Prologue

A Chapter by Chi Mière

The escape from the Sea Godlings.

A malacodermous nymph and her aqua hair stole across sands with the wind, clutching swathes of water in which a baby cried in dribbles, and tears streamed down her liquid cheek. Her spindlelegs reflected the pale of the moon in slick blades. Trickles suffused into the air, not from the tides which rushed, nor from the drizzle that spattered, but from the throat of the waterwoman: the language of watercreatures; her weep.

Roots thicker than houses met her, embraced her. She entered the forest. In the dimness of the near night she was invisible, being made of water, though not as unseeable as a black object in the dark, she appeared to her watchers less visible than a clear object in daylight. She had emerged from the waves, and she emerged from the surface of them, and she knew the sunlight by day and the moonbeams at night, but she found a solace in the dark of the forest greater than any brine of her former abode could provide. Her watchers themselves felt this: they had noticed the less bated breath as she dived into the roots, their hearts sensed her relief as she loosened her grip on the child. When she had rushed deep enough into the trunks to have lost herself from the eyes of the Sea Godlings she stopped and sunk to her knees. To the spirits of the forest she wailed.

“You are safe.” the forest spoke with the creak of boughs and rustle of leaves.

“Please, please,” she trickled. “Please, take my child! They will kill him,” The tears swelled in her glassy eyes tickled down her cheek and merged with her face. “They can kill me, but not him… Please, not him. I won’t let him die!”

“You do not have to part,” spoke the forest with the wind in the litterfall and with the scent of petals.

“If they find him they find me!” she wailed. “Hurry!” She smacked her hands on the trunk of a tree turning them into splashes, then reforming hands as she moved her forearm from the tree.

“Combine with me,” spoke the forest. A thick root weaved through the undergrowth like a serpent and reared like a cobra above the nymph and her baby. “Become one with us and watch over him.”

She gazed at the wood of the root and knew. She touched the root. Her finger sucked into the root, then her arms, head, torso, legs, feet, and she disappeared. “My son…” she said as she became one with the forest. The root wrapped around the baby, lifted him to the highest bough of the tallest tree and left him to rest in the wind moonlight. He slept.

***

“Where is she? We had her in sight!” roared a male nymph. “Where is the boy? He cannot escape! He could destroy us all! Did you not hear the prophecy? Find him! Find him!”

The nymphs coalesced and cascaded the forest in crashing waves.

They searched for years but they did not find the boy nymph.

***