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