slightly compressed from the sides, but not so much that I can't pull my once-knees up to my chest and hug them. The motion presses the tail-fin's bottom edge into the mud. Its alignment makes it look like I'm supposed to swim fish-style, which is an odd thought until I give an experimental paddle and discover that I can move the tail even more easily from side to side than up and down. My legs didn't have that range of motion.
I give another kick. Silt swirls up around the tailfin, then drifts sideways. A current creeps over my skin, reminding me of mud flowing downhill, sliding around anything it encounters and then carrying on as if it was never disturbed. It's like wind but also nothing like wind at all. Wind never feels like it's stroking you in a slightly invasive manner. I add a lack of common decency to my list of qualms against the ocean. It's a pretty sizable list, and I'm starting to understand a little of where the First Rule actually comes from.
I do another scan for the anticipated rescue-and-apology party from upslope, though I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be looking for. Nobody on Telu, my island, has taken a boat to the water in two generations. Not since people started leaving for the neighboring islands to visit friends and family, and never coming back.
If Andalua is coming for me, at least she's also taking her time. I bring my gaze downward, to where the slight slope I'm sitting on extends off into the blue-green oblivion of untold spans of ocean. The water downhill darkens just slightly in the distance: it's deeper there, though how much, I can't say.
I want to swim down.
I shudder violently at the sudden, visceral tug. Is this how Andalua finds me? By twisting my psyche to make me want to come to her myself? I won't give in to that. I dig my hands deeper into the seafloor, pushing through silt and mud in search of anything to hold onto. There's nothing there. The mud just keeps thickening, always firmer beneath my fingers than between them. I pull one hand out and leave a plume of grey through the water as I sign my desperation to the sun's smudge above me.
"Why me?"
The sun doesn't answer. Does Rashi have no power here?
Or did I break the First Rule and lose myself to Andalua forever?
Never set foot in the sea. A toe's touch, and the village elders would let you off with a warning. A slip, by accident, would merit a ceremony and an offering: a meal or something of value released on a boat of banana leaves into the bay. The first real trespass earned you a goddess crescent carved on your chest to beg Andalua's forgiveness. On the second, you were made to stand in the water where the waves rose to your neck. If you were still there come morning, you had been spared and could return to land.
On the third trespass, you were tied to the rock in the bay, where the water deepened past even the tallest man's head when the sea breathed in.
I have no carving in my chest, no taste of sacrificial herbs in my mouth, and no memory of being walked to the rock in the bay. I have no recollection of drowning, or being consumed, or having Andalua's spell cast on me. I would check my feet for the scrapes that struggling might have left, but I have no feet to check.
I can no longer keep the panicky edge out of my chest. In a burst, I swim uphill, to find that it does not lead to my island like I thought it would. In just heartbeats, I crest the top of a broad, grey mound: a hilltop with nothing around me but the vastness of the ocean.
Nobody is coming for me.
The sun is higher now, smeared across the ocean's surface, close enough to sparkle but far enough to give that sparkle a sinister feel. The water is brighter than it was when I woke up. I find myself scanning it as far as I can. For what? My mind paints a shadow into the waves, and I dive for the silt. When I look up, there's nothing there. I'm imagining things. Andalua lives in the deep, but at the surface are sharks, Luasa, toxic fish, and the fabric-soft shapes of jellies that can kill with a sting even when washed up on Telu's shores.
Nobody on my island has so much as built a raft since my grandmother was a child. Even when another Rashi-blessed in the village—just a toddler—fell from a rock and got caught in a sea-god's tail when I was ten, nobody ran into the water to save her. The swift, narrow current swept her away.
I hug my tail tighter, its warmth suddenly the only thing between me and the endless, horrifyingly empty nothingness around me. And I discover that when you cry underwater, you don't shed tears.
A/N: Hello! August the author here with a question for anyone who happens to read this: How did you find this book?
I'm asking because the Wattpad algorithm works about as reliably as a duct-taped charging cord plugged into an outlet with intermittent electricity, but readers are somehow still managing to find this book, and in increasing numbers, no less. Obviously, the data nerd in me must know how this is happening. So what about you? Did you find my profile first, and scroll until you saw something you liked? Spot it on a reading list? In a recommendations sidebar? Promoted by another author? Word of mouth? I'd love to hear if you're willing to share!
Cheers and thanks!
- August