The thousands of songs humming and buzzing through the oceans carried Ecco through the strange presence of light. Every other sound became irrelevent to him...he simply wanted to focus on the calls.

Finally, the brightness in his eyelids dimmed. Carefully he opened them again, one after the other. What he beheld made him gasp softly.

I thought I was in the frozen north waters! This can't be the same place! he thought.

Instead of harsh, terribly cold waters pressing in around him, the water was warmer than his own home near the equator. Instead of massive white glaciers and icebergs silently pressing in around the waters, there were beds of sand and smooth rocks, leading up to beaches that looked so foreign, a virtual paradise of a mix of many different trees. Where the waters were nearly devoid of life, here were so many schools of blazingly colorful fish.

It's impossible for a place like this to exist in frozen waters...

A sudden chorus of echoes made him refocus. The bay he found himself in was small enough for him to explore, with plenty of ocean to play in. It was an Atlantis created by nature herself, untouched and untainted.

A giant shape suddenly appeared before him, slowly cruising near the surface and casting a vast shadow on the floor. It was definitely a whale...but it disappeared in a zone of shadows before Ecco could see what kind it was. He shot quickly out of his stance and followed the whale, wherever it went.

Peering around a coral bed, he finally found the source of the beautiful singing. But its tone wasn't happy...it was mournful.

He was in the very center of the bay. A pod of about twenty great whales were converged at the surface, spyhopping and staying near it. Their rumbles and reverberations were so close that they passed through Ecco's body in wave after wave.

And they sang. Ecco was perplexed, for a whale's song could be decifered by others most of the time...but as he suspected, this was a dialect that not even he knew...that not even anyone knew. It was whalesong practiced long ago...before Man, before singers were even used to the ocean.

And now that Ecco noticed, the whales weren't in too definite a shape for him to recognize either. Some had fins as long as those of a Humpback, but not calloused. Others had small dorsal fins toward the back of their flukes. All were the size of a Blue, all were colored various shades of white and aquamarine, all were singing in the same tone, and all had baleen in place of teeth.

Staying back from the magnificent pod, Ecco poked his head above the surface to gaze at what the whales were viewing. But he saw nothing.

Suddenly, he dropped beneath the waves and cringed as the voice from before seized his mind again.

A cousin.

The immense pod turned, their deep ebon eyes staring past Ecco with a mix of wisdom and...

Yes...hatred.

The dolphin backfinned slightly. "Hello...I am Ecco...what's wrong, have I done something?"

The arctic seers just don't like what's become of singer-kind, little one. You are an example.