“We’re out of time, my dears,” Loquolchi sing-songed, pointing at the constellation. It now had shimmer, fire, and form, their many points writhing like tentacles. “‘Dance of the Eight Spears’ on my count. One two three four...”
More pirate than performer, Cinrak hummed the melody and bleated the words she knew, having heard Loquolchi practice and perform the opera often.
What would the kraken look like after nearly a thousand star-turns wandering beyond the limits of mammal understanding? Surely Agnes would gather their notice, but she had been here before, to no avail.
Agnes honed in on the Eight Sisters, her tenacious spirit shining through from the bubble and orange flesh taut with anticipation and effort.
Cinrak tried to reach out with her ocean sense, but she could only taste the way ice and wind brushed against land and ocean. There was a tang of salt buried in the elements surrounding the Eight Sisters, the bubble of life that kept them alive in the airless empyrean, but she could not penetrate deeper. Needing all her senses to stay balanced, she pulled back and concentrated on what she could control—singing to the kraken-stars, convincing them they were needed to rebalance the oceans and their family.
Running stars crashed and burned against each other, taking turns to dip low enough to graze their underbellies against the air, sending up sparks, whipping and moving to the beat of the sky only they could understand, the great breath of life.
Now the stronger stars were pulling back, having tasted enough of the air-filled world for another star-turn.
Little quivers coursed along Agnes’ tentacle, her veins popping blue with the strain. With one final enormous effort, Agnes pulled level with the rear guard of the Sisters. The bubble almost faded away to let through a freezing, roaring blast, but with one big krakeny breath, their safety sac renewed, held, and flashed brighter, maybe for attention, maybe for reassurance.
The song died in Cinrak’s throat. Loquolchi faded to a breathy squeak. Benj pressed his face and paws against the elastic bubble, not caring, as he leaned precariously over a drop that could end him if Agnes’ strength gave out. Cinrak grabbed his forepaw out of a powerful storm-born instinct.
The rear star of the constellation was not one, but several bright beings, carousing krakens in close formation. Each being pulsed a different colour. They all had in common trailing tentacles and a castle-window sized single eye.
Those eyes were open, glazed with a crystal-like quality, staring at Agnes’ and her passengers. Passengers who felt like motes of dust compared to the enormity of these kraken-stars and their journey.
Agnes fluoresced again and inserted herself into formation.
The Eight Sisters were Nine.
The kraken stars made no indication they knew Agnes was there.
Agnes tried all sorts of tricks, wriggling her other tentacles, flashing the bubble, intricate weavings between the stars. The three passengers sang as loud as they could, making a hatchet job of ‘Perceive the Celestial Way’, the opera’s finale. Cinrak untied a length of the mer hair rope, tried interpretive dance, waved it about like a flag, skipped rope.
Nothing. The kraken-stars didn’t blink. Their flight angle began to turn upwards and away.
How to touch a kraken-star heart? Cinrak desperately ran through her bags of tricks, all she knew about how to use her salty magic. Agnes pulsed in time with her siblings. Like a heart beat.
A heart! That’s it!
One forepaw still clutching the mer hair rope, Cinrak reached into the Alice pocket of her vest and floundered through her chest of goodies under her bunk on the Impolite Fortune. A hard warmth nestled into her paw.
What if Xolotli’s gift from so long ago wasn’t a whale heart at all, but a kraken one!
Cinrak pulled the Heart of the Ocean free from her pocket. Its scintillating sapphire shot with resplendent ruby flashed in time with the krakens. Did it...float above her paw?
Then she was seeing the opposite of stars, black freckles slicking together like evil fire.
Out of breath, her passengers in various forms of exhausted disarray, Agnes angled towards the call of home.
She had given her all.
And her all had not been enough.
Everyone tumbled off the end of Agnes’ tentacle, and Cinrak tripped to collapse face down in sand.
Back where they had begun.
Water whispered a sad tune to the islet’s beach. The Paper Moon hid its face behind a wisp of cloud while the Moth Moon remained a staunch beacon.
Loquolchi lay on her back, staring up. Benj curled in on himself, listening to some far-off tune, breath hitching. Agnes bobbed a way off shore in a deep bay, only the tip of her spade head visible.
One final booming crack from above, and the light of the racing stars disappeared back down to their usual fine points.
Every piece of Cinrak ached, to the tips of each individual fur strand.
None of them said anything for a long time, watching the empty, betraying sky.
Cinrak cleared a sad crackle from her throat, determined to do what she always did as a captain: carry on. “The sky doesn’t forget, nor it be immune to worldly worries, but sometimes it just doesn’t care. An’ we must be a’ight with that.”
Loquolchi heaved a sigh. Benj remained still.
“Poor Agnes,” Cinrak murmured. “I failed ye, ye poor mite.”
A squidgy damp mass patted her on the chest. Cinrak chuckled wryly. Even mired in exhaustion, Agnes was trying to comfort her.
Cinrak patted the tentacle back. “Ye a good wee squiddy. We take care o’ ya.”
A harmonized gasp.
The exhausted mer hair rope coiled atop her jacket twitched. Cinrak lifted the heavy weight of one eyelid, then another, forehead wrinkling with surprise, cracking the crust of sand and ice.
The tentacle exploring her silk clothes, fur, and face was not orange, but a beautiful sunrise pink.
A second tentacle wriggled out of the water and patted Benj’s leg. This one was the purple of a late summer’s night.
More tentacles and colours washed the bay with a delicious luminescence, making the water ripple like a cave of hidden jewelled wonder. Crystal scales dissolved in the warm water and flaked off their enormous eyes. Those curious, all-seeing eyes blinked, scattering waves, startled dolphins and birds.
The three mammals crawled to the water’s edge, entranced, Benj reaching out a paw and unerringly finding an orange tentacle amongst the morass.
Her prim divaness dissolved, dress covered in wet sand, Loquolchi sobbed. It took effort for Cinrak to lift a stone-heavy arm to put around her love.
With her other forepaw, she patted down her person. The Heart of the Ocean was gone. Lost in midair, or a gratefully received gift?
Salacious Sharks! Cinrak dug back into her Alice pocket and tickled the kraken-spirit guarding her chest from it star-turns long slumber.
In all their star-turns working together, Cinrak had discovered they weren’t of the kraken, but a symbiote sprite. They had been happy to stay in a pirate’s employ as Agnes’ had her own symbiote in Benj. Now was the sprite’s opportunity to return to the life they loved most: keeping a kraken clean for the pleasure of travelling the “Great Dream,” as they called it.
Cinrak held her Alice pocket open and with a trilling cry, the sprite slid out and latched on to the nearest kraken, a great blue. The blue wriggled with what could be read as happiness, if Agnes was anyone to go by.
She gave the sprite a salute for services well rendered.
“They came back.” Benj finally found his words, tears making his voice deep and throaty, keeping the volume low as if afraid anything louder would scare the embrace of squiddies executing an intricate dance around their long-lost sibling. “They heard us. They—” he jerked as if touching one of those new electrickery wires the engineerers were playing with in the laboratories. “They love Agnes. They love us. That’s an over-simplification, of course. I don’t think I can touch thei
r mind-speak without going a little mad, because what they know is—” He struggled to find an adequate word. “—astronomic.”
They all managed a little chuckle. Loquolchi hiccuped.
Cinrak wiped the silent tears from her love’s fur, then squeezed Benj’s free forepaw. The chinchilla looked like he never wanted to let Agnes’ tentacle go.
Agnes patted each of their cheeks, the huge tip of her tentacle gentle as a kiss. Cinrak had never wished for more magic than the little salt she possessed, but for a moment she wanted more than anything to touch the enormous intellect to express her thanks.
Agnes’s tentacle wriggled a little. Somehow, she knew.
Lights flared along the spread of the islands to the east. The splash-down must have been observed. People would be coming. To rescue them. To observe. To wonder. To love.
And to fear the enormity of it all. Because there were always those who feared something larger, more intelligent, something that would threaten their power, even if that something was nowhere near that way inclined. It would be a hard task to explain how the kraken were back to balance the world, not take it over.
For a moment, they had the spectacle to themselves. Cinrak held her family tight, including Agnes’ tentacle. All they had to do was watch the precious star-jewels swirl in the deep bay, and revel in the beautiful and terrifying and intricate change that was life.
About the Author
A.J. Fitzwater can be found living between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. They survived the Clarion workshop in 2014, added two Sir Julius Vogel Awards to their shelf, and have gone on to have work published in Clarkesworld, Shimmer Magazine, Giganotosaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Glittership, Capricious Magazine, and other venues and anthologies of repute. Their WW2 NZ Land Girls shape-shifter novella "No Man's Land" will be published by Paper Road Press in early 2020. They Twitter at @AJFitzwater.
For more information
@AJFitzwater
pickledthink.blogspot.com
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About Queen of Swords Press
About QUEEN OF SWORDS PRESS:
Queen of Swords is an independent small press, specializing in swashbuckling tales of derring-do, bold new adventures in time and space, mysterious stories of the occult and arcane and fantastical tales of people and lands far and near. Visit us online at queenofswordspress.com and sign up for our mailing list to get notified about upcoming releases and offers. Or follow us on Facebook at the Queen of Swords Press page so yo.u don’t miss any press news.
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The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper Page 13
