A dozen newchildren struggled down out of the Bright, the first sign I had that something was wrong in those thin waters. They swarmed around me, so tiny they could barely breathe in the Shadow, their tentacles waving and their bodies mottling as they signaled panic and danger. My school of oldchildren broke into a clamor that filled the water with a haze of electricity so intense it made my puppeted body buzz and ache.
The newchildren were already drifting back up into the Bright despite their panicked attempts to swim down into thicker waters. They knew too few words for me to comfort them well, and so I drifted up after them, my mantle darkening with protectiveness that even the newchildren could understand.
“Don’t follow me,” I told the oldchildren, pitching the electrical signals strongly enough to reach them all. They would strain their mantles trying to reach the heights where they had been hatched, and my puppeted mutesquid body could climb even higher than the hatching currents without strain.
“There are monsters in the High Bright,” one of the oldest of the oldchildren said, huddling against my side. Her name was West-Cold-Blue, and she had struck me as fearless so far. But now she curled her tentacles around herself and shrank her trailing arms and made her voice small as if signaling from far away. “We all know.”
“Those are egg dreams,” I said, and shook her from my side. I propelled myself upward, and she followed despite my warnings. “Reckless child, go back,” I demanded. “If the High Bright is full of monsters, why are you climbing?”
“I want to see,” West-Cold-Blue said. “I would rather know than wonder.”
“You’ll see nothing but the spawning currents, and you’ll make your mantle ache,” I said. The Shadow was already giving way to the Bright, and beside me West-Cold-Blue was drifting feebly, her tentacles spreading out in the thin waters of the Bright. A few newchildren bumped up against her curiously; one bit her tentacle in exploration, and she slapped it away with one flat arm, sending it end over end.
“I’m all right,” she said, straightening her pitch in the water. I signaled disapproval all the same, my mantle blotching with negation. Lingering too long in the high hot waters of the Bright with its flash-bright colors would not help her mature, and she was days away from her next descent.
Above her, I saw something moving, impossibly high in the Bright, unearthly colored and drifting like a dead thing one moment, then pale and moving purposely the next.
“Stay here, or go down,” I told her, and sent my mutesquid body climbing further up.
The water thinned and brightened to a blaze that dazzled even my mutesquid eyes. I was well out of the Bright and into the High Bright, with schools of fish in a hundred colors blazing past me, and plantstuff drifting in great ribbons inhabited by even more colored things. The ocean here was made of violent color and light.
Probably that was all that had frightened the newchildren. They had drifted up too far into the High Bright and seen colors beyond their understanding. I was still telling myself that when the monster twitched its way into view.
It looked like a person, but its tentacles drifted like dead plantstuff, its long arms rigid and moving like a jointed crab’s. Its beak was oddly smooth, with no features to give it character, and its pale body was lit with threads of blazing color as if its whole body were a hunting lure. Worst of all, it sang, a low wordless hum of electricity that made my mantle ache and my beak tighten.
It looked like a dead thing, like legends of deadmothers returned to some hideous life to hunt among the newchildren. “Go back,” I told it, signaling negation, but my voice barely rose above its keening.
“Leave our male parent alone!” West-Cold-Blue cried from far below, the electricity of her song barely reaching my skin.
And then the thing spoke, in a deep buzz that made me shake. “You hear me. You understand my speech.”
I trembled, and could say nothing.
“I have been watching you,” the monster said. “I will come again.”
It finished speaking and, impossibly, ascended, climbing higher than I could possibly reach even in the mutesquid body, disappearing into the High Bright. I raced downward into the Bright, the dimmer light soothing my nerves as I descended.
West-Cold-Blue drew alongside me. “I saw it,” she said. “It spoke to you.”
“Come down into the Shadow before you rupture your mantle,” I said, and after a moment’s hesitation, she followed as I descended further, the water changing from blue to inky grey.
“What did it say to you?” West-Cold-Blue demanded as we reached the rest of the school.
“It said nothing,” I lied. “It was a mirage. Floating plantstuff that looked like a dead person to silly newchildren.”
Her skin lit in stripes of incredulous frustration, but her words were polite. “I am sure you are correct.”
“Forget about this,” I told the other oldchildren now gathering around us. West-Cold-Blue’s friends were stroking her mantle in concern. One of them, a swift female named Down-at-an-Angle, was solicitous enough that I suspected she would waste no time once they made their next descent in becoming West-Cold-Blue’s firstmate. “If you want more lessons before you descend, compose yourselves and listen.”
I had meant to set them to memorizing more songs, but stories of monsters and heroes seemed the worst thing for them at present. Instead, I began explaining the principles of building with stone and oldmetal on the oceanfloor. It was hard for them to grasp even the idea of making a structure, having nothing to manipulate in the Shadow except dead flesh and shreds of plantstuff, but it was a sufficiently new idea to distract them from the monster until the Bright above us began to dim as evening fell.
I left most of the oldchildren drifting and dreaming, and enlisted a few of the oldest to watch the mutesquid body until it slept so that it would not wander. They promised to feed it as well, as I had been too distracted to hunt. I left West-Cold-Blue shoving fish into the mutesquid’s beak, knowing that her sense of responsibility would keep her too busy to think of investigating the High Bright again until I returned.
Coming back to my own body was always painful. I stretched my cramped arms and tentacles, for a moment feeling the dark water around me as shockingly cold after the warmth of the Shadow. Then my perceptions adjusted. I rolled over to peer up past the thermocline into the Shadow. The dark shapes of my school were just visible, drifting, feeding, resting.
They looked safe and content, and I was hungry. I dove deeper, catching the glimmer of a lightfish out of the corner of my eye, and pursued it until I caught it and crunched into its tasty flesh with satisfaction. It took the edge off my hunger, and I abandoned hunting for the moment and descended through the darkness to the oceanfloor and the oldmetal house nearest to the spawning currents.
People were beginning to gather for the evening, glowing in soft blues as they grazed on the brittle stars that carpeted the ocean floor or talked in little knots above the shell-like curve of the oldmetal house and the winding arms of the stone houses built onto and around the oldmetal base. A pair were mating, stretched out beak-to-tail with their tentacles twining, their friends gathered around to shelter them in their out-of-season coupling.
As I passed, I could see that they were both male, unsurprising in an out-of-season mating, but I was reminded with a pang of my own firstmate. I felt at the dart he had left in my mantle long ago, the only reminder I had now that we had ever been young and in love. Now he was a deadfather, and although I was not so much younger, my life still seemed very dear to me.
“Drifts-at-Thermocline,” an older female said. Arm-over-Arm was building even though it was nighttime, stacking rocks to shore up one of the stone houses that was in danger of having a wall collapse. “When will you do some real work? My arms ache, and all day you’ve been dreaming.”
“I’ll trade you anytime,” I said. “Learn to puppet, and you’ll have an aching head instead.”
Rings of amusement rippled across her sides, and I signaled amusement in return. I liked her very much, and she liked me, enough so that we were careful around each other. We both had work that mattered to us and still took pleasure in life, and I had pierced three mates with darts already. Another mating would probably be the end of my life as well as hers.
“Were they awful today?” she asked. She had little patience even for newadults, and had often expressed her disbelief that I could stand to spend my days among oldchildren who were just learning to speak and to behave.
“No worse than ever. Some of them are nearly ready to descend. You’d like West-Cold-Blue. She’s an intrepid creature.” I hesitated, and Arm-over-Arm left off her building, picking up my distress. “I saw something,” I blurted out, and told her about the monster.
She signaled strong skepticism when I was done, her mantle striping, although her words were teasing. “I think you’ve been spending too much time among the newchildren,” she said. “You’re having egg dreams.”
“Did you have egg dreams like that?” I asked her. “Dreams of monsters?”
She let her tentacles drift thoughtfully in the water. “Sometimes,” she said finally. “Oldmetal spheres that descended toward me. Oldmetal things like crabs. But those were egg dreams, and we’re not newchildren anymore. We’re not even young anymore,” she said, making a wry gesture with her tentacles. “We’ve grown cautious in our old age, haven’t we?”
“Grown wise, maybe.” Arm-over-Arm had been daring once; I could see that from the weathered stone dart piercing her mantle. It was a dangerous gift for a female to give her female mate. Piercing the mantle even with a dart made of stone could bring on egg-laying and the swift death that followed. But it had been worth it to her, once, to share that sharp pleasure on the edge of annihilation, and to wear that pledge of love.
I touched the dart with the tip of one tentacle, too intimate a gesture. She didn’t withdraw, her tentacles brushing mine but not twining with them. “What was her name?”
“Remembers-Red,” she said. “She talked about her dreams, too. You remind me of her sometimes.” She shook off sympathy with a whole-body shudder. “She’s a deadmother now. She spawned years ago. Mates die. We go on.”
“The thing up there … it looked dead. Dead and moving. Like someone trying to come back.”
She jetted abruptly away, leaving cold space between us. “I don’t want to hear any more of this. Whatever that thing up there is, it’s not your dead firstmate or mine.”
“Maybe I’ve been puppeting too long,” I said, and signaled apology.
She accepted it, but more than a little grudgingly, and retreated within the oldmetal house. I didn’t follow her. Instead I ascended back to the thermocline and drifted just beneath it to sleep. I wanted the comfort of seeing my school as dark forms gathered above in the Shadow.
I dreamed of North-at-Night. We were mating once again, his body stretched against mine, his arms reaching into his own body for a dart and piercing my mantle with it, sweet unforgettable pain. But something was wrong. His eyes were clouded like silt-choked water, and his tentacles drifted without purpose. His arms moved jerkily, reaching out to enfold me, like a crab’s arms closing around its prey. His beak was at my mantle, ripping me open in a parody of a lover’s dart–
I burst gasping through the thermocline into the Shadow. The Bright above was lightening to blue, and oldchildren rolled sleepily away from me, protesting being disturbed in their sleep. It took a moment for me to understand why my mantle ached and my skin burned. West-Cold-Blue stared at me for a moment before I dove.
The pain eased as I descended, but it was a while before I felt steady enough to reach out for the mutesquid, overwhelming the electrical impulses in its brain with my own. I opened its eyes to face West-Cold-Blue, who was waiting impatiently, her beak nearly touching mine.
“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “Were you afraid of the monster?”
“There’s no monster,” I said. “That was a lesson. You should know what an oldadult looks like before you descend.” My own body below still ached. I hoped I hadn’t ruptured something significant, but I could hardly abandon my school all day to tend my self-inflicted wounds.
“Was that you?” Down-at-an-Angle asked, signaling that she was both impressed and intimidated. “You’re so big.”
I used the opportunity to begin a lesson on the changes they could expect when they descended — slower growth, the sharpening of their vision and strengthening of their electrical senses, the strangeness of descending for the first time to the oceanfloor and learning what it was to have a solid bottom to the world. I was trying again, with little more success, to explain “building” when the oldchildren watching me shrieked alarm, most of them too frightened even to form words.
I turned, my mantle shrinking with horror. The monster was behind me. It was pale as death, its tentacles drifting, its arms reaching for me, crooning a nonsense song.
“Get away,” I signaled to the school, surprised to find that I could even move. “West-Cold-Blue, take them as deep as you can.” She raced away, Down-at-an-Angle close behind her, and the rest of the school followed raggedly. They were angling down toward the thermocline, and I thought some of them might make it through and to safety.
The thing reached out an arm and touched my tentacle, its arm hard and rigid, like a crab’s claw.
“Go away,” I told it. “Go away and be dead.”
“You are Drifts,” the thing said in its buzzing voice.
“Drifts-at-Thermocline.” It spoke awkwardly, badly, and that gave me courage. North-at-Night would have called me by my name.
Without giving it further warning, I lowered my head and jetted forward with all my might. The monster signaled alarm, but did not evade my charge. I hit it hard with my beak and drove it backwards.
Its words buzzed in the water between us. “We will not hurt you! Do not break this object! If you do, we cannot speak!”
I backed away. “What object, dead thing?”
“This is not me,” the monster said, gesturing with its jointed arms. “I am controlling this from far away.”
“You’re puppeting? Like me with this mutesquid?”
There was a long pause. “We knew you were a different kind of animal from the others.”
“I am not a mutesquid,” I said with scorn. “This is an animal bred to be docile and easy to puppet. Like your monster thing. I live below. I am too old to swim in the Shadow.”
Another pause. “You live in the Dark?”
“Of course. You live in the High Bright?”
There was another pause, this one very long. Below I could see West-Cold-Blue and the other oldchildren darting below the thermocline and then climbing again into the Shadow. “We live above the High Bright,” the monster said finally. “Where the water ends.”
“The water ends at the oceanfloor.”
“Above what you call the High Bright, the water ends and there is something like very thin water. You could not breathe it, even if you could ascend that high. And higher still there is nothing. Emptiness without water. We travel through the emptiness and the thin water in things like shells.”
The monster’s tentacles drifted. It still looked dead.
“I want you to go away, shell thing. Don’t hurt my children.”
“Are all of these your children? From your eggs?”
I signaled surprised negation. “I am their parent, not their deadfather. I am here to raise these oldchildren.”
I had only ever had one female mate, and we had mated in season, when the water around us was filled with roiling bodies. She had been pierced by four darts from eager male mates before she had slipped into the lassitude of egg-laying, wreathed in her female mate’s tentacles. Her female mate had been the one to cradle her as she laid her eggs and died, and to release her dead body to rise with the eggs up into the Bright. I would never know whether she had chosen my dart to fertilize them.
The monster drifted closer. “I also had a child.”
“I don’t want you here, dead puppet thing. Go back to the High Bright.”
“We will go when I find the shell we have lost,” it said. “There was a shell that traveled in the ocean. It sank to the oceanfloor, long ago. It was the shell of my female child. My female child and her hunting partners sank and became dead in the Dark.”
“Even parented children die,” I said, but for the first time I felt something for the monster thing besides horror. West-Cold-Blue would be a hunter when she descended, not a builder. She would fight the greatwhales and bring back meat from their carcasses, or perhaps be prisoned in a greatwhale’s jaws and carried up into the High Bright to die. If she died because I had not taught her well enough, I would grieve. “And shells dissolve with time.”
“The metal of her shell would not dissolve.”
“An oldmetal house,” I signaled, dread creeping inside my mantle at the idea that seized me.
“Describe this.”
“A round shell thing of metal that remains strong. It is big enough to shelter many of the people.” I tried to remember stories I had been told as an oldchild. “Some people say it fell from the High Bright. Hand-over-Hand says she had egg dreams of an oldmetal sphere, falling.” I imagine the creature that might have filled the shell, something vast and toothed and eyeless.
“Show me this,” the dead thing demanded, and did not signal courtesy in the request. Its arms jerked, as if it had forgotten to make sensible signals with them.
“Go away, monster,” I said, and rushed at it. It ascended abruptly, one tentacle tangled around me. I was flipped over as if wrestling with enormous prey, my mantle straining as it dragged me up into the High Bright, and then with a jolt I was free.
Not entirely free. The monster was gone, but its tentacle was still draped around me, lifeless flesh more slick and smooth than any real flesh, like a strand of plantstuff.
I wreathed it in my tentacles and dove, ignoring the oldchildren who followed me signaling curiosity and alarm. I struggled at the thermocline, my mutesquid body protesting at being driven into pressure and cold that would harm it. Then I forced it down.
I choked on thick, chill water. The dark, dreaming bulk of my sleeping self was a yielding mass below me. For a moment, I was sick with the sensation of double vision through two sets of eyes.
Then the mutesquid was ascending, even its primitive brain sufficient to tell it that staying in the Dark would be its death, and I was clutching the dead monster’s tentacle, wrapped around my own body’s arms. It felt slick and cool, and when I raised it to my mouth, it tasted of nothing until a bitter aftertaste grew in my mouth.
I thought that Hand-over-Hand would be appalled when I showed her the tentacle. Instead, she was fascinated.
“Like a puppeted mutesquid, but a built thing,” she said, signaling excitement with every part of her body. “And the oldmetal sphere — another built thing.”
“This was not built out of rocks.” I did not understand. I did not want to understand dead monsters.
“Look,” she said, and drew me down as if she were teaching me her craft. Her tentacles tangled for a moment with mine, and the thrill and danger of it pierced me. I was painfully aware of my darts within my body, like an itch I longed to scratch.
Hand-over-Hand took two rocks and banged them together. She did it again, and then again. One of the rocks broke, splitting into two pieces, and with my tentacles I could feel their new shape. “I changed the rock,” she said. “To make it the shape I want. Your monsters changed something so big . . .” She caressed the curve of the oldmetal house reverently. “They must be giants.”
“Like greatwhales? Maybe they mean to descend to the Shadow in their shells and feed on the oldchildren. Maybe they mean to come down here and eat us all.”
Hand-over-Hand turned her back on me impatiently to investigate the tentacle. “I can use this,” she said, and began wrapping it over and under the rocks, and paid no more attention to me after that than if I were a wailing newchild who had not yet learned to speak.
I could think of no one else who would believe me, even with the tentacle as proof. It was as hard for me to explain what I saw in the High Bright every day as it was for Hand-over-Hand to explain building to me. Most people remembered the Bright and the Shadow only as dim egg dreams put aside with adulthood.
The monster did not return the next day, but the day after that, it was back, although it kept a healthier distance from me. “Will you show me the shell now?” it asked.
“Perhaps another time,” I said. I did not like the idea of the monster down among the houses of our people.
“It must be soon.”
“Why?”
The monster drifted for a long time, dark against the blue of the High Bright. Finally it said, “Others like me will come. They will break the oceanfloor. They will make the water here bad. Your people will have to flee, then, or die.”
“You are trying to frighten me,” I said.
“It is true. We have uses for the metals of the oceanfloor. That is why we have come here through the emptiness. We will destroy your homes for these metals. I cannot stop this from happening. I am here to watch your people, before you are driven away. But I must find the shell of my female child before they break the oceanfloor and everything here is destroyed.”
“This is an egg dream.”
“It is not.” The very flatness of its statement made it hard not to believe it. It was not signaling aggression, but barely contained desperation. “Please. We have so little time now. My female child — I need to hear her last words.”
“She is dead.”
“I will make her shell speak and then I will know if she had words for me before she died. I need to know what went wrong. I need to know why–” It broke off abruptly.
“You are looking for her ghost,” I said. Below us, straining for height, I could see West-Cold-Blue watching us.
The monster hunched in on itself and let its tentacles drift, looking more dead than ever. Eventually it spoke. “Yes. I am looking for her ghost.”
“Can your puppet thing go so deep?”
“No. I will come in a metal shell. Tomorrow I will come. You will show me the shell? You will help me hear the words of my female child?”
“Yes,” I said, and descended fast before it could ask more questions.
West-Cold-Blue followed, rushing downwards in obvious relief. I matched our speeds, still descending toward the thermocline.
“You heard what it wanted?” I asked her.
She signaled assent. “You will show it this shell thing? I saw a shell once, falling. It had meat in it for eating.”
I despaired for a moment. She could not understand the meaning of a shell, a home, a built thing. Then I felt resolution settle over me.
“You must descend,” I said.
“I am going down.”
“I mean that you must make your next descent. Now. Today. We will tell the hunters and the builders in the Dark what we have seen. You will tell them I am not lying or dreaming like an eggchild.”
I thought I would have to persuade her. I did not bargain on her recklessness. She darted downwards, and before I could warn her to go slowly, she pierced the thermocline and descended into darkness.
I had to return to my own body to follow. For a moment, disoriented, I could not imagine who swam beside me, pushing at me with her tentacles as if I were a newchild. Then I realized it was West-Cold-Blue, now a shadowy bulk far smaller than my own, her body spotted with surprise.
“It’s cold,” she said.
I pushed her away, gently but firmly. “You will get used to it. If you’re in pain–”
“I’m not,” she said, and whether it was true or not, it was clearly her final answer. “I won’t return above. Where are the hunters?”
“They will return to the oldmetal houses with meat,” I said. “We will talk to the builders first.”
We saw their shapes arrowing towards us from a distance, a dozen hunters towing chunks of greatwhale meat and bone behind them. West-Cold-Blue hesitated only for a moment, then darted toward them. She fell in with them as if she had always belonged there, and I could see her mantle beginning to glow in their hunting patterns as she spoke to them.
Hand-over-Hand watched, her tentacles draped over one of her rock walls as if she cradled eggs in her dying arms. I wanted to tell her not to be afraid, but it would have shamed the grim resolve she was signaling. Instead I reached out one tentacle and caressed the dart in her mantle, too blatant a proposition to be ignored.
“Are you finished looking for your ghosts?” she said.
“Soon we will both be ghosts,” I said. “If you will have me.” She reached out a tentacle in return and stroked the darts in my own mantle, sending pleasure-pain through me, and then brushed against me mantle to mantle, all too briefly. It made me feel perversely less afraid to have promised myself to death, but I was glad that I had finished teaching West-Cold-Blue.
We did not mate yet. I was afraid that death would claim me too soon if I did, and Hand-over-Hand wanted to live to see the monster. We slept chastely near each other, dreaming in a stonehouse she had built, and then I arose to wait just below the thermocline.
At first, all I could see was light. It was a hideous white that I had only seen in the highest reaches of the High Bright, a white that screamed every color at once. Then I could make out the shape of a shell, something like the oldmetal houses, but smaller. It descended, humming its mindless song, and I could see that the front of it was smooth and as transparent as an egg. Within it, something moved, squirming like an eggchild.
The light pierced my eyes and made my whole body itch and burn. “Too bright,” I signaled, and it dimmed somewhat, though violet afterimages swam before my eyes. I wreathed the smooth place with my tentacles, tasting it, and then pressed an eye to it. Within was something starfishlike, with four long pale arms, each tipped by five thin tube feet, and a bulbous head. When I squinted, I thought I could make out tiny eyes staring back at me from the front of its head.
“Is that you?” I signaled. “I am Dreams-at-Thermocline.”
The starfishthing moved its head, and the outside of the shell lit in patterns of agreement. The monster could not sing meaningful words, then, without its puppet thing, but it could signal with color and pattern.
“Follow me,” I said, and dove.
It followed me down, drifting without any limb moving, but with a vibration that pulsed through the water and made my head ache. Below, near the oldmetal houses, the gathered people scattered at the first sensation of those vibrations. For a moment, I was afraid they would all flee like newchildren, but they came drifting back in ones and twos. West-Cold-Blue was nowhere to be seen.
The metal shell descended until it hovered above the oldmetal house. It extended arms like metal crab parts, and scraped at the rocks, scattering part of a stone wall. Hand-over-Hand darted forward, and then stopped herself, wrapping her tentacles around herself and huddling unmoving in the water.
The metal crab arms were prying something loose from the oldmetal house, a thing with sharp corners and flat sides. They pushed it into an opening on the shell, a strangely obscene gesture, and the starfishthing moved its arms inside the shell.
I approached the shell and wreathed it with my tentacles, peering in. The monster was watching patterns of lights move on a flat place inside its shell, forming the shape of another starfishthing. The new starfishthing moved its mouth, waved its arms, moved its mouth.
The monster spread its tube feet across the flat place, caressing it. Then it crumpled itself, its head bent, its body heaving. It did not have to signal grief for me to know that it was seeing its child’s ghost.
“It’s time,” Hand-over-Hand said. I caressed the shell. I hoped that the thing inside knew I understood that it grieved. I hoped that it had found some comfort in summoning its dead child. I wondered if there was some bone or stone or tooth that would call North-by-Night back to me to say my name again.
Then I backed away. The monster never looked up, its tiny eyes fixed on the image within its shell. I drifted in the water and watched as West-Cold-Blue and the hunters closed in.
They hit the shell from three directions, and it lurched in the water. The monster within waved its arms, and the shell’s colors changed to signal fear and negation. I started forward, and Hand-over-Hand tangled her tentacles in mine, pulling me bodily back.
Three more of the hunters closed in, slamming into the shell with their vicious beaks, bludgeoning it as they bludgeoned the greatwhales. The shell rolled wildly, its droning song faltering, its pulsing vibrations stuttering and stopping. A crack appeared in the transparent part, less like an egg splitting than a stone breaking.
West-Cold-Blue and two other hunters hit the shell a third time. This time the transparent part crumpled inward, and they wrapped themselves around the shell and, straining and struggling, pulled the shell apart. It fell silent, the absence of its song a physical shock. Great bubbles of gas rose, as if the monster were decaying before our eyes, and then were gone.
“Let the other monsters try to come,” West-Cold-Blue said, signaling satisfaction. “We will make them afraid.” She shook the floating starfishthing, tasted it curiously, and then let it go to drift. “It tastes strange.”
“Do not eat it,” I said. “It will give you strange dreams.”
The hunters were already circling the oldmetal houses, forming up as if to return to the hunt, and West-Cold-Blue joined them without a second thought. Hand-over-Hand had descended, and was putting rock on rock, slowly but steadily repairing the damage the monster had done to the stonehouses.
I touched the drifting monster with my tentacles. Its tiny eyes were open, and it trailed thin hairs like weeds from its head. I propelled it upwards, thrusting it up toward the Shadow, hoping it would rise back into the High Bright, and that the other monsters would find it before the newchildren stripped it down to bones.
I hope they have found it. I hope it has made them afraid. Our hunters have learned now that the monsters from the High Bright can be fought. They will not destroy our houses without a struggle. They will not scatter the stones that Hand-over-Hand had spent her life arranging into houses. We will break them and crush them, and new builders will make houses from their shells and bones.
When she finishes rebuilding, I will mate with Hand-over-Hand. West-Cold-Blue is busy with her hunting, and another parent will lie dreaming at the thermocline to take over my teaching. The time before a last mating should be a time of nostalgia and anticipation, but I have begun to have troubling dreams, not about the mating but about the dying afterwards.
In my dreams, I am rising back into the Shadow, the world turning from black to grey, my body drifting like weeds in the currents. North-by-Night is there, singing with a chorus of monster voices, droning a wordless and terrible song.
And above them, in the High Bright, I see a creature of bones and metal and hideous light, relentlessly descending.
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Amy Griswold writes speculative fiction novels, short stories, and games, and enjoys exploring themes of queer community and resilience. Her short fiction has been published in markets including F&SF and Fireside Magazine. She lives in North Carolina, and can be found online at @amygriswold@wandering.shop and @amygriswold.bsky.social. |