"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
"All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?"
The trembling takes many more heartbeats than it should, and all of Beqanna is shaking. The violence is much louder, more ruthless, of a grander scale than any of the shakes that Tephra is used to. Trees wail their foliage and crash into one another, rocks tumble and crash, possibly trapping anyone located in caves, opening up other routes. The volcano seems to be bubbling, and the aquatic sorcerer knows to move away from any lava streams.
Into the water.
But the violence is not over yet. The land is reforming, and Tephra's southern neighbors - Sylva, Loess, and even that peninsula meadow attached to it - it's all drowning. Emerald orbs find the sinking lands as he walks the ocean floor like he has a million times, and notes a small rocky landbridge where once the highest peaks of Loess had stood. Notes the sunken grass and the few daring crustaceans and reef fish that come to explore this new territory. Notes the small animals that didn't quite make it in time; some swimming, some drifting lifelessly. Nature always finds a way; sharks and other water hunters take them and clean the area.
Into the water...
The water elemental continues and finds that something new has risen, too. Fields of sea-grass and kelp, too well-kept to be natural, come into view as he strolls on, occasionally swims a part over reefs. He has no fishtail to guide him, so he is not a quick swimmer, but his hidden gills and otherwise-flat-laying fins now keep him steady in the water. His oily fur will rid itself of the water as soon as he surfaces again, but so far, he has far too many interesting lands to explore.
As he nears what seems to be more of a settlement, he stops. The single-horned male does not wish to cross boundaries he may never come back from, but the bland curiosity is there. Tephra is an island now - best be polite with whomever the new neighbors are. The stoic male has lived too long to push buttons by being impatient. Instead, he calls out to the nearest creature he can find - provided that someone would be near, perhaps investigating their new borders.
"Hello? Is anyone here?"
--ahti
"You are not one wave, you are part of the ocean."
appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
She is near. In all honesty though, the only reason she is near is because she’d just gotten back from investigating the strange earthquake herself, and she has already been too far from her Queen for too long. It is vastly easier to just stay close so she can easily be found when summoned, but it’s been unusually difficult to stay there when she has so many questions. Things have changed, and she needs to understand what their situation is now.
Surely Helice has guards all around Baltia right now (she always does), and Rezza imagines that if she ignored the stranger someone else, far more trained than she, would find him soon enough. Yet curiosity gets the better of her, for she cannot recall a time that someone new could come and join them in their waters. He has no tail or obvious magic, and yet clearly he can breathe just as surely as she can.
Unlike him, she looks like she belongs in the water. Her skin glows faintly, and her usual jellyfish tentacles swing in her mane. They are not menacing, though they certainly could be, should she be angry enough. Her lower half is in the shape of a long tail, her preferred method of moving about the water if she is not in her jellyfish form.
She swims into his view, assuming (perhaps wrongly) that her vision underwater is still better than his with her Baltian eyes. But then again, she does not know enough about these stranger or their magic to make any assumptions. ”I am Rezza,” she says, not unkindly, though certainly with some reserve. In her century of life (longer, really), she cannot recall a time that a stranger came, metaphorically speaking, knocking on their door, and she does not entirely know how she feels about it now. ”Who are you?”
"All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?"
His peripheral vision registers a dark, moving shape somewhat akin to a large fish or sea mammal, which quickly - very quickly indeed - moves through the water to reveal an equinesque shape. Truly, he'd always thought he was well-adapted to the water; he had moved water and walked the ocean floor for decades before even setting a single foot in Sverige, the place that had mutated him so that he had jokingly been nicknamed Narwhal; fins and horn and all. But this species he can only admire for her grace in the water.
(Had he lived in Beqanna longer than this, he would have met shapeshifting horses, nereids, and kelpies for sure - but he has not, not yet, and so the one nearing is the first melding of horse and fish he has seen in his life.)
He bows his neck lightly, threading the line between a greeting and deference with well-practiced perfection. "My name is Ahti," he tells her when their eyes meet again, "and if I've guessed correctly, your new neighbor." He nods vaguely behind him (northeast), indicating that that is the direction he had come from. "I'm told Beqanna is not new to land-shaping earthquakes, but perhaps you were less accustomed to the idea of moving." An understatement, sure, but one she could ignore if she wished; he usually leaves room for interpretation and diplomacy. His world is now occupied with more than just a few superior water-dwellers and doesn't feel like provoking a kingdom full of them. Besides, the aqua male has never really bothered with kingdoms - only people are his interest.
--ahti
"You are not one wave, you are part of the ocean."
appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
Rezza nods at his name, though offers no more on this particular topic. It is not that she is a mare of few words (what a terrible diplomat she would be when her job was to appease others with said words), but that she is a mare who does not waste words (for again, what a terrible diplomat she would be if she ran her mouth too much). Instead, she simply moves on. ”You speak as if you are new to this Beqanna,” she says, something of a question in her tone. ”Though you are correct. We are familiar with the idea of lands shifting all the time. The earth shakes and the lands shift and change. We see it happening, often, before land dwellers ever know. But the sea. The sea has always been unmovable, and yet…well, here we are.”
How was it that the sea could be moved? How was it they could occupy one place and suddenly appear in another? How was it that the ruins had been grafted into a land to which they do not belong? Lands shifted regularly, crack and eroded and changed and most Baltians lived long enough to see the process and think little of it. But this? This was something else entirely. ”We are also not accustomed to land dwellers being able to walk within our sea. How is it you are here?” Again, her tone, though a bit sharp, is not unfriendly. It is inquisitive, albeit demanding, though she is used to being the voice of an even more demanding Queen. The rest of her appears relaxed enough though, tail moving lazily in the water to keep her near this stallion that should not, though somehow is, at the edge of her kingdom.
"All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?"
She doesn’t run her mouth, which in Ahti’s mind only earns respect. Too many times has he spoken to the younger ones, and listen to them ramble on and on; even the few that didn’t, seemed to get uneasy with too long a silence, a feeling instilled by the aforementioned youngsters-in-a-rush. As if belonging could only be achieved through words, and many at that.
No, the elder male knows better. He knows to look past the words and into said words’ meaning; there is a fine art to choosing just the amount that is necessary. The female might not think herself a good diplomat, but there is a wisdom to her demeanour that comes from living long enough, to not be in a rush.
”I’ve arrived a few seasons before you lot,” he agrees to her unasked question swiftly. ”Beqanna is not the first realm I’ve found myself in quite on accident, and I suspect it might not be the last. When magic is abundant, places, when shifting, become only just that.” He shakes his head lightly when he thinks of the Stockholm Zoo and of Atollon. Kalaallit seems to be fading from his mind already, as does, to his shame, Vellamo’s face. It’s Enfys who comes to mind instead. But even her, he hasn’t seen for so long.
Her statement of the sea moving has him puzzled a bit, too. He nods in contemplation, about to say he must conclude some form of magic was involved - worth investigating later, perhaps - when she moves on to state she is not used to land-dwellers on the sea floor. Her tone demands an answer, which in this context amuses him a little. However, he has nothing to hide. ”There’s plenty of magic in Beqanna. There are those with elemental attributes, like me,” for the sake of it, the water elemental pushes some of the water next to her back and forth, reversing the natural current. All it does is perhaps tangle up her mane, if even that, but she should feel the change. ”But there is more. Horns and wings, scales and feathers, gills. Magicians, genies, shifters. You’ll find the land is as rich as the ocean in this regard.” It’s only fair to warn her, right? ”I suppose I won’t be the last to investigate.”
--ahti
"You are not one wave, you are part of the ocean."
appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
She spends plenty of time talking. She also spends plenty of time not talking. Both are equally fine by her, and she doesn't mind silence. Silence has a purpose and a place. Besides, she spends so much of her time as a jellyfish that she really ought to be okay with it. She doesn’t exactly speak in that form, after all.
She appreciates that he neither wastes words nor minces them either. He answers her unasked question as any good diplomat would, simply because it is a harmless enough question. That’s the trick, learning to answer only what is beneficial to answer and how to skip past the things that ask for information you aren’t willing to give in such a way that no one ever realizes you never answered in the first place. Granted, she doesn’t actually need them to answer aloud and her questions usually provoke a mental answer that she can grab. Though, at least at the moment, this is not that type of conversation.
“May I ask how many places you have found yourself?” she asks, both curious and a bit repulsed at the idea. Her ocean-bound home has never moved before, and residents did not simply disappear. This first time seems like quite enough. It may perhaps be a blessing in disguise, though she cannot be sure yet. Blessings and curses often look a lot alike.
He answers her next unasked question easily enough, and she feels the current as he moves it around her. So they do have magic much like what Baltians had, though something about it still feels like it might be different. ”Is there a source to this magic?” she asks, curious. They had one, long ago, but she has never actually known a living source of magic. Was Beqanna like Baltia in this too?
”Come,” she says, an invitation and not a demand, though she nods her head in the direction of Baltia. She will show him parts of it, for it seems only fair. Parts, of course, being the key word, and then she will escort him out. She doesn’t yet trust Ahti, though she isn’t worried about him either. Mostly though, she is pretty sure Tsilutsuli will eat him or Helice will slaughter him should he be caught anywhere near the heart of their home (or possibly anywhere, but she ought to be able to talk them out of it if she is careful where he goes). But there are things she can show him that perhaps will be of interest all the same.
