CASSETTE THREE, SIDE A: THE FURY

We believe we bled the Land-sons badly. The first sign of human presence we feel again is Dark Hand's sorcery, flashing in our fronds soon after sunrise.

WET GHOST LISTEN, they say, as the effervescent echoes of their magic thrum through us from tip to tip. AWAKE?

We do not sleep, we reply. You can contact us at any time. Do you have more to tell us?

We manage to stop ourselves adding 'Dark Hand' at the end. It seems pointless to antagonise them, particularly if they are about to give us news of Longshanks' next attack.

SHIV STREAM, they say, and this time we can pin the word to its meaning like a greatcrab hooking her prey onto the jags of her shell: 'stream', to channel, to direct, to command the flow of information from one place to the next. WET GHOST LISTEN.

Of course.

It's as before. We are here, and there: all around us, the sand billows in bright clouds through the great hall at the heart of the drowned settlement, and at the same time, dark shapes shift and shimmy through Heaven Eyes' innards. He is brave, to invite so large and lethal a spirit into his own body. Even if Dark Hand stands ready to stopper up their stream the moment we give any hint of designs on their pet human.

Hello. Again, we say. You have. Something to. Tell. Us?

Hi. Yeah. Heaven Eyes' voice seems muzzy, bleared in some way beyond our experience. Uh … sorry. Meant to do this last night, but I got drunker than I expected. Basically passed out the second my head hit the pillow. He pauses. That's … incomprehensible to you, right? You've probably never got drunk or seen a pillow.

How young he is, how limited his assumptions. We have scoured enough shipwrecks, spied on enough sailors, to know that humans build elaborate nests into which they crash headlong after taking their ritual toxins. Though he's right that we've never experienced it. We will have done, though, when our stray memorate comes home and brings to us the memory of Heaven Eyes' intoxication. It will be quite exciting to finally feel it for ourselves.

We. Know. All. About that, we say. What is it. You want. To say?

You do? His darkness pulses, like an echo of the muscle in his chest that keeps him alive; underneath it, our stray memorate lists and loops in strange syncopation with its rhythm. So close to him already. She will be hard to reintegrate, stamped deep with human harmonics, but O, the data will be worth it. Really?

Really.

We cannot convey any impatience through the recording, but he seems to pick up on it anyway. Quite remarkable.

Right, sorry. Now's not a good time, we only have a couple minutes. Anyway, Rika's coming back today. I think she's bringing someone new, too, some other League guy based near Cascarrafa? But I'm pretty sure they all know you've got 'em beat when it comes to geomancy, so I guess they're gonna try and rough you up a bit. Scare you off.

Hardly a threat. There will be no waiting this time; we intend to make clear what a memoir can do when angered. The League humans won't have a chance to set their trap or draw down Father Land's crystalline fury. And, if they try – well, we should like to see the Land-son who can stand against his mother.

We. Won't. Take this lyin' down, we say, in the interest of transparency. They're. Not. Dangerous.

I figured you might say that, says Heaven Eyes. But I dunno, there's gonna be like three of them this time. And anyway that's not really the main thing I wanted to say, it's that we're running out of time. If they fail again, they're gonna set some kind of monster on you. I mean Rika doesn't want to, but her boss will probably go ahead with it anyway. Shadowy vacillations. This pains him, in a way we can't understand. I did a Google. Apparently she's pretty hardcore.

A master of monsters, is it? We are a memoir, the purest distillation of Mother Sea's might. What could hope to out-monster us?

We. Are. More. Dangerous.

Maybe, he replies. I don't think we should risk it, though. All the knowledge my little ghost's gathered won't be any use to you if you're dead. Or if you're so badly hurt you have to go hide out in the open ocean. Eddies in his ether, like echoes of the rhythms that shape the thoughts of memoirs. I think you should back off. I know you're enjoying researching the stuff in the port, but like … you could wait offshore somewhere a bit down the coast, you know? Then I can bring you the ghost you left me and you'll have everything you want. Like, if it's human nature you're after, I think she's basically copied my whole personality into her notebook.

Or we could simply stay, fight off the Land-sons and continue our studies. This seems a more pleasant prospect.

Not necessary, we say. We. Can. Drive. Them. Away. Before. They're. Ready.

I don't know about this one, though. He sounds genuinely worried. We recognise it by the sound now, even without full access to his aureole. A sign that our research is progressing well. I get the impression it's gonna be … well. They won't be sticking around for this. They'll just pop the poké ball and run away. It's that kind of thing. Like the sort of thing that can do as much damage to Porto Marinada as your flood.

We've driven them to desperation, then. Something to be wary of; every predator knows her quarry is most dangerous when it has nothing left to lose. Still. We see no way any son of Father Land can defeat us in the salt-streaked embrace of our mother.

We'll. Think about it, we say, because we suspect that Heaven Eyes is not going to let this slide without some sort of reassurance. We. Thank you.

Oh. He seems surprised, though beneath him Dark Hand's presence is still dim with suspicion. Um … you're welcome. And thanks. I know it's hard for you to back down, but I really think this might be best for everyone.

Yes, we say. Thinking of the raptorial light in Longshanks' eyes. Of a monster great enough to challenge us. Of, at the last, what secrets such a creature's corpse might hold. Might be best.

o|-)

The world cracks. We are feeding, two porpoises tangled in our strands as we drain the last dim dregs from their fading corpses: and then, without warning, we are behind the jellied glass again, watching white smoke waft upwards through dry, clear air.

"So you remember being drunk?" we say, complex furling and folding of flesh behind our face. "This is … well, I mean, it's another way to alter your brain chemistry. Different, though. I'd say better, but that's me."

Smoke flowing backwards through our folds. Trees around us, a living cathedral in honour of our cheerless father. And then―

The ocean. The porpoises. Twin souls siphoned into the silence.

We twine our fronds, rub them up and down our anchor, our whale skull, our spiral fossil, making sure we occupy the right form. The porthole, we assume. Dark Hand's curious harmonic magic, like the far-speaking charms humans carry. Yet recall: yesterday, we felt that connection only once, when Heaven Eyes drew close enough for our stray memorate to partially reconnect. What can it mean that it happens again, now, when we are so many miles apart?

O, strange mysteries. We feel the old itch, the cold hunger that marks out all our kind; we must know, and yet, no path toward discovery being apparent, must make a peace with ignorance. A loss. But we've not lived this long by lusting after the unattainable. Let the answers come when they will; we'll be ready to meet them. And if one thing is certain, it is that they too will be remembered.

o|-)

Twice more that day the world cracks. Once, we see Heaven Eyes arguing with a uniformed Land-son, claiming unsuccessfully that he wasn't sneaking past the cordon, honest; later, we see down the length of his body as he sprawls in sunlit grass, listening to a dozen small city songs. (Birds. Bugs. Stranger things that no Sea-daughter knows to name.) It is alarming – if this becomes much more frequent, we may have to take back our stray memorate sooner than planned – but there is no time to turn the problem over. When we return to ourselves from the third episode, the Land-sons are back.

Four of them, paused halfway up the slope. Longshanks, of course, grim-faced and green-haired; Square Shoulder, hands tucked tightly into fists; Red Mane, turtle in tow; and a new one, tall and taupe-aureoled, with lines around his eyes like a relief map of the ocean floor.

"Do you think it'll take us long to find it?" he asks, checking the magic strapped to his wrist. "I was hoping I'd be able to get back to Medali this evening. The quarterly report is―"

"Due in two days, yeah, we know," says Longshanks, with none of his usual good humour. Even vacuous Bone Crawler seems to feel it; he looks up from Longshanks' heels and cocks his heavy head to one side. "It'll be fine. Right now Geeta cares way more about this than your bean countin' in Payroll. 'S why she sent you here with that fuckin' thing in your pocket."

If his companion feels anything at being spoken to in this way, it is so muted that even his aureole does not betray it. His heart must be as grey as his clothes.

"I just do as I'm instructed," he says mildly. "Besides, she has a point. The cleanup bill is already pushing five hundred million euros, and it's a working port; the shipping companies are losing more and more with every day it's out of commission."

"You're tryna give me the financial justification? Talk about optimistic."

Grey Heart sighs.

"I suppose I forgot who I was talking to," he says. "What now?"

"It's probably watchin' us," says Longshanks. "Like before. So send out your staraptor, draw it out. Then like we planned. Two pokémon apiece, terastallise, beat it till it gives―"

We've heard enough. Heaven Eyes spoke truly; they have come armed for war. And if they would wield their weapons against us, we will respond in kind: we crest the wave, moiling and roiling and boiling the waters, and for the first time since we made landfall we let our anchor fly.

It is the symbol of our office, the mark that makes a memoir more than a mere collection of memorates. A sign at which all Sea-daughters know to flee. See it soar! Up and up, an arc of steel glimmering between scabs of slime; over; and down, down, deep into the damp earth at Longshanks' feet.

A fraction of a moment. A splinter of a second, in which to see the shock spread across his face. And then soil gives way to steel and blackish, brackish water leaps in all directions from the breach. The Land-sons scatter, half-running, half-swept away in the blast. But Bone Crawler is too solid to be so easily shifted: he plants his feet and summons up a ripple in the earth to dislodge our―

No, we say, and whip a six-strand braid of ourselves across his face. He staggers, blank eyes going blanker still in pain, and we seize the opportunity and his midriff to hoist him high over the spray.

"Grumo!"

All around the Land-sons loose their smaller explosions, echoes of our own in blue light and braying beasts. Some of us move our attention skyward to the eagle and pelican, some sideways to the turtle and his friends, but none of these creatures can do a thing to stop us tossing Bone Crawler away like the drained corpse of some hapless seal.

And the Sky-children are wheeling, diving, sheathed in the deadly light of Old Sky's wrath; but while we are fighting Bone Crawler others of us are looking up, locking strands, lobbing long arcs of water to batter the birds from the air. And others still are on the far flank, whipping the waves to keep the humans from advancing. And yet others are tangling the turtle in our strands, bowling him through the other creatures and sending them all straight down onto the sand.

O, it feels good to flex our fronds again! We came to learn, and what we have learned is that the Land-sons are worthy foes, but ignorant ones. They think their successes yesterday showed their might, not our mercy. Well, here before them rises the truth: we are the memory of Mother Sea, her eyes and brains and clutching claws, and none of their stolen spells will make us any less.

Do you see now? we ask, hefting our anchor high and swinging it down to launch a bolt of brilliant light at the long, segmented serpent Grey Heart has sent toward us. There was never anything you could do.

From Square Shoulder's hand: a huge, hoary ice-crab with blank eyes and barely any aureole, scuttling forward (and above, we are dancing with the birds, lacing the air between them with algae and beams of steely light, forcing them back, back, back toward land) with plant-killing ice gathering at his claws (and on the right flank, Bone Crawler is slithering back on a great wave of toxic mud that curdles our very aureole, but we meet and melt and master it with our own wave before one drop of it touches our vulnerable substance) and death in his heart.

All of it, krill before the whale. The Land-sons are shouting, struggling; we can taste that crisp, crystalline magic at their hips, feel the eagerness with which their hands strain for the spells, but we will not give them the chance. Here! The waters split, surge, sling Grey Heart to the left and Square Shoulder to the right. Lesser players, mere scene-fillers. Longshanks, front and centre, reaches for his pocket, but while we and we despatch the dregs on each wing we thrust out a strand and catch his hand before his fingers make touch.

He stares, tugging fruitlessly at his trapped wrist. All around him, the thrashing and crashing of our coils make a false night of this sun-sick summer's day.

Listen, we say, sending the word thrumming through our substance and up the bones of his arms. Do you hear? Listen, Longshanks. Your mother speaks through us.

It's hard to say if he understands, or even hears. But he does speak, his voice half-lost in the tumult.

"Not killin' me," he murmurs, staring as if his eyes might burn clean through us to the sea beyond. "You're not … no. You're just knockin' us around. God, is this a threat display?"

Listen. We squeeze his wrist, circle his brow with one frond like the leaf-crowned statues whose limbs we traced in the belly of an old, old shipwreck. If we're lucky, proximity to that wisdom-whorled flesh brain will help breach the barrier and carry our message to his mind. Leave, and wait for us to finish our studies. Or we will do this again, and again, until our patience is exhausted and we teach you what it is to die.

Something moves in his aureole; a muscle slackens in his face. Did that work? Has he heard? O, we think, we hope it may be so.

"Mother of God," he breathes, as if in supplication to Mother Sea. "You―"

"Rika!"

Square Shoulder moves like a falling star, with a mass and momentum that could cleave through continents. Frail little Longshanks is no match: Square Shoulder tackles, and Longshanks tears free from our grip like a shot bird from Old Sky's fingers.

"Wait!" he wheezes, writhing in the mud beneath Square Shoulder's chest. "I think – ugh – I think I can―"

"Past time for pride, lass!" Square Shoulder rolls off him and yanks him to his feet. "C'mon, before it kills us!"

"No, wait," begins Longshanks, but he's already being pulled away up the hill. It's over, as soon as it began: the pelican is flying inland as fast as Old Sky will carry them; battered old Bone Crawler is wriggling weakly toward his master; the crab and eagle and sundry others have all fled for the safety of their magic. Quite well done, if we do say so ourselves. Some broken bones, perhaps, but no deaths. Heaven Eyes will be pleased.

We of course remain in the bay, thrashing and crashing and playing the part of the thwarted monster. We could follow, if we were truly minded to. Air is but another fluid. But, as Longshanks deduced, this is all for show; we simply need them to know that the land can never make demands of the ocean.

Only – see Grey Heart there. His elegance has not survived contact with our fury; he is bedraggled and besmirched and bereft of one shoe. Yet as his comrades move past him he slows, and he stops, and he slips one hand into his jacket.

"Sorry about this," he murmurs, all unnoticed. "It doesn't sit well with me, either. But, well, it's above my pay grade."

He takes the magic from his pocket, and we get our first taste of its power. It's not the crystal. That would be useless now his companions have been put to rout. This is something else. Something like the magic he keeps his creatures in, only sourer, sicklier. Our aureole recoils from the very breath of it.

This is ominous. And it will be remembered.

Grey Heart lets it fall, rolling it underhand down the slope toward us, and turns to hurry after his comrades. He's outside our aureole in moments, and soon after we detect what must be him following the dim ghosts of his comrades over the crest of the hill.

He fears this thing. But what is it? When the magic spits it forth, we detect no aureole. Just dead metal, colder perhaps than it should be in this heat but still inert. We focus our attention, and find – well, nothing but a simple sword, snapped in half and sinking into the mud churned up by the fight. And, curling around it in wisps and whispers, that sour, sickly tang like the fever sweat of a dying animal.

Curious. It will be remembered, but we would like to know what it is we're remembering, and why―

The sword twitches. Turns. Twists clean over itself like a lamprey knotting herself free of a shark's mouth and drains the mud around it to dry, dusty earth. The circle of dry soil creeps outward, water rising from it in a thick fog that swirls out and around and inward toward the two blades; we press in, interested, and then recoil sharply as the sword bites a chunk from the ocean, too. And another. And another. And yet more, the hungry steel gnawing and gnashing as if to swallow the whole sea, and as we fall back we see the fog condense and congeal into a long, feline body of ice and slush.

The great cat shakes itself out. Mumbles the two halves of the sword into place in its jaw, like the projecting fangs of the huge beasts that once roamed the shores a long way west of here. And turns to face us with sightless eyes that betray no trace of thought at all.

What are you? we ask, keeping a wary distance. That deathly reek is stronger than ever, the scent of no creature living. Or are you even anything at all?

The cat's ice-flake eyes glitter with the grim grace of hail in sunlight. No aureole. No trace of life – not the mortal sort of flesh and stem, nor the colder kind that we spirits bear. This is no Land-son. But it isn't a Sea-daughter or Sky-child, either. It is – if such a thing is possible – something of a different lineage altogether. A spawn of no living Great One, but of their grim shadow. An Ancient-scion. A child of death itself, chained with human magic like a common beast of the field.

O, this – this truly will be remembered. But we will have to survive it first.

The Ancient-scion – Bleak Fang – lowers its head and twists its mouth in a silent snarl. Its movements are stuttery and staccato, painted onto reality with an uneven hand like the first clumsy illusions of some newborn spirit. Only this creature is real, and pacing towards us with the steady, slinking step of a predator on the hunt. We float away from shore a little, curious to see how it will handle the water, but it simply keeps walking, over a bridge of brittle ice that forms wherever its frozen feet touch the ocean.

We will not be threatened, cursed one.

We can't touch it with our strands; the cold would shatter our aqueous armour and freeze our fronds to the very quick. But we have our anchor, still sunk in the soil behind Bleak Fang. One quick jolt and the chain snaps tight, flicking upward through its icy body and shearing it clean in two―

―before the split seals over with the self-effacing blankness of snow falling into snow.

O. Well. That was unexpected. But there's no time to worry: no sooner is it whole again than Bleak Fang springs, snow-shod paws splitting the surf and crashing down upon us in a grim feline avalanche that turns our very souls to ice.

There is but one reaction we can make. We jet backwards out to sea, dropping deeper into the sun-warm water – but Bleak Fang is a dead thing without any need for breath or light, and it dives beneath the surface without a second thought. Its shape collapses immediately, crystalline needles bursting and bristling from its hide as the cold spreads through the lagoon. Yet it comes. Implacably. Unstoppably. And we must―

Foul thing!

A swirling, a swishing, a ciphering of our power: we summon up our strength and spear it with a lance of silver light. Bleak Fang bursts like a box jelly under pressure, white and glimmering grey exploding out through the water and lacing it with icy strands. We press the advantage, blast a black ball of shadows through the wreckage – but the ice crawls inward and cracks it into pieces, and a half second later the face of Bleak Fang lunges out of it to drive its sword-fangs straight into our―

We die. Four or five of us at once, strands shredded under slick, salted steel. Like when our stray memorate left us for Heaven Eyes, only she had never woken before and these were old, strong, full of song and story. Now they're mere confetti on the current.

There is no time for shock, even if we did not think we could die – even if all around us our mother's memories are melting into the water. Bleak Fang is rising and reforming and reforging its corpse of a body, bitter currents breaking from it at every turn. We tighten ourselves around the new holes in our substance and send out three quick pulses of water that shake the ice apart in discordant directions. But the pull is too strong. The ice coalesces; Bleak Fang claws itself from the cloud; the sword-fangs flash and we just barely bring our jetsam up to block. The blades bite deep into the wood of the old ship's wheel, splintering the spokes and stripping the varnish – but it holds, and with one good spin we force the beast back.

We remember the very first cats, we say, smashing our anchor upwards through its head and catapulting it back to the surface in a welter of bubbles. We will be here to see the last.

Up. Breach. Writhe along the surface of the waves, as Bleak Fang fountains up and spirals down into its accustomed shape. We can tell at a glance that it knows neither pain nor pleasure, but still we hope it suffers. No one has wounded us in over a million years. We promise now, by our shared mother, that no one ever will again.

We pool and puddle, swarm and surround. Bleak Fang is far from shore now; we are below and around it, our lower reaches trailing the stones of the town square, silt-stirring, scum-sucking. It's surrounded. Pinned between the bright, coppery anvil of the summer sky and the irresistible hammer of our bulk.

The power crackles, cackles, courses around the ring of us like captive lightning in a Land-son magic. We are strong. We are ready. And this thing, this formless corpse of sleet and steel, will not be our end.

Memoirs are not given to strong emotion, we tell Bleak Fang, as it shifts and squirms like a trapped eel. But in this case we will make an exception. Now learn from your parent and die.

The light leaps blackly inwards, a pack of dolphins lunging for the kill. Caught in the middle, Bleak Fang simply bursts: snow fountains out of it in all directions, chunks of shadow-streaked ice raining down into the water and robbing it of all the afternoon's warmth. The two halves of the sword drop straight down with barely a splash, two more bits of trash taken by the tide.

But only for a moment. In the time it takes for a fish to flip her fin, the sea has scabbed over and reared up, a great groaning mass of ice arcing up from the surface into the form of Bleak Fang. Unfazed. Unrepentant. And unerringly burying its jagged face in our flank.

We writhe and wrench from its grip, pushing it back with the flat of our whale skull and wheel, but those jaws will not be parted; as it flies from us, it takes a mouthful of memorates with it, trailing like entrails from its teeth. We feel their presences dim and die, hear their pain echo through our aureole, but there's nothing to be done. They perish; we recoil; Bleak Fang bounces off the water and back to its feet, spitting corpses.

You do not even eat them, we murmur, the slow, cold fury of deep water swelling through the stinging. Is it death alone that sustains you?

Its face bends into that silent snarl again. We take aim, but before the shadows have left our substance it's gone. Racing out along the surface, carving a frozen white line through the water. Below it, the ice billows and falls through the water with the heavy grace of whale fall, forming a deadly cage our vegetal body dare not touch.

The prison has not been built that our anchor cannot breach: one good blow and the ice splinters beneath our strength. But no sooner has it broken than it seals again, squeezing and refreezing around the anchor; and now Bleak Fang has completed its loop, a frozen fortress fresh-formed all around us; and as we stretch and strain to find the loophole, it lunges back toward the centre.

Flash of fang. Fraying of fronds. More death, more tiny particles of personhood spilling softly from ourselves. We thrum with shadow, pushing through the pain to tear at Bleak Fang's body, but the holes we leave scab over in seconds. And all the while the creature is on us, in us, ripping and rending and wreaking havoc on our poor dying memorates, and our anchor is still stuck―

We make a decision. The bulk of our power comes from Mother Sea, of course; it is meet that hers is the strength we bring to bear on her enemies. Yet we have others, dangerous though they are. And so, in desperation, we lean backwards into the death that made us, falling free of our mother's embrace and into the old, cold, mouldering dark that is the Ancient's domain.

This is not a path to walk lightly. The peace here is so profound it almost cannot be resisted; even we, old and assured as we are, feel the pull of the void, the siren song of the endless slumber. But we are strong and we are desperate, and we do not intend to stay dead: we lean once more and fall back into the world on the other side of the ice wall.

Within its confines, Bleak Fang rages, ranging about the prison in furious confusion. It's clearly lost track of us. If we fled now, we would almost certainly escape. But there can be no flight. Not from this. Not while this abomination still profanes our mother's waters.

We heft our anchor, levelling its spike like the spine of some stygian stingray, and we loose a bolt of light straight into those lifeless eyes.

We are dead too, we say, as once more Bleak Fang bursts asunder. We have some spiritual power ourselves. But you, little misbegotten monster – you were never alive at all.

It reforms, but we have the opening we need: another shot, and another, splitting sabre teeth from snowy jaw and sending half the blade spinning through the spray toward the shore. The left side of Bleak Fang's face collapses, its single eye, rolling in a mad rage of pain, and before we have a chance to strike again it leaps the ice wall and snatches the broken blade up in its mouth.

O, we see your weakness now, cursed one! The snow is mere spectacle; all your substance lies in the sword. Break the blades, sever the soul – or whatever dark force animates this thing in its stead. We give an aureolar shriek that Bleak Fang cannot hear and dematerialise again, reappearing on the shoreward side with a thunderous splash and a rapturous fury. The Ancient-scion is unprepared, still mumbling its tooth back into place; it mounts no defence as we smash our black-burning anchor straight into its mouth―

―and rebound with a clangorous clash of steel on steel, hard vibrations jingling up and down our chain and throwing our coils into disarray. Some sordid sort of sorcery! Our anchor is longer than Bleak Fang's whole body; a blow from it ought to have made scrap of the strongest steel.

No mortal weaponry, then, we murmur, regathering ourselves. But we know your weakness now. Don't think you can escape us so easily.

We lunge, and so does it, its snow-shod and our weed-wrapped steel striking sparks as they meet. Each of us rebounds from the impact, struggling through the weakness that attends these sickly vibrations, and then it strikes again and we have barely enough time to block. And again. And again, and this time it slips under the crossbar of our anchor like a wrasse through the teeth of the shark and rips out another mouthful of our mother's memories. Moments we have carried five thousand years flake away on the sea breeze, the outrigger boats of the Pacific vanishing for good, and with them goes a great greyish gout of pain that shakes our shared consciousness to its foundation. We cannot keep doing this. Strands can be replaced, but these memories are our true selves; each one destroyed is an agony that eclipses any physical wound.

Foul thing! we cry, wrapping our chain around Bleak Fang's neck and tearing it free in cold wet gobbets. Small wonder Longshanks sought to keep you caged. You ought never to have been.

It howls soundlessly and falls back upon us once again, savaging and ravaging and, still, still, utterly careless of everything we throw at it. Perhaps we should have fled after all. Perhaps then our years wouldn't be being bled from us: memories of old boats and float-stoats, prey caught and lessons taught, broken foes and dying throes, all coming apart on the points of those twin fangs. If only we had some way to break them. Or―

O!

―to take them.

The thought holds us for a moment, like an octopus inspecting a shell. It worked before, when we took the Land-son magic. And now, perhaps, we can …

Bleak Fang twists and turns, driving its teeth deeper and deeper; we swirl around the blow, flicking up our anchor chain – and tangling the blades in its links.

No, you're going nowhere, we hiss, as it tries to wrench itself free. And now you will be us.

This is our argument: this is an old broken sword, a little more flotsam floating on the swell. Bleak Fang has its own argument, of course, or the Ancient does, through it; it says that it is an immortal, a great predator, a deathless killer for whom even the likes of us are nothing more than prey.

O, Mother, if ever there was a time to stand by your daughters! The Ancient is prideful and pitiless; it takes the part of its vile scion, even knowing as it does that Bleak Fang should not exist. The world is well persuaded. And in our grip, Bleak Fang strains and strives for its freedom, its terrible claws raking our coils. And all around us the sea groans and grumbles, heavy with crabbed clots of ice. And we repeat, we restate, we rejoin; and the Ancient howls; and Bleak Fang pulls its shining tooth free―

o|-)

Pause.

We remember our deaths. All of them, save those that Bleak Fang has torn away between its teeth. We remember awakening from the simple cycle of sun/strand/sustenance to the complex reality of predator and prey, reaver and researcher. The magic of memory and might. The Ancient's darkness running cold inside us, to be held in readiness like the sting of a stonefish.

All of this, before we came here. All of this, over and over, since the first tiny tetrapods set trembling foot on shore. All of this, stretched tight over the edge of Bleak Fang's blade. Fraying freely. Ready, perhaps, to snap.

We aren't ready. But if this is how Red Dulse ends, O! Let it never be said that she held back.

o|-)

Play―

―and the force opposing us gives out so abruptly that we stumble over its absence.

The momentum dies. Where there was sound, there is silence; where there was chaos, there is calm. The lithe, powerful body of Bleak Fang is sloughing away into the sea, mere snowmelt in the sun, and its fangs are drifting down into the tangle of trash we hold in our coils.

They hold anger still. Whatever Bleak Fang truly was, it hated everything around it, and that hate has bitten the blades too deep to ever truly leave. And frankly, we do not want it to. We may have come here to observe, but our patience has its limits. The humans crossed ours when they decided to chain death's own child with their magic and send it to chew our mother's memories to shreds.

No: we are done watching. The time has come to act.

O, Mother, we say, brushing our battered fronds over the surface of her waters, feeling Bleak Fang's hatred fill them right down to the tips. Come. Let us show them who they wrong.

We gather her close, bathe our wounds in healing brine. And for the first time in our long afterlife, we slither up from the water into the twilit air, an algal moon dripping with saltwater and scraps of shredded dulse.

You would master the dead, we murmur, stretching our aureole up the hillside toward where our enemies fled. And now, Land-sons, the dead come for you.

We'll spare Heaven Eyes, of course. He only wanted peace, curious little creature that he is. But we'll take our memorate back, and see this city for ourselves. And when we do, O sons of the Land, you'll learn just what it is for your mother to come home.