Authors note:
The story of two seals comes to an end. It’s been a novel (no pun intended) experience, writing it. I hope the story can mean something to others, the way it meant something to me. Thank you for reading.
Chapter 26: Freya
They had drifted a long while, in the twilight before dawn, when Drifter remembered.
“You told me once that they killed Freya. The walrus. You said they carved her likeness in stone, as a warning to everything that lives in the sea.” He nudged her. “I want to see it. I want to know if the surface dwellers did a better job on her than they did on us.”
Something passed over Chaser’s face, and for a moment he thought she would say no. Then she said, “It’s not far. Come on. But it’s not like our monument. Ours was an accident. This one they meant.”
She led him to a new section of the fjord, tucked between a serene land full of green trees and colorful dwellings, and a barren wasteland that reminded him of the place with the sleeping titans. Further in he saw more boats than he had ever seen in his life, endless rows of them, resting side by side in the dark. For a moment his body told him to turn back. Chaser turned right, away from the boats, and stopped near a sloped wall of large rocks that rose from the sea. She signaled for them to climb it.
It took Drifter a while to reach the top, where Chaser was waiting for him. And there, at the end of the wall that lay flat on top, with the sea on either side, he saw her. Freya. She was far bigger than the carved seals, and it made him feel very small. It looked like she was sleeping. It didn’t feel like a warning, he thought quietly to himself.
“I was here,” Chaser said.
He turned to her.
“The day they did it. I’d been in the fjord for a season by then, and I knew her well. She wasn’t like me. She did not fear anything, but she wasn’t reckless the way I was. She just trusted them. She’d haul out on their little boats to sleep in the sun, like they were her own colony.” Chaser’s voice had gone flat, the way it did when she was trying to hold something painful at a distance. “More of them came every day to look at her. They really loved her. I used to watch them. And I thought, that’s the proof, isn’t it. That they’re not bad. Look at how they love her.”
Drifter said nothing.
“I was in the water, not far from her, the morning it happened. It was early, so the crowds that came to see her were still sleeping. And then a few of the surface dwellers came out in a boat. They got close to her. One of them held a long iron branch in its arms. Pointed it towards her. And there was a sound.” She stopped. “Not a net. A sound. Louder than the iron whales, louder than anything. It came across the water and went straight through me, and when it was over, she was just gone. They didn’t even have to touch her.” She was quiet for a moment. “I learned something that day. The nets, the boats, those are the threats you can see coming. If you’re careful, and if you swim fast enough, you’ll be fine. But you can’t outswim their dark magic. The sound of death. Nothing in the world can outswim the sound of death. They had marked her for death, because they loved her too much. And death found her.”
She looked up at the cold stone face of the giant who had only wanted somewhere warm to rest.
“That’s what the likeness is for. Not to remember her. To remind the rest of us. Stay away. Don’t get too close. Don’t be loved by them. Because they can take you whenever they decide to, and you will never see it coming.”
Drifter noticed that the light of day was almost upon them. A familiar wariness moved within him. She was still looking at Freya, somewhere far away in a memory he did not want to take her away from. So he stayed beside her, his fur against the cold stone and against her. He let her have her grief, as the light behind them slowly began to drive away the darkness.
Chapter 27: The Last Wake
“Drifter,” she said. “I’d like to watch the sunrise with you. Watch it rise over the castle in the distance. From our spot.” She turned to him, faintly lit by the coming day. “Come watch it with me. Then we’ll find somewhere quiet and sleep the whole day through.”
Drifter looked at the fading darkness with weariness. “The light’s coming. The surface dwellers wake up with the light. You said it yourself, the harbor’s no place to be once they’re up.”
“We’ll be under the walkway. They can’t see us there.” She had already made her decision. “And when we’ve had our sunrise, we slip out underwater, and they’ll never know we were there at all. Trust me. I’ve done this a hundred times.” She nudged him gently. “One sunrise. That’s all I’m asking.”
He could not end the best night of his life with a fight. She wanted one more moment of beauty. It did not ask too much of him.
“One sunrise,” he said.
They left the memory of Freya behind, and swam for the harbor. The sky was brightening little by little as they crossed the open water, and that was when the vessel of pride came across their path.
It was one of the surface dwellers’ most precious vessels, pale and sleek, cutting through the water toward the marina. A wide white wake unfurled behind it, standing up out of the dark sea like something alive. Drifter had watched her ride the wakes of boats since the first moment he ever saw her. He had never once joined her.
“Chaser,” he said with a smile. “Let’s ride it.”
She turned, surprised. “You want to chase a boat?”
“I want to chase one with you. Once. Before the night is over.” He was already moving. “Come on. Show me how.”
Something washed over her face, an expression of pure delight. Not once in all her seasons of chasing boats had another seal wanted to chase one beside her. “Took you long enough,” she said, and then she laughed and shot past him, and the two of them tore through the water after the proud vessel, into its churning wake.
It was glorious. For a few breaths it was the most glorious thing they had done all night. The white water stood in walls around them and they flew through it shoulder to shoulder, thrown and caught and thrown again, and Drifter understood at last why she had spent her life doing this. It was not madness. It was the closest a seal could come to outswimming everything. Grief and memory and fear, all of it left tumbling in the white behind them. He would have followed that boat to the end of the sea.
Then the boat stopped moving. The wake collapsed into the water and drained away, and the warm joy he had felt a moment before went with it, replaced by something colder.
The surface dwellers had seen them. He could hear them now, up on the boat. There were four of them, and they were wrong in a way he had no word for. Their voices were too loud for the hour before dawn, loud and slurred and shapeless, sounds that fell out of their mouths sideways. They waved their bottles at the sky. They stumbled into one another and barked their laughter at the stumbling. He had seen surface dwellers move with fear, and with wonder, and with the flat busy purpose they carried on their boats. He had never seen them move like this. As if the stormy sea itself were inside them.
“Chaser, I think we should go.”
But she was curious, drifting closer to the low flat deck at the back of the boat, the one that sat almost level with the water. The surface dwellers were leaning over it, reaching down and making sounds at them.
“They’re not afraid of us,” she said. “Look at them. They want us closer.”
“I don’t like it. They’re not like the others. Something’s wrong with how they move.”
“They’re harmless. Look.” And she did the fearless thing she always did, the thing that had never once failed her. She hauled herself up onto the low deck, into the surface dwellers’ own world.
Drifter remained in the water, every instinct screaming at him to flee, to be anywhere but here. But then she looked back at him from up on the deck, unafraid, and he could not let her be up there alone.
He followed her up.
Chapter 28: The Deck
The deck was hard and dry beneath him, and some spots were sticky. Up close the surface dwellers were enormous, and they stank of something sharp and sour. They stumbled around like newborns, and their loud sounds crashed over the two seals without a trace of gentleness. One of them put its flat fin on Chaser’s head and pressed down hard, and she flinched. Two of them held something small that kept flashing the seals with a harsh bright light that stung his eyes. They were laughing, the harsh barking laugh, and crowding closer. When Drifter tried to turn back toward the water, one of them moved to block him, and would not let him pass.
They were not going to let the seals leave. Not until they were done with their fun.
Chaser was not curious anymore. She was cowering beside him, and a sound came out of her that he had never heard from her before. A deep, frightened warning growl. Drifter felt his own rise to meet it. The two of them backed together, fur against fur, hissing at the lurching giants. The bright things flashed them again, and the giants only laughed harder.
And then one of them came closer to Chaser, yelling something to the others as it bent down beside her. More flashes. The giant lost its footing, and fell over her, crushing her under its weight.
She cried out in pain.
He did not decide to do it. The giant that had fallen on her, laughing even now, was right there beside him. She was hurting underneath its weight. There was no decision involved. The giant’s throat was next to him, fully exposed. It was pure instinct.
Drifter went for the throat.
He had never bitten anything in anger before. He had lived his whole life without giving in to aggression, biting only into the smaller things he intended to eat. But none of that mattered the instant she cried out. It drove him forward with his jaws open. He felt his teeth close around the giant’s throat. He bit down with the full strength of his jaws, and thrashed violently.
The metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth, thick and sickly, nothing like the clean cold blood of a fish. The giant made a sound he would never forget, one full of pain and shock, a loud gurgling scream. Drifter held on to the throat with the full weight of his body, twisting, the way he had broken fish too big to swallow whole. He felt tissue tear between his teeth. The giant convulsed and beat at him with its great limbs, and the blood poured out warm over Drifter’s face and into his eyes, and still some animal part of him refused to let go.
When he finally released, the giant rolled off Chaser at last, clutching its own throat. The blood came through the gaps of its flat fins, painting the deck red. The sound it made was no longer a scream, but the pain in it was still there.
Drifter hung there over Chaser with the giant’s blood dripping from the fur beneath his mouth. For a moment a terrible and savage joy filled the entirety of his being. It was a feeling that did not belong inside a seal. He had hurt the thing that hurt her, and some old buried part of him sang.
Then the part of him that was still himself recoiled from the taste in his mouth, and from the warmth running down his face. The gladness turned to horror, because he had never wanted to be this.
The deck erupted.
The others were shouting now, and all the careless laughter had gone out of them. One had thrown itself down beside the bleeding one and was pressing something white against its throat, and the white went red almost at once. The others turned on the seals, and their movements were no longer slow and clumsy. They were sharp and precise. He had drawn their blood. In their eyes the line had been crossed by him, and whatever they did now, they would do it as the wronged ones. As if the blood on their deck had nothing to do with the weight that had crushed her, and the flat fins that had refused to let them leave.
Chaser was trying to rise beside him, hurt, as if the weight that had come down on her had broken something.
He pressed himself in front of her, snarling. His gentle life hidden behind a mask of blood.
One of the giants reached down into the boat. It rose up with something heavy and glittering, a bottle, and raised it high above its head. The bottle shattered into a thousand glittering pieces against Drifter’s blood-soaked head.
Chapter 29: The White
Everything became white.
After, the world would not stand still or hold together.
There was a hard deck against the side of his face, sticky and tilting. There was a ringing, high and thin, that blocked out the shouting and the sound of his own racing heartbeat. There was blood in his eyes, his or the giant’s, he could not tell, and the light came through it in broken colors.
He was somewhere far down inside himself, deep down in the depths, and the surface was a long way up.
Sounds without their pictures. A blow landing somewhere on his body, dull and far away, as if it were happening to some other seal. The giants moving, towering above him. A long and dark branch held up against the sky. Then an argument in their ugly slurred sounds, one voice barking louder than all the others, and the long dark thing was lowered, and set aside. He did not understand it. He understood almost nothing now. The ringing grew louder.
The bleeding one lay stretched out on the deck not far from him. Its sounds reached him between the waves of ringing, wet and pained, and each time they came back they were smaller than before. Then, at some point he could not place, they did not come back at all.
Then pieces of her.
They were doing something to her. He could not keep his eyes open for long, and what he saw came in fragments, out of order, refusing to assemble into anything he understood. Something black, pulled down over her face. Her struggling against it hard, the way she fought everything. The fighting making it worse. The silver, going round and round her throat. She had no face anymore. Just the black shape where her face had been. Frantic movements. The black shape turning from side to side. He could not move toward her.
They lifted her up. A splash. Something had been thrown into the sea. The place where she had been was empty.
He made a sound. He did not hear it over the ringing.
Then they were over him. There was more of the black. They meant to do to him what they had done to her. The thing came close to his face. The black.
Something in him was not finished. Some lost ember still glowed hot beneath the ringing. The same flame that had gone for the throat, the spark that refused to let her go, bursting into flame again.
His teeth found a giant’s hind flipper, low, where the false fin ended, and he bit down to the bone. A scream tore through the ringing. The weight came off him. The deck opened. Drifter dragged his ruined body across the blood and the broken glass to the edge, and over it, into the cold sea.
The cold pieced some parts of him back together.
Chaser.
She had gone down into the deep. He forced himself after her, down through ever darkening water. The blood washed off his eyes but the ringing was still louder than the sea. He could not see her anywhere. But he could feel her. Her panic came to him through the water, through his whiskers, through his skin. The frantic, broken rhythm of a body fighting everything and nothing at once.
He found her near the bottom. The black skin was sealed tight over her face, and the silver ran round and round her throat like a net drawn narrow. She could not see him with her eyes, and in her terror she did not know him. When he came close she fought him too, because to her he was only one more thing the world had sent to hold her down. Her heart was going like a bird dragged underwater. She struck the seafloor, turned over, and struck it again, raising the silt around her until the whole world was a grey cloud of terror.
He tried to reach the black skin with his teeth, but her thrashing made it impossible. Every moment cost her air she did not have. He did not want to watch her die down here, on the bottom of the fjord, fighting the dark alone.
So he did the only thing he could. The thing that had worked once before, on a night she never knew about, when he had crossed a line drawn in the rock to sit beside her drowning dreams.
He pinned her down against the ocean floor with the whole of his weight, put his head down where her ear would be, and gave her the name.
“Chaser. I’ve got you, Chaser.”
She kept resisting.
“Chaser. You’re not down here alone, not anymore.”
Her movements slowed.
“Chaser. I’m not going anywhere.”
And somewhere in the black, she heard it. Not the words, maybe, but the thing beneath it. The voice that had decided, long ago, to stay. Her body went still under his. And in that one moment of stillness she bit through the black skin from the inside, and the last of her air rushed out past them toward the surface in a flurry of silver bubbles, and the cold water rushed in where the air had been.
Drifter tore at the opening she had made. He ripped through the rest of it, tore the silver loose with his teeth, and the black came off her whole and drifted away over the bottom like a jellyfish made of darkness.
They looked at each other for the length of a single heartbeat, two seals on the floor of the fjord with no air left between them.
Then they rushed for the surface.
Chapter 30: The Sound of Death
They broke the surface together and gasped, filling their lungs, and the air tasted better than any fish ever could.
They had made it, he thought. They had survived the wrath of the surface dwellers. Now they would slip away underwater, the way she had promised, and never come back to this corner of the fjord. It would just be one more thing they had lived through. One more story for whatever rocks they slept on for the rest of their lives.
He saw the vessel of pride in the distance.
It was not where it had been. While the two of them fought the black thing on the bottom of the fjord, it had crossed the last of the water and reached the marina, the place she had meant to show him, the place they never got to see. It lay tied against the wooden platform among its kin.
Two of the giants were up on the walkway. They carried the third between them, and Drifter understood what he was seeing at once, in his body, before any thought arrived. The carried one made no sounds. Its head hung loose, and its long limbs swung with every step the other two took, the way kelp swings in a current. The way nothing alive has ever moved. The white thing at its throat had gone entirely red, and no one was pressing on it anymore. They carried it away the way the sea carries driftwood.
Drifter’s mouth still carried the taste of it. Of what he had done.
Only one surface dweller remained on the boat. It was limping from the wound he had given it. It stood on the deck gripping the railing, swaying, staring out at the water.
Then Chaser pulled back from him, and he saw her eyes, and they were not the eyes of a seal that had survived. They were the eyes from the wreck. The eyes of the pup in the red water, watching the black and white take everything, unable to move. Her eyes were fixed upon the vessel of pride.
“No,” Drifter said. “No. We go. Now. Underwater. Away from here. You promised.”
“They don’t get to win.” Her voice was all wrong. “I let it win once. When I was small. I floated there and I let it take them and I did nothing. I’m not that pup. I won’t be the one who floats there and lets it happen. Not again. Not ever.”
“Chaser, please. There’s nothing to prove. Not to me. Not to anyone. Let it be enough that we’re alive.”
“It’s not enough!” The fear was all the way through her now, and she was not fighting the giants, she was fighting the thing that had owned her since she was a pup. The helplessness. The floating still while the world took everything. “If I swim away now, I’ll be afraid of them for the rest of my life. I can’t live like that. I have to go back and leave on my own terms, or I can never leave at all.”
He was losing her. He could feel her slipping toward the boat the way the tide slips toward the shore, and no argument he owned was going to hold her. So he reached for the deepest thing he knew about her, the thing she had given him under the willow tree, and he held it up between them, because he believed it could save her life.
“Then float,” he begged. “You floated once, and you lived. It’s the only reason you’re still in the world. So float now. Do nothing. Be still, and let it pass, and be afraid, and stay alive. Stay alive with me.”
He knew before the last word had left him.
Her whole face changed. Not to anger. To something quieter and far worse. The look of a creature that has just been shown its own reflection by the one it trusted most.
“Floated,” she said softly. “Yes. That’s what I did. That’s what I’ve done my whole life.”
“Chaser, that’s not what I…”
“It’s the last thing I will ever do again.”
She turned. She was already swimming, fast and fearless, straight at the thing that frightened her, the way she had swum at every iron whale since she was a pup. And he understood, too late and all at once, what he had done. In trying to hold her back, he had named the one thing she would rather die than be. His words caught her like a net.
He went after her, because he had never once been able to do anything else. He did not call her name again. His words had already done enough.
Up on the deck, the limping giant saw them coming.
It bent down into the boat, and it rose with the long dark thing in its arms.
The thing was thin and straight, like a branch grown out of iron, and at the end of it was a small black eye. A perfect, round, hollow eye that looked out at the world the way the carved seals on the moon-beach had looked at them. Drifter had never seen one before. But he knew. It was the thing from her story. The thing that had reached across the water one quiet morning and taken Freya without ever touching her. The dark magic of the surface dwellers. The iron branch that brings the sound of death.
The giant laid the iron branch across the railing and pressed its face against the side of it, and the black eye came around and looked at the water.
But the giant could not hold it still. It stood on one good leg, and the ruined one buckled beneath it, and the boat rose and settled against its ropes with the slow breathing of the tide, and whatever storm the giants had poured into themselves that night swayed it further. The black eye wandered. It slid across the water, from her to him and back again, drifting between the two seals like it had not, or could not, decide.
Chaser stopped.
She lay still in the water in front of the boat, and she stared into the hollow eye without blinking. She was not floating. Anyone in the world could have seen that. She was standing her ground the only way the sea had ever taught her. On her own terms. Unafraid. So that whatever happened next would happen to a seal who had chosen to be there.
Drifter put everything that was left of him into the water.
He did not think about the eye, or the sound, or the kingdom turning gold behind them. He thought about a rock with a line drawn on it, and the width of a fin, and how he had crossed that distance once in the dark and sworn that she would never go under alone. He surged the last length between them, to crash into her the way she had crashed into him at the wreck, to carry her down and out of the eye’s wandering path, and he reached her.
The very moment his fur touched hers, the world made the sound.
It did not build, and it did not warn. It arrived whole, from everywhere at once, a crack that split the morning down its middle. It went through the water, and through their bodies, and through the stone of the kingdom. The hills across the fjord threw it back, so that for one breath there were two sounds, the sound and its ghost, calling to each other over the water. Every gull on the pale slope went up into the air at once, screaming. In the colorful little dwellings on the islands, lights came on, one after another. The whole kingdom woke, just as she had told him it would, at the first light of day.
Where the two seals had been, the water was empty.
They had struck and rolled and gone under as a single animal, one shape of fur and scars and blood. Not even the giant on the deck, swaying over its iron branch, could have said which of them the black eye had chosen. Perhaps it had not chosen at all. Perhaps, in the end, it was only the sea, taking what it takes. The way it took a pup’s parents in the cold water long ago. The way it took a curious seal in a net and kept nothing but the bones.
On the surface by the marina, a small red bloom spread, and thinned on the tide, the way the blue light had bloomed and thinned around two dancing seals at the moon-shaped beach.
When the sun rose over the fortress, a dead seal was sinking slowly toward the bottom of the fjord.
Another seal, the one cursed to live, swam down after it, into the dark where the morning could not follow.
The fjord silently watched them sink into the deep. It had taken a seal that morning, and it has never said which one.
And somewhere in its waters, the story goes, there is still a seal that carries two names, and answers to neither.
Adrian Tornholm 