Riverlilly

by William Young

FEEL THE AIR GROW HOTTER!

  DRY YOU OUT AS DRY THE LAND!

  PEEL YOUR SKIN AWAY WITH SAND!

  AND STEAL YOUR BLOOD FOR WATER!

  Jai opened his eyes, squinting in pain. Ceder was kneeling over him, holding his head. The chanting stopped and the voice of their master said coldly, “I see you.”

  Strange shapes emerged in the turbulence of ash; gnashing teeth and the tips of horns, forked tails whipping back and forth, eyeless reptilian skulls, all growing larger and more solid as the storm expanded, sweeping up entire dunes with every rotation. The demonic apparitions separated from the tornado and flew out from the whirlwind for brief bursts before being sucked back in.

  “Syn,” said the voice of Sorid, exultant.

  The red dragons screeched and thrashed at the disembodied voice of their master. Their forms coalesced and crystallized as the water in the tornado mixed with the whorling sands, spawning short-lived hordes of blood-red dragons that glittered like diamonds in the night.

  “Eat them all,” commanded the merciless voice of the magician.

  A familiar voice cut through the storm, “EEEEEAT THIIIIIS!”

  II. Lighting the Way

  Accompanied by stampeding thunder, rain erupted from the sky and charged into the red tornado like an infinite host of cavalry. The half-solid dragons snapped at the rain as if they could bite chunks of liquid from the air, but the driving torrents plowed through the insubstantial demons like light through darkness, dissolving tails, wings, and teeth with endless sheets of clear water.

  A streak of green with white wings soared into the last lingering dragon skulls, obliterating them one at a time with thunderclaps like cannonballs. Everywhere the green streak flew, rain followed in waves thick enough for fish to swim through.

  For several minutes Jai and Ceder had no idea what was happening above them. They knew only that the chanting melted away one word at a time, then the heat dissipated, and finally the shrieking wind faded. The river was flowing again.

  “Was that the Oldest Fish in the Sea?” Jai asked Ceder in a breathless whisper.

  She shrugged. “I think we have something else to worry about at the moment.” The rainstorm immediately presented a new threat: the boat was filling up fast. The waterline was up to their ankles. They tried to clear the water out with their hands, but the rain fell faster than they could work. Astray jumped onto the middle bench and looked at the sloshing water in the bottom of the boat with obvious misgivings.

  The river bloated to twice its normal width, rushing with the speed of a charging bull. Foaming rapids formed at every turn as though the current itself was mad with bloodlust.

  While the children were stooped over, bailing out the rainwater, Astray bit a yellow petal from his necklace and released it into the wind. It floated away like a glowfly.

  Lightning struck, illuminating the world! In the afterglow, Jai and Ceder saw that the Sands of Syn were being washed away for as far as the eye could see. Only the tips of the tallest dunes remained, rapidly succumbing to the relentless rainfall.

  The current doubled back on itself in the downpour and carried them away from the sea, running to the black mountains. The water ahead of the boat was strewn everywhere with broken rocks sticking out like a graveyard of giant bones.

  Lightning flashed again and again! Wherever the jagged bolts hit the water huge explosions of sparks were thrown into the air, lighting the way forward. Ceder grabbed her oar and fended off the craggy rocks as they approached, ferrying the boat left or right with no time to think, acting on impulse.

  Jai cupped water out of the boat as fast as he could. At one point he noticed what looked like a pair of purple tree leaves floating away from the boat. “Why!” Jai leaned over the side of the boat and scooped up the unconscious butterfly before he drifted away. Not knowing what else to do with their delicate companion, Jai tucked Why inside his satchel and resumed bailing water out of the boat, though the effort seemed preposterously in vain.

  Lightning hit the water a dozen fins in front of the boat—before they sailed directly through the geyser of sparks the children saw that the river was flowing straight for the edge of a ravine, gushing over the side to disappear.

  There was no time to turn. In the final moment before the boat reached the edge Ceder pulled her oar out of the water and knelt beside Jai. “Ready?” she whispered.

  III. Down the Middle

  Without pause or punctuation the boat launched over the ravine through all-encompassing darkness. They seemed to float in midair weightlessly, without time or space, and then, to Jai and Ceder’s immense surprise, they landed almost immediately. Looking back, the ledge they had sailed off was no more than ten fins high; looking forward, their new location was far less preferable.

  The mountains formed a circle around them to all sides, except for the small crevice through which the river entered the enclosure. The rushing water fell into a violent whirlpool that sucked every drop down its center into unknowable oblivion.

  Jai grabbed Ceder’s oar to combat their acceleration toward the center of the whirlpool. The paddle was ripped out of his hands at once and sucked away into the vortex. “We’ll never make it out alive!”

  “Why did the King and Queen want us to take the river?” Ceder cried frantically. “Were they trying to kill us?”

  “That’s it!” said Jai. He took the waveglass compass out of his satchel—the gift the King and Queen had left them. The directional needle was going haywire.

  “What are you doing?” Ceder had to shout to be heard.

  “Cross your fingers,” said Jai, and he threw the compass into the eye of the whirlpool.

  The rain ceased at once.

  Lightning struck behind them, sending a detonation of water and electricity into the air. The boat scaled closer to the center of the vortex, only a handful of rotations away from falling into the gaping black hole.

  Astray stood in the prow, digging his claws into the pink wood for purchase. He roared into the cycling storm, though his voice was drowned out by the rushing water pounding against the cylindrical escarpment.

  Jai and Ceder slumped into the bottom of the boat. Whatever help Jai imagined the compass might have provided, he had been wrong. There was nothing else they could do.

  “Ceder!” he shouted in her ear.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  “I have to tell you something!”

  “What?”

  “I—”

  Lightning struck into the very heart of the whirlpool, crackling and fizzing like a wasp caught inside a jar, and then the entire brilliant bolt vanished down the vortex. At once the swirling water sped up and began to glow with a bright yellow phosphorescence. The amplified spin threw the boat to the outer reaches of the enclosure, where it smashed against the walls of the cliff, threatening to splinter apart.

  Astray continued to stare ahead with the lethal concentration of a dog chasing his own tail. There was no more lightning, no thunder, no rain.

  The boat smashed into the mountains and Jai saw a hairline crack appear along the bottom of the hull—another jarring hit would split them in two, right down the middle.

  “Jai, what is that?” Ceder pointed to the center of the enclosure.

  Something was dangling down from the air above. The children had to squint to see what looked like a thread—or some manner of line—shimmering in the glow of the supercharged water. A gleaming hook hung at the end of the line, two or three fins above the mouth of the whirlpool. The hook swung like a pendulum over the vortex. Impaled on the sharp tip was a wriggling glowworm.

  The children guessed what this meant at once. “Somebody up there is fishing!” they shouted, laughing like a pair of lunatics at the absurdity of the idea.

  Instinctively they understood this was their only hope, but neither Jai nor Ceder could think how to use the line to their benefit short of trying to jump onto it, which would surely be a suicidal endeavor. Jai bellowed into the sky at th
e top of his lungs, hoping to be heard, but there was no reply.

  Then Astray leapt from the boat.

  Ceder reached out for the cub before she could even say his name. The glowing white patch on his back streaked across the darkness like a trail of incandescent paint brushed across the very air. He caught the dangling hook with one claw before the line swung back over the whirlpool. His tail was so close to the black hole that living shadows were sucked out of his fur by the insatiable vortex. When the line swung free, Astray pulled himself up. In one acrobatic, curling leap, he skewered a pink petal onto the hook and then launched himself back into the air. He landed with perfect timing in the prow of the ever-circling boat.

  The fishing line reeled away into the blackness above.

  The spinning water decelerated, the lightning trapped within fading. The boat veered to the center of the whirlpool.

  Streaking down from the darkness an impossibly long serpentine creature with a head like a half-moon scythe plunged into the boat, looped underneath the middle bench, and coiled itself into a pulsing knot. The creature stretched up, trying to hoist the boat out of the water. Its body swelled like one big vein pumping too much blood.

  The vacuum was more powerful—the boat dropped several fins in a freefall, stretching the serpentine creature down like taffy, but rather than descend into the black hole, the hull formed an unexpected plug in the vortex like a cork in a bottle. Freezing water shot everywhere, diverted from its natural course. The huge creature reared up again. When the boat finally pulled free of the suction a sound like an upside-down burp burst out in the enclosure, echoing in a round.

  Silently their serpentine savior lifted them to safety. Soon the whirlpool was too far below to see. The world went completely black. All Jai or Ceder could feel was the spinning of the boat as they rose into the darkness.

  The Year One,

  When the fisherman arrived at the forest he had still not located the river. And yet, the river was not his ultimate goal—any body of water would do. If he found so much as a babbling brook or a small pond his beloved would be waiting for him; it did not matter where.

  The forest floor was matted in thick fog. The fisherman wandered among the trees like a ghost in the gray mist, listening for the sound of whistling, which he knew would lead him to water. At last he heard it, a song consisting of three pitches. He followed the tune on the wind until it led him to a clearing. He glanced around in surprise—he had not expected to find this place again so soon. The river was but a moment away, he knew, but the clearing would serve his goal much better, if what his beloved had told him about the forest was true.

  In the center of the clearing was a stone tower, thirty fins tall. He indulged himself to a rare smile—he would be able to change everything, after all. He would be able to see his beloved again and be with her always, forever.

  The fisherman dashed to the tower and vaulted to the top. But for a narrow catwalk around the edge there was no ceiling, only a pool of dark, mystical water. He stared at his reflection—this was not a place where she could meet him, he knew at once; this was no ordinary well. The surface was the face of midnight, a mirror, or perhaps a doorway. The fisherman took a meditative moment to arrange his thoughts and then leaned over the well and made one simple wish.

  He was no longer alone. Three fat, green frogs sat around the edge of the wall. One of them grinned, most hideous. “You would Be with her? Did you really need to waste a wish on such a simple thing? Will she not love you without our help?”

  The middle frog licked its lips. “Always and forever, stranger? I didn’t know you were the sentimental type. But we can’t give you eternity. Are a thousand years not enough? There are laws, you see.”

  The fisherman heard the whistling in the forest abruptly stop. He knew the sudden silence meant the tree that sang had been unmade. His suspicion was confirmed when he looked up to the second frog and saw in its webbed hands a most unusual key. That could only mean one thing: the river was closed again, shut off from the rest of the Land of Lin. There would be no escaping the forest, not without his friends. His friends had all been washed away.

  The third frog nodded to the water—the last answer to the fisherman’s wish would be the most cruel. The fisherman looked down in the well. What he saw drove him mad.

  In the water was a vision of his beloved. She was waiting for him, as she had promised, on both sides of the forest. She was looking for him, she was straining to see any sign of him near the river. But the forest was now closed, the fisherman knew. He would not be able to leave. His beloved would wait for him until her eyes bored holes in the river itself like screws into wood.

  Much to the delight of the three frogs, the fisherman keeled over. A single drop fell from the small hole in his forehead and landed in the water; through the mystic well, his beloved felt his pain. Her face appeared on the surface for a flickering instant and the fisherman saw her heart break as neatly as an icicle snapping off a roof.

  He felt water leaking down his face, though he never wept. The shell he had made for his heart fell apart like shattered glass and he collapsed. At the very instant that his dark mask melted away like ice held over a fire, his lips touched the mystic water, a kiss for the vision of his beloved, a vision which rippled at once into his own reflection, midnight water flowing upwards, coalescing, melting ice in reverse.

  When he pulled away, the dark mask was forged anew, hard as ice though never frozen, strong as iron.

  The three frogs jumped off the tower.

  The Spirit of the Sea had been right all along—the fisherman could not change anything. There is hope, his beloved had told him not so long ago. It was a lie.