Sea of Secrets Anthology

by J E Feldman

  “I’m quite certain,” Omani said firmly, dismissing any human involvement. The blue flames in her eyes died out as she killed the parley spell and cut the telepathic lines of communication between them.

  Their inter-species parley was over and none too soon. The sea was growing rougher by the moment as the storm intensified its attack on the Veil. Bolt after bolt struck the shield with barely a pause between them, and he had no magic to stop it.

  Kurago was sure that Omani was wrong about Damos, but it wouldn’t hurt to check on that curious youngster. His people were the distant cousins of the humans on the One Continent and humans were a resourceful lot. Worse still, Kurago didn’t know if anyone was watching the Hold. The weather might not be bad enough on the seafloor to keep Damos inside tonight. Kurago whistle-clicked several curses as evidence of his growing laxity.

  As another volley of violent bolts struck the Veil, Kurago took a deep breath and dove. May the One God have mercy on him if he was wrong about Damos.

  Far below the surface, Damos swam along the seafloor, hugging its contours. The pressure all those gallons of water exerted on every square inch of his nearly seven-foot-long body comforted him. It was a big watery hug that never ended. But the shadows he tried to blend into kept shifting as the creatures throwing them moved with the strengthening current.

  Just ignore the extra-large fish with arms shadowing the bottom-feeders. Damos willed the Watchers to be anywhere except right above him, even though he had no power to make them do anything. He couldn’t see them, but they always cruised the mid-ocean, scanning for trouble. Damos smiled as he darted into a patch of undulating seaweed to break up his silhouette.

  Those plants got a little too friendly when he peered through their rippling fronds for signs of the Watchers. No other sea creature had hair and right now, Damos wished he was bald, then those weeds would stop grabbing his hair. That “hair” was a weird anomaly unique to his kind, the Darodreds. According to the lore, his people were one of the eight species known as “the Magic Kind.”

  What had happened to the other seven kinds? Had they died out or were they still hanging around somewhere? No one had ever said, and Damos had asked everyone, including the Watchers, who on many occasions had subjected him to a parley spell.

  Maybe tonight’s quest would shed some light on those other magical races. Curiosity sang a siren song and it turned Damos toward the only forbidden place left under the sea—the Veil. It was the one place he’d never thought of visiting before and the only taboo he hadn’t proved wrong yet. Perhaps he would do that tonight.

  Doubts crept in, but Damos shoved them aside. The mid-ocean was clear. There were no Watchers in the area. Excitement made the lobes of his caudal fins tingle. Before he could change his mind, Damos shot out of that seaweed patch and sped westward.

  Lights twinkled and twirled as the roughening current whipped the pinprick stars dusting the sea floor into shining vortices. Of course, they weren’t really stars. They were tiny creatures that liked to clump together into luminous macro-colonies that looked a lot like stars, which was probably how this sea had gotten its name. Those shiny motes were everywhere.

  Why couldn’t they leave him alone tonight? Damos glared at the creatures clinging to him. He didn’t bother with a parley spell. The Watchers made it look so easy to cast, but it wasn’t. Besides, the Andurai were supposedly magical creatures, so they should be able to hear his agitated vocalizations even if none of the sounds he produced were actual words. If they did, they gave no indication of it.

  Damos swatted at the Andurai, who’d hitched a ride on his body. Since he was trying to be stealthy, the pinpricks of light dusting his tail were an unwelcome addition. More Andurai flocked to him, as if he’d issued some kind of invitation. In an eye-blink, both lobes of his caudal fin were covered in them, and they made his tail glow a soft silver against the deep blue of the sea.

  Supposedly, those little buggers were the building blocks of magic, but Damos had never believed that particular rumor. He shook his tail, but they clung on, lighting him up for all to see.

  Sleek as a runner, Damos was like the rest of his Darodred brethren—man-like from waist to head. Not that he’d ever seen a human man before. And if he ever did, said human would faint dead away at the sight of his alarmingly human, if a tad blue, face. Though, his flattened nose was just there for decoration since Damos had never found a use for it, but the Andurai had. A group of them settled on its tip, and Damos glared cross-eyed at those glowing buggers as he swiped at them.

  At least his multicolored hair wasn’t glowing. It was cut short, and its mottled blues matched his scales. But that’s where the similarities with his distant human cousins ended. Instead of skin, scales covered him from tail-tip to the crown of his head in a rather fetching pattern of blue, silver, and teal, which the Andurai augmented with spots of glowing white.

  “Please go away and leave me in peace,” he said in a whistle-click language, not very different from dolphin speech, but the Andurai just migrated down his torso, tickling him as they went.

  Their colonies changed sizes to match his scales, which were smaller on his face but increased in circumference as they moved down his body. The Andurai even outlined the gills along his sides, which were bubbling away as Damos thrashed to rid himself of his luminous passengers.

  His fingers and opposable thumbs were webbed and fin-like and more than adequate to brush those Andurai off him. But those glowing annoyances kept catching on the translucent blue fins trailing artfully from his elbows to his wrists on the outside of his arms, which he noted with growing horror were glowing too as more and more Andurai abandoned his tail and migrated to his arm-fins.

  Why me? Damos scrubbed his now glowing hands over his face, but that only worsened the problem because it transferred those annoying things back to his face. Fabulous. Now his eyelashes were glowing.

  From the waist down, he had a long, muscular tail ending in a large caudal fin with two large lobes perfectly fashioned for quick getaways, but Damos couldn’t outswim a creature that was in every gallon of seawater. At least his tail was slowly darkening as the Andurai found other places on his person to hitch rides.

  Damos twisted around to check his back. Like dolphins and other sea mammals, he had a dorsal fin at the base of his spine. It was the only part of him not dusted with glowing motes. Thank you, God. But that left Damos with two choices—abandon his quest tonight and head back to the Hold or go on and hope he could shake his passengers before any of the Watchers saw him—if they hadn’t already. And they might have since he freaking glowed, and not softly either. No, the Andurai were in light-up-the-sea mode. Damn them to the deepest trench.

  Home won out above the Veil because he couldn’t continue on while parts of his body glowed like a second sun. Damos turned toward the Hold instead, but Arosities’s words echoed in his mind, renewing his determination.

  “Do your duty, boy, or you’ll bring the Lord God down on our heads,” Arosities had said, then he’d pounded his massive fist against the cave wall. The phosphorescent sea life lining it had withdrawn into their hidey-holes at his ire. But Arosities had ignored them, along with the fish darting away, as he’d turned his fury on his youngest charge. “Are you a fool, boy? Why test the lore? Respect it like I damned well taught you and quit all this exploration nonsense or so help me, I’ll make you!”

  As if that old Darodred could catch him! He had to be careful not to vocalize that though, especially here in the channel. Sound traveled far under the sea, and Arosities had a keen sense of hearing for his age.

  But what if the lore was wrong? Dead wrong. Damos had already proven that on more than one occasion, but nothing had changed in the Hold. His hands balled into fists and he punched the seawater in front of him until his anger subsided.

  There was only one taboo left—the Veil. If legend was wrong about everything else, then it must be wrong about that too. If only Damos could prove its nonexistence, all t
he lies oppressing his people would finally topple. Then maybe everyone would finally come to their senses.

  Because it was past time to found a new Hold. His people couldn’t keep living in these overcrowded conditions. But the old ways grew more entrenched no matter what he did. Soon they would trap him too unless something changed.

  Damos regarded his still-glowing body. Even now, covered in Andurai, it betrayed him. His scales were darkening and slowly taking on the satiny sheen of the breeders. Just what he didn’t want to be—a captive. But that’s what he was: one of the few who could engender the next generation whether he liked it or not.

  The number of breeding males and females were dwindling with each brood, but the numbers of neuters and sterile males and females were increasing. Because their species was dying out. But no one would listen. That too was the Veil’s fault. The lore surrounding it kept his people penned up in the Hold. No one would tell him why.

  “Changes come in threes,” sang the voice of the sea. It vibrated the bones in his jaw, conjuring hazy pictures in his mind of his people throwing off the old ways to embrace change.

  Yes, indeed, changes came in threes, and Damos aimed to be one of those three.

  Bubbles shot toward the surface ending his daydream and Damos dove through a stand of bioluminescent weeds. Someone was coming, but it couldn’t be a Watcher because of the depth. They usually stayed in the upper sea because most of them lacked gills, which meant it might be one of the few Darodreds who still ventured out of the Hold.

  Damos scanned the seabed for signs of his pursuer, but there were only bioluminescent plants, fish, and free-floating Andurai about. If he hugged the sea floor, he could blend in with them and slip away. Eventually, those plants would peter out as the seafloor plunged into deep trenches. By that point though, he’d better lose his shimmering passengers.

  A passing shrimp shook its head and Damos was suddenly hungry. But the shrimp had already zipped out of sight, behind a patch of sea anemones. Their dark tentacles tickled his tail as he passed. None tried to sting him, but he kept his claws out just in case the idea crossed their minds. Some of the Andurai leaped off onto the anemones, making them glow. Good riddance.

  More Andurai lost interest in him and drifted away, but some remained. They dotted his tail, turning his scales into a constellation of stars, and Damos took a moment to admire the effect. It was subtle, but quite fetching against the blue twilight of the sea. Was their glow soft enough though?

  He'd find out soon. His course was set and miles of open ocean lay before him.

  A lone figure sighed as she lowered her tired arms. Energy still crackled around her fingertips, making her hair float around her face in a black, frizzy cloud as she examined the fulgurite. The glass tube had formed when lightning had struck the spit of sand behind her. It barely qualified as an island, but the atoll was rich in fulgurites and sea glass, and that made it priceless in her blue-glowing eyes.

  Svetalia regarded her haul fondly. She had a half dozen fulgurites piled on the sand and twice as many pieces of sea glass. Foolish sailors had thrown their empty bottles overboard, and the sea had polished the shards into perfect amplifiers for the fulgurites’ power. Did she have enough to break the Veil and the curse upon her kind?

  She might be risking her life for nothing, but she pushed that thought out of her mind because she’d come too far to quit now. Svetalia slid down the rock she’d perched on hours earlier, into the foaming sea, tail-first. She grimaced as the water climbed her scales to her waist, where her blue-green fishtail faded into a muscular woman’s bronzed upper body. Oh, how she hated that wet reminder of what she was—a creature who was neither fish nor a woman, but something in between.

  She was born of a race of cursed shifters called Shallans, and like the rest of her race, she was stuck in a half-human, half-fish warrior-form. But it missed that goal by a nautical mile. In fact, this half-form was a cruel joke. She had a tail, but no gills, so she couldn’t dive deep for long enough to enjoy the sea’s pleasures or explore its wrecks. And without legs, she couldn’t wander about on land for long without drying out and ending up in excruciating pain.

  As the cold water touched the fulgurite burning her hand, it cracked. The storm was dissipating anyway. All its energy was spent and so was the fulgurite. The current grabbed it and the pieces of sea glass from her hand. Both were now spider-webbed with cracks.

  She let them drift away. In time, the sea would fashion them into something new, and they’d wash up on another atoll. Someone would put them to use, for that was the way of the sea. Nothing was ever wasted. Everything was reclaimed and recycled.

  Svetalia watched them disappear into the night-shrouded ocean as the storm blew itself out. Thunder grumbled at her for abandoning the storm she’d summoned as she crawled on her belly out of the sea and onto the narrow beach. Her treasures lay on a ragged square of sailcloth. One by one, she fed each carefully into the glass bottle she’d found after she checked it once more for cracks.

  There were none, so she trimmed the swollen cork to fit and pushed it in. Then she covered it with the wax-coated sailcloth, tied that tightly around the corked top, and placed the whole thing into a rucksack she’d fashioned from more of that same waterproofed cloth before looping the entire bundle across her back.

  She was ready, but the Veil was far away—too far for her to swim to it unaided. If her plan succeeded and she broke the curse, she had no way to reach land before she drowned. Her quest was hopeless before it had even begun, but she had no other choice. She couldn’t live like this anymore.

  The wind tousled her wet hair and flung spindrift into her eyes. Was it the wind of fate or change?

  For a long moment, she sat half in the water and half out. She was caught between two worlds. The uncaring surf rolled in and covered her tail then withdrew, revealing it. She stared at the play of starlight on her deep purple-blue scales until a shadow fell over her. All those defeatist thoughts fled like a school of startled fish as she dug her hands into the wet sand and scooted deeper into the water.

  There was a dark shape fast approaching her deserted little island. It was too big to be a ship, but what else could it be? Maybe a Watcher? In that case, she had nothing to fear because she belonged out here. Well, she actually belonged in the shallow waters of a coral reef many miles away, which may have alarmed the Watchers—but as the ship came into view, she stopped, wondering about them and staring at the random, wandering crew. What was that ship doing out here? When she saw it sail toward the western horizon though, she had her answer. She wasn’t the only one hunting for the Veil this night. Perhaps her quest wasn’t hopeless after all.

  Svetalia smiled for the first time in a long while as she swam toward the ship, ignoring all her instincts. They were screaming at her to turn aside and swim away instead of toward the ship and its two-legged passengers. She kept a weathered eye on the shadow-laden deck and scanned it for the metallic gleam of a harpoon.

  A sonic call vibrated the bones in Damos’s skull, specifically his lower jaw, and the sensation startled him out of a light doze. Where had that come from? He floated, listening hard for a repeat to give him a fix. Hopefully the noise of his passage hadn’t sent a similar vibration through the bones of the creature employing said sonar.

  It might not have since all the water around them generated quite a lot of sound, as did that passing school of fish. They didn’t even glance in his direction as they swam on, in search of dinner or some Andurai to chase.

  Clicks reverberated through the water again, and their echoes mapped a three-dimensional section of the craggy sea mountain. It offered plenty of places to hide. In fact, hiding sounded like a great idea as more click trains followed that first volley. That meant a dolphin was on his tail. They were the most persistent of the Watchers and the speediest.

  He concentrated on the successive click trains and used them to navigate as he dove into the valley below him. But he couldn’t tell if those cli
cks came from Kurago or not. All dolphins sounded alike to him, which was how they wanted things, and it was a damned nuisance.

  Since a concussion would also end his quest prematurely, Damos thrust his arms in front of his face and touched his palms together to protect his head. No sane Darodred would plunge blindly into a trench of unknown depth, but Damos had no other options.

  Fortunately, all the Andurai had fallen off while he’d been swimming and their free-floating brethren had made themselves scarce, which was downright strange. The Andurai were everywhere under the sea. So why weren’t they here?

  Their absence sounded an alarm in his head and set his senses afire. But none passed any usable intel except touch and the vibrations in his bones, painting shifting soundscapes in his mind. Damos felt the current with every scale on his body and used its changes to navigate through the utter darkness as the dolphin turned his sonar on a different part of the undersea range.

  Another sonic scream vibrated through his bones and Damos flattened himself under an outcropping until its echoes attenuated into silence. That was definitely a whale and not a happy one, but she was farther away and might be searching another section of the seafloor.

  There was a cave behind him. Damos darted into it and put a solid rock wall between him and those echoing clicks before they could bounce off him. One of his favorite pastimes was avoiding Watchers, but he didn’t want to play that game tonight, not when his people’s salvation might be within his grasp. If he could prove the Veil didn’t exist. To do that, he needed that Watcher to move along.

  “Come and see. Oh, come and see. What’s beyond my twinkling shield,” whispered the sea.