I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the sun.
It was another clear day in the middle of the ocean — the sky an uncomplicated blue, the kind that exists without qualification, the kind you only find far from land where there is nothing to interrupt it. The warmth settled onto my skin with a thoroughness that felt almost like attention, and the wind came across the water constantly, sweeping my shoulder-length hair back and carrying salt on it, which I could taste at the tip of my tongue if I breathed in slowly enough.
The clothes I wore were light — a black fitted jacket cut in the saree style over a flowing black skirt with slits on both sides, all of it magically conjured and designed with the specific logic of a life lived on a ship deck: comfortable, practical, offering freedom of movement without sacrificing the particular rightness of the style I had always preferred. I was happy with the choice.
I stretched my arms out to either side and simply held that position for a moment, taking in the sun and the wind and the salt air in as much quantity as I could manage simultaneously.
The only jewellery I wore was the bracelet — 'The Bliss', the silver-stoned piece with the carved dragons flanking the enchanted stone. I had been told, with a firmness that suggested it was non-negotiable, never to remove it. Especially not at sea.
Why especially not at sea? I looked at it with mild curiosity.
The stone caught the sunlight and returned it softly. The carved dragons on either side of it were so finely worked that each one seemed to be mid-motion rather than frozen in place. It was a beautiful thing, and it felt — it had always felt — like something that belonged to me in a way that went beyond having recently purchased it. Like recognising a room you have been in before.
I felt no particular worry. I could not, in this moment, remember what my worries even were. Whatever I had been carrying before the sea and the sun and the wind — it had been set down somewhere, perhaps at the harbour we had departed from, and the distance between me and it had grown steadily with every day of sailing.
It was a blurry thing, how I had ended up here. The general shape of it was accessible — a decision had been made, an adventure had been wanted, and Arvid had presumably agreed, because I was here — but the specific texture of events leading up to departure had softened at the edges the way things do when you are no longer paying attention to them.
It didn't seem important. Look at the ocean.
The clear blue expanse extended in every direction as far as I could see, the surface moving in long, rolling patterns that the ship met and parted with a steady confidence. The vessel itself was far from small — elaborately constructed, broad and well-built, carrying a considerable number of passengers with room to accommodate them properly. The Silver Eagle guild emblem was painted on its hull, and the ship had been given a name: 'The Lady'. She moved through the water as though she knew where she was going and had no doubt about getting there.
All the people aboard were members of the guild. In that sense, I was the outsider. But from the first day they had treated me as though this were not the case — welcoming, present, generous with their time and their company, ensuring that I rarely had an unoccupied moment unless I actively sought one.
Today I had actively sought one. And I was deeply, genuinely glad of it.
The solitude was restorative in a way that company, however warm, could not be. I loved each of them, after a fashion. But I was also a creature who had spent a great deal of time recently being very close to other people's presences and concerns, and the particular quietness of being the only person on the deck at this hour, with no one requiring anything of me, was extraordinary.
Seagulls arced overhead from time to time, calling to each other with their sharp, careless voices. Once, a pod of dolphins appeared off the port side — surfacing in a smooth sequence, breathing, going back under — travelling in the same general direction as 'The Lady' with a complete indifference to her presence.
Everything was new. Everything was interesting. And the ocean, I had discovered, contained more wonder than I had been prepared for.
The first time I had gone over the side and swam down into it — really down, past the light-filtered surface zone and into the deeper, colour-rich world below — I had stopped and simply floated there in my dragon form, barely moving, looking at things I had no names for yet. Coral in formations that had been growing longer than most kingdoms had existed. Fish in colours that seemed too deliberate to be accidental, moving in schools that turned and fractured and reformed as one fluid thing. Light that came from the surface and was transformed on the way down into something ancient and green.
It had taken my breath away. Which was not, given what I now was, a thing that happened easily.
The memory of it made the wanting rise up again, immediate and uncomplicated.
I had been on the ship for several days. I had done this already — several times. Each dive had been more satisfying than the last, and there was no particular reason to resist the impulse now. Something had changed in me since leaving Arpa: a loosening of the careful self-consciousness I had always carried about how I appeared to other people. It had not gone entirely, but it had lifted enough that impulses like this one didn't require the same negotiation with myself that they used to.
Who was there to object?
I leaned over the railing and looked at the water moving below.
Then I stepped over it.
The transformation happened as I fell — bones restructuring mid-air, scales covering skin in a flowing wave of black with silver at the edges, wings erupting from my back with a sound like something enormous unfurling. The conjured human form dissolved as the dragon form asserted itself, and I threw a single powerful wingbeat downward to redirect my fall upward instead, careful to angle away from the ship so that the displaced air didn't catch the rigging and cause problems.
I climbed. Higher and higher, until 'The Lady' below me was a small, neat shape on the surface of an immensity — the kind of perspective that reorganises your sense of your own significance in a useful way. Even in this form, even with all the capabilities that had come with it, the ocean was simply larger than me. The world was simply larger than anything in it. That knowledge had a particular quality — not humbling in a diminishing way, but humbling in the way of things that are simply, honestly true.
I turned in the air and flew ahead of the ship, putting enough distance between us that the waves I was about to make wouldn't reach the hull.
Then I folded my wings and dove.
The water took me in. The surface broke and closed above me and the world changed — the sounds of wind and sea replaced by the deep, resonant underwater quiet that is not silence but something more absolute than silence. The salt water was warm near the surface and cooled as I went deeper, and I let myself go deeper still, past the lit zone where the coral was and into the heavier dark below, where the pressure wrapped around me like something solid and the light from above became a distant, wavering suggestion.
I stopped. Drifted. I closed my eyes.
Whatever had been pressing on me — whatever accumulated weight I had been carrying without quite identifying what it was composed of — it diffused in the water the way ink diffuses in water, spreading outward until it was too dilute to be felt as a discrete thing. I rested in the dark and the pressure and the cold and felt nothing in particular except the specific physical relief of being entirely, temporarily unlocatable.
When I opened my eyes, there was a shape above me, descending.
A person. Swimming downward with the deliberate, unhurried efficiency of someone who has done this before and knows how to move through water. The light from the surface framed him in diffuse gold, softening everything at the edges, and for a moment he had the quality of something seen in a dream — graceful in a way that seemed disproportionate to the medium.
I watched him come toward me.
'He's here again,' I thought, with the fond exasperation that had begun to feel like a natural response to his presence.
Every time I dove deep, he followed. Without comment, without making an occasion of it — he simply appeared at some point below the surface, swimming toward me, and accompanied me back up when I eventually decided to return. I had never asked him to. He had never explained the compulsion. It had simply become the established pattern.
He drew closer, and my eyes adjusted to the underwater light, bringing his features into focus.
Long silver hair moving with a slow, water-current grace. Eyes that were the exact blue of the ocean on a clear afternoon, watching me with the steady, unwavering attention I had come to associate with him — that quality of looking at something and actually seeing it, without the glaze of half-attention that characterised most people's ordinary gaze.
The rest of him was equally unreasonable in its effect, which I was by now accustomed to and had adopted a policy of simply acknowledging without elaborating on.
He looked, suspended in the underwater light with his silver hair drifting and his blue eyes fixed on mine, like something the ocean had produced of its own accord — a seaborne figure from a story about a world before the one we currently occupied.
I looked back at him and said nothing, because underwater, there was nothing to say.