Authors note:
Hello again! The daily upload schedule did not hold, haha. Good things come to those who wait, though, even the very impatient ones.
When I returned to ACT 2 after having written the rest of the story, I rewrote much of it. When you’re writing characters, you learn so much about them as you write, you know. And with that knowledge, I made some improvements.
In other news, I’ve booked a plane ticket to distant lands. At some point during the summer, I will get on a plane and land somewhere in Asia. I won’t return to Norway until next summer. 10 months of solo traveling.
Let’s fucking go!
Chapter 6: Bones
Far-Drifter followed her into the fjord, and for a long while she swam as though she did not know he was there.
She was a good swimmer. Better than Quickfin, better than any he had watched move through water. The movement of her scarred body turned the fjord into something that belonged to her. He stayed back, close enough to keep her in sight, far enough that she could pretend she had not noticed. And she did pretend. But every so often her head tilted slightly, the way a seal listens for something behind it. He knew that she knew, and that she had decided, for now, to allow it.
“You’re still here.” She said at last, to the water in front of her. Not to him.
“You were bleeding back there.” he said, catching his breath. “I wanted to make sure you were alright.”
“You followed me because I was bleeding. You know what else follows blood through the water?” She turned then, and there was an edge in it.
“I’m not a..” he stared at her in disbelief. “I just wanted to make sure you were alright.” he said.
“I’m never not alright.” she said. “You can stop following me. Go home. This fjord isn’t for you.”
He let the water settle between them before he answered.
“I could say the same to you, Boat-Chaser. The fjord isn’t for any seal. We all learned that as pups. And yet here you are.” He held her eyes. “If you get to choose this, so do I. And for the record, even if I left and swam back to the shores I came from, there’d be no home waiting. I don’t have one.”
Something moved behind her face and reached her eyes. They studied him, looking for something, and he could not tell whether she found it. Then she turned toward the deeper water.
“Far-Drifter.” he said, before she could go. “That’s my name. If I’m going to follow you, you may as well know what to call me.”
She paused, her back to him. For a moment he thought she would not answer at all.
“They called me Boat-Chaser.” she said. The name came out of her sideways, held at a distance, as though it belonged to some other seal she had once been told about, and never quite agreed with.
“Boat-Chaser.” he repeated.
“Don’t wear it out.” She still had not turned around.
“Follow me, Far-Drifter.” she said it without warmth. Not an invitation, only a refusal to keep stopping him.
She led him down.
The light thinned as they descended. The surface and its noise fell away above them until the floor of the fjord rose up grey and cold. She slowed. He understood, later, that she had brought him here on purpose. That she had meant this place to do what her words had not.
“There.” she said. “Look.”
Something pale lay half sunk in the silt, tangled up in a heavy old net. He drifted closer, and as the shape made itself known, a cold went through his fur that had nothing to do with the depth. Bones. The bones of a seal, held under the weight of the net it had died in, many seasons ago. The sea slowly reclaiming it.
“Do you see the resemblance?” she asked. She was circling slowly above it, her eyes on the bones and not on him.
He didn’t. The bones were just bones. But before he could say so, she went on.
“I do. I think he looks just like you.” A pause. “I knew him. Long ago. He was kind. Curious about the fjord, about all its secrets.” Her voice had gone flat and careful, each word laid down apart from the next, as though set in stone. “He didn’t last long.”
The flatness was wrong. It was too smooth, too practiced. The voice of a seal who had said a thing to herself many times to wash away its meaning. He said nothing. He had the sense that anything he said would be the wrong thing.
“This is the fjord.” She went on. “Not the wonders. Not the excitement. This. It will not warn you, it will not care, and when it takes you, no one will come for you.”
She faced him fully now. “So understand me. I am not responsible for you. You swim where I swim because you chose it. Not because I asked. If something here takes you, that is not my burden, and I will not come back for you. I will not even slow down.”
It was more than the moment asked for. He noticed that. A seal who truly did not care would not have built the warning so carefully, would not have needed every stone of it in place. She was not telling him the rules. She was telling herself.
“Alright.” He said.
She waited. Braced for the argument, the plea, the thing every other seal would have given her, the thing that would have let her turn and go.
“Alright?” she said.
“You’ve told me the rules. I heard them.” He looked down at the bones in their grey net, and then back at her. “I’m not leaving the fjord.”
For a long moment she only looked at him, and whatever she had brought him down here to feel, it had not worked. Something in her face that he could not name closed over. Then she turned and rose toward the light without a word, and did not tell him to follow.
She didn’t need to.
Chapter 7: The Days
The fjord opened up to them.
The water widened into a great basin, shores falling away to either side until the far ones were only a low grey line. Somewhere in all of that water, she started swimming the way you do when you have decided, without admitting it, that you would rather not be alone.
She kept him at a distance, and she was plain about it.
“You sleep there.” she told him the first night in the open water, marking a stretch of rock a full body’s length from her own. “Not here. I don’t sleep well with something breathing on my neck.”
He slept there. He did not mind the distance. He had spent his whole life at the cold edge of other seals’ warmth; A rock of his own was nothing new.
In the warmth of daylight she taught him her fjord.
She took him to a flat of pale sand and hung over it, waiting, until he could not stand the stillness.
“There’s nothing here.” he said.
“There is. You just don’t know how to look.” She drove her nose into the sand and came up with a flatfish thrashing in her jaws, a fish he would have sworn was never there. She swallowed it and looked at him sidelong. “They lie flat under the sand. You feel for them with your whiskers. Eyes alone can’t find them.”
He gave it a shot, but got a mouthful of sand. He tried again and clouded the water so thick he lost sight of his own flippers. Above him came a sound he had not heard from her before. A huffing, broken sound. It took him a moment to understand she was laughing.
“What happened to them?” he said, “To make them so flat.”
“The surface dwellers.” She said it at once, with total certainty. “They drop their heavy things into the sea. Anchors and worse. One of them came down on a fish long ago and pressed it flat, and its pups were born flat, and theirs after that.” He could not tell if she was serious or not. “Everything in this fjord has a story, if you know how to read it.” She nudged a furrow in the sand. “Try again. Feel.”
He felt, and found one. He brought it up clumsily and proud, and she did not tell him he had done well. But she stayed and watched him eat it. That was enough.
She taught him the boats.
There were more kinds than he had known. There were the ones that hunted with nets. And the colossal ones, the floating islands that either carried the surface dwellers themselves or their blocks of greed between their kingdoms. They were so vast that they never noticed the seals beneath them. There were smaller boats too, fit only for a few surface dwellers. And then there were the imposing vessels of wrath and the shining vessels of pride.
“And those.” She tipped her head toward a low sleek shape cutting the surface, throwing a white wake behind it. “Those are always worth chasing.”
He learned to watch her chase them. She would line herself up behind one and slide into its churning wake, fearlessly riding it. Every time she did it something in him pulled tight until she came out of the far side grinning. He never joined her, only kept an eye on her, prepared for something to go wrong. But nothing ever did.
One day he was the one who saw them first.
Shapes on the bottom, down where the light went thin. Surface Dwellers, deep underwater, their skin gone dark and heavy, moving slowly across the seabed. They were gathering something into nets at their sides. His whole body locked, hoping she would see them and flee.
She did not flee. “It’s alright” she said. “Those ones are safe.”
“Safe?”
“Shell-pickers. They come down for the shells with a thousand eyes.” She was already drifting towards them, closer than he would ever have gone, close enough that one turned and a pale face looked out at her from behind a circle of glass. He braced for the end of her.
She swam up to the surface dweller’s strange flat fin, and pressed her own against it. And the surface dweller, gently pressed back.
She held there for a moment, fin to fin with the thing every story of his childhood had taught him to fear, and then she pulled away, pleased with herself.
“You see?” she said. “Not all of them want to eat us. Some of them just want to say hello.”
He did not know what to do with it. He had been raised on tales where every one of them was the end of you. He was beginning to understand that she had been raised on the same tales, but that she had decided to stop believing them. He did not yet know what that decision had cost her. He only knew she had made it alone. And that it had something to do with her being alone.
There was a place she would not take him. A place that came up in many of the stories he had heard from the fjord. The great kingdom at the end of it.
“Not yet.” she said. “You’re not ready. You don’t know these waters well enough, and the waters up there are more treacherous.” She looked north toward a narrowing he could not yet see. “Maybe. If you last. I’ll show you the kingdom one day.” And she left it there, a promise and a withholding in the same breath.
Then there was the day she forgot herself.
He never knew what started it. Some old feeling must have surfaced in her without permission. All of a sudden she bumped into him hard with her side and shot away, and when she looked back, he understood he was meant to follow.
So he chased her. And she let herself be chased, and then she turned and chased him, and they swam circles through the warm bright water with no reason for any of it. She rolled and he rolled with her. She came up under him and tipped him over and dove, and he went after her, the two of them spiraling down to the ocean floor, and back up again to the surface.
But there was something in how she did it that caught his eye even as he laughed. She played too hard. She threw her whole body into it, almost frantic, the way a starving seal eats. As though she had found a thing she had been denied for so long that she could not trust it to last. She played like a pup. Not like the pups he had known, easy in their games because the games would be there again tomorrow. She played like a pup who had never been allowed to, making up for all of it at once.
And then she stopped herself. He saw the moment it happened, saw her eyes catch the sound of her own joy and go still in the water, as if she had been caught doing something she was not allowed.
“Enough.” She said. The careless mask came down so fast it was almost cruel. “You’re exhausting. I’m getting food.” And she was gone toward the deeper water, swimming hard, leaving him alone with the understanding that he had seen a thing he was not meant to see, that she would make him pay a little for it, and that it had been worth it.
That was the days.
The nights were a different matter.
Chapter 8: The Nights
The first night in the fjord, after she had marked the rock he was to sleep at and told him not to crowd her, he lay awake longer than she did. He listened to her breathing go slow and even, as if she had fallen asleep the way any seal falls asleep. Then it started.
Small sounds, low in her throat. The sounds of a seal swimming hard in a dream, away from a threat that is closing in. A catch of breath, a pained whimper, a stillness and then it repeated. It frightened him the first night. He half rose, thinking she was hurt, that something had come out of the dark to eat them. But they were alone, and she was asleep on her rock, fighting against something that was not there.
He did not know what to do, so he did nothing. He lay back down on his rock and listened to her whimpering until he fell asleep. In the morning she was back to her sharp and careless self. She spoke not of the night, and so neither did he.
The second night it came again. And the third.
By then he understood that the careless seal of the daylight, the one who rode the wakes of boats and pressed fins with the surface dwellers, the seal who feared nothing under the sun. The seal of the day handed the nights over to another seal. A frightened one. And the frightened one had been there the whole time, he realized, underneath all of it, held down by a force through every waking hour and let up only when she could no longer keep watch over the depths.
It changed how he saw her in the daylight, a little. Whenever she laughed her broken huffing laugh, or stared down a boat with that flat fearless calm, he could not entirely forget the whimpering sounds she made while she slept. The carelessness began to look less like a thing she was and more like a thing she did. A wall, built new every morning, that came down every night whether she willed it or not.
He never spoke of it. Some part of him knew that to name it in the daylight would be to take from her a thing she had not chosen to give. So he kept her secret with her, even from her, and lay a distance away night after night, listening to her struggle against the ghosts of her past.
There was a particular helplessness in it he had not felt before. He had spent his whole life unable to close the cold gap within himself. But that was an old ache, and a familiar one. This was different. This was lying near enough to sense her warmth, hear every pained sound, and being able to do nothing at all about any of it. Because she had drawn a line in the rock, and that line was the only thing she had asked of him. He could follow her into the fjord against her word. He could refuse to leave when she told him to go. But he could not cross that line while she slept, because that distance was hers to close, and she had not.
So he kept his distance. And he hated it. He lay awake and wondered what she was swimming from, down there in the dark of her own head, and whether she had ever once had anyone lie close enough to hear it.
That’s how it remained for most of a moon-cycle. Then came the night that changed it.
When the whimpering started it was already worse than he had ever heard it. This was something deeper and more desperate, her whole scarred body was twitching, her breath coming out in ragged catches. The sounds climbed. They reached toward something that was almost a cry, and fell back, and rising again. A seal going down and down and down in the black water of a dream, with no rock to climb out on and no one coming for her. Her sounds were full of pain and loneliness.
It was unbearable. He could not lie there and listen to it. Whatever the line in the rock was worth, it was not worth this.
He crossed it.
Slowly, by the width of a fin at a time, he approached her. Watching for any sign of waking, ready to slide back to his own cold stone the instant she stirred. The distance she had marked had felt like a small and a fair thing. Crossing it now felt enormous, like swimming into water he had been warned away from his whole life. He closed the distance until he was nearer to her than he had ever been at night. Nearer than she had ever allowed anyone. Near enough to fully feel her warmth, and there he stopped. Just shy of touching. Just shy of fur to fur. He would not take that. That was still hers to give.
He put his head down close to hers, and into the dark between them he said the thing he would never have dared in daylight.
“I’ve got you. You’re not down there alone, not anymore. I’m not going anywhere.” A breath. “Chaser.”
The name he had never said to her face. He gave it to her in the dark, where it was safe to mean it.
And yet something in her heard it. Not the words, maybe, but the feeling beneath them. The nearness, the warmth, the low sound of a voice that had decided to stay. The thrashing eased. The drowning sounds came slower, and slower, and then stopped, one by one, until her breath ran deep and smooth and unafraid. The frightened seal went quiet, and Boat-Chaser slept. Truly slept. A fin’s width from him, the closest the two of them had ever been, and for once nothing chasing her down in the dark.
He stayed awake a long while after, unable to sleep. He had not done much in his life that he had been certain of. But he was certain of this, that she should not have to go under alone, not while he was near enough to reach. He kept watch over her quietly, until sleep quietly took him too.
Chapter 9: Breakfast
In the morning, she was gone.
Her place on the rock was empty, and the stone had gone cold where she had lain a fin’s width from him through the night. He called for her. No answer came back off the water. He searched the shallows, the kelp and the deeper grey beyond. He found nothing, and a fear opened in him that he did not like the size of. He did not want to lose her. Not now. Not so soon after the sea had finally handed him a thing he wanted to keep.
Then he understood, and her name itself was the answer.
Boat-Chaser. Where else would she be.
He found the iron whale first, far off in the distance. The kind that hunts with the net, sitting heavy and still on the surface. He swam for it, and there she was beneath it, a small dark shape in the shadow of the hull. Circling patiently, waiting for something.
He would have stopped her, once. On their first day he would have thrown himself between her and whatever she was doing. But he had spent the better part of a moon-cycle learning that she knew these waters the way he knew his own breath, and so he hung back and watched.
The surface dwellers above began to haul. The net rose out of the deep and drew itself into a familiar shape, walls on every side, open only at the top. Fish poured into it, a panicked silver storm, and through them ran the one she wanted: a fish more colorful than any he had seen, the kind that could outswim a seal in open water.
But this was not open water.
She drove it down, herding it into the deepest corner of the rising net, turning the surface dwellers own trap against the thing it had caught. He watched in something close to awe. The fish jinked. Once. Twice. Slipping between the others, a whisker from her jaws each time. She would not let it reach the top. But she could not quite close on it either, and every miss cost her, and the net climbed the whole while.
Then she had it. Her jaws snapped shut on the bright scales, and in the same motion she spun for the open top of the net.
But she was a beat too late.
The net drew closed above her.
She hit the mesh and it held. She pressed; it pressed back; the trapped fish thrashed around her in the shrinking water. The net tightened and rose, lifting her toward the world above the surface, the world that was theirs and not hers.
Far-Drifter was already at her side, on the outside of the net.
“Drop it,” he said. “Drop the fish. Look at me.”
She dropped it. That, more than the net, more than anything, told him how frightened she was. The carelessness had gone out of her eyes. The mesh had bitten a thin line into her flank, and the water inside the net was running out, replaced by a squirming mass of fish.
“Be still,” he said. “We bite through. Together.”
They bit where she could reach, tearing at the fibers, his teeth and hers, gnawing away. But the net was made to hold, and their time was not their own. When it ran out, they had opened a hole the size of a fish, and she was not a fish.
“The one I caught.” Her voice was small. “Grab it. Quickly.”
He did not let himself think it might be the last thing she ever asked of him. He shoved his head through the gap and took the colorful fish by the fin and dragged it out just in time.
The net broke the surface and took her up into the air with it.
His own head came up. He found her among the catch, hauled out of the sea, and his heart stopped, because surely this was the end. Surely she would go up into their world and come back to the sea the way the seal in the silt had come back. Bones in a net.
But the surface dwellers were not cruel.
He watched them work, their pale faces and their flat loud voices, sorting their harvest. And when they came to her, they did not strike. One found the hole she and Far-Drifter had torn and held it up to show the others. One laid a flat fin on top of his own head, and they made the barking sound the surface dwellers make when something amuses them. They took the fish. They freed the seal. Their strange unnatural fins worked her loose of the mesh, and a few moments later they let her fall back into the sea.
She broke the surface and he was on her at once, circling, frantic, running his eyes over her for wounds.
“What were you thinking?” The colorful fish dropped from his mouth as he said it.
She shook the stress off her like water and answered him with the old carelessness.
“I was thinking about breakfast.”
“You nearly died. For a fish.”
“I didn’t.” She nosed toward the fish she’d caught. “They only wanted the catch. They let me go. I was never in any real danger.”
“You were in the net, Chaser.” The short name came out of him in daylight now, to her face, where she could not help but hear it. “Up there. In their world. You could have..”
“And now I’m in the water.” She looked at him at last, and there was a flat defiance in it. “I always come back to the water. It isn’t a difficult concept, Fish-Brain.” She took the colorful fish in her jaws and began tearing the flesh from it, done with the conversation.
He let it go. Chaser did not lose arguments. She ended them.
But the raw line the mesh had cut along her side told a different story than her mouth did, and Far-Drifter watched her eat with the fear still cooling in him, and he thought of the bones in the silt. Had that seal seen it coming, before the end? Had he known the danger he was in, and stayed anyway?
Was he any different?
For the rest of that day she let him stay closer than she ever had in daylight. She did not say anything about it, and neither did he. But when they hauled out to rest, she chose the rock beside his without marking any distance on it, and when he settled a length away out of habit, she looked at him as though he were being slow about something. He moved nearer. She did not tell him not to.
Chapter 10: The Beach
She took him to the beach a few sun-cycles later.
It was a shallow bay, the water gone warm from the season of the bright sun. There were surface dwellers in it, their small ones, pups. They splashed in the low water near the sand, shrieking and falling and flailing about, and their cries carried out across the water. Far-Drifter could hear that the cries were not fear. They were the opposite of fear.
“Come on.” Chaser was already moving. “I want you to see this.”
“Toward them?”
The direction she was swimming was the answer.
They came in slow, two curious heads breaking the surface. His whole body told him to turn and go, but she was calm beside him, and her calm was the only thing that kept him there. The pups saw them. There was a moment where everything went quiet, where it could have gone any way at all.
A small one pointed. The pups barked, and the bark was laughter.
And then she did the strangest thing. Chaser swam in among them, positioned herself upright in the water, and began to turn, slowly, around and around. The pups watched her spin. And then they spun too. So she did it again, and they did it again, and Far-Drifter found that he was doing it as well. Three small surface dwellers and the two seals all turning together in the warm shallows, the golden light coming down through the water around them. For a while, no one was afraid of anyone. Every story he had been told about the surface dwellers thinned to nothing. For a moment, in that one corner of the sea, the seals who had left the water and the seals who had stayed were one and the same.
It did not last. Moments like that never do.
A cry came from the beach. A grown voice, sharp with the fear the little ones had not yet been taught. Other voices joined in. The big surface dwellers came wading in fast, snatching their pups up out of the water, their voices high and hard, and the fear in them poured into the pups all at once, so that the last thing Far-Drifter saw in those small faces was terror. The two seals turned and slid back toward the deep, and behind them the beach was all panic, the grown ones clutching their young and staring out at the water as though death itself had been turning circles with their children.
Out past the shallows, the two of them slowed.
“They’re not so bad,” she said, and there was something lighting up her face that he had not seen before. It was the happiest he had seen her. “Their pups, anyway. Just like ours. You saw it.”
“I saw it.” And he had. “That was more than I expected, Chaser. But the grown ones..”
“Are just like our elders.” She finished it for him. “No seal is born afraid of them. No pup of theirs is born afraid of us. The fear gets taught, after. On both sides. We all learn to be frightened of things we shouldn’t be.”
Far-Drifter turned that over. “What should we be frightened of, then?”
Her face changed. The light went out of it, and her eyes went somewhere far off, down into the deeper water, or into something deeper than that.
“What should we be frightened of,” he said again, when she did not answer.
“Who knows.” She came back from wherever she had gone, and looked at him. “You’ve called me Chaser. Twice now.”
He had not realized she’d been counting.
“That’s what frightens you?” he said, trying to make it light. “Nicknames?”
“They should frighten you too.” She was almost smiling, but not quite. “A nickname means you’ve let someone close enough to lose. That’s the most dangerous thing there is.” She held his eyes a breath longer than the joke could carry. “You should be very afraid of it.”
Far-Drifter felt something turn over, deep beneath his fur. He looked at her, at the careless seal who whimpered in her sleep, who played like a starved pup and hated being caught at it, who had let him a fin’s width closer every day and would die before she said so. A nickname means you’ve let someone close enough to lose. She was right. That was exactly what it meant.
“You called me Fish-Brain,” he said. “Back at the net. So, by your own telling, you’ve..”
“That wasn’t a nickname.” She turned and swam, unbothered, toward the deeper water. “It was a factual statement.”
Adrian Tornholm 