Title: Miracle of the Sea
Pairing: Raven/Luna
Summary: In peace may you leave the shore. Some pains are as uncontrollable as the tides. The trick is not to try to be in control.
Death is a part of life, all life. No matter how powerful or feared a gona is, they cannot live beyond their end, any more than even the most hardscrabble of forgers could survive a tenday in pauna territory.
Luna's people, on days when storms hide the light and none of the boats that dare to venture the waves return, light their fish oil lamps, huddle beneath shelter and tell the stories.
They tell old stories, new stories, fish tales, the time Yolan fell and Triks caught him in her net like a seacow, and all of the tricks and song that will bring fish to their boat and keep hunger from their bellies and all but the most determined of deaths from the people. All life has its ending, welcome or not, but the people of the earth and wave do not seek it like fools chasing a battlefield. Leave that to the tribes and their gona.
When it is darkest and the other tales have all been told, the oldest among them dims the lamps and tells the tale of how humans came from the sea. See, strikon, taste your blood and there you find salt. In the story, they learn of the salt of the ocean's tears for losing her children. At the end of their days, her people's bodies return to the sea, and from the sea they will return again, with salt in their veins and tears in their blood.
Shipfish are souls that have not yet chosen to become human again. Luna thinks that their choosing is because they don't want to face the conflict, the constant struggle and pain that life on the ground brings. Pain is part of life. Suffering is part of life.
With pramfire, there will soon be nothing on the ground for the souls to return to, and the ocean will have all her children at last. Luna waits, but does not chase. She is the last of her people. To her falls the duty of memory.
"I give myself to the miracle of the sea."
There is no life without death, nor living without suffering in some way. Reivon merely suffers more than most, in the tomb of this last fortress.
Pain and suffering, death and war, are all part of life, but they are only one part of a greater whole.
This, this small moment of comfort, her fingers in hair, her flesh pressed against fevered flesh, is what it means to be something small, she and Reivon two small links in a great chain, and even if they are the last links the chain will ever gain, even if the chain is drifting in deep waters, even if they are clinging by their fingertips like crabs in the claws of a great gull, it is enough.