Authors note:
This is the penultimate chapter! It’s also the longest, and perhaps the most important. The seal I found that day, it is now immortalized through a story. It’s going to be strange to leave the seals behind, once I publish the final ACT…
Anyways, hope you enjoy!
Chapter 19: The Sea of Stars
He wasn’t sure what woke him up. Something within the dream, maybe. Or a distant sound that had since gone quiet. It was early in the night. He had not slept long. He looked up into the sky. It was dark and moonless. Only the stars were shining that night, same as the night by the willow tree, the night before he lost her. Had it really been a whole moon-cycle?
The moonlight did not light up the sea that night. Something else did.
He noticed where the water softly kissed the beach. Something cold and blue came and went with every wave. It came out of the blackness in slow drifts of blue. The glow took the shape of the moving sea, fading to nothing when the water went still. He moved closer. The wet sand beneath him lit up as well, and it looked just like the stars in the sky above him. At the edge of the beach, he waved his fin through the water, and the sea bloomed.
He had heard of such water in the old stories. Before he saw it for himself, he thought the elders had made it all up, that it was only a story they told the young pups. Now he knew it was real, and it was pure wonder. Every small movement left a trail of blue behind it, holding its shape for the length of a breath before letting go.
He slid down into the water, mesmerized by the glow all around him. The blue light reacted in an instant. It found the shape of his body and his fins, and lit up the sea around him with every movement, no matter how small. He swam toward the bay to his right, toward the great moon-shaped beach, where the blue light was even stronger. Swimming had never felt this magical. The waves that crashed against the beach lit up the whole coastline. And within the bay itself, wherever he went, a glowing seal of blue went with him. Racing around the water of the bay, diving deep, spinning in circles and jumping through the mystical water.
After a while he noticed that he was not the only creature swimming in the light of the sea that night. But was it a friend or a foe?
Across the glowing water, far out, something stirred in the blue. A shape, trailing light behind it, was slowly coming towards him. He went still. The blue settled around him and went dark. He did not let himself believe it at first. He had made that mistake before, and back then he had poured his whole heart out to a stranger. So he held his position in the water, watched the glowing shape in front of him go still before it went dark. He did not move, and he did not call out. After his voice had taken so much, and ruined everything, he did not know how to trust it.
Her silhouette lit up in blue as it moved in closer.
Boat-Chaser.
It really was her. The familiar way she moved through water gave it away. He recognized her before she got close enough to see her face and her scars. She came within a length of him and stopped, and the blue glow she had carried settled and faded. For a while the two of them simply stayed there in the dark water, without movement or speech. Two seals who had said the cruelest things they could find to each other. Two seals who did not know how to begin taking them back.
Neither of them spoke. The last words between them had left wounds, and even a single word now might tear open something that had barely started to mend. So instead of speaking, she moved.
She drifted a slow circle around him, and the blue light lit up wherever she passed. She formed a ring of cold blue starlight around him. He followed her with his eyes, afraid that if he looked away for a moment, she would be gone. That he’d wake up from a dream on the island where he had fallen asleep. She kept looking at him too. Her eyes glowing in the blue. They were not the careless eyes of the seal who feared nothing, and they were not the dead eyes that had met him in the poison water either. They were present, asking for something neither of them had the language for, but both of them understood.
He answered it the only way that made sense. He moved towards her.
She did not pull away.
They circled each other slowly in the glowing dark. Slow, as if a single rushed movement would scare the other seal away, the way reef fish disappear when they’re spooked. The light bloomed and faded around them, two trails of cold starlight winding together and apart and together again. Together, they painted the dark ocean blue.
It no longer felt like they were swimming in the cold waters of the northern fjord. That night, they swam amongst the stars high above, two celestial beings bound to a dance that was only theirs, as ethereal as it was tender.
He brought his head alongside hers. She pressed back against the side of his. Fur against fur, the way it had been beneath the willow tree. The weight of the apology he had carried with him through the poisoned water and the changing season, it left his body all at once.
They stayed like that for a long time, turning slowly in the water, wrapped in a blue blanket of their own light. The cruel words were still there. They had not been forgotten, but they were behind them now, in the gloomy waters they had chosen to leave behind. In the here and now, there was only the glowing blue light, the warmth of another body, and the unspoken thing neither of them had ever had until they found it in each other.
It was she who spoke first, when speaking had become safe again.
“Drifter,” she said quietly.
He had told the others he had no name. For a whole moon-cycle he had been nameless. And here she was, handing him the only name he had ever wanted. The short one, the one that had only ever been hers to use.
“Chaser,” he whispered in return.
And that was all the words they needed to say.
Chapter 20: The Forlorn Monument
The blue light faded from the sea, little by little, until it was all gone. The waves were now ordinary waves, and when the two of them moved through the water, they left no trace.
“During our dance, I saw something near the shore,” she said, signaling him to follow her.
There, near the middle of the moon-shaped beach, he saw something partly submerged in the water. They drifted closer until they could see what it was. In front of them, facing away from them, stood two seals carved out of rock, at the border between the sea and sand. Two seals. He looked at her.
“What did the surface dwellers mean by this?” Drifter asked.
“You never really know with them,” she said. “It could be a warning, like the one they made when they killed Freya. A reminder that they took the lives of two seals here, and that other seals should stay away.” He saw her think for a moment, before she continued. “Maybe it’s historical, a reminder of how they used to be seals before the surface changed them. Most likely one of those two,” she concluded.
It made sense to Drifter, as much sense as he expected from the surface dwellers.
“Maybe it’s none of those,” he said. “I’d like to think it’s a monument to us, seeing as we discovered it tonight, right after we found each other again. I’ve heard stories about how surface dwellers can predict the future. So I’m thinking, maybe they saw our future, and we become great seals worthy of a monument to our legacy. And they placed it here, because they knew we’d be here.” He liked his theory more than hers, even if it was a bit unusual.
She laughed, but not in a cruel way. “If that’s the case, let’s see if they captured our beauty,” she said, and hauled herself onto land so she could see their faces. Drifter followed close behind.
They stared at the carved faces for a while, not sure what to think about what they saw. The carved ones looked like empty husks. Wounded, lost and forgotten. Round hollow sockets instead of eyes. They felt like they were staring into the lifeless eyes of something taken by death.
“You’re right,” she said, playfully pressing her head against him. “That’s definitely us.”
In between the two carved seals, they could now see a third, hidden by the tide. A seal pup, the offspring of the two adults. Chaser pointed it out and looked at him with a smile full of trouble.
“If the surface dwellers can predict our future, what do you think they meant by that one?”
Drifter opened his mouth, and nothing came out. She watched him flounder with open delight.
“I suppose there are worse fates,” she said, looking the little carved pup over as though appraising a fish. “It would be a strong swimmer, at least. From my side.”
She was in the water before he could find a single word, and her laugh carried back to him across the dark.
Chapter 21: The Sleeping Titans
They left their eerie monument behind, and swam north towards the other islands.
“Should we find a quiet spot where we can rest?” Drifter yawned.
“The night is still so young, Drifter. And there’s so much I want you to see,” she said with a voice he could not refuse. “I want tonight to be special. Tonight, I’ll show you the great kingdom.”
“I can think of no better guide,” he said. “Show me the kingdom. Sleep is for fish.”
There were other islands in the fjord, and they passed by several of them. Some were full of trees and life, untouched by the greed of the surface dwellers through some sort of miracle. Others were populated by many smaller dwellings, colorful little homes where the inhabitants of the kingdom slept during the night. Even the iron whales and the smaller boats were asleep.
Underneath the fjord, he could see that they were closing in on the kingdom. The seafloor was covered with all the junk the surface dwellers could no longer store on land. Forgotten things they had given to the sea, things the sea never had asked for. He tried to understand what he saw. Artificial miniature surface dwellers with blank eyes. Metal cylinders with colorful markings. The things they put on their mutated hind flippers when they’re not at the beach. The worst of it was the false jellyfish substance, which was everywhere. The transparent, floating choking hazard that all seals hated. Filling the seas with false jellyfish was the greatest crime the surface dwellers ever committed, he thought. He was about to ask Chaser if she agreed when he saw that she was on her way to the surface.
When he breached the surface, he saw something majestic ahead of him. Rising out of the dark shore, lit up by the lights of the surface dwellers, stood the titans. They were enormous, taller than anything he could conceive of. Great long-necked things of metal that did not move or breathe. They stood in a row along the shore with their heads raised above the water. Beneath them he saw stacks of those huge blocks of greed he had seen some of the colossal iron whales carry with them, in and out of the fjord.
“What are they?” he breathed.
“They’re the sleeping titans,” Chaser said. “They only wake up when the colossal iron whales come in. Then they bend down to take, and take, and take, until the whole whale is empty. Then the whale leaves and another takes its place.” She regarded the motionless titans without fear, but she spoke of them in a serious tone. “This is the place where their hunger lives. Where the iron whales bring everything the surface dwellers drag up from the world. And the titans stack it where the tide can never reach for it.”
She stared at them in silence for a moment. “You asked me once, what we should fear. I think it is this. I’m terrified of the black and white hunters, I am, and you’ve seen that for yourself. But in the end, it only wanted to eat us. This thing is a different beast. This thing, it wants everything. I can’t feel the fear in my body. But I think this is what we should fear.”
He looked back at the titans once, saying nothing. When he turned to her, Chaser’s somber expression had changed to one of mischief. She swam closer. “I’ll race you to the false iceberg.”
“What icebe-“
She was already swimming away from him.
Chapter 22: The False Iceberg
Drifter was chasing after her, slowly catching up to her. He was a better swimmer now than when she last saw him. All the days of searching for her across the fjord had been good practice. He wasn’t going to let her win without a fight. He was just about to pass her when she slowed down and stopped. He didn’t stop. “Wait! Come back!” Her voice had something in it again. Vulnerability?
He swam back, eyeing her with suspicion. “What?” She looked back at him with pup eyes. Definitely grounds for suspicion. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a surprise. Can you close your eyes?” He squinted at her. “You’re only going to swim away when I’ve got my eyes closed.” She feigned offense. “I’m not! I promise that I’m not only going to swim away.”
It took some convincing, but Drifter reluctantly ended up closing his eyes. He was paying attention to the ocean around him, waiting for any sound or vibration that revealed her trick. He was ready to bolt after her, past her, he was going to win the race. He was not going to lose to- She kissed him. He was suspended in the water, speechless, thoughtless, senseless. He heard her laugh. When he opened his eyes, she was far ahead of him. He knew it!
He surged through the water, more determined than ever. He was not going to let her get away with it. Were they getting close? A quick look above the surface confirmed it. He saw what must be the false iceberg. It was close, but not too close. If he kept up this speed, he sh-
Without warning a bird broke the surface in front of him. He thought he would crash into it, but the bird was no longer there. Now it was swimming in the waters around him, faster than any bird had the right to swim. The bird was black with a white belly, and it moved like a deranged arrow. He got so focused on the bird that he forgot all about the race. By now it was already over, and Chaser would claim that she won. She didn’t. Not really. If it hadn’t been for her trickery, he would have beaten her. But she’d never accept that argument. She never lost arguments, she ended them.
The false iceberg sat just outside the kingdom, a great floating slab of glass and metal. It was positioned in the middle of a flat space, one Chaser had already hauled out onto. She was waiting for him with that look in her eye.
“You’re late,” she said. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I would have won,” he said, pulling himself up beside her, “if it weren’t for the swimming bird. And the cheating.”
“What cheating?”
“You kissed me.”
“I wasn’t aware you had a mate…” she teased.
“That’s not what I..!”
“I won the race,” she said serenely, looking out at the water. “Fair and clear. I’m simply a faster swimmer. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You kissed me so I’d stop swimming.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. To me it looked like you stopped swimming to receive a kiss.”
He let it go. Losing an argument to her swiftly was its own form of winning. And more importantly, from where he sat, for the first time in his life, he could see the splendor of the kingdom up close.
It was a kingdom of light, outshining the stars above. Lights upon lights, covering the surface and climbing up and down every unnatural structure he could see. The waters around him reflected the light from the kingdom above, painting the waves in white, yellow, and red. Closest to them in the water stood a large pale structure, sloped in the strangest of ways. Like a mountain of ice the surface dwellers had carved into their own. At its shore, the rude birds of the sea rested their screeching beaks. Behind the pale thing, the kingdom climbed and climbed. He had heard of this place his whole life, in hushed whispers. He had crossed the whole world to get here. Laid out in front of him, glittering in the night, it was stranger and vaster than any story had managed to convey.
“It’s a lot, the first time,” Chaser said, watching him take it all in.
Drifter tilted his head toward the small beach next to the mountain of ice, where a raft of black and white birds rested in the water. “There’s the rest of your swimming birds,” Chaser said, following his eyes. “The recent storms carried them to the fjord from the open sea. Out there they live on the great bird-cliffs, in colonies bigger than any seal’s. Then the first storm of the season of the long dark comes, and the young ones get carried into the fjord.”
“Do they find their way back?”
“Some do.” She watched one surface with a fish crosswise in its beak. “Some perish, and some decide they like it here.”
He watched them a while longer, the little storm-driven strangers, fishing in the dark so far away from wherever they had come from. He decided he liked them.
For a while they only looked at the kingdom. Then he spoke what was on his mind. “Back in the poison water. What I said to you. About your-“
“Not now,” she said. “It’s not important right now. We have time.”
“It’s important to me.” He kept his eyes on the kingdom, since it was easier than looking at her. “I went looking for you. I went back into the poison and swam its whole length, calling for you. I searched for you every day, and I never stopped. I need you to know that I tried to find you.”
She sat there in silence, looking out at nothing.
“Did you look for me?” he asked.
“No,” she said, a little too fast. “Why would I? I had the whole fjord to myself again. It was peaceful.” Her eyes didn’t meet his. He didn’t feel sad when he heard it. Some lies are just the truth wearing armor, and he had learned to tell the difference.
“Of course,” he said. “Peaceful. The one thing you’re all about.”
“Don’t,” she said, and gently pressed her head against his. That was as close as she would come to saying it, and it was enough.
“Dawn can’t be that far away,” he said. “The kingdom will wake up at first light.”
“We have plenty of time,” she said.
“We should find somewhere to rest before-“
“We have time, Drifter.” She stretched out along the flat surface, unbothered. “There’s so much left to show you. And after tonight, there’ll be other nights. We have time to have your important talk. We have time to build something, you and I, somewhere far away from all this. We have time to figure out every broken thing between us.” She closed her eyes for a moment, bathed in the light of the kingdom. He had never seen her look this unguarded before. “Don’t stress yourself out over nothing. It messes with the good parts.” She looked at him with honest eyes. “Drifter. You are not going to lose me again. I promise.”
He believed her. She meant every word.
“What do you suppose they call it,” he said after a while, patting the false iceberg with a flipper. “The thing we’re next to.”
She considered it for a moment.
“Probably something meaningless,” she said. “They name everything. Most of it doesn’t mean a thing.”
Then she slid off the edge, back into the dark water lit up by the lights of the kingdom. Her head returned to the surface, mischievous as ever. “Let’s scare the crap out of those birds on the pale slope.”
Chapter 23: The Great Harbor
They left a hundred shrieking gulls behind them. The whole pale slope of the kingdom’s ice-mountain had erupted into chaos. Chaser couldn’t stop laughing, not until they reached the colossal iron whale.
Drifter recognized it at once. It was the very same from the day he had met her. The towering island of iron and light that had carried Chaser on its wake, back when Quickfin had introduced her as Chaser. The night everything began. It lay still now, dormant, waiting for the day to wake it.
“That’s where you found me,” Chaser said, reading him. “Behind this one. Riding the wake like it was made for me.”
“I remember,” he said. “Quickfin thought you were insane.”
“Quickfin was right.” She said it fondly.
“Nah. Quickfin was barely scratching the surface,” he said, and surged forward.
They rounded a corner, and swam toward the next destination Chaser wanted to show him. The Great Harbor, as she called it.
Before that, another colossal iron whale came into view, but this one was different from the others. It did not carry surface dwellers or blocks of greed across the ocean. This whale was grey and flat and full of sharp angles. A shiver ran through him. He had seen nothing like it on the surface, and yet he recognized it. It did not look the same, but it was a vessel of wrath all the same.
“Like the wreck,” he said quietly. “The one we hid inside.”
“They’re the same,” Chaser said. “That one’s still alive, younger than the one you saw. Give it enough time, and the sea takes them all down to the bottom, the violent ones and the gentle ones the same.” She didn’t seem too interested in lingering. “Come on. We’re almost there.”
The Great Harbor of the Kingdom opened ahead of them. He saw the great wooden boats along the piers of stone. He had heard of them in the old stories. Before the age of iron, there was the age of sail, where the great wooden boats ruled the sea.
He followed Chaser in between the two great piers of stone. There, a smaller pier came into view, and she swam all the way to the end of its left side. “This,” she said, “is the most important thing in the whole kingdom. I found it myself. Look.”
It was so small and hidden away that he almost missed it. A tiny figurine of the surface dwellers’ making. The top half of it was surface dweller, gazing out at the sea with his forelimbs crossed. Below, where the hind flippers should have been, it looked more like a…
“You see it?” she said, and there was none of her usual mockery now, only a fierce pride. “Look at the lower half. That’s a flipper. A seal’s flipper.” She circled him excitedly. “The old story is true, Drifter. They made this. A surface dweller who was still half seal. They remember. Somewhere in all that wanting, they remember what they used to be, and one of them made this so the others wouldn’t forget. It’s proof. I’ve never shown it to anyone.”
Drifter looked at the little half-seal figure and then at her. At the certainty she radiated from building a truth out of a small figurine. A figurine the surface dwellers had likely forgotten they had ever made. He could have said it was only a carving, but he did not.
“It’s proof,” he agreed. “Could be the greatest discovery of our generation.”
She glowed.
“I’ve made even more discoveries on the bottom,” she said. “Come on. You won’t believe the things I’ve found down there.”
She dove down before he could answer, and he went after her. Here the seafloor was its own museum, and she moved from one find to the next, explaining each with the same confidence she’d given the half-seal.
Once the tour was over, they returned to the surface. Two iron whales sat tethered in front of them, side by side. She knew these boats well. “They cross the waters all day, even during the ice season,” she said to him. “Back and forth between the peninsula and the Great Harbor, always filled with surface dwellers.” She looked at the iron whales one last time. “They’re really good for chasing. Close to perfect.”
Chapter 24: The Vow
She had more to show him. Next up was the marina, she said, where they kept their most precious boats, the vessels of pride. They swam beneath an endless platform of wood, sloped and layered in a way that made the surface dwellers want to sit and stare out at the ocean.
Drifter stopped before they reached the marina.
He could not say why. It was just something about this place. The structure stood out over the water on its wooden legs. Beneath it the water was dark and quiet. Just beyond it, past an old fishing boat and a platform of wood that reached into the sea, was the marina. He wanted to stay here, on this side, a moment longer.
“What is it?” she said, circling back.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just want to stop here for a while. With you.”
She looked at him, and whatever she saw made her let the marina wait. She came and floated beside him in the dark water under the kingdom’s reach, and for a while it was enough to simply be there.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Dangerous.”
“I’m serious.” He had crossed half the world and risked his life more times than he could count, and somehow this was the hardest part. To tell the truth to her face. “When I was a pup, I used to lie at the edge of the colony and look out at the dark water, and I thought if I just swam far enough I’d find the place I came from. The place I belonged. I went all the way to the top of the world looking for it. But it was never a place.” He looked at her. “It was a seal.”
She had gone very still.
“I belong wherever you are,” he said. “I belong to you. Not to a colony, not to the fjord, not anywhere else. You. You’re the place I was swimming toward the whole time, before I even knew you were in the world.”
For once, she did not deflect it. She did not make it into a joke. She did not end the moment before it could end her. She just looked at him. The carelessness was gone, and she wore no armor. What was left was the creature underneath all of it, the scared small seal who had decided long ago that loving anything was how you lost it.
“I told myself I’d never do this again,” she said quietly. “Let something matter this much. I watched it kill the last one. I swore I’d keep moving, keep chasing, never slow down, never let anything catch me.” A breath. “And then you wouldn’t leave. You just kept following me, a stubborn fool from the south. I swam into every dangerous thing, and you wouldn’t leave.”
“I’m not going to leave.”
“I know.” She pressed her head against his, the way she did when words ran out. “That’s the trouble with you. You’re not going anywhere. And neither am I.” She pulled back just enough to look at him, and there was something fierce in it now, something decided. “So that’s it, then. You and me. Whatever’s left of this fjord, we do it together. No more leaving. Not you, not me. We’re done being alone.”
“We’re done being alone,” he said.
And that was the vow they made in the dark. Under the spot where surface dwellers reject loneliness by sitting next to each other at night, twining their flat fins together while staring out into the sea. From up there, the lights of the kingdom are at their most beautiful. And far in the distance, high up on a cliff, sat an old fortress. The seals saw it too, and without sharing a word to one another, they felt certain that the lord of the kingdom in the fjord lived there.
“Come on,” she said, and there was joy breaking back through her voice. “I’m done showing you things. I just want to swim with you now. The whole rest of the night. Just us.”
Chapter 25: Fur Against Fur
They left the Great Harbor and the unseen marina behind, and swam out into the dark water together, two seals in love with nothing left to prove to each other.
What followed had no words in it, as it needed none.
They swam out where the lights of the kingdom could not reach. With no one watching them, nothing hunting them, and nowhere they had to be, they gave themselves over to each other.
It was nothing like the careful circling of the bioluminescent dance, when every movement had been a question. The questions were all answered now. He rolled and she rolled with him, the two of them turning through the black water belly to belly. Where she once would have darted away the instant she felt too held, now she only pressed closer. He ran his whiskers along the old scars on her flank, the ones she had earned by fearlessly chasing after the iron whales. She let him get close without flinching.
They chased each other through the dark, but it was not the chase she was named for. Before, whenever she had chased after something, she had also been escaping something else. But this was play. He let her catch him. She let him catch her. They spiraled up toward the surface twined together and broke into the night air in a single motion and fell back laughing in the way seals laugh, which is with the whole body.
For Drifter, who had spent his whole life at the cold edge of every pile of sleeping bodies, kept but never held, the wonder of it was almost too much. To be touched and not let go of. To press against another living thing and feel it press back. Not out of the need to share warmth during a cold night, but because it was him and her, and they had chosen it. The small cold gap that had been with him since the tide first carried him to a shore that was not his home, the one no colony had ever filled, the one he had crossed the entire world trying to close, he could not find it anymore. It simply was not there. Chaser had not healed it. She had done something better. She had made it so it had never been a wound at all, only the shape of a space that had been waiting for exactly her.
And Chaser, who had long ago decided, when she was a pup submerged in the blood of her parents, that the only safe thing was to never stop moving, was now still. For the first time she could remember, she was not going anywhere. She hung in the water with him, unguarded, her scarred head tucked against his. Not once did she look toward the horizon to see what she might chase next. There was nothing out there she wanted. Everything she wanted was here, in the dark, breathing beside her.
They drifted together a long while, fur against fur, rising and sinking with the slow breath of the sea.
“I never got to be like this,” she said very quietly. “With anyone. I never let myself.”
“I know,” he said.
“It’s better than chasing boats.”
“High praise,” he said, as she snuggled against his neck. Then she whispered something to him. “I wish this night would never end.”
Adrian Tornholm 