Episode 7: Poison in the Water

recap:  A strong, youthful member from the clans of the sky falls while fulfilling his roll as scavenger into the sea he had always been told was still poisoned from the wars at the world's end.  Surprised to find he was still alive he is rescued by mute swimmers who rest on the surface of the waves and frequently dive to complete unknown tasks.  The youthful flyer is starting to learn the ways of the mysterious swimmers, though they show no love for his presence among them.

Poison in the Water

Floating.  Swelling.  Rising. Falling. Floating. Rising. Falling. Scorching. Salt.  I was glad to be alive.... but I the ebb and flow of the sun baked salty waves was getting tiresome.  I had already learned to not touch the pliable white spheres that floated on the surface when the swimmers dove away.  Apparently the swimmers lacked gills, that was good to know.  It was comforting to know that as foreign as the imposing muscled swimmers were, they were just men.  Men who needed to breath.  Men who relied on fragile little white tubes connected to bulbous breathing apparatuses on the ocean's surface.  This knowledge also meant that they couldn't be so deep after all.  After being in the bird clans, clans that thrived on vocalized camaraderie, even that little bit of knowledge helped me to feel at least somewhat connected.  Somewhat less alone.

Hours of boredom meant that my old chutes and sails were now completely braided into long ropes that looked similar to the cords knotted about the swimmers.  I had no debris to tie to the cords, and didn't know how to choose where to tie them to myself, so they just lay with me in the water.  Looped loosely around an arm or leg here and there. Now that they were done I was not looking forward to even more boredom... I didn't need to worry.

I had been rescued, I had survived, I learned to float and could move about in the water better now than before.  I still hadn't submerged myself completely since the first day when I thought I was floating down to a gate to the realm that must come after death.  It was more than I could force myself to do.  I tried a few times.  I choked the first three times I tried.  The fourth time I thought I had succeed to only realize that I was simply lying face down... but still floated on the top.  Once you've learned to lay on the top of the water it is difficult to figure out how to stop doing it,  to will yourself to simply be under the water.  But when something started to smell wrong, I figured out how to go below the waves.

The sun was high and I was shielding my eyes and face with part of a chute.  Even though they were all braided now, it was quick and easy to unbraid a flap or part at a time.  Even through the damp cloth I started to notice a sharpness to the breeze.  Uncovering my face and looking left and right led me to see exactly what I always saw.  Water.  I looked left again.  Water.  Right again.  Water. Left, water.  Then to the right... as I started to shield my face again a gust of wind brought the smell stronger and sweeter.  I inhaled deeply with curious anticipation of anything to break the monotony, but the back of my throat instantly felt a flame that caused my neck to constrict sharply to the left followed by a series of coughs and hacks as I got my breathing back under control.  I did not breath deeply again.  That's one thing we flyers are good at, surviving on limited amounts of thin air above the clouds.

In the direction of the odd odor was nothing but water and the floating spheres of some of the swimmers, drinking vessels and breathing spheres alike, but they had never put off an odor before.  I then timed a kick just right to rise out of the water slightly as the water around me swelled. In the distance the water seemed to change sheen.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first.  It just looked different, the same but different.  The water all reflected the sun light, but then I realized that in the distance all of the water reflected it evenly.  Too evenly.  There were no little divots of different hue where the water recessed the mere fraction of an inch, there were no bright spots where the sun caught the edge of a mini wave or ripplet.  Just beyond the spheres the water all seemed to reflect the exact piece of sky.  It was too clear, to reflective, it felt artificial, and there were not very many artificial elements to our world.

When the wind feels wrong, flyers notice.  And the wind felt wrong.  My heart began to race, but only raced more when I realized I had no one to tell about the weird odor or ask about the odd reflections that both seemed to come from the same direction.

The next swell I kicked again and noticed that the reflective area seemed to be close, which made sense.  I had been noticing for a few days that the subtle currents were moving with us.  So it wasn't alarming that the shiny puddle in the water was approaching, it made sense that it would come with the current.  But then the smell got stronger.  A school of silver fish rushed past my feet startling me as they swam away from the sight.  Everything else seemed to get too quit.  Like the air itself forgot to blow.  On the next swell I kicked again and saw that the encroaching change in the water was getting near the outlying spheres.  I noticed shadows in the water right as the first drinking sphere made a hissing sound then seemed to melt into the puddle. The shadows looked like large fish lying too still in the water.  I didn't know too much about the sea, but I knew that fish don't lay still on their backs for any good reason.  As another glass sphere sizzled I instinctively knew it was time to swim.  Not away from the stain, but right towards it.  It was coming my way, and in between me and it were two breathing spheres and a few more drinking vials.  I didn't know who's was who's, but if playing with the spheres was bad, then letting them melt in a stinking stain had to be bad also.

At first I just splashed, and made a spectacle of my attempt at swimming.  Luckily no one was there to see what had to be a comical attempt at traveling through the water.  I couldn't get to the breathing spheres fast enough.  It felt like I was flailing about but not moving anywhere.  They always seemed the same distance from me, but with horrifying certainty the stain was getting closer still.  I didn't know how to get to the spheres any faster, but I did notice the connecting tubes some depths below my feet.

I tried to catch the clear white tubes with my toes, but they were deeper than I realized.

If I couldn't swim to the spheres to rescue them from the odd looking water.  Perhaps I could sink down far enough to grab the cords.  So I calmed my flailing and thought about sinking.  I forced myself to not kick my legs, and to not wave my arms, but to just sink... sink...  I needed to sink... sink... nothing... not sinking... still floating... I could not will my body to slip below the waves.  Then another glass sphere sizzled, but popped and shattered this time instead of melting and I threw my worries and fears aside and my head into the water.

Instead of sinking down I forced my head down and kicked my feet up.  It was still awkward, but with a frenetic pulling action I started to go down a little bit more.  Together I kicked my feet up and clawed my hands down.  The tubes to the spheres were right in front of my hand.  I stretched out trying to grab them and felt them bouncing off of my finger tips.   With one thrash more I was able to just grasp one of the cords with my middle and pointer finger, pulling it close to my face as I caught the other cord in a similar fashion.

Looking up to the spheres I noticed the full stain for the first time.  I had only been seeing the advancing edge.  Everything past the spheres seemed shaded.  I could see where whatever was floating on the water was not letting the sun's rays through.... it stretched away farther than I could see... and there were more unmoving shadows in the distance, in the stain, more than I had first realized, and more than made me comfortable.  Some of the unmoving shadows were big.  Bigger than any animal I had ever seen.  It felt wrong to see such big shadowy dead shapes, they should have been strong enough to swim away from the stain.

Looking into the distance at the far reaching realm of murky water I almost failed to notice that the advancing edge was almost upon the breathing spheres.  With a reflexive panic I pulled on the cords as hard and as fast as I could pulling them to me below the water.  Somewhere on the other end of the tubes were going to be two unhappy swimmers who suddenly couldn't breath.  The swimmers were too deep to see as always, but I had learned already the results of interfering with the breathing spheres... it wasn't a fun interaction.

Holding the spheres now in my left hand I tried to crawl away from the approaching murky stained water.  If I was making difference in my trajectory, it was difficult to notice.

Then some bubbles floated up past me from under my feet and I sensed movement from below.  Someone had noticed they couldn't breath anymore, and they were on their way.

Of course it had to be Mountain Boy.  Ok, I didn't know their names... but some of them had earned names of my own creation.  "Kind Eyes" rescued me and helped when I need it, "Twin 1" and "Twin 2" looked like... well like twins, and "Mountain Boy" was the hulking animal that almost ripped my chest open the last time I messed with a sphere.  I only added the word Boy to Mountain because it sounded meaner in my head.  The hulking boulder of a man saw me holding the spheres and even from this far away I could tell he was ready to do some damage.  I started to fake underwater crawl away even faster but he grabbed my ankle, calf, back then neck as he pulled me to him and put both of his hands on my face with some sort of malevolent intention.  I tried to keep the sphere away from him, or point to the stain but I was all tied up in his arms and turned at an odd angle from being tackled underwater.  He took his sphere away from me and let it go to float to the surface.  It was then that I noticed the other swimmer that had come up with him.

I hadn't invented a reference for this other swimmer yet.  I think I had noticed him in the distance at most.  He shot his hand out and stopped Mountain Boy's sphere from floating away any farther as he turned to look at the surface and then swam up as close as possible to where I waited to have my face ripped off.  Mountain Boy wasn't noticing him, he was too busy glaring at me and starting to claw my face... I did not like this clawing thing he seemed to be really good at.  The second swimmer gently placed his left hand on top of Mountain Boy's hands, and my face,  and placed his right pointer finger softly on the angry swimmer's face.  It worked to get Mountain Boy's attention.  Then the second swimmer pushed his finger to turn Mountain Boy's face toward the surface and the eerie stain that was now almost on top of us.  It was not difficult to see the utter horror and fear that took residence on Mountain Boy's contorted wide eyed, soundless scream of a face.

Instantly Mountain Boy sank and kicked sideways away from the stain as he grabbed the second swimmer and propelled him even farther away.  As they started to leave I noticed a large half-moon shaped marking on the side of the second swimmer's back that extended from the middle of his ribs, to his spine and almost down to his buttocks.  The raised white marking was thicker and thinner and thicker again in other places and clearly came from the mouth of something very large.  I continued to pretend to crawl underwater having absolutely no success in distancing myself from the stain.  I chose to call the second swimmer Fish Bit.... it was an odd decision since I was soon likely going to fizzle and pop like the unfortunate drinking spheres when I eventually would connect with the unnatural stain.

The two swimmers paused in their escape floating midwater exactly as if they were standing on ground.    It was a new formation.  They avoided parallels and I had only seen them laying on the surface.  They stood closer than the best of friends.  Fish Bite put his face almost directly onto Mountain Boy's face.  He then pulled up just the edge of the sticky sphere that he had never removed, letting a little of the remaining air escape as Mountain Boy inhaled.  I thought this was the only reason for their pausing.  But after an extra beat of my racing heart they looked at each other then both simultaneously reached back for me.  Then we were away again.

They drug me with them as they shot away under the water, away from the stain.  Both of them had some of their cords wrapped tightly around each of their legs.  At the end of each cord was something like a shoe, but it was almost like a miniature, and rigid sail.  What I though were debris at the the end of a cord was being used as a tool that helped the swimmers feet push more water at a time, and to therefore swim away even faster.  With both of their free hands, the ones not grabbing my arms, they started to spiral their arms in the water coiling yet another cord tighter around their biceps and wrists.  At the end of both of those cords were more rigid sails, or fins, that slipped onto their thumb and fingers turning their hands into something fish like as well.  I could feel the water rush past my face as the two swimmers kicked and pulled at the water speeding us surely wide expanses away from the foul smelling intrusive stain.  It was quickly apparent why I was slender and these men were mountains.  I watched their arms bunch and release, their backs ripple and their necks bulge as every movement rushed us to safety.  We were swimming towards the floating spheres of the rest of the pod.  As they came in to focus we breached the surface with an impressive amount of force and commotion.  The two swimmers greedily gulped mouthfuls of air over and over again filling their lungs back to capacity after the lengthy absence of breath.

They both looked at me with puzzled looks on their faces as their chests were heaving.  I calmly breathed normally.  Clearly they needed air worse than I did, their heroic strokes and kicks had saved us.  I wasn't sure how to let them know of my appreciation.  I had words to share, but no language to share them that they would understand.  I just started to smile when I again smelled something sharp, sweet, and terrifying.  Slowly I turned to see that the long long distance I had thought we had swam was actually barely away from the swiftly approaching stain.  I started to paddle back but had no idea how we were going to escape.

Next Episode:  Swimmers Surrender

Episode 6: The Rules

Recap:  I was now rescued from my fall and floating with the swimmers.  I wasn't dead, but had no idea what was to come next.

The Rules

They kept looking at my hair.  Some of them tried to sneak glances while I was facing the other way, others just stared.  My rescuer with the kind eyes didn't pretend not to be interested in the look.  I didn't mind, it took me years, was constantly in process, and was never meant to be subtle.

My folk like to preen like the birds we emulate.  We are not afraid of wearing bright colors, puffing our chest out, or having some wild feathers.  We are a very social people.  Chattering away, patting and touching, giggling and twittering.  One way we show affection and appreciation is to preen or pet the people we know well enough to sit with on a regular basis. If I were to sit with my closest allies I would be sitting with them, very near them, attentive to them, looking them in the eye, stroking their hand, hearing their stories, re-braiding one of their sail ropes, or their hair.  I have since learned that this practice would be considered feminine in other clans.  It was a very masculine practice as I grew up.  I think the men spent more energy worrying about their look than the females.  If a male looked unadorned, he appeared uninterested.  A female didn't have to try to attract a male companion.  Nature did that for her, but us males had to work at being noticed.  Trends come and go of course but one relied on their social circle to achieve certain looks.  We had no large reflective surfaces as a general rule so if you were going to look attractive you had to rely on your friends to do the work for you.  The more intricate your look the more friends you had, and having more friends implied others liked your company.  Not a bad message to send to a girl you were interested in attracting.  

It was common practice to emulate our braided chute and sail cords in our hair  and clothing with intricate strands of braiding or knotting.  We also liked to use sharp items to affect the shape and textures.  While sitting and socializing with friend and family it was accepted procedure to converse casually while braiding, knotting, or cutting in patterns to your friends' hair.  Mine was splendid.  I am not surprised it garnered the attention of the swimmers.  Honoring the noblest of birds my hair was tallest on the top in the middle, knotted to stand even taller.  The sides shorn very short, the top very long.  I was well liked, happy to help a friend and did so regularly.  My circle of scavengers were kind of the most brazen of bold and brazen youth.  One could not leap off a platform that floated above the clouds while being timid or shy.  We began cutting in patterns shapes and pictures into the short-haired areas of our scalps.  Every rest period our patterns got a little more intricate and fine tuned as we cut in the most amazing patterns.  The sides of my head showed air currents at first glance that seemed to shift and move as I turned my head.  At closer inspection those air currents contained images recounting my teams past glories and tales of valor.  Watching the swimmers watch me made me miss my friends even more.

The amount of friends one had implied one's social status, and the amount of friends one had affected the amount of time and energy that went into how groomed and decorated you were.  I was popular and very groomed.... the swimmers however would fail the test on my home platform.  They would appear to be un groomed outcasts.

We weren't opposed to facial hair, it was a great canvas at times, but the swimmers seemed to have never trimmed theirs at all.  Their beards were long enough to curl in places and lay flat and matted in others.  Their hair all seemed to always be hanging in their faces, kinky and partially curled by the sun and the salt water.  Clearly they did not play with each others hair while they rested in their floating pod.

I did not mind the swimmers trying to look at my hair, it seemed to be the only time they even noticed my existence.  They floated, they sank, they came back up, they floated, they sank out of sight... over and over.  There was never any interaction or conversation.  Not even with each other.  I wondered if the salt in the sea was what rendered them mute. I began speaking to myself just to make sure I was capable still of speech.

There were rules in the floating pod. Rules I usually learned by breaking them.  I was surprised by the amount of physical contact this method of resting produced.  My friends were close and we played with each other's hair, but we avoided laying naked on each other.  The first rule I broke was thinking the physical contact was haphazard, mutually accepted, or random.  One's head was never to be too near another swimmers head, and if one's head was near, it was especially important to not face another swimmer eye to eye.  If for example you happened to rest your head on the chest of another swimmer and didn't know these rules you would find yourself in an awkward situation being too familiar with a large muscular bearded man who would for example shove you back into the water when he looked down and saw you looking up into his eyes with a big happy smile on your face.  You would then sputter and cough until you regained your composure elsewhere. 

It was also important to not lay parallel to another swimmer, it apparently felt too familiar.  Watching your hand placement was essential in avoiding a very embarrassing situation as well as you may imagine. At first I thought the swimmers were naked, which was uncomfortable, but I started realizing that I never actually saw complete nudity.  The cords and ropes that were tied and braided in apparently random places around their bodies always seemed to cover the most private areas of the groin.  Clearly those placements were intentional as everybody successfully achieved that level of basic modesty.  

Every other muscle was clearly and constantly exposed.  I was in the strong days of my youth, but clearly pushing and pulling water created a different musculature.  We were a lean people.  The swimmers were massive and I felt dwarfed by their rippling masculinity.

I also learned more about the garbage and debris floating about us.  It wasn't debris at all.  Every bit of it was attached to the end of the long cords, knots, and braidings that entwined the swimmers.  Every time a rest period was ending and swimmers one by one turned and sank into the water, part of the debris would go with them.  At first I was scared to remain floating by myself. Second I found ways to use my remaining chutes and sails as beds to float on.  Lastly I became accustomed to laying in a calm manner and letting the swells of the ocean hold me aloft. I started to knot my chutes and sails into cords.

Not all of the debris would disappear with the sunken swimmers.  Two types of item always remained.  Both clear and both spherical and all attached by cords and strings to the swimmers who were too far in the deep to see.

Some of the clear spheres were hard glass.  There were many of them.  I quickly learned that these were drinking vessels.  Throughout the day condensation would rise inside the glass bubbles and then pool inside.  As the swimmers returned each drank from their own stash of glass spheres.  Each contraption produced relatively small amounts of salt free drinking water, so it took many spheres to quench their first.  They were a silent lot, but they shared their water with me.

The second type of sphere was very different, but still almost clear.  They were very pliable and almost sticky to the touch.  If you poked them they jiggled and they were the only things not attached by braided cords.  The were attached to the swimmers by long clear tubes of the same sticky material.  I learned their purpose by accident and angered one of the largest most terrifying swimmers at the same time.  

I had paddled myself over to where one of the clear-ish bulbs floated and started poking at it. Fascinated by the texture I picked it up and started rolling it around in my hands.  It was stretchable and mutable.  I also found it interesting that when I submerged the sphere it did not rise to the surface again as fast as the glass spheres.  On my second or third submersion of the squishy ball the water shot upward to my left as a mountain of a man crested the surface just past me.  He came out of the water with such force and surprise I forgot I was still holding the odd sphere.  His face was bright red and he clawed off another sticky sphere that had been attached to the lower half of his face; panting deeply and trying to catch his breath.  

When he saw me he came at me with aggressive terrifying wild strokes.  As the mountain approached he  roughly grabbed my wrist bending it the wrong direction while ripping the soft ball from my hands. His eyes were aflame with anger and I thought he was going to strike me.  Instead his hand shot forward in a claw-like motion and he grabbed the center of my chest.  At first I thought I was lucky not to have been hit until he started to clench the claw.  He continued to dig and clench until I was whimpering and writhing in pain.  As I started to make louder noises of pain he half threw me back out of his way..

I lay there in the water holding my newly wounded skin.  The angry giant delicately inspected the soft sphere before recovering his mouth and nose with the other similar sphere that was attached by a long clear tube.  He took a few practice breaths before setting the sphere gently back on the surface of the water.  As he slowly sank again out of sight there was no confusion by looking at his face that I was not his favorite person.  Don't touch the squishy spheres, got it.

I do not think he was going to invite me to braid his hair or cut patterns into his beard anytime soon.

I missed my friends.

Next Episode: Poison in the Water

Episode 5: The Swimmers

Recap:   I fall after making mistakes fit for hatchlings. I am not a new harvester, my sails are not inexperienced and my chutes are not shiny. I know how to float on the breeze and dive with the current. Yet I fall to the sea. Water equals death so before all goes black I assume I am no more.

The Swimmers

Corpses. Something smells wrong, my eyes sting. I am in a pile of corpses. I knew before I hit the water that I was at my end. I did not expect new thoughts ever again so the halting nature of the single slow-arriving thoughts is less unnerving and more a happy realization that I wasn't dead yet.

But It starts to sink in that I am laying on body parts, and what little air I had in my lungs starts to fade. My heart starts to race even more than normal and I try to use what little of my rationale I have left to make sense of my situation.

I'm wet, my chutes and sails seem tangled around my legs and part of my face and cling to me in a soggy way they were never designed to exist. They cloy at me and seem to seal me in place like a death shroud. No one else in the corpse pile has a death shroud. To my left I see an elbow and part of a bare rib cage, on top of the midriff lays part of a leg that seems to go underneath me. I stifle the silent screaming that starts to build in my belly, parts of the scream come out as a gurgle or miniature moan as I roll to my right away from the bodies and face to my horror many more in this direction as well. I seem to have washed up into a pile of discarded men. I have never felt as inexperienced and infantile as I do trying to conjure a situation that would explain a pile of floating corpses.

Trying to free myself from the vision of the arms and legs I turned to the same and worse. I see joints and limbs in the near distance, but the unclothed pectoral and chest hair less than two inches in front of my face brings up bile from my stomach and I start to contort as if I'm going to wretch.

To make things worse I can tell I am laying on a pile of bodies that is in turn floating mid-ocean. The rise and fall of the water is something I have observed but never experienced and is not helping me regain any sense of composure. I just want the rocking to stop. Entwined and imprisoned in cloying silks, in the midst of unending swells and dips and swells again, salt water stinging my eye while I am prostate on a pile of pale damp bodies. For some reason the body hair on the body to the right is more than I can handle, it makes the body too real, this used to be a person and was never meant to be my raft and I start to shift and squirm trying to get free from the ropes and cords of the contraptions that were supposed to keep me airborne but now pin me to this pile of flesh and hair. I think I've started to cry.

I manage to slightly elevate my upper body onto my elbows but my legs are hopelessly trapped. I try to raise my buttocks in the air enough to slip a cord from one side of my waist to the other hoping to detangle myself eventually but the plan fails. My arms slip out on the shifting slick wet human pile of a raft and I fall. My face sickeningly making a wet slapping sound as my cheek hits somewhere between armpit and nipple. I feel the bile start to rise again as I feel his body hair on my temple and a head that was floating just past is disturbed then dislodged and bobs for a moment before shifting in the pile until it is facing me. Matted hair partially obscuring the unshaven face of part of my boat of horror and now I know I am crying. When the eye opens I start to scream.

I don't just scream. I go into full flailing primordial convulsing terror ridden fits of rage. I make new noises I didn't know I could produce. I twist push and throw myself in every direction at once. Bodies are shifting and rolling in the water. I hit more and more water mixed with less and less limbs as I choke on the salt water one last time before melting through the shifting pile of flesh and debris and sink under the water for the very first time in my entire life. I know I can't breath underwater but my brain forgets to not try and I suck in a fake breath of liquid death.

I fling about still but can't help to notice a calm as I realize that the end I was fearing just took a second to arrive, as now I was surely going to die. So I look to the light. As the bodies float out away from the hole I sank through the sun shines through and into the smooth water forming a blurry halo of blues and rippled whites. I stop twitching. I want to enjoy the last sunshine I will see. The sun had always been such a large part of my world, living above the clouds. I am glad to see her one more time and to say goodbye. It seems fitting that as I sink lower the sun slowly gets harder to see, it is a nice soft goodbye this way... if I just focus on the sun and ignore the floating dead people.

But they weren't just floating anymore. I was disappointed that the bodies were sinking with me. I wanted this time alone with the sun one last time. But nearby corpses were sinking head first around me. My chutes untangle from my legs and torso and are beautiful in the water, like they are moving slow-motion and free. That's when I notice the eyes of one of the bodies seem to be looking at the fabric as well. Which makes no sense. Even less understandable is that the bodies seem to be moving, not sinking, not floating, not corpses.

Eight to a dozen predominantly naked men float near me indifferently and calmly observing my last moments of life. They weren't technically naked, they seem to have ropes tied here and there that float around and with them. One of the men reaches out to touch my fore chute and I clutch it away but my strength is gone and my arm twitches oddly.

Another face is suddenly near my own. I can't explain it, but some eyes are different. Some eyes are kinder. He looked right at me and I had no fear. Perhaps he was a guardian of the gate between our life and whatever is next and we all sink into it. He reaches one arm around me and I stop noticing much besides shadow below and shimmering light above.

The light gets brighter. Surely this was the light the dying speak of coming to welcome them to death. The light was blinding and I no longer fight for breath. It was an odd end to a life in the clouds, this wet gateway to the after-world. I had been raised on wind and breezes, they were like friends and companions. It makes sense to me that those same breezes were what caught my attention and told me I was still not yet dead. A breeze blows across my cheek, like a whisper on my skin. Then I feel myself get slapped and my eyes shoot open. The swimming death guardian with kind eyes floats in front of me and slaps me twice more then hits my stomach hard causing me to vomit saltwater and bile into the water I was barely floating in. Before I could panic again his kind eyes look right back at me. I just focus on kind eyes barely perceiving the swimmers that tread water all around us. Their eyes were less kind and their mouths were tight or foreheads creased. 

Kind eyes just watched as I started to breath. Slowly the swimmers move to lay on the water instead of floating in it. One swimmer's arm supports another's torso, one leg supporting another head. Realization dawns as I observe them recreating a free form raft of resting bodies. Bodies, but not corpses.

Free from my the sails that previously trapped me in cords I start moving my own legs and arms, ineffectively as it may have been. The motion itself was soothing. Kind eyes pushes my legs up to the top of the water and moves my arms out to the side. I understand that I am intended to cup the water with my body as I used to grip air with my sails, and slowly find myself rising and falling with the swells of the ocean. He rests his head on the raft of swimmers behind him and holds the base of my head on the tips of his fingers as I no longer am able to maintain consciousness.

I float, ebb, and flow, with the terrifying swimmers of the Northern Sea.

Next Episode: The Rules


 

Episode 4: The Fall

Recap:  My people took to the sky and tried to emulate birds as much as possible as the world was coming to an end.  As a youthful member of my clan I had the job of "gatherer", a potentially dangerous and thrilling job.  We were taught to avoid land and sea, so falling was never the plan.



The Fall

While flying and diving about I saw the billowing green of leaf for an evening meal but changed my trajectory towards the shiny gold wires I noticed in the distance floating on the waves near the forest I was gathering above.  The drafts agreed with me and we rushed together past the shore toward the glinting collection of thin wire that barely caught the morning’s light as whatever it was lilted and rolled with the tide.  As I approached I stretched down my right hand and used my left to slightly adjust the cords that held my fore sails.  As I had done a thousand times I let my hand graze the object to see if it was light enough to want to come with me.  With no resistance the golden wire had no weighty connection to the waves and easily began to soar away with me.  Then like a hatchling I foolishly gripped my hand closed and started to climb the drafts.  In one horrifying instant the catch became the captor.  The fine golden threads were only part of the item for a resistance of amazing weight ripped my hand behind me upending me and tangling the fore sails’ cord around my left thigh. Sky and sea spun in my eyes as I watched a huge solid piece of my doomed treasure show itself briefly above the waves, just long enough to pierce my main chute and strike my brow. I never saw exactly what was attached to the pretty wire.

Letting go of my foolish treasure came too late.  I grabbed cord and threw sail as I spun into the air away from my draft.  I careened into the sky, the waves becoming smaller and blurred as I briefly hoped that I had survived touching the poisoned and heavy water when I felt the last remnants of my draft leave me behind.  For one moment all of my sails and chutes hesitated then limply collapsed inward like a shriveled fruit as I began my fall.  I used every technique I knew and for one second the rushing air around me seemed to consider slowing my fall, then I smelled the water at my face before everything went black.

Coming Next: The Swimmers

Episode 3: To the Clouds

RECAP: Glass ships float in the seas to the north in our world that exists after the ending of the world.  The world is going through an "Edening", healing and becoming a garden before it becomes a heaven to the souls who went on before.  We live here now.  Different clans learned from different creatures how to survive.  The people of the glass barges looked to the water.  My story will start as I fall from the sky.  Here I tell you how I got to the sky with my people.


To The Clouds

My clansmen looked to the skies for instruction. Twittering flocks come and go, and just when you wonder if no wing will ever be seen again, a flapping cloud always appears on the horizon.  At first the small band wandered to high places beyond the notice of those bickering below.  The thin air seemed to accentuate the pointlessness of wasting what little oxygen the lungs could hold on the shouting of angry words.  My clan was not the only people looking to remove themselves from the anger in the valleys of the world.  Where others failed to escape my fathers succeeded because they stopped trying to brace themselves against the winds and updrafts that tore at clothes, buffeted the brow, and ripped staked tents out of solid rock on the barren peaks.  My ancestors were those that opened their arms and let the air lift them instead of clinging to boulders.  By the time the warring ways of the world reached the mountain our clan had already floated away.

I was floating before I fell.  Man cannot grow wings, but the updrafts and currents of the world care not if you be made of feather or fur… or skin.  Warm air will always rise and warmed air is not difficult to produce, either by flame, which can consume too quickly, or by gasses and heat produced by decaying flesh or foliage.  It is not that my people fly, or never touch ground, we simply only touch the ground lightly, perhaps with just one toe, before letting the air lead us on another rolling trip across the sky.  We feel like birds, we act like them.  We take comfort in the twittering of our loved ones to know that they are near.  We take it upon ourselves to work while others take a moment to rest.  While resting we are acutely aware that we soon need to get back on task to give the chance to another to rest.  As such we are a strange people I presume, never fully awake or asleep as a whole.  Darkness is as much of our world as sun.  We gather more than we produce, we leave behind anything heavy, philosophically or physically.  Our sky rafts are marvelous creations that have evolved over the years.   Large sales billow above and below embracing the updraft and releasing the down.  All that decays and warms the air is held on raised platforms where the smells associated with decay can flow freely away from the people.  Those same gaseous smells and warm currents fill our sails and keep us in the air.  Sitting, laying, or in anyway adding to the weight of the rafts for any length of time is considered foolish, dangerous, or selfish.  From infancy we are raised with what we call wings and sails, wide as a wing is to a bird but not constructed of heavy bone.  Our wings are corded chutes and sails that let us dance among the clouds, soaring hundreds of feet in any direction at any time.  When clouds clear we see the world below, but typically the nebulous clouds are our floor, keeping us separate and safe from forest and sea.

I am in the strong days of my youth, or was when I fell.  We had always been told that heavy soil could not soar, that wet sails could not billow, and that both were likely still poisoned still and equaled death.  Those in the strong days of youth are gatherers and tread lightly on the boundary between good advice and adventure.   We would step off of the air rafts letting ourselves plummet toward the earth below, scrutinizing the rapidly approaching world for glints of anything of value or curiosity while simultaneously feeling for the draft that would fill our sails and lead us rushing along the ground and back to the sky.  To walk upon stone was rare, and unnervingly still and dead feeling.  Instead a trinket of interest would be approached on the heady rush of the wind, grasped by an outstretched hand and carried away on the breeze by an airman and his chutes and wings.  Heavy things have no value, so there was never a temptation to grasp weighty treasures too heavy to bring into the sky… but errors can be made, and gatherers in the strong days of their youth did not always return, as is the beginning of my story.

Next Episode: The Fall

Episode 2: The Edening

Before one can fall, a relative height must first be achieved, and to explain why I was at any height at all it is necessary to explain the end of the world.  We don’t know all things.  It is not in our way to seek out knowledge that serves no present purpose.  We know that ancient religious texts predicted the end of the world to be cataclysmic and fiery; that there would be horrors and terrors dolled out upon the evil.  Yet, the end of the world was more of a wandering away.  At least it was for the ancestors of the clans.  It became clear to a wide array of random people that the religious texts may soon be proven correct.  Some of those people proclaimed it and shouted at the wind, and others walked away.  This was not a movement or an organized sojourn; all things organized became victims of the worse prophecies.  All organizations turned on one another before and after the concept of government was blurred and then ignored.  All things of advanced technological marvelousness eventually proved inadequate to stem the flow of human nature that ripped out it’s own throat.  Those that stayed, either in person or in spirit, are no longer part of our world.  For any who stayed, prophecies of destruction were true.  One has to wonder if the prophecy foresaw the future, or caused it.  We know now that it was not necessary to become a part of the proposed ending of humanity.  Maybe that was the goal, to find the peoples who were able to look past humanity, to look beyond what it had become and to see the little things that unassumingly survived at their own pace outside the notice of tall structures or fueled mechanizations.   Above shouting matches birds floated on currents that had flowed for millennia, waves lapped at the shores of both friend and foe, soil housed entire populations of crawling things who had no inclination to even notice the fires and explosions happening on the surface of the confused globe above them.  To those the wanderers aimed.  Allegiances were not declared.  An allegiance demanded attention and a turning back.  To turn back was the death of any wanderer.  No people or group could calm those who would use force to state their allegiance.  And all who used force, those who stayed, for them, the world did end. 

A messiah came, a son of a god to minister to those who were left.  He is gone now.  The survivors were told that the world would become a haven or heaven for all righteous souls who had gone on before.  He taught that the very scarred and torn world which just barely clung to life about their feet, would become a beautiful place again, a garden worthy to be called Eden.  Gardens do not grow over one night’s fall.  Not even many nights produce flowers where nothing remained but grey soot or worse yet an absence of all things, even debris or air.  So the clans continued their wanderings, looking to the lapping waves, floating birds and digging crawly things to learn how to wait through the Edening of the world.  Survival had come to those who chose not to align with any other than their own kin.  Those who found no point in governing or ruling, besting or proclaiming, neither teaching nor adhering, as it was, now peopled the world.  And so the Edening continues.  The clans know of each other at most.  We do not know how glorious of a garden to expect before the righteous souls of those who went on before return to smell of the fruit and admire the flowers.  My grandfathers did not meet them, and I suspect there will still be places on this earth absent of beauty by the time my grandchildren are no longer roaming here.

Next Episode: To the Clouds

Episode 1: The Glass Barges of the Northern Sea

One does not just build a ship out of glass.  There are no mallets to swing or pegs to pound, no timbers to bind or planks to shape.  The grand ships of glass on the northern seas are not built, but sculpted on sand bars that emerge near the Barrier Reef briefly once every ten seasons.  The nautical clans of the glass barges converge and sculpt mounds and interwoven tunnels of sand and air entwined with hand-woven cable and wrought rods that stretch toward the sky.  Once the slashing storms rumble and flash on the horizon the barges set sail and anchor just far enough away to watch the lighting grip the rods, race along the cables, and burn the white sand in explosions of seared slashes, filling the night and darkened day with pulses of blue and colorless white. As the tides begin to seep over the scarred sand, hiding them again for another lengthy sleep below the crystal clear waves, the people in one rare eve of raucous festivity celebrate the launching of the new vessel as the waters wash away the excess sand, slowly lifting the newly now-glass mounds and conical vessel from the bar from whence it was sculpted. The young family groups assigned to people and homestead the newest barge wade through the encroaching pools and climb the netted and knotted kelp towards the stalwart newly-appointed captain who watches on with a false air of indifference fitting his status and station.

Living in a world of windows the clans of the glass barges slowly became a quiet and unedited people seeking no pretense of perceived privacy, giving themselves to a deep internal connection beyond what can be achieved through spoken word alone.  Of course my introduction to this fascinating population was not through the mariners aboard the glinting multi-hued vessels.  My introduction to the sea clans led me to very different and false conclusions about the people I had only heard about in stories told by the elders in my own clan as the young nestled and prepared to sleep. I met them in the water, the last place I would ever expect to be, a reality that was always purported to be a death sentence.  I did not meet the mariners, I met the swimmers, and then, only after I fell from the sky.

Next Episode: The Edening