SSCS 02: Installment 24 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 24 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“I can teach you the First Hum, now, while you cook,” the priestess said. “First, though, do you want to know how your parents died?”
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 24: 21.0221-0227
“What?” Mina almost dropped the pot she’d just ladled rice into. “They died in the wave.”
“But do you want to know why the wave came? The night when the tides got away from us? All of us. The whole long line of the spires lost our hold.” Gran-Tom said this, but then made another shooing motion with her claw, sending Mina back to work. It gave Mina a reason to look away, though almost this time she didn’t want it.
“The sea is vast and changeable,” gran-Tom began, “and the night of the great wave there was already a storm blowing up far out, far, far out in the middle of it, where even the spires can barely reach. We could feel it there, though, tugging at the Moon and the tides, spinning the ocean beneath it. Each spire alone, we made ourselves ready with our acolytes beside us, those who’d mastered the seventh song at least. I was here with Carlynn up at the top of the tower, where we could see the grey of the storm smudging the edges of the horizon, at least until the sun set and the moon rose. The Moon that night came up through a fog bank, but then shone bright and clear, and in our tower, barely any wind had reached us. The two of us sang together, Carlynn and I, and our voices sounded sturdy, the echoes of our sister spires filling in the low sounds from far away.”
Later, Mina would find herself hoarding every word of the story that gran-Tom spoke now, going over each like it was some precious gem to be pried out and plundered, examining it for flaws and hidden truths. But for now her head was buzzing with the new pictures being painted into it, holding answers Mina hadn’t known she’d been seeking. Just to see those pictures while also forcing her hands to follow the path of her cooking were as much as Mina’s brain could manage right now. There wasn’t room for anything else.
“A distant storm and a tide night. But we didn’t realize how much the storm had grown,” gran-Tom continued. “And I know now that that was true for nearly all of us. Only gran-Linni and gran-Sol, the very two farthest east, told us later they began that night in a struggle. The rest of us sang our songs like normal, felt the tides swelling like normal. The Moon was three fists high on the horizon before I felt how fast the waters were moving, but even then neither of us were alarmed. Carlynn’s folk were from the deepest parts of the ocean, the great waters moved through her blood like the air in your lungs. And that may have been part of the problem. She rose and fell with the tides – more than me, even. They never threatened her.
“Then all of a sudden, from a nearly still night, the winds picked up, surrounding the spire in a great gale. The storm was upon us so fast that we were already several measures into the rising song before we realized we must switch to the song of holding. That is a terrifying moment, to realize you have the song wrong. But we made the change together, the waters and the Moon pulling against our voices, but with two of us we could hold fast. I know that, at some of the spires, that was the moment their acolytes were lost, lifted too high by the waters, their souls flung out to sea before even the worst of it came.
“Even still, like so many of the rest, Carlynn did not survive what happened next. The holding song is a tug-of-war with the tides, you know. You have to move forward and back against it, and it uses almost all the strength you have. If you cannot anticipate what will come, you will be swept under. We had been singing an hour when I felt a thrum, just in the tips of my claws, just… And so I took a breath. But Carlynn didn’t breathe with me – she was already falling with the waters, that great, distant shudder pulling and moving on the deepest part of her, and no strength left from the struggle already fought to do different. And then the wave came.
“By itself, it would have been a terror. It is sure some would have been lost, no matter what. But after fighting the storm, and with so few of the acolytes able to sense the shift in the earth beneath the ocean that had started it, it was a massacre. We lost our acolytes, and we lost our hold on the tides. And so that great wave rushed outward, rushed up to the land, and carried your parents away – along with thousands of others.”