carl@fire

"Must not have been too big of a wave if we didn't even feel it that much," remarked Willelmus as they trekked along the underground passage.

"I'm sure the Hero and the Archbishop—not to mention all the castle mages—will have no trouble protecting the castle," said Emaurri with an overly-confident tone.

Isemeine didn't comment.

They walked a little farther.

"Um, My Lady," Willelmus said, his voice hesitant, "this, uh, item we're carrying—"

Emaurri tried loudly to shush him.

"I know we're not supposed to talk about it," Willelmus continued, perhaps emboldened by the sense of intimacy fostered by the enclosed environment, "but is she… Was she a person?"

Isemeine stumbled slightly, catching herself before she was in any danger of losing her footing as the question echoed along a line of thought that she'd been desperately trying to avoid since she'd caught sight of it once again just a short while earlier. "No, of course not," she said, clinging to the idea in her mind. "It is not a she, merely a construct made of magic to…" she trailed off as a subtle rumbling began to sound from behind. "Faster," she called at once, picking up her own pace.

Military training had been strict for her: as a princess, unless she was called to command a military unit in a time of war—an impossibility considering the number of better-qualified and more experienced officers—her sole responsibility at all times was to keep herself safe at any cost.

Investigating strange noises or waiting for them to approach was explicitly not what she should ever do if she wanted to remain safe.

The princess's mind was a disorganized mess, nothing resembling the usual order and logic of her thoughts. It's an it, right? It was never a person. It couldn't have been.

The rumbling grew louder, ominous.

Isemeine hopped as she removed the fashionable leather court shoes from her feet while she walked. She took them in one hand once they were both off. "We run!" she shouted. "It's not far, hurry!" She had no idea what was following them, but she would rather face it under the suns than in a cramped tunnel. She showed no fear, however. Her time with her manners tutor had remedied her of that weakness.

The soldiers clanked along behind her, their breath heavier under the armor and the weight of the thing they carried.

"Drop it," Emaurri called in an urgent tone that was accompanied by a rustling. "Better to—"

"Do not drop her," Princess Isemeine shouted, not looking back over her shoulder in order to maintain her pace. It's an it. It's an it. It's an it. It's an it. She repeated the mantra over and over in her mind. Please let it be an it. Her breathing quickened.

She caught sight of the door in the distance.

The rumbling behind them had reached a terrifying volume.

Isemeine reached it first, her hands moving deftly to operate the mechanism that kept the hidden one-way door shut. It sprang open once opened, and she rushed through into the now-blinding light of day. Her hands kept a hold on the heavy, moss-covered side of the small hill, pulling it wide for her companions as they hustled through after her. "To the side!" she shouted, directing them to run with her to the side of the door as it slammed shut.

They sprinted a few paces across the field just beyond the city walls outside the nobles' district, heading towards the rear of the large building that housed the Creature Marketplace.

A deafening boom rang out, and the ground trembled.

Isemeine finally lost her footing, tumbling to the ground in a manner not becoming of royalty. She looked back in time to see the metal, moss-covered door that they'd come through land distantly at the other end of the deserted, grassy field. Water gushed out of the opening in a torrent that showed no signs of stopping. Her eyes were wide as she stared at the exploded hillside that had nearly been her death.

Pressurized water was one of the most powerful non-magical forces in the known world.

It was just as she'd learned from her dwarven tutor when she was younger.

She looked up past the edge of the city walls to the cliff where the castle still stood, encased completely by the edge of a wall of water so high that she could not see its top, so wide that she could not see where it began. The end of the wall passed over the castle at last, and the water continued onwards, charging down the river without losing speed.

The bright blue, fractured barrier over the castle faded out instantly, and the castle still stood, unharmed if a bit wet.

The still-living girl wasn't sure if that was a good thing, but her mind wasn't working properly at that moment. She wondered idly what would happen to the towns along the river, or whether the wave would have enough force behind it to reach the distant ocean. She didn't have the mental energy to give serious consideration to either matter at the time, however.

Isemeine allowed herself a moment to recover from her near-death experience before she turned to the soldiers with worry creasing her brow. Did they—

The two men were collapsed on the ground, still gasping for breath.

The bundled thing lay on the ground next to them, seemingly undamaged.

Isemeine sighed with relief for reasons she most definitely did not understand.

She refused to.

"Willelmus, Emaurri," she called, forcing her voice not to tremble as her hands were still doing against her wishes.

The men looked over.

"For your perseverance, I'll see that your reward is doub—quadrupled after this," she said, staring them each in the eye for a long moment. "I'll pay it out of my own purse if I must."

Both men nodded, one with an expression of gratitude on his face, the other confusion.

Halimeda floated deep beneath the surface some distance from the sediment-covered delta at the shoreline, sensing out the position of a steel-hulled steam-powered warship above her. She knew that it was steel-hulled despite the distance.

She could smell the steel.

The massive vessel was accompanied by no fewer than two dozen smaller ironclads which were, according to the scouts she'd sent up to scan with their eyes, still using the masts and sails which had yet to be fully phased out of the humans' shipbuilding techniques. She imagined it was the cost.

With humans, it was always about the cost of things.

The general had a long memory, and she recalled a time when she'd captained a ship similar to the small ones. A time when she'd not been a general, but simply a low-ranking officer who was eager to see and experience the world. A time when trade had flourished between the sea and the land, enriching the lives of all cultures involved, and a small band of seafolk had decided to crew a ship for the sheer novelty of it.

A time when there was still blood, yes, but much less of it.

Her latest burst of clicks told her the human fleet was holding position, more or less. They were bringing to: neither setting off nor preparing to aweigh anchor.

She pondered her course of action. As one of the seafolk's prized generals, it was only slightly unusual for her to personally surveil the fleet as it drew ever closer to a small outpost nearby, one of the many inhabited for the sole purpose of providing an early warning of incursion.

The seafolk had learned after the humans' initial betrayals. They were greedy for land, for money, for creatures they might use as pets, for others they might hunt for entertainment…

Above all, however, the seafolk had come to realize that what the humans thirsted for was victory.

The seafolk generals were not idiots; longevity had a way of broadening the mind of even the most jelly-brained among their people. They gave the humans what they wanted in order to prevent deeper incursions. They fabricated their own losses.

It was truly a beautiful means of doing battle, Halimeda had always thought. They would feign engagements all along the line held near the human harbors, hurling their massive, coral and seastone-crafted javelins towards the shore to skewer who they could, subtly weakening the underwater supports on piers and docks to snap and crumble in the coming days, and silently inducing a corrosive type of algae to take root on the undersides of the tough metal hulls the humans had been so proud of.

Then the seafolk would rise to the surface, shouting curses and invectives at the soldiers as they scurried around trying to mount a response to the surprise assault. Inevitably, the humans would turn their cannons towards the annoying sea-bound creatures who yelled out their taunts in their strange, accented version of the humans' own language, and the firing would commence.

That was where the genius of the seafolk shone brightest.

How could cannons fired at a distance possibly harm the most agile and speedy dwellers of the sea? Even the slowest child could out-swim a prized racehorse, as they'd so ably demonstrated in by-the-sea bets during the peacetime of old. No, the idea itself was pure fantasy!

But the humans, perhaps from their sheer arrogance, still believed in the supremacy of their weaponry.

The scale, fin, and sometimes even barnacle-covered seafolk clicked their amusement as they dove beneath the waves. Their supporting supply corps would release their payloads a moment before the munitions struck the surface of the sea, and the result was what looked, felt, and smelled like the remains of the audacious raiding party, but was actually nothing more than the destroyed remains of a group of fish or whales tended to by the seafolk as part of their food source. They included some of their aging and flawed weapons and accouterments for added realism.

Could the ruse work at sea, away from shore?

Of course it could.

The seafolk battered the humans bloody, destroyed their ships, then swam away mostly unharmed, laughing the whole way. What absolute fools the humans had to be to challenge the seafolk in their own territory when they were at a disadvantage! Sending large ships and fleets out to attack? For what purpose? What can a ship with hundreds of sailors do against an equal number of seafolk at sea?

The idea was comical, and Halimeda let out a click of amusement when she considered the prospect.

It wasn't as though the sea-dwelling peoples had any strong desire to attack the land-dwellers, either. They were quite happy to stay in the water where they would not dry out and grow uncomfortable from the stiffness that ensued. Sure, the more bellicose of the disparate groups that formed what the other races had termed the "seafolk" had made their attacks in the past—typically with some specific goal in mind—but it was never about expanding their lands or attempting to gain dominion over a place they had no interest in occupying.

The trouble came for the seafolk when the humans began developing magic to aid in their quest to annihilate the sea races.

The seafolk had magic, true. Halimeda herself was capable, given enough time, of casting a spell that would draw together a powerful hurricane over the course of several days. Weather manipulation was a specialty of the seafolk, generally speaking. Halimeda's people, the Shells, were adept in such matters, at the least.

Weather was a tricky thing to use in the heat of battle. When the humans sent their spelled warriors to the bottom of the sea—or worse, their Heroes—the seafolk had little to use as a counter. What could they do against a man who could move as fast as they, who had no need for breath, who could cut through the nearly indestructible armor of an old Shell warrior with ease?

The humans had never won battles with their ships, but they had been learning and adapting to the ways of marine warfare with alarming speed over the past decade.

That was when things had changed.

No longer did humans attack simply to kill. No longer did they attack occasionally just to capture some of the more treasured oceanic beasts that none who resided beneath the waves dared to eat lest they rouse the ire of the old deities.

Now they attacked to capture the seafolk themselves.

Halimeda didn't know why it was happening, but it was unmistakable that warriors bearing great, enchanted nets were becoming commonplace now whenever the humans attacked.

This was worse than simply being killed. This was an unknown fate.

None had ever returned once they'd been taken away.

With the introduction of magic, so too did the balance shift in favor of the humans. They guarded their ships with it; no longer could the seafolk corrode their hulls or even damage them. Their cannons fired faster projectiles which created bigger explosions, managing to reach even the deepest depths of the ocean and lay waste to entire cities. They traveled faster atop the waves, too, able to strike and retreat before the sea-dwellers could ready their defenses.

That was why Halimeda was here.

They'd been losing too severely and too often of late. Fewer and fewer of the seafolk were killed, true, but an even greater number were taken—snatched away, never to return.

The generals had all discussed the current state of things in their small groups and cliques. The seafolk were no united, singular people. They banded together for assaults and in the case of a larger-scale attack such as this. This was a fleet that could subjugate and capture an entire reef.

Halimeda clicked in distress. She needed a miracle. Failing that, she needed inspiration, an idea. Something that would—

The shelled general paused. Her click had revealed something that puzzled and alarmed her. She hesitated.

Why was there suddenly so much water approaching her position from the shore?

It was water, she was sure. Her click had returned to her instead of vanishing as it did when she faced the surface and there was nothing above her. She felt that much.

But…

Halimeda had seen the great waves at sea. She'd rode them for fun as a child, clicking her happiness as she was tossed about harmlessly. She rode them again more recently, too, when she used the wave she'd summoned with her magic to wreck a small fleet of human scouting ships as they searched for another of the seafolk's homes.

This didn't feel like a great wave.

The old sea general moved closer, her interest in the ships above postponed.

Suddenly, an incredible suction swept her—against her will—towards the shore.

Halimeda panicked. Was this some trick of the humans?

She'd been foolish. Of course they would learn to control the water!

Her hubris had been her defeat, just as it had been for the humans for so long.

Except…

There were no nets, no magical cages.

She was thrown around within the water in a way she hadn't experienced in centuries, feeling powerless for the first time since she'd joined the then-smaller group that defended her small home from sea behemoths and hostile seafolk tribes. Her clicks sounded out frantically, but none returned to her.

It was as if she was not in the sea any longer, but instead inside of an infinite ocean that expanded in every direction.

She moved upwards—or at least, she moved in the direction that she thought was up. Her instincts hadn't failed her, and her head broke out of the water. She stared around with eyes that could not blink.

She was riding another wave. It was a massive wave, far larger than any she'd ever encountered before. She was facing the shore, where the river that ran into the land-dwellers territory had once joined to the sea.

Only, there was no longer a river. An empty, wide ravine existed in its place.

And Halimeda was high above the land, far higher than she'd ever been before even when she'd been atop the crow's nest in her old ship.

She struggled, moving to look out the opposite side of the wave as it somehow continued onward.

The humans' ships were caught in the wave. Such was its speed that, rather than rise up and over it as they might have otherwise given the time to prepare for it, their vessels simply flipped over and were eaten by the wave as it continued farther out.

Halimeda was stunned.

She didn't know how it had happened, but it was the miracle she'd been hoping for.

This time, anyway.