Authors note:

The third of six acts! Editing really eats up a lot of time. Writing too, takes way longer than you’d expect! But it’s all worth it, when you’re creating something of your own, something you can look back on to say “I made that!”.

At least that’s how I feel. Existence is a bit hollow when you can’t point to your own lasting impact, whether it’s the art you’ve created, or the people you’ve affected.

If you’ve read the story so far, if my story about two seals somehow registered as worthy of your time, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Anyways, here’s ACT 3!

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Chapter 11: The Vessel of Wrath

They swam north for many hours. Deeper into the fjord, further and further away from any colony. She had something else she wanted to show him. She said it might just be her favorite thing in the whole fjord. He liked how excited she was to show him things in these waters. To Far-Drifter it felt like she was showing him more than just the fjord.

They reached a group of islands. One of them was so big it split the fjord in two, and Chaser took the path to the right.

“What’s down the other path?” he asked her.

“Poison water. I don’t swim there. Once was enough.”

A group of small islets appeared in the distance. “We’re here.” she said.

“There’s nothing in the whole fjord like it.” she said with reverence in her voice, as they dived towards something ancient on the bottom of the ocean. Down into the cold quiet water where the light was dim.

She took him to the final resting place of a once-mighty vessel of wrath. One built by the surface dwellers for no purpose but violence, now laying on its side on the ocean floor, vast and broken. Its colors twisted by the sea over decades. It was lifeless, though life grew on it now. It did not glow or thunder, and in that way it was more peaceful than the boats on the surface. But something about this ship sent shivers down his fur. Whatever wrath it had been made to carry was still in it somehow, soaked into the iron, and the waters surrounding it were quiet. Some fish moved quietly between openings in the vessel, as if they were afraid it would wake up.

He hung back, taking it in from a distance. Chaser went closer, as he expected of her by now. She drifted along the ruined flank with her scarred head turning, looking for interesting details she might have missed in the past.

Then she turned to look for him, and her whole body changed in an instant. He was given no time to wonder what it meant. With a look of terror on her face she rushed towards him faster than he had ever seen her move. She struck him hard in the side and drove him out of the place he had been floating.

The water where he had been seconds ago closed with the sound of the sea itself being bitten in half.

The black and white hunter had come out from the darkness behind him. A mouth wider than his whole body, a maw he barely avoided thanks to Chaser. She was next to him, shivering in fear. Above them, the predator blocked out the last rays of the sun, as it circled back around for another chance to feed. He heard her scream something at him.

“Inside! Hide! Now!”

She swam for the ship, with Far-Drifter right behind her. Every second counted. She forced herself through an opening barely larger than her body, and the torn iron raked her flank as she went. He followed, and it opened his skin too, the ship drawing blood from both of them as it swallowed them whole. A second later the black and white hunter crashed into the ship with a force he had never before experienced. It was violent and loud, and was heard from miles away.

And then it went quiet. For a moment he heard nothing but his own heartbeat and the quivering sounds of his partner. “Did it get you?” she asked. “Did it get you? Did it…”

“No.” He could barely speak. “It didn’t get me.”

He turned around towards the opening, but he could no longer see it. Was there more than one out there? He drifted closer.

“Stay away from the openings! It can reach in! It’s not safe!” she screamed.

He backed away, and took a closer look at her. She was unrecognizable. In front of him shook the frightened seal of the nights. She had never once shown herself in daylight until now. Eyes wide open, frozen in terror. In the net her fear had barely been visible, gone the moment she was free. This fear was total. Quivering. Terror in her eyes. Her whole body shaking. Right now she was not the chaser of boats he knew. Now she was chased inside one.

For the first time, her eyes told him that she needed him. He got close to her, sharing the little comfort he could give. “Drifter.” she repeated quietly to herself. “Drifter. Drifter.” Minutes passed, as they both bled next to each other. Eventually her body stopped shaking and her breathing stabilized.

They had survived the ambush, but now they were running out of air. They pushed deeper into the wreck, and through the gaps in the iron he could sometimes see it. It was alone out there. It did not throw itself at the hull, it didn’t try to tear its way inside. It moved slow, unhurried, from one opening to the next, putting its eye to each in turn, watching them in silence. A chilling realization came upon him. It knew that it didn’t need to break in to feed on them. It knew what they were. That they were made the same way it was, different from the fish that swam beside them. It knew the breath in them was running low, that the dark corners of the ship had no air to spare, and that the sea only had one roof.

“It’s not leaving.” he said. “It’s waiting for us.”

“It’s not supposed to be here… It’s not supposed to…” she muttered to herself.

He felt his chest ask for the surface.

They didn’t talk much after that. There was no breath to spare for words, they had learned to hoard what little they had. Every sound had a cost they could not afford to lose. And something in her had closed around itself, and he felt that words could break whatever she was using to stay whole. Once, only once, she said, very low, as if to the depths and not to him, “I’ve survived them before.” He did not ask her what she meant by that. Not asking was the only thing he could offer her.

The pressure to breathe became a hand around his throat. He could see it on her as well. He understood what the ship was doing. It had been built to kill, long ago, and the sea had killed it in turn. Now in its death it was killing them slowly, by holding their air away from them. And outside, through the gaps in the iron, a different kind of killer waited for the first one to finish. He could see the urge to rise in her as well. They could not stay.

It was Chaser who found their exit. She knew the wreck, after all. She pulled him deeper instead of up, through a dilapidated passage where a gap in the metal led them into a long flooded corridor. At the end of it, the open ocean. A hidden entrance to the wreck, on opposite sides of where they entered. The hunter didn’t expect them to leave the ship on this side. Out there in the ocean, they saw the underside of a small island, the landmark she had used to find the ship.

“When we go,” she said, “we don’t stop. Not for anything. You don’t look back to see where it is. You swim as fast as you can, as if it’s the only thing that matters. Because it is.”

“Chaser.” he said. “Ready when you are.”

“Drifter…” she said, looking at him, as if for the last time.

She turned around slowly. “Now!” she said, and they went.

They came out of the wreck into open water, and swam for the island with every ounce of strength they had left. Drifter feared it was not enough, that they had waited too long. Behind him he could feel the sea change, and he knew without looking that it had seen them. The vibrations of it came up through his body. The great driving surge of a thing built entirely for this, closing the distance.

It was inevitable, he thought, that this would be the net that took him, the way it had taken the seal in the silt. Chaser swam faster than him, further ahead. The beast would not get them both, he understood. That gave him some peace. He did not look back to see how close he was to the end. These were the longest seconds of his life. The island was closing in now, and the sea went from cold to less cold, to warm. The water was shallow now. But was it too shallow for the monstrosity behind them?

The floor scraped his belly, reminding him of his wound. When he could no longer swim, he found himself galumphing as fast as possible. Up onto the beach, and into the grass. Further up, in the shade of a willow tree, the two seals collapsed from exhaustion, fur touching fur. And behind them, in the water past the shallows, the monster let out its breath before it disappeared beneath the waves. It was an ominous, patient sound. The sound of a thing that had marked them for death.

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Chapter 12: The Weeping Willow

For a long time neither of them spoke. They just looked up at the beautifully colored clouds in the sky. The fjord lay there in front of them, reflecting the sunset above.

It was Chaser who laughed first.

The laugh of a creature that had been certain it was about to die, only to find itself alive. It caught him too, and so they laughed together, the two of them shaking with laughter beneath the weeping willow. It went on for a long time, longer than they could remember having laughed before. When it finally wore down, their world got quiet again. But this silence was peaceful.

It was then he noticed the cuts. The torn iron had opened a thin line along her flank, and when he looked down at his own side, there was the twin of it, in nearly the same place. Both of them still bleeding a little into the grass.

“Look at that.” she said, following his eyes. “Matching wounds.”

She said it lightly, and neither of them wiped the blood, and for a while they just lay there with their matching wounds, stinging in the open air.

Far-Drifter turned to her.

“Back in the ship, you whispered something. That you had survived them before…”

She was looking up at the sky when she answered.

“When I was very small.” she began, and then stopped. For a moment he thought that was all she would give him. “They took my mother and my father in front of me. Mom and dad were teaching me to swim, not far from the colony waters. It was supposed to be safe.” she cried. “They came from the deep. A whole pod of black and white. I saw my parents torn apart like fish. They ate their heads first. They played with their remains before they fed on the rest.”

Far-Drifter had no words to say.

“It’s my first memory. And it’s the last thing I’ll ever forget.” She had to stop again. “The thing I don’t remember is how I got back to the colony. How I survived. Did I escape? Did they spare me? And if they did, was it out of compassion, or was it the opposite? I’ll never know. I’ll never understand it.” The story came out of her in waves, a little at a time, with the sea between them.

“After that,” she went on, and her voice steadied now that the worst of it was behind her, “the northern colony didn’t know what to do with me. A pup who’d seen all that before she learned how to speak. I didn’t grieve the way they wanted me to. I went toward the deeper water instead of away from it. I started swimming at the boats, at the iron whales.” she turned her scarred head, finally, and looked at him. “Everyone said I had a death wish. That I was trying to finish what the black and white ones started. They were wrong. I just couldn’t stand a danger I wasn’t allowed to fight. The boats I could win against. I could go right up to the blade and come back alive, proving the sea couldn’t take my life or break me in any way. And so I did it again, and again, and they feared me for it. They decided I didn’t belong, and I decided that they were right, and I left.” She let her gaze go back to the fjord. “I’ve never belonged to a colony. Stopped wanting to. This is where I belong, this fjord.”

Far-Drifter thought about her story for a while, in the quiet. Then he gave her the only thing he had that matched it.

“I came in on a tide,” he said. “When I was a pup. The colony that raised me found me drifting in one morning, alone, too young to remember any of it. No one came looking for me. There were no bodies, no story, no memory to grieve. Only a gap within me, that the seawater I came with could never fill.” He breathed. “They were good to me. They kept me my whole life, raised me as one of their own. But I never once felt like one of them. I used to think if I swam far enough from the colony, I’d find the place I came from. That I’d be recognized, and welcomed back to my home. But now I’ve learned that there’s nothing to find. I just couldn’t stand the emptiness I felt.”

She was quiet for a bit. Neither of them had spoken those words out loud before.

“We’re not so different.” she said.

“We’re not.”

“Drifter.” she said, weighing it as she spoke, as if the word was hers alone.

“Chaser.” he said back, and upon hearing it he could see her softening.

Neither of them had a colony. They had no home to return to. But as they rested next to each other, they felt a sense of belonging, the first either of them had been given in a long time, maybe ever. They moved closer to each other. There was no cold to speak of, but they did it anyway.

That night, for the first time, the frightened seal did not come. Far-Drifter lay awake a while out of habit, waiting for the small drowning sounds to start. They never started. She slept against his side, quiet and unafraid, and the only sound he heard was the willow moving in the wind above them.

The next morning, when strength had returned to their bodies, they looked across the water. Far to the north they spotted a black fin that pierced the water. They saw it breathe too, filling the distant air with mist.

“It’s waiting for us out there.” Chaser said. “That way’s no good now. Not happening.”

“Wasn’t there another way?”

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke there was no relief in it.

“There’s that one path.” she said. “But the water there can really mess with your mind. It runs past the place where the surface-dwellers bleed their poison into the sea. The water burns, and nothing lives there. One has to be pretty desperate to traverse those waters.” she paused, trying to make light of it. “So there’s never been a better time for it, all things considered.”

They rested on the warm sand for a while longer, just the two of them, before they went down into the water together. Fearful of the predator, they stayed close to the coastline of the large island, and they traveled south towards the path of poison.

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Chapter 13: The Poison

There was no tidy line between where the clean waters ended and the poison began. The sea on this side of the fjord looked the same as anywhere else. Still, the poison slid into them through the eyes, through the breath, and through the matching wounds the wreck had cut into their sides. The cuts were fresh and open, and the poison found them at once, pressing into the very places that had made them feel like one creature the day before. It got in faster than it should have, faster than even Chaser had braced for.

For a while they swam in silence. He noticed that the fish no longer swam beneath them. Chaser had told him to stay wordless until they reached the far side, because every word opened the mouth, and every open mouth let the poison in. Silence was the only armor the crossing allowed. The trick, she said, was to speak only once you could see schools of fish again.

But the silence was its own kind of poison. The night before, under the willow, they had said the most vulnerable words either of them had ever spoken. He had given her the gap inside him. She had given him the worst day of her life. And now there was only this burning quiet, the two of them swimming side by side and saying nothing. The longer it went on the more certain he became that he was losing her. That the closeness of the willow was being rewritten, and that the silence allowed it to die. He told himself to hold his tongue. The water told him that if he said nothing, she would drift away from him forever.

He could not bear it. That was the whole of his nature, and the poison knew it.

He spoke.

“The seal in the net.” he said. “You said you gave him a name.”

For a while she said nothing. He thought she would hold the silence for both of them.

“I did.” she said at last.

“What was it?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s bones.”

The poison stung where the words went in. He should have stopped there. He knew he should have stopped there.

“I just wondered if I remind you of him. You said he looked like me.”

“Yes. Yes and no. It really doesn’t matter.” Her voice had gone flat and raspy in the burning water. “Why are you talking. I told you not to talk here.”

“Because you’ve gone quiet, and I can’t stand it.” It came out of him before he could shape it into something less true. “After last night. After everything we said. And now you won’t even look at me, and I don’t know if it’s the water or if it’s you, and I’d rather breathe the poison than swim next to you wondering.”

She turned her scarred head toward him, and the look she gave him already had the poison in it.

“You want to talk?” she said. “Fine. Let’s talk. You asked once what became of the walrus. Freya.”

“You knew her?”

“I knew her.” Her voice was raw now. “She came to the fjord not long after I first arrived. She had beautiful tusks and a gentle heart, as gentle as any seal. When she wasn’t looking for her mate, she hauled herself up into the surface dwellers little boats, to sleep in the sun. Some of them did sink, but she just wanted somewhere warm to rest, and to be near these creatures she had learned to trust. She wasn’t afraid of them, and they had no good reason to fear her back.”

“What happened to her?”

“They killed her, obviously.” She said it without softening it. The poison made it come out like an accusation, as if he was to be blamed for it. “Our gentle surface dwellers. The ones whose pups spin with us seals in the water. They decided she got too close to them and their great kingdom at the end of the fjord. More of them came to see her with each sun-cycle. Their love for her became too much for the surface dwellers cold hearts. One morning they came for her, and after a loud thunderous sound, she was dead.” She turned her head toward him in the dim water that burned them both. “That’s what happens to those who don’t keep their distance.”

“That’s not all of them.” he said, feeling the water twist it, making it sound like a defense, as if he was taking their side. “The ones who freed you from the net. The pups. You showed me yourself that they aren’t all…”

“I showed you what I wanted to believe.” Her voice rose in anger. “Don’t throw my own water back at me. You’ve been in the fjord one season. You spin with their pups once and you think you understand them. I have lived here for years. I watched them load Freya’s body onto a boat. I watched them carve her likeness in stone, as a warning to everything that lives in the sea. You watched some pups wave their fins.”

Her words stung, and the poison turned the sting into anger.

“Then why show me any of it?” he said. “Why take me to the beach, to the divers, why show me any of it, if the only lesson you wanted me to learn is that everything kills you in the end?”

“I don’t know why I took you anywhere.” And there it was, the first deep cut, something the clean waters would never have let her say. “I knew better. I’ve always known better. I allowed a fool to follow me around the fjord once before. I even gave him a name. And then he died. Left me, like everyone leaves me. I showed you his bones. And now I’ve let it happen again, because I’m the same stupid seal I was when I first came to the fjord.”

“So I’m a mistake.” He growled at her.

“You’re a thing I’m going to lose.” The poison had her fully now. She did not test the weight of her words before they cut him. “Everything I’ve ever let close, the sea takes from me. My mother. My father. Him. The moment I let you matter, you’ll just end up as bones in a net too. And I’ll swim past you again and again, unable to forget. So yes, you are a mistake. I knew the rules. I made them myself, and you selfishly made me break every one of them for you.”

He couldn’t hear the fear underneath the anger, the poison filtered that out. Too much poison had seeped inside them both, and their oldest wounds were festering with it. He could only hear what he feared the most.

“At least the sea gave you something to lose.” It came pouring out of him, all the old envy he had never once let himself feel. “You had a mother. A father. You saw their faces. You have something to grieve. I got a gap where mine should have been. Nothing. No bodies, no story, not even a memory to mourn. And you, you got to keep yours, and somehow you’re still the one who falls apart about it.”

“You want what I have?” Her voice had gone to something colder than anger. “You want my first memory? Take it. Take the sound they made. Take their faces while it happened. You can have all of it, every night, for the rest of your life, and we’ll see how long you last.”

“At least it’s something.” The poison would not let him stop. “At least it’s yours. You’ll never understand what it is to have nothing at all.”

“So that’s what this is, then.” he went on, before she could answer, the sick water turning every word into a blade. “You’ll keep me near. You’ll let me follow you, sleep beside you, you’ll even give me a name. But you never intended for me to belong. Kept me close and at a distance. You’re just like them, aren’t you? You’re just like the colonies who rejected us both. At least they were honest about it. They never pretended.”

She recoiled as though he’d struck her.

“Don’t.” she said.

“It’s true, isn’t it, Boat-Chaser.”

The name landed between them like a crumbling cliff into still water. He had not called her that for a while now. He saw her own name cut her deep. Whatever they had become on the island faded from her eyes. The belonging between them, withdrawn in a single breath, and he had been the one to do it.

“Fine.” She said, with a voice now dead. “Then go belong to someone else, Far-Drifter. There’s a whole sea of colonies out there. Go find one desperate enough to have you. I never asked you to follow me. I told you that on the first day, and you didn’t listen to me. You looked past the bones in the net, and that’s not my fault either.”

“No.” he said. “Nothing is ever your fault.”

A frail voice within him begged him to be quiet, to apologize, to swim back in time with her. But all of that was out of his control. The physical pain from the water had become indistinguishable from the emotional storm within him, and it was aimed at the very core of her being.

“If you’d been a better swimmer, your parents wouldn’t have taken you out for that lesson.” he growled at her. “You took their lives from them. Their whole future, gone, because of one meaningless pup. But don’t think about what you took from them, no, don’t do that. Keep on wallowing in your own misery instead, and don’t stray from your reckless little path of self-destruction. Promise me that. Promise me you’ll keep putting your life in danger, so you can go on scaring away anyone who might ever care for you.”

Something went out of her then. Not anger. The opposite of it. He had found the most vulnerable part under all the others, the ache she had carried since before she could speak. He had said it out loud in the burning water, and it broke her like nothing else could. She did not fight back. She had no water left to throw. She only looked at him in horror, and then she looked away, and that was worse than anything she could have said.

That was enough. He had said everything the rage told him to. He gave her one last scowling look. All he could see at that moment was a pitiful overgrown pup, and he felt like a fool for ever having seen anything good in her. He left her there. She had not moved when he turned around.

The poison was thick around them. The color had gone out of the sea, and the light barely reached them. He did not need to swim far before she was lost from sight behind him.

A part of Far-Drifter wished the poison would take her. He heard that part clearly.

And underneath it, far down inside himself, another part of him was screaming. Turn around. Go back. Find her. Tell her none of it was true. It begged him with everything it had. It was the one voice he could not hear. The poison had silenced it.

So he swam on, through the burning dark of the poison.

And not once did he turn around to look for her.