At first she thought she had found some bizarre sort of asymmetrical, deformed, giant starfish. It floated at the surface, five limbs akimbo. Its body seemed black like the abysses, but for the very tips, brownish; the shortest, roundest tip covered in red cress, small leaves drifting with the waves...
She was almost tempted to get closer and poke, except it was a good way to get eaten and fail her Huntress time. But she was so curious... Tail curled under her, toes splayed on the rock, to spring in case it moved, she tilted her head this way and that -- and then suddenly the image snapped into place, and it made sense. The cress was hair, coppery hair as short as a child's, and there were shoulders and a back, and the other limbs were arms and a -- oh.
She huddled in the tall seaweed and stared, shocked into stillness. So this was what a two-tails' body looked like? It looked like it should have been painful, like the poor creature had been cut in two from fluke to groin, and then people had pulled.
Her first impulse should have been to escape, before he saw her. Instead she felt sorry, throat tightening in sympathy. There were stories amongst the Mothers, stories never told around the men and boys, of poor, mewling babies, so grossly deformed the only kind thing to do was to leave them behind. So that the mother wouldn't kill her heart trying to keep a doomed child alive. So that maybe -- maybe -- one of those rare two-tails who lived to be adults would find it and keep it safe, even though it would never swim in the sea again.
This one had lived, though. He was big -- not the biggest male she'd ever seen, though his tail -- tails -- were short and weirdly stiff, but with large shoulders and a strong back. It made sense to Lìadan, that his upper body would grow stronger to compensate for the deformity, but it made her a little wary too. If he required assistance then she would have to find a way to provide it without getting anywhere close to arm's reach.
She hesitated for a second. The two-tails had lived to become an adult; perhaps he didn't need assistance at all and she was free to go.
...Even though he was weaponless and alone in the middle of the sea, and she could hear no calls from his pod to keep in touch over the breakers -- no calls from himself either, quiet and closed like he knew no one would be looking anyway...
Even though she had found him under the Great Dragon's trail.
Ah, curse it. She would need to breathe soon anyway. Lìadan checked her surroundings, and then she swam up, tapping her knuckles against the shell tied to her belt in cautious greeting.
The two-tails didn't turn around; he didn't even react, as if he hadn't heard. She frowned, paused -- he couldn't be dead, could he? Dead mer floated with their back up, limbs dragging around and down bonelessly. Asleep? But what was the silly thing doing, sleeping right there in the middle of open waters, instead of staying safely on his island?
She tapped again; no reaction, so in the end she cautiously, very cautiously, floated closer, and poked him with the blunt end of her spear.
He jerked and twisted to face her so fast, she immediately whirled the spear around point first, heart pounding.
There was a strange black thing strapped to his forehead, but she had seen stranger adornment amongst the pods. But she had never seen a mer with colors so intense or mismatched. His whole body was black and deep red, but his hands and face were the tanned brown of the equator, and his baby-short hair the copper-red of the pods of the Pasagas sea. Beside him she seemed pale and colorless as an Abyss wraith, and asymmetrical to boot, with the top-color smears on her tail and the blurred tail-color patches on her left arm. He was so... symmetrical. So neatly delimited.
Also choking, but that was what you got for trying to breathe underwater. Lìadan watched him struggle and break the surface, bewildered. What sort of idiot did that? Even newborns knew better.
Perhaps the Girl-Child had touched him. Perhaps that was why the Dragon... No, such a powerful omen would never be given to a cripple, to a two-tails.
Neither would it be given to a girl who hadn't even carried one child to term yet.
She surfaced as well, keeping a cautious distance between them. He most likely couldn't swim, perhaps paddle at most, but his arms looked just as strong as any man's; she didn't want to take the risk.
The series of short, aggressive sounds he made then had her draw back a little more. It was no dialect she knew, but it wasn't too hard to recognize swearing. She couldn't tell whether it was shock or aggression; it was hard to read his body language when he kept gesturing wildly and staring at her as if she were some mer-shaped fluorescent jellyfish.
And they were developing a dance; the male slipping under, Lìadan imitating him warily to keep an eye on him, him staring some more and resurfacing, only to swear again. She wanted to swim back and forth nervously; she held still, waiting for him to calm down and talk to her instead of cursing at the air all around.
He didn't calm down and address her first, so in the end she sighed and whistled sharply to get his attention. "Stop. Be quiet."
His mouth closed with an audible snap, and she allowed her eyebrows to return to a less forbidding, less Motherlike expression.
"What are you doing here?" She looked around openly; no island in sight, nothing more than a smattering of tiny reefs and breakers here and there. "How did you even get here?"
He shrugged his shoulders, grimaced strangely at her, and spewed out some gibberish. At least his tone had calmed, but she couldn't understand the first word; she didn't even recognize the melody of his accent. There were too many rolling sounds and clacking consonants. How strange. How interesting.
Wriggling in glee would be childish, so she didn't. There was so much she should do anyway. Where to start, where to start... She pointed at herself. "Lìadan." She pointed at him, arched an eyebrow in question.
He grinned; she relaxed. His grin was friendly and amused, and not all that touched in the head, really. "Arun."
He pronounced it weird, with a r that came from the back of his throat like a growl. Ah-Rroun. She copied him, tilting her head in question -- a lopsided smile, a nod. Good enough.
... Now what was she supposed to do with him?
"Where do you come from?" she asked slowly, as she looked around with open confusion.
Arun the two-tails opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. She frowned, suspicious. His dark eyes wouldn't meet hers. Now he was shrugging sheepishly, as if to say "I don't know" or "I forgot." She really wasn't convinced.
"Are you lost? You don't seem very worried," she commented softly. When he made a grimace of incomprehension, she shrugged it off, and dived to circle him curiously. His two tails kept moving stiffly to keep him afloat, and not even in unison. She shuddered to see them jerk around; it was strangely reminiscent of the fits one of her youngest brothers sometimes went through. If Arun's eyes rolled in their orbits and he started going so stiff he couldn't stay afloat, she didn't know what she would do. Could she support a thrashing grown man long enough to prevent him from drowning?
He asked a question when she resurfaced; presumably wondering what she was doing. She waved it off and sighed, watching him. Perhaps if she found him a reef that wouldn't cut his hands open...
She glanced up. In the Sea-above, the trail of the Great Dragon slowly finished disintegrating. She couldn't help but miss the tangible proof of her sighting, even though she had committed the direction to memory.
Arun babbled at her again, grinning. She thought he seemed somewhat... nervous, as if he didn't have any more of a clue about the whole situation than she did. She wondered, bewildered, if perhaps he wasn't lost at all; but short of pretending to leave and stalking him at a distance to see what he would do if left to his own devices, she wasn't sure how to go about finding that out.
She was still pondering what to do next when the water currents surged at her back, making her braids dance. She rolled to the side, lifting her spear -- just in time to see a dark gray bolt narrowly miss her. She forgot herself and broadcasted her alarm -- big, fast!
The two-tails! she realized as she fought the beast's currents. It had been aiming for the --
Arun was chiding the beast. And laughing.
Lìadan breathed out slowly and tried to calm down her racing heart. The adrenalin didn't help much, but eventually she forced it back to a more manageable rate. She surfaced to breathe back in, and stared at the two-tail and his strange beast. Now Arun was holding onto its flipper and letting it drag him around on the waves.
... Well. Perhaps it only ate seaweed. Arun didn't seem too worried that it would bite him. And when she hissed and moved away from an inquisitive beak, he smiled at her over its back like she was a silly child scared of a striped-seal cub.
"... Is this yours?" she asked, pointing at the animal as it circled her and chirped. It was surprisingly noisy.
Arun patted the beast's nose when it surfaced in a clear 'there, there, this is not a monster, see?' way, and spat out another string of would-be-reassuring gibberish. Except that in the middle there was a word that sounded almost like... 'dohfeen?'
She stared at him. The accent was horrible, but -- "Dolphin?" she repeated slowly.
Arun blinked at her, and then nodded emphatically. "Dol-pheen."
Oh. Good. Common words. She had been wondering how far Arun came from.
Common words, but who had taught him to talk? "That's not a dolphin," she protested, shaking her head. Dolphins were smaller, not even as big as a mermaid -- and maybe there was some resemblance in the head, and especially the beak and the smile, but dolphins didn't have a tail anything like a mer; they had six flippers and many fins along the sides, that were soft and tickled when you petted them. And sometimes when they thought you were their mother, they licked you.
That sleek, streamlined thing wasn't a dolphin. It was too muscular, too fast, and maneuvered too easily. And big, had she mentioned that it was big? Perhaps as massive as two mermen.
Arun didn't seem scared at all. He was petting it, with broad, confident strokes. "Hmm?"
"That," she repeated, slowly, sternly. "No dolphin."
Arun snorted at her, and caught the upper fin of the strange beast as it surfaced at his side. "Un, Dolphin."
She presumed it was a yes, since he was nodding and seemed all too amused about contradicting her. At least the not-dolphin seemed tame enough, and if it wasn't, well, its beak was too small to swallow her whole, and she still had her spear.
"... Fine. Dolphin."
It circled her, nosed at her tail end, tickling the webbing; Lìadan twitched her toes and rolled out of reach, vaguely alarmed. The beast chirped happily and moved to poke her again.
"Stop. Stop -- Arun, stop it."
... Silly two-tails was laughing at her, laughing so hard he ended up breathing water and choking. The dolphin-thing left her alone and went to hold him afloat as he coughed up water, still laughing; she couldn't help but sigh and shake her head in despair.
Now he was staring at her expectantly. She shrugged, glared briefly at the beast. Arun chuckled, rueful, and turned to the dolphin to give it -- she presumed -- a stern order. She hoped it was an order to leave her alone and not an order to bug her whenever possible, because the two-tails seemed silly enough to do so.
It was so strange, that he would be so playful. He was alone in the middle of the ocean, but he didn't seem worried. She could have hurt him a lot before his not-dolphin came back, if she'd wanted to. She had a spear, and he didn't even have a knife. And if two-tails aged as mermen did, he was old enough to have at least one mate already, or at the very least to start giving serious thoughts to finding one. Instead he behaved like a drifter.
"Arun?"
"Nhh?"
She looked around pointedly, and then looked at him again, gesturing at the sea. "Where are you going?"
He blinked. Lìadan sighed, and made swimming-fish motions with her hand, and then pointed at him. She finished with a wide circular gesture sweeping across the horizon. If he still didn't get it, she didn't know what she would do.
"Oh!"
Well, good.
"Uhh."
... Not so good. She considered his guilty grin doubtfully. Why didn't he want to tell her where he was from, or where he was going? Did he think she would lead a pod to his island and destroy it from the sea?
Sighing -- he incited this reaction a lot, apparently -- she contemplated her options. She could try to mime more questions, but apparently he felt like playing stupid. She could try to teach him her words, or learn his own, and then ask her questions, but it would take time. Or she could just grab him and drag him to an island, but the closest island big enough to sustain a colony of two-tails was several days away, and the dolphin-thing might object anyway. Besides, she didn't want to come in reach of a male, friendly or not, even one so malformed.
It didn't give her much hope that Arun seemed as much at a loss as she did.
Perhaps if there hadn't been the dolphin, they would have kept staring at each other in undecided confusion; as it was, the creature demanded attention just as insistently as one of the dolphins Lìadan knew best. It nosed her side, chirping and clicking. It didn't seem to want to bite, so she petted it warily. There was a strange hole over its head, that opened under her eyes and blew out a fine mist of droplets and air. How strange.
"Na," the two-tails called to her before her hand could rub it way up to the hole.
"What?"
He shook his head, grimacing, and pointed at her hand. Bad idea, then. She petted the dolphin's side instead, giving Arun a curious look. He touched his nose, inhaled noisily, and then pointed at the strange hole. Lìadan touched her own nose as confirmation. "It breathes from there?" It made no sense; it was like having a nose on the back of your neck. She touched her mouth and pointed at the dolphin's beak, arched her eyebrows in question. This time he mimed eating his own hand, and then rubbed his stomach with such a silly air of satiety that she couldn't help but chuckle.
"So you eat from the front and breathe from the back?" she asked the dolphin for confirmation. It nosed her and shoved itself harder against her hand. Fine, she could take a hint. She gave it more pettings.
Strange creature. Both of them.
+
"No, this one is poisonous."
Lìadan wondered how long Arun had been on his own, that he couldn't even tell what was edible and what wasn't.
"Po... zunuss?"
"... Bad. This--" she pointed at the plant he was holding-- "is bad. Ew." She made a little grimace of disgust as emphasis. He chuckled, repeated 'bad', and tacked on another word in his gibberish that she carefully repeated. Hopefully it was two-tails for 'bad' and not for 'you look so very silly when you make faces.'
They had been gathering plants and little shrimp and crawlies for a while now; but even though Lìadan had been pointing out anything he could eat, and even demonstrated by plopping a few pieces in her mouth, Arun still hadn't tasted anything. Perhaps he didn't like greens. Perhaps he wanted to bring back what he found to... someone; everything went into little nets at his belt.
He hadn't caught any fish either, even the slow ones; but then with the awkward way he swam, it wasn't surprising. She still couldn't look at the wriggling, out-of-synch appendages without shuddering.
A couple of times, he had directed one of the not-dolphins -- it turned out they came as a pair -- at a fish, but while the beasts caught the fish with incredible ease, they only bothered to bring it back one time out of two at best, to his great frustration. The rest of the time, the not-dolphins wandered off in the reefs, or circled the two of them and whistled curiously, or disappeared to do the gods only knew what. Fortunately for Lìadan, the second beast, which so far she could only identify because it was a slightly darker gray, wasn't as aggressively friendly as the first, and hadn't asked to be petted yet; still, she made sure to keep them both under watch, in case they decided to check if she tasted good as well.
She watched as Arun made a hand gesture she didn't know, and one of the creatures immediately came to his side and offered its dorsal fin. The not-dolphins seemed to have no trouble at all dragging a grown man along, and if they were so easily tamable that one cripple could easily keep two, they would be an asset to any pod. She wondered why they weren't more widespread, since they seemed to like the temperature of the water just fine. Maybe they just ate too much for it to be convenient.
She wanted to ask Arun where his pod was, but she didn't know how. If he was a drifter, why wouldn't he eat at least a little? He might need to give up his food to distract a shark or something of the sort. Or perhaps he had just finished gorging himself and wasn't hungry at all... In any case, he seemed quite happy to dive with her and pick up weird things, as she could see when they surfaced and he asked for their names.
"... That's a rock."
"Hm?"
"That. Rock." And not even a pretty rock, or one with a funny shape. It went into his belt anyway. Lìadan tilted her head; if there was anything special to the rock, it was beyond her ability to see. "Perhaps the Girl-Child did touch you," she mused. In that case, she really couldn't just leave him to fend for himself. The goddess would be displeased if Lìadan refused help to one of hers.
"What?"
It was one of the words the two-tails had learned the best, but his accent was still horrible. She smiled and shook her head. "No, nothing."
She followed as he dived again, though she kept out of reach -- even if he looked about as threatening as a seal pup. Arun never went very deep, and never stayed under long; it wasn't hard to keep up with him. Engrossed in whatever else he had found this time, he didn't listen as she tapped her shell in warning; she had to rap his knuckles with the dull end of her spear to keep him from picking up a pricklebug.
One of the dolphins clicked at her and moved quickly between the two of them; she swirled to avoid it, tensing up, waiting for a bite.
Before it could move toward her, Arun shoved at the dolphin to get its attention, and tugged on its dorsal fin. Lìadan had learned to interpret the gesture as 'tow me back up'; once again the animal obliged, clicking at her a last time before it propelled itself toward the surface, the two-tails clinging to its fin.
She kept her distances this time, only her eyes above the surface as she stared at the dolphin warily.
"Lìadan?" Arun's voice softened; there was a laugh in there as well, a tone one would take toward a child who got a scare doing something a little silly. She pouted, briefly; it was his fault for not listening to her. Was he entirely deaf underwater? She thought she had seen him react to noise under the surface, but now she wasn't sure anymore.
"Bad. You were -- you are bad, Arun. Come," she added, gesturing before diving again.
It was so frustrating to be limited to a handful of words. Yes, no, you, me, this, what, good, bad, stop, rock, fish, seaweed, crab, water. Though she still wasn't sure if he had meant to ask lava-warmed-water, or surfacing-current, or spraying-wavelet, or cove-stilled-water, or even basin, lake, sea, ocean. Water-element, maybe?
He followed her with the dolphin, though the beast stayed between the two of them and stared at her suspiciously. Lìadan gave it a wary look, uneasy; the second dolphin, the darker, less friendly one, was circling around the three of them. She steeled herself, ignored them to dive to the bottom, and found the pricklebug again.
The second she brushed it with the end of her spear, the round, squishy little thing transformed into a mass of stingers long like her hand. She gave Arun a stern look, but he wasn't watching her. He was staring at the bug with wide, fascinated eyes. Both of the dolphins were staring along with him, chattering and whistling animatedly between them. She shoved the pricklebug into a crevice with her spear; she didn't want Arun's animals to try to eat it, or even to look at it too closely. Heck, she didn't want Arun to look at it too closely. He seemed to have all the sense of preservation of a child.
At least he seemed to understand now, if she took in his duly chastened expression -- and ignored his laughing eyes.
The less shy dolphin nosed her, and tugged playfully on a lock of her hair before swimming through the loose curve of her tail. Hopefully it meant that she was forgiven.
They kept going along the reefs, Arun exploring all the nooks and crannies in his reach. She still didn't understand why he was picking up half of what he picked up, especially after she told him he couldn't eat it or braid it or anything; but it wasn't like she could take his things from his hand and scold him. He was old enough, really he was. Perhaps he wanted a collection of things from the sea, to bring with him as a proof of how far he'd gone. ... Yes, that made sense, and perhaps she was even right, not that anyone could tell her otherwise. It wasn't like anyone knew the rituals of the two-tails, after all.
"Lìadaaan! What?"
"Aragne. Bad. Not food."
"Ohh. That? What?"
"Silure. Bites!"
"Whoa! Heheh. Dolphin food. You-me food?"
"Not now that they've chewed it up, it isn't."
She worried that she was wasting her time, that she hadn't chosen right. The Shaman had told her the Dragon hadn't come for her, but seeing something so extraordinary still had to mean something, didn't it? She remembered the way; a delay wouldn't make her forget. But it bugged her to stay here having fun when there might have been a task that needed doing.
In the other hand perhaps minding Arun was supposed to be her task.
And in the tail-hold perhaps the Shaman meant it when she said the Dragon's message was to do what she wanted to do, even if keeping company with a scatterbrained cripple and watching him play with rocks was it. That she would be in the right anyway.
It was the trouble with omens, it was so hard to figure out how literally they should be taken.
It was her Huntress time. Her selfish time. But it was sort of wrong to choose a two-tails to assuage her loneliness; almost like cheating. If she couldn't take being on her own then it meant her time was over, wasn't it? But she could easily stay alone a lot longer, if she felt like it. She really could.
She just... didn't feel like it. It wasn't like she could make a pod with a cripple and his two pets anyway; the end of this strange in-between time would come soon enough, as soon as Arun found an island to live on.
It couldn't have been literal, she told herself. She wasn't meant to follow the Great Dragon's trail to the end; it was just a direction like any other, one that suited her best because it was the least-traveled. But if she went much further straight onward she would skim the haunted places, and surely the Great Dragon couldn't ask that of her.
One of the not-dolphins nudged her, and she smiled at it, letting her hand trail along its smooth hide. Yes, that direction suited her. She took hold of its fin and allowed it to tow her after Arun and its other podmate, grinning at the beast's effortless power. Little creatures scattered under them, a few eels slithered away; clouds of small fry made shadows dapple and dance over her skin.
She hadn't expected to circle yet another reef, a silly pleased smile still on her face, and come face to face with the Great Dragon itself.