Day 4 of 31 Stories - By the Sea

As you can see, I'm currently a story behind. Yesterday was extremely slow going, so I didn't manage to finish the story until today. I'm hoping to get caught up this weekend, but we'll see! In the meantime, for something completely different, enjoy day 4 - By the Sea

I managed to make my way to the surface just ahead of Alea, which was one of the few times I'd managed it. "Ha!" I cheered, spinning in a circle when I saw her head pop up from under the water. "I beat you, I beat you, I beat you!" My tail countered my upper body as I did my happy dance around her in the sea.

"Are you quite finished?" Her tone was mild, but I could see the glimmer of a smile on the edge of her face. She didn't let me win - she would never do that, her pride would never let her - but she could appreciate the effort and joy that I had put into beating her, and it warmed my heart to see her notice the work I'd put in. I had been training more recently, trying to get faster with my arms and tail, trying to catch up with the rest of my pod, and finally, it looked like I wasn't the last one left anymore.

I did one more spin to show off my extra dexterity (it had taken weeks for me to get the balance right, get the spin just perfect and not end up falling back into the sea with my mouth filled with water again), and then I smirked. "Yeah, I'm done." I swam closer to her. "OK, now what?"

"Now, we wait," she replied, moving toward the shore. When she got to the shallows, she kept moving, tail changing into legs until she was walking upright by the time she reached the dry sand. She put her hand on the spot where her tail had met her body, now the place she called her hip, and called out to me. "Are you coming, or not?"

I should have known. I'd gotten better at swimming, and was finally doing well enough to keep up with the pod and breathe air on command, so now she wanted me to move to the next pool and walk. I'd tried getting my tail to transform a few times, but it hadn't worked before. She had said that it was because I was under water, that it wouldn't work until I was breathing air and moving on land, but once I was doing those things, it would move naturally, like everything else. I glanced around, but fortunately, the sheltered cove we'd entered was empty of everyone but the two of us. At least no one else would see my failure.

I swam to the shore, and forced myself to keep moving once my tail felt the first bits of floating seaweed. The floor of the sea here was so much rougher, so much more changed by the passage of time and the churning of rocks and birds and animals, that it didn't feel like the same ocean I knew. I winced as my flukes first started to drag across the rough pebbles and sharp, broken shells that hadn't yet been worn down to a smooth dullness with the tumbling of the waves. I kept my eyes on her as I kept moving forward.

It happened so fast, I almost didn't catch it. One moment, my flukes were starting to feel tight, warm, as though I had an illness, and the scales were beginning to itch against the sand. An instant later, my flukes were gone; in their place, something that I hadn't felt before but somehow still felt like me. They were warm, and covered with the same scale-free skin that my arms and chest had, but without any of the toughness borne of long days and nights swimming against heavy tides and bathing in the sun that streaked down beneath the sea's surface. They bent both like and unlike my arms, and ended in things that were and weren't hands.

My startled shout caught her attention, and she came out to the edge of the water, close to me but not quite in the water again. "It's all right, beloved," she called, her voice floating on the breeze. "Keep coming toward me, and your legs will know what to do. It's as simple as breathing, as easy as loving me." She gave me the crooked smile that stole my heart every time I saw it, and instinctively I continued my journey toward her.

The water fell away from me, and I had a moment of sheer terror as I felt the air against the part of my body where my tail normally began. It felt wrong, and harsh, like a knife cutting me in half, but it wasn't as bad as seeing her move away from me. She kept taking steps back, beckoning to me, and I followed her. The fear of letting her go was greater than my fear of losing half of myself, and so I followed.

The sand under the edge of the water was rough, but it was nothing compared to the sand just beyond the water. The ends of my legs, these not-hands that I still didn't recognize as my own, caught on the rocks and shells that no longer had the water to soften them, and I found that the parts of me that I hadn't know were still capable of feeling the pain I always had known. If anything, the pain was greater, as it came from a place I didn't understand, and I didn't know how long it would last or if there would be more of it when it finally did fade away. I learned quickly, however, that touching some parts of the sand didn't cause the same kind of pain, and so I started to avoid the spots that caused more pain and to pay more attention to where my not-hands touched the sand.

Still, through everything, she stood in front of me, her hand outstretched, just beyond my reach. She kept moving backwards, displaying a grace that seemed magical to my eyes - not only could she move with these legs, but she could do so without watching where she placed her not-hands. I briefly wondered how many times she had stumbled out of the water here, and if she had done so with others before me. Would she do so again, after I was gone? Now was not the time to worry.

With a final lurch, I managed to throw myself in her direction and trusted her to catch me before my entire body landed on the too-hot, too-dry sand. Sand should never be so dry, so harsh, so gritty; sand is the cushion upon which we sleep, the soil in which our gardens grow, the foundations of our homes and lives. Such dry, crumbling stuff as this would be useless for anything we would need; surely it couldn't be the same thing as what lived under the water with us.

She caught me, of course - I knew she would. Leaning, she maneuvered us back into a reclining position, where she sat directly on the harsh not-sand and I leaned against her almost completely. I finally looked as these legs that had taken the place of my tail, and I was torn between fascination and revulsion. The skin was fish-belly white, with tiny streaks of dark lines the color of my hair scattered across them. Tentatively, I ran a hand over one, and shuddered to feel the streaks raise against my fingers. The dry not-sand clung to the skin, making it itch and raising tiny red spots where ever it had been brushed away. Curling my hand into a claw, I reached to scratch at the itch, and she grabbed my wrist, stopping me.

"It will hurt, if you do that," she said mildly. "It may draw blood, because the skin is fragile, but you don't know that yet. Leave it for now. The next time, we will have something here to brush the sand away from our legs, so we don't hurt ourselves. For now, rest, and look." She pointed over my shoulder, out in the direction of the water we'd left.

I tore my eyes away from my legs, from my love, and followed her direction to the sky. There, the most magnificent changes were happening. The sky, which had been a bright white-blue when we first surfaced, had gotten darker, and in the time it had taken me to get to the sand, to my love, it had changed colors. It was pink, with streaks of dark purple and blue, and the sun was no longer visible anywhere. I was used to not being able to see the sun, of course, but never when we broke the surface. The sky had never looked like this before when I was in the air, and even as I watched, the sky kept changing.

Now there was orange, and red, as though one of the dangerous coral had somehow grown large enough to blot out the horizon. No fish swam around it, however, and from one blink to the next, it had changed again. Now it was more purple, more blue, and the bright pinks and oranges were fading toward the bottom of the sky, reflecting off the surface of the water. I had seen the water used to reflect small things before, but never the entire sky! And yet, here it was, doubling the colors in a reversed order, and still, the sky changed further. Now the purples were fading into grays, and the blues to a deep, inky black. Within that black, however, there were tiny spots of white - small points of discrete brightness against the darkness. Another blink, and the colors of the sky were gone, leaving only the black, and the spots of white.

I began to speak, and she put her finger to my lips. "Lie back with me and look up," she said, stretching out on the strange not-sand. "Just for a moment. We can go back soon." I looked on in confusion, and she gave me that smile again, and ran her hand down my arm.

I never could deny her anything. I lay down next to her, trying to ignore the strange texture under my back and failing, until she pointed up. "Look!" Once again, I followed her, and then it felt as though everything was different.

Hanging above us, as though they would fall at any second, were thousands - no, millions - of the white spots I'd noticed before. They'd multiplied when I looked away, and covered the black sky so thickly that it was impossible to think it was dark any longer. How could it be, with so many bright points in the sky?

Her hand fell back to her chest, and we both kept staring up at the sky, watching as more and more spots appeared. They seemed to start moving after a fashion, groups of them slowly dancing around each other over our heads. Though I couldn't hear any music, I was certain that they could, and all of their rhythms were expressed in this slow, steady dance. Without taking my eyes off of the sky, I reached for my love and took her hand, the one she had used to point to the changing sky, the one she had used to beckon me onto the dry land.

She entwined her fingers in mine, and we lay back watching the dance in the sky for a long time, only the sound of our breath and the water lapping at the ground breaking the silence. Soon, as we watched, the moon joined the dance, moving slowly over our heads in a steady arc. The moon was only a sliver of a crescent, not nearly as powerful as it could be, but it pulled the water to us nonetheless.

Silently, we sat up and began to return to the water, which had closed the distance and was now lapping against our legs. She went first, and as the water enveloped her legs, I saw the shape of them change back into their proper form. I was emboldened by the transformation, and eagerly joined her in the water.

Shortly, we were swimming back away from the shore, our skin and hair absorbing the good, cold sea, but I found myself hesitant to dive again. I kept looking up to the sky, to the dancing spots, to the moon. She noticed, of course, and took my hand again. "We'll come back," she told me, pressing a kiss into my hand. "I promise. Now, show me how well you swim again." With a wink, she let go of my hand and dove. And I, of course, followed.