Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

  Tethiel gazed up at her, his face glowing like moonlit pearl. “Tried to wake you for hours, my heart.”

  Emesea yanked a sail to better catch the storm’s gusts. “We knew you wanted to stare death down the gullet.”

  The possibility that Hiresha now dreamed frightened her more than the monstrosity. She realized then that she wanted her rescue of Tethiel from the cave to have been real. The memory of their time together above the coral garden distracted her with afterimages of pleasure.

  She asked, “How’d this terror croc locate us again?”

  Neither warrior nor Feaster could answer over the howl of wind and the roar of the crocodile. Water sluiced between fangs of its opening mouth. Scars and ridges of tissue crossed over its palate, crimson in the light of Hiresha’s diamond.

  The enchantress leaped, over fangs, over tongue. Her toes slapped against the lump of the monster’s snout. Breath of half-digested fish seared her ankle. The terror croc tossed its head, and one eye narrowed to a vertical slit from the glare of her gem.

  She threw the diamond onto the monster’s brow. The triangle stone flamed a hot hue between its eyes. The enchantment yanked her to kneel on the leathery ridges of skin. The terror croc worried its head from side to side. Water cut into Hiresha, but she could not be shaken loose.

  Her hand lay between the ridges of its eyes, anchoring the diamond. She would enchant it to implode the crocodile’s skull.

  Tha-thump! The sound came from her right. She recognized it, had to beat down memories of swimming alongside a beautiful kraken, had to remind herself of the noise’s peril. She jumped before finishing her enchantment. She had to.

  A boulder of liquid blasted over the crocodile’s head. Water at that speed would hit as hard as rock, and had Hiresha not reacted, her body would have lost much of its solid parts. Even a glancing blow had dazed the terror croc to a drifting stillness.

  Hiresha spotted the Murderfish. The cauldron-shaped siphon on its neck pointed to the enchantress. With another sound of water forced between walls of muscle, a torrent erupted. A river of force launched at where Hiresha hovered in the air.

  You are one craftily cruel cephalopod. A sense of betrayal stung twice because it was illogical. Hiresha knew she had no reason to expect kindness from the kraken. Not in my red dress.

  She Attracted herself back to her diamond. Droplets stung her from the water coursing overhead. She rolled over the comatose crocodile, along its scaly neck. Its underside was patterned like a dry creek bed. Her fist rested against a rectangle of hide below the creature’s brain and beneath her diamond.

  Two tentacles curved downward through the water toward her. A third angled upward. None would reach her in time.

  Her fist opened, and the red diamond bore through the crocodile’s skull, brain, and sinew. It smacked into her palm and stopped. Blood leaked from between her fingers.

  A spasm ran down the long creature. Stubby arms beat against its flanks then hung loose. The terror croc died before it could release any sound shockwave. It was a mercy killing, considering what the enchantress planned.

  She whisked herself onto the ridged back of the corpse. Her diamond plinked against its snout, and her magic hauled on the gem to pull the beast’s jaw vertical, to crack it with the sound of a falling tree. The enchantress jumped and landed on the squishy carpet of a tongue. She touched a tusk of a fang then Attracted it from the bone. The tooth circled around her. She wanted the fangs like an archer wants arrows.

  With the kraken’s arms a grasping jungle around the terror croc, the enchantress had run out of time. She wondered how to defend herself with but a single tooth. The next moment held a year’s worth of uncertainty and tension.

  Mist billowed from Tethiel’s outstretched hands. A red aura formed around Hiresha. A whiteness covered the stars, making the light-speckled arms of the Murderfish all too obvious. The kraken’s skin never adapted to the fog. The Feaster’s illusion must have only been intended for the minds of humans.

  Emesea pounced from the boat and dug her axe and knife into a tentacle. The warrior said, “Hope she tastes even better than she looks.”

  An arm that had reached for Hiresha snapped back to crush Emesea. The warrior scooted onto the other side of the starlit skin. She kept her hold with gashing weapons. Suckers closed in, and she beat them back long enough to plop into the water.

  Tethiel and Emesea had secured Hiresha the time she needed. She ripped out all the terror croc’s fangs. Blood only trickled from the jaw, with the creature’s heart already stopped. A fleet of ivory spikes followed her as she leaped over the Murderfish.

  The kraken’s slatted eye saw her. The wide mouth of the pupil gaped, and the Murderfish was gone in a burst of water and a spin of tentacles. The kraken drilled its way into the deep.

  Hiresha glanced to The Roost, saw the boat sleighing its way down a wave. Tethiel’s whipping hair was a star storm in the wind. She called out to him. “The mist was a most excellent counter illusion.”

  “My heart, krakens flee you. What does that say of your greatness?”

  An air-pocket formed over the enchantress’s grin as she pursued the Murderfish. She towed herself beneath the storm-tossed surf one throw of her diamond at a time. Neither moonlight nor the glow of her jewel extended far in the blackness. She had to slow down.

  Have a care. I mustn’t die to a mistake now that I have a desirable life. With only one diamond, she feared to dive too deep. She would be vulnerable.

  The duskiness ahead condensed into spires of smoky water. Eels roiled in and out of the fumes in streaks of purple. Beyond them, a rim of basalt stone reared up. A shivering knowingness spread over her. She saw what looked like her laboratory, drowned and broken. Her heart thudded against her ribs. Her spine arched backward as if she had swallowed strychnine poison.

  It was an underwater volcano. Not her laboratory. She knew that, but the feeling of looming fate remained.

  She coasted around the jagged ridge of basalt. Lava-red coral filled the crater. The smoke boiled from patches of brimstone. The vents growled. The eels careened around her and nipped at the pulp ends of her crocodile teeth.

  Twice she swam around the summit, searching for the Murderfish. The enchantress found nothing, except a simmering tension beyond that of the water’s heat. Perhaps the volcano will soon erupt. Or it already has, in my other facet.

  The pit of foreboding in her even made her wonder if she had died here. Can one aspect of me live on with the other dead? She doubted it. Death, she suspected, would at least shatter the dream inversion and take away her power.

  Hiresha could remember only flashes from the previous day. The taste of abalone, a tentacle sucker pulling against her skin. Two days ago was clear to the last detail of her pyramidal diamond.

  She had a theory. Perhaps both blue and red facets occur simultaneously. Part of my brain sleeps while the other is awake. She realized she might be flattering her mental ability too much, but it would explain her disjointed memory.

  The first time she had woken to wear the blue dress. The second time, the red. And one of those is false. She realized that perhaps she only perceived the blue dress as coming first because of the time of day. Sleep may have held her in oblivion until the evening, when she donned the red. Twelve hours later she dreamed of a blue dress and cutting the paragon diamond. That would explain my reaction to the atoll. Not a prophetic feeling but a suppressed memory.

  Hiresha could imagine the Jeweled Feaster in the dream laboratory. Her smile stretched to inhuman dimensions reflected in an orb of crystal. She stole memories and locked them in stone, sprinkling them back into Hiresha’s consciousness when best to deceive her.

  Whitewater parted around Hiresha’s face, and she launched from the sea and onto the boat. Emesea stood over a steaming slab of crocodile meat. A layer of fat separated the muscle from the hide. The terror croc’s carcass dipped into the trough of a wave.

  Emesea grinned at the fangs floating behin
d the enchantress. “Nice set of corn-nibblers you got there.”

  In this light, Tethiel looked less like a person and more like an entity carved of onyx and moonstone. In the flame pattern in his vest, gold thread danced within crimson fabric. Speaking over the gusts, he said, “If the Murderfish comes, I’ll know it. She fears you now.”

  He knows I couldn’t yet kill the kraken. She guessed he had seen it in her face, or scented her worries. The enchantress took his hand and was surprised to feel the stiffness of his knuckles.

  “Your fingers, they are not healed.” Hiresha glanced over his shoulder at an essence tempest with autumn hues. Yes, in my dream, the wild magic cured his hands.

  “Intriguing that you expected them to be, my heart.”

  “An oversight I’ll correct as soon as I have a spare jewel.”

  “What?”

  She had to repeat herself, shouting over the wind. Closer than any essence tempest, a thunderstorm dominated the sky with a cloud like a cliff overhang. Hiresha knew she had searched for dragons and their storms earlier in her dream. Was it Emesea’s dragon? Hiresha could almost remember.

  “Emesea, might your dragon have birthed this storm?”

  “No. She would’ve dropped her snout by to say hello.” Emesea had stopped rowing to speak. She resumed paddling on one side, facing the boat back into the waves.

  Her pause bothered Hiresha. The warrior could talk and fight at the same time. She could’ve pumped the oars and shouted simultaneously. Unless she had to focus on a lie.

  Her dragon could never have created this storm or any. Because that dragon is dead.

  “Emesea, I am sorry that your dragon has departed the Lands of Loam,” Hiresha said. “Do you speak of her to try to comfort yourself, or me?”

  A wave burst behind Emesea in a netting of collapsing froth. She stared at Hiresha. And the warrior laughed. “You sound as certain as a man about his cock.”

  “I learned of it in my dream.” The memory was dust in the wind, but it felt true.

  “Ha! Well you’re wrong.” The warrior knuckled the enchantress in the chin, too light to bruise. “And you’re right. I knew a storm-master of a dragon, the best scaled, and the most courageous. She took on the Sleeper, the leviathan who snores tides, and she came out the worse for it—”

  “Sorry I don’t feel guilty for interrupting,” Tethiel said, “but shouldn’t someone be afraid of this storm?”

  The warrior ignored him. “The dragon had been chewed up pretty good, and she was bleeding in her skull. She was dying and she knew it. The dragon cast the only spell that could save herself. She shed most of her crushed body and became a human.”

  “Became you.” The enchantress gestured to the warrior and her immense tattoo. Having swum the first part of her life as a dragon would explain her knowledge of the sea.

  “So you don’t have gems for brains after all?” Emesea’s snaggle grin may have had a bit of dragon in it.

  Hiresha had made the deduction even though it jarred with her blue-dress facet. Everything clashed. She grew aware of the pitching boat, the disorienting collisions of waves. She thought she understood at last what it meant to be sea sick, a dry twirling in the throat.

  Emesea could have deluded herself, Hiresha thought. Believing that dragon blood flowed in her veins might grant Emesea abnormal courage. Not that I’m in any position to criticize. I’m deluding myself into grandeur.

  Tethiel leaned close to Emesea to be heard. “Then, Madam Dragon, do you think much about changing back? Or are hands too useful?”

  “Shape changing is harder than you worms make it out. I didn’t even turn into a big person, did I?”

  “An inefficient transformation?” Hiresha asked.

  “Go back and I’d be a dragon the size of a shit.”

  The enchantress said, “You’re not the most venerable dragon I’ve met.”

  “What’s the point of being human if you can’t be vulgar?”

  “All I know,” Tethiel said, “is that there’s no point to being an adult if you can’t be childish.”

  Emesea smiled at him and tapped her tattoo. “It’s enough to remember and drink beer. That and…”

  The warrior swung an arm behind the Feaster and smacked his posterior. She cackled and did not stop even when her arm appeared to disintegrate. The illusion caused her fingers to sift to ash and blow away over the waves. Emesea took it in stride, and the magic soon faded. She whistled as she fixed the rigging with both hands.

  They had crested only three more foothill-sized waves when Tethiel grasped Hiresha’s arm. Excitement burned its way along her skin.

  “My heart, it’s our favorite kraken. There’ll be no point in my telling you to be careful.”

  Hiresha leaped out of The Roost, her terror-croc fangs hissing after her through the air. Something glowed under the surface. She dove and saw the Murderfish with one tentacle shining red. The rest of the kraken was invisible, just a single wriggling worm of an arm.

  A great platehead pursued the lure. Its anvil brow shifted side to side in time to the swaying thump of its massive tail. It looked to be made of rock, muscle, and meanness evolved over millennia. Scavenger sharks dashed close to its armored head in anticipation of a meal.

  He’d be not so eager, if he knew he chased a kraken. Hiresha could see the Murderfish, and the enchantress swam toward its side. She needed to close the distance without throwing her only jewel within tentacle reach. If the Murderfish tried to leap into the air, she could launch her barrage of fangs all the sooner.

  The Murderfish waved its crimson arm toward the enchantress then let it vanish. Blending into the whitewater above, the kraken swam away. The only red light left came from Hiresha.

  Throwing more sea brutes at me, are you? Hiresha suspected the kraken had guided the terror croc to the boat as well.

  The enchantress hid her jewel under an arm. The great platehead still turned to her with a sweep of its spear-shaped tail. Eight eyes fixed on the enchantress, six black ones from sharks. The two from the craggy monstrosity gleamed with the confidence of an alpha predator. Its cold assurance told of never being afraid a day in its life. And to its minnow-sized mind, Hiresha was already as good as eaten.

  Hiresha decided to show her respect by killing the creature quickly. She dove beneath its spotted belly. Her fangs whisked behind her, one skidding off the armored head. The rest of the teeth she pulled with more force, and they formed white lines shooting toward the fish’s unarmed gills.

  The teeth impacted. They shattered off a translucent plate of magic. More armor surrounded the fish in crystal that shimmered then faded back out of sight. Pieces of broken teeth drifted away, along with the body of one shark that had been pierced.

  A monster with magic? That seems uncalled for.

  The fish twisted into a half circle, its fins tilting to bring its crag jaws close to her. The enchantress slung herself past. Using precise calculations of angle and trajectory, Hiresha Attracted a fang into its golden eye. The tooth splintered into ivory shards. Unhurt, the big fish had not even flinched.

  The enchantress decided to spare this great platehead’s life and fly away. Bubbles of foam washed over her. She met the air. Winds howled about her, but they still slowed her less than water as her leap carried her in an arch above the waves.

  A crinkle in the froth below her warned her of a massive creature. The whitewater hid all sight of it, but Hiresha had no doubts. The Murderfish is waiting to catch me. She Lightened herself, stopped her descent, and waited for a gale to position her for a perfect strike.

  Water exploded behind her. The great platehead breached, its tail hacking through the waves. Hiresha was reminded of a trout jumping to catch a fly, an unfavorable comparison for herself.

  Being a creature of intelligence, Hiresha was frightened. Her intestines felt oiled with fear, but she did not let that stop her from escaping to the side.

  Back underwater, she glimpsed the Murderfish circling ahead.
She changed course again. The sea boomed as the great platehead fell back in and resumed its chase. Its tail strokes were slow but powerful. Each made a “whoom!” sound underwater. Hiresha tossed her diamond to stay ahead.

  A tentacle lashed from the darkness. The Murderfish slapped her gem back.

  Adrenaline slammed within Hiresha’s heart. She launched a volley of fangs, to keep the kraken away if nothing else. She caught her gem in time to feel herself lurch backward.

  The great platehead had snapped open its maw. The inrush of water yanked her legs into the living crevasse of the predator's mouth. This fish had no teeth, but its plated jaw was like a jagged mountain range. Its spikes would fit into a matching upper lip of stone, with her hips between. She could not move her body fast enough to escape.

  So she used her mind. A spell Attracted her feet to her diamond, pulling her legs out from between those crushing jaws. They slammed together, shearing off a fold of Hiresha’s dress. She was bent into a ball. She rocked in the tremor from the fish’s closing mouth and tumbled over the breadth of its brow.

  A shark’s underbelly shone cherry from the light of her gem. It swerved to bite her. Her feet landed on bony plates, and she jumped to safety.

  The enchantress rushed at the Murderfish, ready with her ivory fangs. The kraken sped away from her with ease, disappearing into the depths.

  Caught between a cautious kraken and impervious boldness? Being surrounded nipped Hiresha with panic. Time for some innovation.

  As if her mind granted her a magical wish, Hiresha knew what she had to do. Emesea had given her the right approach. ‘When your foes are strong, make yourself look weak. They’ll believe it.’

  Hiresha left behind her fangs and diamond. They floated like a school of fish. She swam in line with the great platehead then started flailing. She did her best to flounder and look like a drowning princess.

  And the kraken no doubt has seen me leave my jewel. She suspected she had only four seconds before tentacles reached for her. By then, the great platehead had to be dead.