Ondine

“Joah? Do you hear me?”

On the rocky point, Joah turns her head. "Nareth?" she asks in wonder, her voice floating away in the crash of the waves.

“Yes....

“I am awake.

“I am returned.

“I am... new.”

“Where are you?” Joah whispers.

“Near… I can see you all. I must rise slowly. I have been down so long.”

Joah closes her eyes, her thoughts drifting toward the deep. “We thought you... dead.”

“No... just dreaming.”

*****

I sat on the promontory near the Toxian shoreline at dusk. Clouds dotted the horizon as I watched the sun set through the haze that seems to hang forever over the City. I wrapped my arms around myself because the air was brisk and cold, although most of the snow in the City had melted. Here and there, an icy spot of shadows still held a crystalline drift. A short span away, two young girls stood near the surf, one brown skinned with chocolate eyes and hair, the other lighter skinned with eyes the color of sunflowers and black hair falling to her shoulders.

The brown girl seemed poorly dressed for a walk along the beach. She wore an old-fashioned black dress with a stiff white collar, all strangely formal and out of place. The girl with the sunflower eyes was rather less remarkable, dressed in a sweater, jeans, and sneakers. As I watched the pair, I thought it odd that any parent would bring a child into the City, much less allow two girls to wander freely through its hungry streets and toward the sea.

The black-haired girl stooped to pick up some half-buried sea glass and the girls examined it for a moment, standing just at the water’s edge where the brackish water licks unnoticed over their shoes. I watch the sea, and my thoughts wander to the events of the prior evening.

We had been out further along the promontory, when the air suddenly had filled with a high-pitched trilling sort of song. The sound had been beautiful, but almost painful to hear. I had heard her calling, drawing me along. Tonks, Constantine, Pen and Kryss had followed. Tonks watched the sea, her wings unfurling and feathers rustling in the night wind, her eyes scanning the surface and the depth of water. I stood beside her, feeling my hair whip about her head and peering into the deep. “The Siren...." I had asked, “Do you hear her?” Tonks had simply nodded, while Pen paced around her in circles, watching his angel more than the water, nervous about what was to come. Constantine and Kryss had stood in silent sentry.

A sudden movement drew my attention back to the pair nearby me as the yellow-eyed girl plucked the sea glass from the sand and threw it out into the water. She seemed agitated. She was talking talking loudly to the black-haired girl, who seemed nonplussed. “Who are Father Kraken and Mother Hydra supposed to be?”

“Mother Hydra and Father Kraken are the Pillars of the Sea,” the brown girl replied, “The Keepers of the Abyss, Mother and Father, destruction and conception and everything that lies anywhere in between. In the days of void and shadow, before the gods had grown weary of nothingness and pulled the land up from the sea….”

“I get the picture,” the black-haired girl said with annoyance. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

I watched the pair, carefully studying the brown girl who seemed to know so much of the deeps and the Ones who live there. She in turn studied the black-haired girl, finally shaking her head the way a teacher might shake his or her head if a student was being particularly dense.

“The Keepers have many names among the tribes of men,” the brown girl finally said. “Names are only tools….”

The Keepers.

I stared openly at the girls.

The evening before, Nareth had risen from the sea. I had thought her lost, yet she rose from the water, her hair streaming seaweed against scaled skin. Gill flaps had fluttered as she stood on the same shore. They had fluttered and then lain flat before melting into her.

She’d been reborn of Mother Hydra, consort of Dagon, whom the Old Ones name Cthulhu… or so she’d said after she’d regained the ability to speak, ejecting a gout of seawater and mucus from her mouth.

I tried to shake the cobwebs from my mind as I watched the girls, watched the surf, and drifted on the sea of my thoughts. The girl with the yellow eyes turned swiftly on the brown girl, her black hair lifted by the breeze.

“I wish you’d shut up and leave me alone,” she said as she began to cry. “Go away and never come back.” She pivoted, her sneakers making small wells in the sand, and before the brown girl could say or do anything, she strode away the beach, heading back toward the City.

The brown girl merely turned, looked knowingly at me, and smiled before walking on.



Quotes and paraphrases are from Daughter of Hounds, Chapter 5, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, c. 2007, used with permission of the author.