The Icarus Writing Collective, 04: Currents by The Icarus Writing Collective

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The Icarus Writing Collective Issue 04: Currents

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Dedicated to the coast we both call home, that reared us and guided us, and to the coast that calls to us still, an ocean between the two.

𓆝 Letters from the Editors 𓆞 I grew up on the shore of an island and the grandchild of four Mediterranean immigrants; in other words, the ocean is in my blood. I was raised alongside it, to bathe in its beauty and to respect its unforgiving nature. Water gives life, but it can also take it away. It lies in a state of duplicity that can be both freeing and frightening. There is both familiarity and mystery in its depths, echoing the ever-changing consistency I discussed for the Moon. And it is apt to compare that issue to this one, as the Moon reflects the tides and these stories reflect many of the ones in Issue 02. I have grown immensely since our ode to the Moon, and yet I am still me—still beating against the rocks on the shore, constant and ever-changing at the same time. Elizabeth Zarb I have a love/hate relationship with water, specifically the ocean. While I can appreciate its beauty, I also know first hand at some of its dangers from its tricky riptides, destructive waves, and vast unknown. The beach was a stone’s throw away from my home for a lot of my life, and I still fear it. This balancing act between appreciation and caution is at the heart of a lot of the stories you’ll find within these pages. Water is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Human life starts with water, is supported by it, but also can be doomed by it. Of course, so many stories face this very fact: how like its very own currents, water can ebb and flow, give and take, create and destroy. And so, we beat on… Kyle Ross

𓆝 Table of Contents 𓆞

The Somewhere Blues Richard M. Ankers

What the Sea Goddess Said Taylor Catalana

“Summer by the Sea” RUNA

Rain Muze

The Drowning of Loki Ginny McSheehan

“Healing” 1moretale

Stolen Skin Solstice Lamarre

Iris the Rainbow Ocean

Dans Sœur K. Martin

Under the Water of the Lake Edward Daschle

“Port is Not for Boats” Giulio R.M. Maﬀii

Sovereign and Spice and Everything Nice D.J. Clark

“Flooded (Danube river)” RUNA

Where am I? Leonie Jacobs

My Trust Must Be Natalie Zutter

“Jackrabbit Jive” Entropy

To the Sea and Stars Rian Moneypenny

Buckwheat Flower of the Ocean Vy Lieu

112

“Combarro” Giulio R.M. Maﬀii

117

To have, to hold. Julian

118

The Lights of a Hunting Party Sirius

121

Phantom of the Brine Bella Vedder

129

“On a Lost Marsh” Maeve Chapman

148

Red River Zenia deHaven

149

Queen Jurata and the Amber Palace Robin Zubek

165

The Sea Bride Jules Leclercq

170

“The Sea Bride” Jules Leclercq

189

Eternity is Terribly Dull Without Company sumedha

190

A Song of Silence for the Mother of Grendel G.J. Brillante

193

“The Aquatic Galaxy of Hehór” RUNA

206

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The Somewhere Blues Richard M. Ankers

Somewhere beneath a savage sky lies a kingdom shrouded in blue. Legend says the sky itself was blue one day, and that the world below was the beast, not the world above. This changed long ago. At least, long before me. Still, what are songs passed down through the generations for if not to inspire hope? I do hope, but I don't know what I'm hoping for.

𓆟 I stare. Staring is an occupation in which I specialize. Where others pick a subject and concentrate very hard, like studying a chess piece or watching an unbalanced bird flapping on a washing line, I see the bigger picture. I open my eyes wider than golf balls and take in every photon of diffuse light. True, they fill mostly with blue, but it comes in many shades, and I'm familiar with them all. Cerulean is the cleanest, crispest blue. A blue so vivid as to define every other shade set against it, cerulean is the mask the other blues would wear. It shines as an example, provides a

backdrop to accentuate all else. A shade for the soul as well as itself, cerulean haunts everything. I gasp at its magnificence, but it soon ghosts away. There’s a fade after this, where every blue lessens. There is no diminishment, however, nor fingers pointed. Every blue plays its part in the grander scheme of things. From the insipid luxury of turquoise, through to the delights of aquamarine. Both these blues were once associated with the ocean: a thing of water, of rippling liquidity, settled upon the earth, not falling from above. But this was from long before me, and probably longer before you. I have a penchant for the deeper blues, a yearning, one might say. Those named royal, or navy, and best of all, ultramarine. The latter is another of the wet blues, but one with hints of submerged worlds even more unknown than the one above. Ultramarine is the ferryman, the color that leads us from our bright definite lives to our uncertain dark deaths. Yet, and here I stress, I have no proof. Bright! Who am I kidding? I long for those darkest depths. Just thinking of that sulphuric and jaundiced yellow sky fills me with distaste. So upsetting is it, the color blue is suddenly banished from my thoughts altogether. Time to rethink my worldencompassing observations. Time to sleep.

𓆟 I dream in rainbow colors. I dream of bejeweled splendor. Ruby and emerald delight my senses as gold and silver shine. Opal

and amber only enhance these visions, as do tangerine, bronze and amethyst. They send shivers of delight through my recumbent form. I giggle in my sleep like a spoiled child, expecting to feel the nibble of tiny mouths cleaning my sides. Christmas comes all at once until sapphire steals away the show. Glimpsed as though through a window. A sparkle. A blue dot. I am drawn from the colors making my illusion so perfect, as if it's inevitable. My eyes lock onto the blue, fasten upon heaven, and the wisps of bridal white that flit across it. Which is the dream? What is the truth? The where and the why trouble me so much I no longer know who or what I am. Neither do I have the strength left to care.

𓆟 I awake to a cloying gloom, eyes as wet as always, yet never from weeping. There is no blue, for I am emerged in it. A flap of a fluke. A blink of a giant eye, and I bolt for the surface, having spent too long under the slapping waves. My brothers and sisters await. There's a wretched wind upon the lake. An awful stench circulates above this, the last water the earth possesses. Our lake, the one we have carved out through the powerful limbs of generations, scrubbing and rubbing away the sediment and rock, is now surrounded by death. The worst color of all—the ebony of

decay—proliferates. The volcanic orange of spewed lava grows close, like blood-filled veins emptying out of an open wound. I would gulp, but it would sting. We sing to the ravaged sky. We weep our final tears. The blue we inhabit shall soon be no more. Humanity's legacy shall take the last of us to wherever it is they went. I hope it is to that somewhere blue. Whether I swim or fly there may be another's decision.

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What the Sea Goddess Said Taylor Catalana Content Warning: References to Domestic Violence

They say he is the one who fathered me, the one who slips and slides around this island, through dark shoals of fish and atop the white, foaming crests of waves. So powerful is he, holding dominion here between lands, that no one has seen his real face. He changes shape as easily as the sun touches earth. So ancient is he, his real name has never been spoken, not by anyone still alive. I know—because I know all—that when the stranger comes to us, my father will be called Proteus. A new name that will be carried back across the wine-dark water to take root among the stranger’s people, to sprout in their stories and songs. Proteus, a deathless old sea god. I can taste his satisfaction with this in the air, in the salt I lick from my lip as I scan the horizon. I must be this elusive old god’s daughter, for I, too, have flicked names from my skin like tangles of seaweed. Surely I had one breathed upon me at my briny birth, back in some age past all

human remembering, but I cannot recall its shape to my mouth. Instead, over the eons, I have emerged from the depths at the call of Amathaounta, of Nammu, of Atargatis, myriad names that mortals have cried in stirring supplication only to eventually have them wiped from their minds by the tide of time. Leaving the beach where I stand silent of adulation. Such silence is what sends my father skimming across the sea, learning new shapes to take, new tongues to speak, so that the worship is washed up anew here on this island. I myself never cared much for the stuff. Worship, I have found, is no different than the treasure I watch spill like a bleeding wound from the belly of a wrecked ship. The gold winks as it dances through the darkness, pirouetting glimmers through the depths, and I marvel that something so small, so fickle, is what humans value so much. It is no more than a curiosity to me before it falls to the bottom of the sea, buried, forgotten. I do not need their praise; their praise simply crosses my path on occasion. I am here on this island, molded to its every dune and exhaling its every wave, and I will be until the stranger arrives. He will be a king. He will be rangy and scarred from many years of warfare, but he will be flush with fresh victory, not just of the great war that kept him from his kingdom, but of all the spoils gained on his journey back to it. His ships—those that have not been claimed by the hungry sea, unfed during these long years of

battle—will be fat with the riches pilfered from the continent at my back. But men such as these, so confident in their greatness, so bolstered by the blood on their sword, they make mistakes more often than most. They are blinded by their own prowess and believe that they are as invincible as the gods who grip their lives. They forget to make certain sacrifices. They feel they don’t have to appease gods like my father, who have all of eternity to feel slighted by a calf not slaughtered and all of eternity to make that known. But the king is not my concern. No, as I gaze out at the stark, faultless horizon, I am waiting for the wind that will bring her. The king’s wife. The one about whom every god from the top of Olympus down to the crevices of the Underworld has spoken. Whose beauty, they say, is worth more than all the paltry gold mortals can mine. The one the mortals all blame. Her husband will look at me and call me by the name Eidothea. But she, I know, she will give me the last name I’ll ever don.

𓆟 In the humans’ estimation, it was many years ago, but I feel the passage of time only like the touch of the faintest sea mist. She passed by my island on another ship, helmed by a different lordling. Transported down in the hold like cargo, and wasn’t she? A beautiful queen taken away from her kingdom, though whether the matter was forced, perhaps not even Mother Aphrodite knows.

But when they floated by our beach, the sun was decadent in its illuminating, and the prince who had spirited her away felt it a waste to not bring his new jewel out to shine. He led her up onto the deck with a grip I could see from my place on the slick rocks, surrounded by my herd of equally slick seals. I could see how he possessed her, ready to have her shaped down and fitted like a gem for his crown.

𓆟 Of course she was beautiful; even for the gods, who know only perfection, she caught the eye, caused a pause in the unperturbed divine perusal. But I did not sit up among my glistening seals because I was drawn to her beauty. For I know all, and when I looked across the water at Helen of Sparta, I knew what I was actually looking at: a brightly-petaled curse fully flowered. Those slender shoulders would soon be made to bear the weight of a war fought in her name. Her face would be immortalized, but her name would be thrown at all women after her like the first rock at a stoning.

𓆟 Pale, trembling, light-starved little Helen, blinking out at the turquoise sea—a guiltless vessel made to hold all the untoward urges of men. Their rage. Their greed. Their lust. All around me I sensed the sand and the gulls and the seals shifting toward her. I could even feel the tide pull back in her

direction, drawn in, hungry for her. No different than all the men who had looked upon her and gone mad with longing. How the island desired her. And from the way she gazed out at the island, I knew, in that moment, that she longed for it in return. She looked at our untrammeled land and thought of how lovely it would be to walk free of palace walls, of unshakeable guards, of possessive men. More than she even wished to see her abandoned child again, she wished to be left to her freedom, and with each day of her long voyage to Troy, she sensed greater and greater that freedom might not be what Troy held for her. With a toss of my head, I threw my gaze toward her like a length of rope, feeling her catch it even at a distance that should be impossible for mortal eyes. Through me, she could hear the island calling for her. It was so strong and seductive a song, lingering so long in the air, that when the story of Helen was later told, some would say that this place kept her safe while a mere likeness was sent to Troy and the Trojan prince’s bed. But go to Troy she did. I watched her sail on. I swam out into the wake left by her ship and could taste her disappointment in every ripple. But I consoled my unsatisfied island. I knew that she would return. And when she did, I would be ready.

𓆟 They say he is the one who fathered me, the one who keeps the red-haired king stranded on our island. I watch him elude

the desperate man, frothing the sea in his giddiness at playing such a game. The orders have come from on high, from the lord of all gods, and from down below in the oceanic halls: this mortal must be punished for his lack of reverence. The winds necessary to bring him back to Sparta must not blow. And while he sits miserably on the sand, eating through his stores, counting the treasure that mocks him in its uselessness here on this foreign shore, I watch and I wait. I look between him and my father and smile at what neither of them know. While diving under the waves scalloping my island, I have caught snatches of tales in the wind. There once was a witch who betrayed her father by teaching a hero how to steal his most prized possession. There once was a princess who betrayed her father by teaching a hero how to make it out of his labyrinth alive. Clever girls, House-defying girls. Girls who, for their troubles, for their sacrifice, were then cruelly abandoned by those same heroes. I imagined how, if they had prayed to me, I would have felt more than a mere flicker of interest. I would have scooped them to my bosom and said, and how shall we seek revenge on them all, all the men who strive to own us but fail to love us? I become these girls as I finally approach the poor king raging in the dunes like a child whose toy has been taken away. I know his people’s stories. I am the shapeshifter’s daughter. I know what I should look like, what I should sound like, when I allow him to see me. Here, a helpful goddess sympathetic to his sad little

plight, rounding out her sea-green eyes and saying, I know the way to trap old Proteus and make him give you what you want, O Menelaus, besieged son of Atreus. Oh, and how they struggle out under the sun, the deathless old sea god continually, futilely changing form, and the determined man who has killed hundreds just to get to own his wife again. And while they do, I slip beneath the sea that is no different from my skin. I climb the ship’s hull with an octopus’s dexterity. I descend into the darkness of the hold with all the self-possession of one who knows every contour of the deep, black ocean, who came allseeing and all-knowing from its womb. And I look once again into the eyes of Helen, who is once again a prisoner, who has once again been snatched into the jaws of Fate like a flailing fish in the maw of a pelican. But when she and I look at each other, she knows as startlingly clearly as I know things. It is the scent that comes off of me. I am a goddess of the sea; I am freedom given shape. She knows that the island waits for her after all this time. Her husband, the brutish king, will leave this place behind. But she does not have to. I breathe the salty tang of the deep against her skin as if to free it from the grip of so many undeserving men. Helen, my sister, for she also does not for certain know who fathered her—a man? A god? Does it matter? It does not. I daub my blessing against her fluttering pulse. You are your own. You decide, Helen.

Proteus, defeated, tells the hard-breathing king what he wants to know. How to atone. But that, that is the easy thing. To worship according to prescription. The difficult thing is to love someone enough to let them take any shape they please, even if it is not a shape you can hold. When this king sails away, I go with him wearing Helen’s face. The island has what it wants; it needs me no longer. It, too, will soon bear a new name: Pharos. I have left a Greek in Egypt, the first of many who will hear its song and find it irresistible, who will seek to possess it. A new story begins there, only bearing traces of me. But I find that I need not linger in anything more than the footprints of a woman walking across the beach, into the water, free.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

“Summer by the Sea” RUNA

Rain Muze Content Warnings: Suicide Mentions, Suicidal Ideation

Lan watched the surface of the town ripple from her loft. The rainy season was always a drag. And dangerous too. Everyone in Marehaven already needed to raft to each other’s buildings, but the fourth and fifth months of the year always saw the lower levels flood too, and that gave rise to the deeper things. Lan frowned as one of the dark shapes circled Adeline’s tower. It was such a damn shame that she liked the rain, Lan sighed. She couldn’t help it. She loved the water. On a clear day, it stretched out unbroken towards the horizon, a perfect blue mirror. And when the rains came, it connected everything, blurring the boundaries between her life and everyone else’s. The streets and alleys disappeared into the gray noise and it was almost like those foggy city nights her mother had told her about. How Lan wanted

to slip into that world beneath the surface, into the past that the oceans had swallowed whole. Now, there were only these days, days of waiting. Lan didn’t know what the world was like before the Flood, but her father would surely have found this land just as bizarre and alien. The past her mother had spoken about was lush and green and shaded. Lan couldn’t imagine such a sight. Her mother had been very adamant that the water was blue. She had always said it with the same steel as when she had spoken about Lan’s father. Supposedly, he had shoved Lan and her mother onto a raft and sunk below the waves to join the shadows. They all did, the adults. She still remembered the day she had found her mother on the roof looking down into the crystal depths below. It had been a clear day, months after the rainy season had ended. Adeline had gone out to gather kelp and seagrass, and George had been caulking the base of a different floor now lost beneath the sea. What had her mother seen? Lan stared out into the rain. Something beautiful maybe. After all, her mother hadn’t even looked back when she had shouted her name. Maybe it hadn’t been her name anymore. They all lost things in the sea. Pendants, rings, clothes. Memories, photos, loves. Bodies.

They piled up, each one bringing the waves higher and higher, until they had swallowed entire buildings, roofs disappearing into the dark mass. Lan shook her head. Eventually, they would all reunite under the waves. Perhaps that was why her mother had jumped. She scowled. Adeline had called Lan a Rain Maiden, those children born during the Flood. People used to swaddle them in canvas and toss them into the sea. If they sank, it was one less mouth to feed. But if they floated? Then, inevitably, those boats would find safe passage to a town like Marehaven. They became like idols. Or gods, Lan supposed as she traced the rains’ path down into the waves. Adeline was always coming up with tales like that. Lan hated the idea, maybe because they had tossed her overboard, but then her mother had dived in after her and her father after her. Perhaps that was why things always seemed to be getting worse. If she was supposed to have drowned, maybe the waters were simply rising to reclaim her. She glanced down at the base of her own loft. This year had been particularly bad. George had fallen in before the rainy season and it had been a long time since Lan had seen Adeline, though she knew the other girl was still holed up in her tower. There was no other reason for the dark shape to still be circling Adeline’s tower otherwise.

The other residents in Marehaven never seemed to notice them until the end, but every time someone dropped into the water forever, Lan had seen those shades outside, waiting. She didn’t know what they were, maybe scavengers or predators or merely messengers to take the fallen to the depths. She didn’t even know if they were the cause or consequence of people staring back at the water. Perhaps, suddenly, people finally noticed them prowling the waterways and that was the end. They had a litheness to them, a grace. Captivating. And then suddenly one found themselves at the edge of a roof, looking down into the sea and wondering if that dark shadow would catch them. What a question. To ask if it would all be over, if you would be welcomed and embraced, if the depths were really as pure as the sun made them seem or as dark as the rain whispered. Lan blinked as the shape slowed its circuit around Adeline’s tower, lingering in her sight as if it was an eye gazing at her. Then, it blinked. A thrill ignited in Lan’s chest. She had been noticed. That must have been what they felt before they took that first step off solid earth, a terror and excitement so great it dwarfed everything else. Suddenly, there wasn’t much left between you and

the water, and there certainly wasn’t much meaning in whatever remained above the waves. But no. Not yet. Lan gripped the balcony railing and took a deep breath. It wasn’t her time, not during the rains, not when Adeline was holding out too. Maybe one day, the sea would cradle their bodies and they would all meet under the waves. But not today, Lan promised herself. If she really was a Rain Maiden, she would wait until the last human had slipped away from Marehaven. And only then would she allow herself to rest. She slumped back into her chair and waited, listening. Listening to the pounding of rain and the slow gurgle of the rising waters. Listening to the end approaching. And waiting for the world to swallow her.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

The Drowning of Loki Ginny McSheehan Content Warnings: Torture, Near Drowning, Grief

Sigyn emptied the bowl. Without it intermittently capturing the poison that trickled from the serpent’s lips, I screamed in agony. The damp rock scraped against my back as the venom spread across my face, searing my flesh. My faithful wife frantically poured the poison from her bowl onto the earth, before replacing it under the serpent’s head, giving me a few moments respite to tug at my bindings. I lay bound with pieces of flesh, soft as sausage casing, that should have been easy to tear through. But they were the intestines of my son Narfi, slain by his cursed brother Valli, and an enchantment made them strong as iron. I, the god of trickery, was trapped. It was not the first time, but it might be the last. I shut my eyes, and inky black water closed in around me, filling my lungs with despair as a fish wife fills a slop bucket with guts. The fleshy ropes reminded me of my son’s

laugh, and a wave slapped me in the face: the memory of his mother braiding his hair, punching clear through me yet leaving me alive to know my son was dead. The poison pained my flesh, but the grief drowned my soul in an endless whirlpool of suffering. At the vortex, a single eye stared at me. The Aesir had never liked me, but my blood brother betrayed me and tortured my children. I would never be free from his deceit, or the torment of these black waters, and braced myself for the next current to drag me across a thousand razor sharp rocks. When the giantess Angrbroda and I had come together like lightning and the tip of a spear, she had borne me three children. Rising up from the grim sea came the largest of these, Jörmungandr, his enormous serpentine tail clutched in his mouth. I remembered when he had been a tiny snake, circling my arm and climbing around my shoulders, tickling my skin. But then he had grown, and grown, and grown. Around the world, the length of his body circled, his beginning also his end. He would fight Thor at Ragnarok and die. How pitiful that I was the reason Thor had his mighty hammer, and that it would be the thing to bring about Jörmungandr’s death. Another child, another loss. Another testament to my mistakes and all I could not do. The black waters pulled us both under, and I reached for him in vain as my lungs burned for air. Sigyn emptied the bowl.

My eyes opened, and I faced the dripping liquid once again, each drop a torch that burned my flesh down to the bone. She stumbled over her feet to empty the bowl faster. I heard an inhuman howl, only to realize it was coming from my own mouth; the poison had yet to reach my vocal cords. For the moment, I still had eyelids and I shut them tight. In the darkness, a murky tidal wave of grief sprang from my heart, and their currents dragged me away once more. Floundering to keep my head above water, a wet nose rubbed against my own. Now I saw two bright yellow eyes, a gray snout, and a pink tongue that licked my face. My lips broke into a smile. “Fenrir…” I murmured as I reached to stroke his damp fur. The pup grew beneath my touch. A wave pulled him from me, and the chains overtook him—his snout, once small and cute, pinned with a sword. His howl of pain rang sharper than my own. Two inky waves enveloped me in despair. Sigyn emptied the bowl. My heart and body cried out for relief. A swell swept me up and away, and I hoped it would finally drown me. And then, through the pain of the waters and venom, I saw a face. She was half flesh, half corpse, all goddess. Bones showed through her left side, but her right side was somber. “All come to me, sooner or later.” She lifted a skeletal

hand. “And people bring me their grief, just as you are doing now, Father.” The fingers snapped, and the water encased me, freezing my form in place. My daughter Hel, the little girl that Angrboda had handed me, would forever rule the dead, away from the other gods and the living. Just like my beast sons, Jörmungandr and Fenrir. Just like Valli, when the Aesir were finished with him. Sigyn emptied the bowl and the water turned into nine spears, each stabbing me in the heart, my flesh crinkling and burning. My last living child, cursed like the rest, was dead. I wanted to join him. Suddenly a wave shot me upwards, and I could see over Hel’s shoulder; there stood Narfi. He looked as he had before he was disemboweled, wearing the blue tunic his mother had lovingly embroidered. He gave me a small smile, then walked off into the sprawling underworld, leaving me with my only daughter. Though the waves carried me, she stood atop them unaffected and produced a horn. “We all will make it to the other side someday. But father, you get to be at the helm of it all.” Her lips, only half flesh, blew into the small tip, letting out a low, mournful sound. The waves parted. Something long and scaled rose from the water, and soon I felt it, solid beneath my feet. Planks made entirely of human fingernails formed a ship, the sail woven of hair.

I would ride it into the worst of the loss. I would be left forever maimed. But on the other side was a new beginning. These waters would not be the end of me. I sail on the grief of millions to safer shores. Sigyn no longer held the bowl. She held my hand.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

“Healing” 1moretale

Stolen Skin Solstice Lamarre Content Warning: Blood

He watches the selkie strip her skin away. He didn’t think that it would be this long, this laborious. She only has her nails to dig through the bloody, thick skin, and it takes her almost half an hour to get her hands free enough to be able to tear at the skin faster. Once she’s done, she lays there, naked but for the blood. She looks like a new-born adult, wet and messy and exhausted. An eternity later, she moves. His limbs have gone numb from staying painfully still, observing her, but he can’t afford being noticed. She sits up slowly, then stretches her long legs, as if waking up from a very long sleep in an uncomfortable position. When she stands, she’s shaky on her legs, but determined all the same. She lets out a small delighted noise when her toes dig into the wet sand. She stretches her arms above her head, her fingertips

trying to catch the stars and keep them into the sky a little longer, fighting the coming dawn. She takes her time to wash away the blood, crouching into the waves, humming to the sea, making sure her human voice is still working. When she walks back to the beach, she looks like the woman he’s never seen, but knows all the same. Her long black hair no longer sticks to her face, but falls in wet tendrils down her back. She stands straight, and her smile is sharp. When she looks towards his hideout behind the rocks, he can see her eyes, the bluegray of an angry sea. The same as his. He ducks under the rocks, his breathing hard. He looks down at his hands, pale and tinged blue, the color of a drowned corpse, with webbing linking his fingers together. He despises his hands, just like he despises her. They both make him the selkie’s son, the monstrous good-for-nothing, the give-us-a-break-and-go-drown-yourself of the village. They make his father look at him like he’s a stranger. They make him furious. Once his breathing has quieted down, he dares to glance at her again. She’s cleaning her seal skin now. Her soft humming has gotten louder. He listens to it, searching in the melody a memory, a feeling of fondness, the sensation of a mother found again. He finds nothing at all. So, he watches. And when she walks the rocks barefoot, close enough to him he can hear her breathing, he listens carefully.

He knows the shore by heart. It’s his true home, the place he comes to when his father’s home feels like a stranger’s house. She hides her skin, and he can guess where by the sound of it only. He smiles, and he can’t see it, but he knows it looks unnaturally sharp. Just like hers. When she walks away towards the village, he waits again, makes sure she won’t return. She doesn’t. He stands up. Takes the time to stretch his numb limbs just like she did. He finds the skin easily, and it feels strangely familiar against his cold hands. It feels more like home than anything he’s ever known. He closes his eyes, brings the animal hide to his nose, breathes in the musky, bloody scent of it. And prays, not to the gods, but to the sea, that it will work. He brings back the skin to where his mother crawled out of it, lays it into the sand. He strips out of his clothes, and abandons them in a pile on the beach. He wants her to see. He hopes she will know he did it, even if he doubts she remembers him. It’s been sixteen years, after all. Then he curls himself into the skin, with nothing but needle and thread, and he stitches himself back into it. His hands tremble. For all he knows, it might not work, the skin might only respond to his mother, half of her blood in his body not enough to sing the skin alive. He might stitch himself into the seal skin and asphyxiate alone on the beach. He’s not sure he would care, but it doesn’t sound like a comfortable way to die.

As he stitches the skin completely close, though, he feels it warm against his human skin, and then he feels himself change. It feels like acid melting his body, molding him into something else, something new, something that fits. It hurts, but he has never felt this alive before. When the selkie boy slips into the cold, cold sea, the waves sing to him, chanting his newfound freedom. He sings back, and it’s a song of belonging and delighted revenge. He hopes that when his mother finds his clothes instead of her skin, she will weep.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

Iris the Rainbow Ocean

When I was young I used to scoop water from the sea and pour it in the clouds. It was just a thing I did. Mother and father gave me an ewer in the shape of a wing. I imagined I was a swan when I poured, rainwater streaming from my wing. A swan of every color. I can change the plainest sunlight into a fan of colors, colors you can’t even see. I can do lots of things. I fill the clouds. My father is Thaumas the Wondrous. Not to be confused with Thomas the Obscure, though I expect he’s read it. Father trundles endlessly among the rocks, nose down in a book. He clothespins sogged pages alongside the seaweed harvest. He reads while he’s sleeping, he reads while he’s walking, he knocks into pillars and reorients and keeps going. He treads water in the tidepools spouting Kafkaesque sophomoric passages, recitations regarding eponymous protagonists who struggle drastically to accomplish very little, or who lose themselves in cubes of one-way mirrors, or that otherwise sound of complete gobbledygook. He

clothes himself in ink-smeared folios when he clothes himself at all. They droop and words wash over the world. I picked one up once, a book. I’m not illiterate. A book about reading. Confounding. Father never did much that was wondrous that I knew of, except he did once climb a ladder made of maelstrom to abscond with mother, scooping her up in his arms just the way she likes. That was about a zillion years ago. Father hasn’t set foot in the house for years. But they’re still fond of each other. Father and mother. They croon familiars over the pools. Mother’s as wispy as mist, her skin amber with bugs honeyed in. She used to be a cloud-nymph, but now she mostly crochets. Our place is pretty hard to get to. There’s no land-route through the rocks. We don’t much get visitors. Khronos in his nostalgia iteration comes by once or twice a season to visit father in his man-shack; we never see him, but we know he’s been there because father is a wreck for days after. Sometimes Rhonda comes by in her little dinghy lashed to seals, and mother perks up and fixes juleps, but mostly I’m left to play with my sisters, if you could call it play. Or the snake. We have a snake. It’s as big as the world. Bigger. That old lady moves so slow you can pick her up and put her in a tree in winter and she’s still in the same place come summertime. None of my sisters will touch her. My closest sister, you can barely see her. She can barely see herself, she’s so faded now. I track her shape with my finger. It is said that one day a hero will tear her wings from her and by them

make his sandals swift. I’ve drawn pictures of him with his legs slashed through or his torso in flames. I despise him in advance. My other sisters, the punishers: I love them but they are monsters. Aellope whirlwind, Ocypete swift wing, Celaeno the prophetess. They are hideous, each in her own way, and rather offputting with all that hissing. I once had to do things with the Boread brothers so they’d quit haranguing my sisters. Father was out under some ship—the Argos—making it creak like a cask of wine set a’sea; mother couldn’t be bothered to look up from her work, yarning another shawl to spread over the sky. My sisters—I love them but they are bad. They only got that way because of what men did to them; I did those things too but I didn’t so much mind. You barely notice them, men. They move through like weather. On my way home, I spilled my ewer. The world slept. But Noah took care of things. My name is Iris. I’m the rainbow. This is a story about me. Which kind of makes it like one of father’s books, where the words suspect their scribe. Kind of. My body has always made rain. I gush. I make the leaves sticky with dew, I spread my love over the land of man. After the flood mishap I gave up my ewer and now by my body do I replenish the clouds. Through the sea I go and below, through the sky from world-end to world-end. Through me the gods link to humanity: Hermes grumble all he likes against his caduceus, but

until he can dispatch a simple message without garbling it is I who am post and courier; once I reached ‘reliable age’ Hera entrusted me alone with her scroll-purse and put me in charge of deliveries. For her I have executed many deeds. I once plucked a lock from Queen Dido’s head and sent Heracles that woeful ox into a killing rage that proved its own punishment. I sought for my patron the origin-place of thunder (the only field assignment I’ve yet failed), and stirred the Trojan women to set flame to Aeneas’ ships. And during it all I make rain. Drizzles, showers, torrents. My specialty though is mist when the sun is out. There I shine. Now has Hera set me a new task. Demeter had got herself all in a tizzy and was iceboxing the world. Everyone was in furs, the trees were falling down. It was all about her daughter’s absconding with the dark lord. I think she was a smidge jealous, but I wasn’t gonna say anything. Hera sent me down to lighten her load. Hera said, Love: it symptomizes like a disease. I went. My skirts billowed the wind. I came in the window. Demeter was by the fire. She held her head in her hands. I placed logs in the hearth but the flames emanated only cold. I plunked down next to her. I spoke but it was as though she did not speak my language. I pried her hands. Her eyes looked as though time had been using them as his sand sifter. I positioned myself directly before her; her eyes gazed on and through. She wrung her hands. Look at what love does to a person. Note to self: avoid.

Figured I’d consult my folks. Mother was no help, she was eyeing a new design for a blanket, something floral. Maybe Nimbus. Father was high on sodium pentothal and dog-paddling around his kiddie pool. He suggested I head on down to Hell and dig the young maiden out. You keep an eye. Don’t take nothing they offer. They catch a scrap of you they’ll hold on. He was vibrating like there were worms in his veins. Don’t let it freak you out, he said, he has no face, you know. Hades. Because death is never seen, as Blanchot has shown us. He ruffled my hair and scooped his sogged books around him. I went to see them. It took a while to get there, through a lake still as a mirror, climbing down the reflections of the clouds. The dark got so thick it nearly extinguished the middle of me. But I kept hidden a lamp. Found my way to the bottom, though the bottom of what exactly I could not say. One could hear the purring of the Styx. I knelt by the black water; it flowed veined in water blacker still. The surfaces of the stones were carved in signs. I kicked them in the river, it rippled like the back of some sleeping leviathan. I penetrated through to the throne room. The place smelled of ozone. There was a fountain and it spilled in four directions. I found them as one expects to find a king and a queen: sitting. I guess that’s the job description. Sit royally the day through in your highbacked chairs. Kore was resplendent in white. Her gown spilled nigh to the rivers. Hades held her hand. I could not

make out his face. I told them why I was there; Kore cackled in my face. Her laughter echoed through countless skulls. She spoke: Let it ice over. Here I stay. Storm-wind, you will see. I gazed into the narcissi and the narcissi gazed back. When the ground opened I didn’t even shiver. Love had never invaded me so absolutely. The backs of Hades’ steeds formed for us a bed; I gripped their manes with my toes. May every womanchild be enveloped by a rapture as despotic. True love is totalizing; anything less is not worth parting your thighs for. I gave my will not so much to my king as to that which renovates us beyond the recognition of our former selves; even for you, young Iris of the north: love will come to tyrannize you, and you shall no longer be your mother’s daughter, as I am no longer mine. I took the form of Kore Adamah, after Adam: the Girl of Earth. The Fall of Man was a leap, a leap from the stiffly-kept garden with its wooden groundskeeper. Death took the world in his mighty arms. I gave my virginity to that which unmakes; I continue to give, and death receives. It is here I remain, child. Here I beget death with life. Here death comes to life like a bouquet of flowers. She presented her hand like a dealer over this deadland her gambling board. Her cardplayer’s hands held stems of Narcissi. Black. I recalled Father. My hands threatened to burst the seams of their pockets. I never once saw Hades gesture. The place now smelled of nothing; my fingertips tingled numb. I knew that if I lingered my senses would flood from me and go the way of all things down the chute of time, but I could not conceive of motion. Kore’s face was a distant continent. Then she blinked and the blink shuttered syrup slow and my body trembled and I managed

movement. I went to make my merry way, but I could now nowhere find my merriment, nor my way. I scrabbled over stones, I lost my sandals in sand. My nipples ached, my mucous membranes felt like they had been rubbed in camphor. The dead were stalling and looking at me. You’re getting older, one of them spoke in a voice brambled with thorns. It looks good on you. I ran. I ran until I came to the Styx. My tears tumbled in. The pythonian waters poured and re-poured through my hands. In the streams I saw the outlines of children playing, the shapes of family knelt at deathbed; I saw grandmothers with their hands splayed before them and young hopefuls with poems for their beloveds; I saw animals at spit and the whole coarse rumbling of the earth with its churn of maggots trundling the wheel. My hands groped at the shapes; they slipped through. Throbbing in the fingermarrows, the anxieties of earthkind, and it a horrible thing, doubly so to behold in myself my own burgeoning recognition. See in these coal-dark waters the failed strivings which define this whirling pebble of turquoise. See the memories of man vortex and become gone. My body filled with undescribed shapes. Who stands behind all of this appalling loss? Who is it? I want my hands around his throat. And I sensed then with an inexorable foreboding who it must be, though I had never seen him. You have your fingers in everything: even faceless Hades and his deliriously lucid bride, even Hera at her vanity, even father, even me. Khronos. Khronos it is none other than thee.

How I hate you, I spat aloud. For all of this. For placing love into arms and then stealing it away, and for the off timing which disallows love. For misfortune and illness and sorrow I hate you. For the disconnection of the people. For Kore’s aliveness and Hades’ deathness—both of them your subjects. For birth and aging and decay, for cruelty and then kindness followed on by cruelty again— I loathed my voice. It sounded much too like the voice of mother or Hera or any other number of adults ensconced in their miserous dramas. I splashed at the water and where it touched the shore it was dust. The river began to speak then, and its words came in the split ophidian tongue of Time, crushing with the might of a sky of ice. All things are carried in me, it spoke. Beneath that sonic iceberg my body shrank. All things eddy and are shorn from their births. It is I who am the beginning. It is I who tear forth tears and bring forth birth and take it away. Of me are the beginnings and of me are the ends. You too are of me. You too must pay the dues of existence by the aging of your flesh. This is shit! I screamed and the scream echoed off the walls of the cavern like the horrible laughter of skeletons. I shivered and the water purled itself again. I needed to have a face-to-face with he who inserted into my undemanding and blameless life the conviction I now felt. He who made my sisters go and placed mother out of reach and hewed the wrinkles in father’s face. A new feeling roiled under my skin. I had seen it in Heracles and not known its name then, but I knew it now. Rage. I went through the water.

Time you sadists come to me I will drown you in my waters I will blind you in my light. I sought him long and long, past Galicia and Vesuvio, past Sicily over which the smoke was still pouring, past Mt. Analogue and the marker on the waves for the sunken city, and out over the wasted sea to lands beyond all of ice and all of stone, until I arrived at the edge of the world where the sea drops off into nothingness. There the seaspray blew in every direction at once and it was difficult to hold my eyes open. I hung myself over the cliff-edge like a lure. I knew if anywhere he must be here. I shone in my rainbow form. The sun flashed like an eye. And there in that incredible air at the end of the world something fell from me, that thing which is ever and unbeknownst to us until we lose it, that which is most absolutely irreplaceable, and after which we have no hope of chasing. In the shape of a girl-child it went slipping into the waters of the void. And then I saw what I could not see before: I saw the world as a mandorla around the void, and I saw out beyond it over the sea of infinity a sight which stirred in me thrill and nausea and a thumping in the root of me. A sear across the sky cut in the shape of a man, a vast and auroric man with a musculature of cloud and entropy and surety, a vast, an incredible god: Khronos, it can be only you. His skin olive and bronze, his hair rippling with power. And he was not alone. He braced, twinned, locked in combat with another, another so beautiful that beholding him my heart whipped like a galeborne flag. And I knew

him by his incorrupt smile to be Khronos’ elder brother, Aion, he who does not Become but Is. Aion, time unmeasured, effeminate and free and unselfconscious as a child. They spun, two continents in a ring whose walls were the horizon, and I gazed on them long and long and long. And in this longing I sensed that the elder brother could necessarily defeat his younger, but that he did not, and I sensed that this was by no bond but by choice. I knew then by the sun glistening off their godly bodies and by the stark pheromones carried over on the wind many things about them. I knew that Aion had budded from the dark before there was even a dark, that in the infinity before recording, before Khronos and Inevitability made the world from a glowing egg and begat history, Aion was there. I knew that Aion was the exemplar after whom Khronos imperfectly modeled himself, Khronos with his measuring tape and chronometer, stunned at the deathmask glaring at him from the depths of the accursed mirror of self-reflexive consciousness. I knew that Aion, time unbounded, had always been and would for always be spontaneous and chaotic and the hidden form against which Khronos pushed. I could see them moving through space, the king of measure and the king of eternity, and I knew inside my nascent womanhood that these two were to be ever taken with each other. Trespass not my precious heart. The sun shone like a coin reflecting some other, incredible light. The sun shone through me. I closed my eyes.

Behind my eyelids I saw Gaia swaddling in her arms a bundle. Its face was Aion. I saw by the black holes in its eyes that Aion had taken birth through virgins ever since his little brother started keeping a stopwatch. Aion came to me and spoke in an infantile language which housed in its vowel-heavy syllables all incomprehensible sagacity. He stood bediapered atop a sleeping serpent. The serpent had a name and it was Kosmos. Around him circled the zodiac. As it spun it made the sound of keys jangling. I recalled from Father’s books Nonnos: “Aion transmutes the burden of old age like a snake who sloughs off the coils of the old scales, rejuvenescing while washing in the swells of the Law.” Aion the infant gazed on me and his gaze was vacuum. I knew then what Aion did. He was the life force. He was the jubilation and the rejoicing. He was the shine in his brother’s eyes. He was the allowance infinity made on time. I opened my eyes. I could see the two twisting and sweating. Aion was grinning like a child. Khronos had his fingers up under Aion’s ribs, tickling the living shit out of him. Now Aion had Khronos headlocked, and the two were panting and stomping like stock animals. Khronos was growling and grinning, reaching back over his head for Aion’s hair. From his fingers sand spilled and was lost. It seemed a prestidigitation for the enjoyment of the world. And it was, for every mortal who had ever had the good chance to be granted a stay on this dim earth with purpose unknown. I saw Khronos tickling his brother and his brother’s eyes

wet with tears. I saw therein replica tears of delight and sobbing spilling over the cheeks of men. I saw the rage and the duty and the adoration in Khronos, and the freedom and the exuberance too, from the reflection of his brother’s gaze. I saw the pleasure in Aion’s eyes, and that pleasure matched in Khronos’, and I knew, then, why they wrestled, and why Aion did not let himself win. For joy. For the joy of time. Eternity loved his brother, and this was eternity’s gift. Joy. I rose into the sky. Braids of water fell from me. I felt at my child’s breasts and they were no longer a child’s. The sky had gone tremendously silent. I felt for my scroll-pouch, it was gone. The air was stained with something bitter, and succulent—the crisp burn of things yet coming. I shot through the aether trailing my jetstream of spectra. Home was lit by the dead light of a trillion stars. I felt old and young at the same time. I needed a cocoa with Father. I hunted around a while, I couldn’t find him. At night he stacks his books into a pyramidic cave and crawls inside. He was out back hula-hooping with the ouroboros. He gave me his Do-Not-Disturb look. Mother was in the house, subsumed in an incredible mass of blanketry. I could barely see her, clacking her needle back and forth in the midst of it like an oar. I crawled to her, squinting. Mother? She didn’t look at me. I could find no edge to the yarnwork, I took up a bunch in my hand. It looked webbed by

tentacles, hundreds of them, branching and branching, diminishing in size and interleaving until they seemed to reach down into the very fibers of the weft themselves and I could not make them out any more. Mother, what is this pattern—? Mother looked up. Her eyes the places of thunder, her voice the creaking of a thousand ships beneath the swells of the Law. Khronos’ fingers.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

Dans Sœur K. Martin Content Warning: Blood

You thought you had more time—and instead, you learn that your father brokered your betrothal years ago. You’re only hearing of it at the celebration of your coming-of-age. It should be a joyous occasion. Instead, you feel sick. You know of your intended, know that they will not love you—not as you truly are. You know, too, that your father will not reconsider, not when he refuses to listen to you, despite you being his precious firstborn. In your desperation, you do the unthinkable: you seek out the Sea Witch, and listen carefully as she lays out her terms. None of what she says is a surprise—you grew up with these stories, knew that what you wanted would come at a cost. But you know, too, that everything does, and so you agree, knowing your sisters will be horrified when they find out, that they will say you’ve paid far too dearly, for much too little.

They won’t realize that you understand the price you paid. That you’re exchanging a gilded cage for a wider enclosure—but this one, at least, will be of your choosing, not an accident of your birth. You didn’t expect the Sea Witch to be kind, for her smile to be genuine as she tells you what she wants in exchange. You say nothing of your suspicion that you struck a bargain others could only dream of. You simply agree: she can keep your shimmering silver scales, and the pearl-studded circlet from your brow. You don’t tell her that it was never a gift, that the glittering crown has only ever told others what your family wants you to be, and not who you are. That it has always weighed on your head like an anchor, dragging you to the sea floor with the weight of expectations you never asked for. The smile she gives when you hand it over says she knows. (She is a Witch for a reason.) “You understand,” she says, as you lie upon her altar, “that I do not take pleasure in causing pain—but such sacrifices have always required blood.” She places a pearl on your tongue, hand sliding gently across your jaw to close it. You grit your teeth and hold the pearl against the roof of your mouth as her knife drags down your side, blood forming dark curls in the water as she peels you from your scales. It feels like dying. Once finished, you feel it. Past the pain of bloodletting and the ache of unvoiced screams, there is a feeling of rightness.

You are reborn. Remade. She guides you to the surface, knowing you won’t make it on your own. She’s a strong swimmer, easily able to pull your new, weak body through the water. Her eyes are softer than the velvet you once found in a shipwreck’s cargo hold as she lays you on an outcropping of rock. Land is in sight. She doesn’t speak. She just kisses your forehead and disappears beneath the waves. You don’t know how long you lie there, chill seeping into your bones in a way it never has before, but eventually, you struggle your way to shore. You, who have lived your whole life at the bottom of the ocean, can no longer rely on flippers and fins to propel you smoothly. You would be disgusted with your feeble paddling, if you didn’t feel so free. You set foot on the shore, and a wretched sound bursts from your lips as pain, bright and sharp, tears through your new limb. (You knew there would be a cost.) You fall, your fragile balance crushed beneath the agony. You get up, and it happens again. Every step is the same. But your balance improves. You’re found by men, travelling with a cart and creature, and they scatter like a startled school of fish at the sight of you. They form around you in a ring, keeping some distance, as if more afraid of you than you of them. They wrap you in cloth and

exclaim over your skin—one touches you, gently, and the heat of his hand is shocking. They speak, and you think they’re asking questions, but you can’t be sure. You don’t know their language. You try to greet them, and they understand. Their mouths move, clattering quietly like river stones, before bundling the strange girl they’ve found into their cart. One of them, a man with dark hair sprouting all over his face and eyes that remind you of the Sea Witch, takes you to his home. There is a woman there who gets very loud when she sees you, and when a child comes into view with his dark hair and her face, you understand. She’s his mate. You try to tell her that you mean no harm, and she falls silent, eyes wide as she hears the strange syllables of the sealanguage, so different from her own. She steps closer, and presses a hand to her chest. “Chantelle,” she says slowly. Then, she touches her mate’s chest. “Alexandre.” She touches you—so softly you can barely feel the pressure through the cloth you’re wrapped in—and looks at you. You don’t understand. The child comes forward—a boy, you think—and says, “Je suis Emile!” as he points at himself. At that, you understand. Names. They’re telling you their names. You crouch down and wave at the boy, who giggles, as you think about what to tell them.

You have no name. You left it with your scales on the ocean floor. You shake your head, and watch the woman’s— Chantelle’s—face change. You don’t know what that means, yet, but it makes your middle twist like it’s full of live eels. You let her lead you away. Her eyes are kind, too, and you wonder if the Sea Witch sent you to them, somehow. (She is a Witch for a reason.)

𓆟 Adjusting is hard. The humans have so many rules. Some of them make sense to you—like wearing so many cloth layers, because they (and you, now) are susceptible to the cold. Eating hot food, both for comfort, and because their bodies cannot tolerate raw game. Learning their language also makes sense, and things grow easier once you do, once you can understand and be understood. But it makes things harder, too. Chantelle wants to know where you’re from, if you have a home and family to go back to, why you have no name. You don’t want to lie, but the truth feels sharp, dangerous in your mouth. The warnings you received as a hatchling—that humans would try to hunt you, that they will kill you if they can catch you—echo in your mind. You tell her that you come from a faraway place, and that you had a home, once. No longer. That you left your name

behind—it hurt too much to carry with you, and it doesn’t fit you anymore. (It never really did.) Chantelle holds you, and nicknames you “Belle”. It sticks. You don’t mind.

𓆟 The pain doesn’t fade. You thought it would, once you adjusted, once the muscles grew strong with use, but it remains. Every step sends agony lancing through your feet and legs, as if the ground beneath you knows you have no right to walk on it. You knew there would be a cost. You don’t fall anymore, don’t cry or stumble. It’s enough.

𓆟 You’re in the marketplace with Chantelle when you see it—an image that makes your breath catch. It’s a girl, her skin oddly colored and unusually bared, body arched and free in a way that reminds you of floating on the ocean currents. There are pangs in your chest, and you touch the paper as if it will let you feel free, too. “C’est une ballerina,” Chantelle says, and you turn. You shake your head, not understanding. You don’t know this word. Chantelle tries to explain. “Une danseuse?” Dancer. You’ve heard of dancing, but never seen it. It seemed another of the bizarre human customs that would never

make sense to you. You wonder, now, if you should have paid more attention, asked more questions. You leave the image and follow Chantelle, the danseuse etched in your mind.

𓆟 Alexandre takes you to see ballet, and the danseuse you cannot stop dreaming of. You clutch his hand, weeping quietly. They remind you of your sisters—graceful and ethereal, perfectly in their element. Everything you always wanted to be.

𓆟 You dream of her, and wake with your lungs craving saltwater and the ability to move smoothly through the deep. You take Emile to the seaside, and let the waves break over your feet. The pain in them eases, becomes the throb of a bruise, duller than the knife-sharp heat you’re used to. But you go no further, afraid you’ll be tempted to slip beneath the waves. It’s hard, to remind yourself that you can’t go back, that there’s nothing waiting for you there. That, for all you miss it, the sea and what lies beneath was never your home.

𓆟 You don’t know how, but Alexandre and Chantelle secure you a place with the ballet mistress. Chantelle asks you many

strange questions, first, tells you things that are unbelievable and horrifying by turns. But you give her your word, understanding that she cares for you, wants you safe. The ballet mistress doesn’t like you. She says you are too old to begin training, that you’re the wrong shape. You ignore her words—they’re not what you’re here for. (You have been the wrong shape before, and you know it doesn’t feel like this.) You work hard, and the burn in your legs feels different, now—better in a way you can’t describe. The pain in your feet stays the same, and you bleed through your slippers without noticing. Chantelle scolds you gently, like Emile, as she carefully scrubs out the rust-colored stains. You can only smile at her, because the joy you feel is more than worth bleeding for. (You knew there would be a cost.)

𓆟 Things change, when you move to pointe shoes. It’s harder to dance on your toes but you still push yourself to learn. This is how the danseuse did it. What you don’t expect is for the other girls to cry as their feet bleed. You didn’t realize it would strain them so much, because you can’t remember what it’s like to be without this pain. You do what you can to comfort them, brushing their cheeks when their eyes spill over, and the saltwater on your skin reminds you of the sea, familiar and bittersweet.

The ballet mistress smiles at you for the first time, and says she believes you’ll go far. Pride swells beneath your breast, and you have no words. You never expected praise. Even the reminder that there’s a long road ahead, hours upon hours of toil, can’t dim your smile.

𓆟 Sometimes, at night, you go down to the seashore. You let the waves break over your feet and imagine you can feel the deep currents move through your bones. Once, you hear your sisters, and your throat grows hot with the urge to speak your mother tongue, your jaw aching to form the words that are more music than language. But you swallow the heat and stay silent, because the name they’re crying out is not yours anymore. They are calling for a brother who doesn’t exist. You stay until you can no longer hear the echoes of their voices, until the moon shines bright in the sky, and then you go home.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

Under the Water of the Lake Edward Daschle

Alone on the losing side of the argument, my boyfriend was the first of us to leave for the lake. He dragged the paddle board down the pebbly beach from the cabin, out onto the water, and away until he was only a stick figure silhouette of a man, finally lost in a midday reflection of sunlight. The other four left for the lake in the canoe shortly after, unwilling to sacrifice the remainder of the day to wallowing in the wreckage of our friendship. They invited me to join them, but I felt certain after all that had been said they didn’t want my company. Late into the evening, when twilight was only a thin line of rust on the horizon, and my friends had yet to return, I shouted their names across the water, starting with my boyfriend. With how long they had been out, I worried they might have drowned, but worried too I might be overreacting and didn’t want to make an anxious fool of myself. Instead, I paced the beach, hoping someone would return, all the while replaying the argument in my

head, trying to think how I could’ve saved my boyfriend from his embarrassment and myself from being implicated in the eyes of my friends by his opinions. For just a moment, I thought I hated him. Maybe he had traveled across the lake and found someone there to take him back into town, and would call me up later to break up and ask for his things. Just as I drifted through this speculation, he returned. What I noticed first was the clamminess of his touch when he embraced me. “You scared me,” I whispered in his ear. “Benjamin,” he said, his voice a leaking faucet, “I just needed time to think.” “Okay,” I said. A cold hand slid up under my shirt. “Benjamin, there’s no one around, we’re alone,” he said, before kissing me, his other hand squeezing my ass and pulling me to him. His tongue was a slug in my mouth. What I loved about him, though I had yet to tell him I loved him, was his provocative nature. He made me feel as though I could take the risks being alive demanded. But it was more than the chill of his skin and the strange way he was talking, it was his smell too that triggered something deep in me. He smelled not of sweat, as I might’ve expected, but of the lake, of the reeds and mud. “Wait, stop,” I said, and pulled back from him, “I’m worried about the others, did you see them?”

He looked to the lake and then back to me. His eyes rolled in their sockets before his head turned. “Benjamin, no, I did not. But we can look. Yes, let’s go to the lake.” The pebbles of the beach chattered beneath his feet, and he beckoned me to follow. But all I could do was stare at the hole in his back. It was like the hollow of an old tree where any creature might live, his spine and insides neatly scooped away. And then the last of the twilight orange disappeared from the sky. “I think, hey wait, I think we need to go to the hospital,” I said, uncertain if what I’d seen had not been a trick of the light. “And then we can get the police too for my friends.” “Benjamin,” my boyfriend said, and in the new dark, I could no longer make out the hole, only a vast shadow. “It’s my fault. I want to make it right. Come to the lake, we can find them.” My boyfriend held the paddle board steady for me to sit, and though I hesitated, finally I joined him. I could not bear to face a return of the lonely anxiety from the afternoon again. There was no wind over the lake, and stars had begun to pierce the sky glowing queerly against the dark. Our legs trailed in the water, rippling the reflected void. “Benjamin,” my boyfriend said, his clammy lips at my neck, “I think I ruined your friendship. I think they thought you chose me over them.” “No, that’s not, I mean,” I said. But he was repeating back to me my own fears. He knew me so well. And in a way I had. I

could’ve gently led him aside, could’ve asked him to be more courteous to my friends. But I worried, and believed the worry, if I fumbled a relationship with a man so otherwise good as he was, I would never do better and would spend the years of my life alone. “I just want to find them. We can fix this.” A hand pallid as the underbelly of a timid fish emerged from the water. It gripped the edge of the paddle board, rocking our tenuous craft. Another hand followed, and then a third and a fourth, pulling us along, further to the center of the lake where an empty canoe waited for us, bobbing in place as though anchored. “Help,” I whispered to the dark, certain no one was listening who might stop this. “Benjamin,” my boyfriend said coldly against my neck, before I felt his weight leave the paddle board, and heard the gentle parting of the water as his body slipped below. A hand gripped my ankle and then another, and a third had my thigh. They tugged me off the board, and though I wanted to scream, my throat felt as though there was a fourth hand around it constricting my breath and voice. I treaded water, spluttering, and watched as hands emerged from the lake, beckoning me, and at the center my boyfriend’s head, bobbing, smiling wider than I’d ever seen him smile before. “Benjamin,” my boyfriend said as the hands pulled me under the water of the lake, “do you forgive me?”

𓆝𓆟𓆞

“Port is Not for Boats” Giulio R.M. Maffii

Sovereign and Spice and Everything Nice D.J. Clark Content Warnings: Implied Sexual Content, References to War and Death

The first time I saw her, the very waters slowed around me. Running red over my feet, she washes their clothes and armor as they march to another nameless battle… Some see her. I definitely see her. She does not look my way though, as I am half in half out, as any good goddess knows to do when she is observing mortals. Or other goddesses. I could see in her eyes a fire, and a softness at the same time. As she washed, it was almost a warning… But she didn’t want it, never wanted it to happen. Yet somehow knew that it had to. It was like watching someone you love do the one thing you didn’t want them to. She would wash their bloody garments in my river, in me, and I would stand there. Always, she would be on the opposite side

of the war band heading toward victory or defeat. She would run the cloth down the washboard, then look up at them as if to say “you go to your doom, soldier… You will meet your end, warrior,” but the ember in her eyes was never anger. Or rage. It was sovereignty and prophecy; fate. Like the end was assured but without the blame of fault. As if bidden by the gods themselves. Or maybe just her. She would beguile them, with a veil over her true form… But I could see it clearly. Skin as fair as the rocks I had run smooth over thousands of years. Clean and fresh-cut white like the marble that lay in the bedrock of me. Shimmering in the sun, when it would grace her giving fortunes to the unfortunate. Hair like the raven’s wings, sweeping in the wind as dark as the coal of a long dead fire. The color of the shadow she rubs under her eyes from that same coal—from the fires of the fallen whose armor she washed, wearing the black of their death, for me to see. Her lips, I dared not linger. River though I am, perpetually wet, it was much to confess to admit what I longed for, but even so: Her lips were red clover; honey-sweet and perilous of poison, at least to my eye. I yearned for her to sip from me, just for a touch. It was too much to ask, I knew. It was enough to have her

fingers in me, running through my wild currents and back and forth as she vigorously washed in my waters. Oh, but her eyes, I couldn’t look away. The moment mine met hers, I fell into them. Lush as my green river banks, a shade only the reddest of our peoples, the ones with flame on their head and in their hearts, could shine upon me. I imagined they could grow anything, even love for me. Nowadays we call that delusion, but I was struck for days considering who would dare make such perfections that destroy the goddess, Boann. Days, and months, and years I floated down my waters with her on my mind. By now you know who. An enigmatic deity in every interpretation. I tell you true, it’s all mostly correct what they say of her. The Morrigan. I have seen her terror on the battlefields near my blue waters, running red with the last gasps of men with no names other than “chosen.” To be chosen by her, I rippled. Those days, the few of us that kept the lands and nature under our watchful gaze had little else to do. It is no small wonder that my heart would wander to the busiest goddess of our time. And she barely knew I existed. We had never interacted directly, she had no reason to speak with the goddess of the river of The Boyne, clockwise walker of the well that sprung forth my sweet waters as I ran and ran. Touching other tributaries, underground rivers, watersheds. I was more than most thought. If I had known then what I know now, I

would have not flowed so quietly past her divinity sitting on my banks. But a young river I was and am. And she was providence and regalia incarnate. I drifted with her on my mind often, thankfully distracted with my responsibilities and few supplicants. Every month at least a few farmers or fishermen would say a prayer or whisper a desire to me to catch fish or water crops. But you aren’t here for that. You want to hear the truth of that night at the fork of the Unias river, the famous union on the alleged eve of battle. You are right to want to hear it, no scholar has recorded it true yet, what happened on that river bank. Listen well. I will tell you the story true, as I was there. I touch everything with water on this isle. That includes rivers and lakes that are not of land but of liminal places beyond. Places where myth is born and gods can wrest away from the mortal world. That is where I found them. Of course, the first one I saw and felt was her, and I could feel her satisfaction radiating from that place in waves, could feel the Good God meeting with her as they do often this time of year. She lay with him there, the father of my child, whom with his power brought him into this world through his manipulations of time. I knew well his honeyed words and ample stamina and there

he lay with the object of my lusty figment… Of course, it was his wife. I stalked up the side of the banks, crawling on my hands and knees. I shuddered to think of her eyes on me, she who is ascendant and as such, my survival is not guaranteed… Though, maybe worth it. I remembered: I am the waters. I am not brook, nor stream. I am river, it does not do well to act any way other than boldly. I stood. Watching them in the throes of their annual union. “So. This is what that looks like from the outside.” I heard my voice say, mustering the courage to speak in front of her. I crossed my arms, for dramatic effect more than anything, smirk lingering on my face. He startled. She didn’t. “Boann…” He said in surprise, though I knew he was not embarrassed, nor had he any need to be. “What are you doing here so far from your waters?” “Silly Dagda, good god but not smart god, aye? Though you are not entirely wrong, I do oft stay near the Boyne but any waters become my safe passage, even here.” She finally spoke, amused but also incensed at being interrupted. Who wouldn’t be?

“Gentle waters, you interrupt our union? Was it not enough that he lay with you and give you child, a strong one at that? Does your husband know where you are, mistress goddess?” She was sharp, direct. Though, it did not feel akin to being admonished. She stood, closing the distance slightly on the river bank where they lay. He spoke again, “You should go Boann. Unless it is your intention to stop us.” “Oh, but no, I am not here to stop you,” I started to say, intending to play innocent till the last point, but I could no longer contain myself, “I am just a little put out… That you did not invite me.” There it was, my confession wrapped in my words. I stepped closer to her, my hands clasped at my chest, unsure if I should be so close to the goddess of prophecy. She stopped. For a brief moment, it hung in the air. Had I offended? Was she about to strike me down? Even in my doom, I could not help but warm at the thought of being touched by her, even to be struck. A smile carved onto her perfect face. She moved, I was still unsure, I flinched slightly. But, then she was there in front of me, not a foot away. For what felt like eternity, she just stared at me as if weighing my worth, as if questioning my sincerity. Inclining her head back, “You wish to lay with him as well?”

She must have seen the hunger in my eyes, “…But dark goddess… He is not the one who I am here for… Not the one that caught my eye… Not the one that makes me feel… More a river.” Her smirk deepened, eyes now locked to mine, “Ah, so the river bends to the crow and not the plough.” This was it, my chance. I stumbled into her. She caught me gently, so gently. I melted at her light touch, holding me firm, I slowly snaked my hands from her sides where I had grabbed to steady my fall, up her back. Locked into those perfect green orbs rimmed by black, I looked at her lips again and a flood of every kind, especially emotion, flowed through the currents of my body. I craned my face up to hers and hungrily drank from those perfect lips. I pulled away slightly, still afraid I had overstepped. Until she lowered her regal lips back onto mine and drank back deeply. For years, I dreamed what it could be like and imagined being in this position more times than I care to admit. It was everything I dreamed it could be. So soft, perfect moisture (which, to a water goddess, very important), color vibrant, flavor… Inescapable. I heard a slight shuffle behind her, as the Dagda sat up. Wryly and in good humor he said, “Well, it seems the plough has been indeed set aside in favor of the crow. I have no quarrel with that, but… Now I’m the one left out.” He exclaimed, his smile warm and waiting.

Morrigan and I looked back at each other and birthed a smile between us as we turned to him, and both jumped into bed. The rest, I will leave to the imaginations of the more lecherous, but know even their imaginations still fall short.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

“Flooded (Danube river)” RUNA

Where am I? Leonie Jacobs Content Warnings: Themes of Bodily Violation, Lack of Consent, Violent Imagery

They named me Psyche, but the name lies. There is no soul when one wears the face of Lust. I wear its face as well as its scent. Wet breath, salt, saliva. A body built for worship. As I walk along the shore I feel watched. Eyes tracing me. I turn, but nothing. The gods forged me not with care, but cruelty. They carved a body curved, molded a face so cruelly captivating that my captor’s mother crawled to bow and arrow. A face to sink ships. A face to tempt even the Gods. They did not bless. They drowned. Your mother, behind me. Crawling, dress dragging through wet sand, arrow between her teeth. Her mouth, full of salt. Her hands, bloodless, trembling with rage. I watch her rise. Bow and arrow pressed to her chest. Her eyes, bloodshot. The arrow’s

head pierces my skin and then digs itself between my ribs. Somewhere my soul ruptures. It crashes against the walls of my stomach, curls down my throat. I can’t breathe. You tell me to breathe. You are just a son. Your mother’s greatest creation. While I am her thieving damnation. The siren’s tide. No sailor can resist. No mother can. When you cup my face, she holds my marble heart, squelches it. She crushes it like it matters—a cup full of blood, chewing sacramental bread, Holy Communion at the bottom of the sea. I baptize thee. My neck is caught in the noose of her hair. You drink from the cup. You never ask if it’s okay. Blood and brine. Crimson saliva tying your lips to mine. You are a demon, a thief, a liar. My heart, my prize. I am a look, a bite. Live in your heart, etch my name in your thigh. Oil on your shoulder. Your scent in my ear. My name is Psyche. Where I am is near. I caught you. I know what you look like. You’re angry. You thought it didn’t matter. But it always mattered what I looked like.

You don’t look like the monster I took you for. Amor.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

My Trust Must Be Natalie Zutter Content Warnings: Imprisonment, Medical Experimentation, Prion Disease

My hope, my heaven, my trust must be My gentle guide, in following thee! —Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake Emerging from the cryo pod for the first time feels like a reversespooling film of the polar plunge: icy water viciously sucked out of her open nose and mouth, leaving Noemi choking as oxygen invades her orifices, gas replacing the liquid molded to the space of her nostrils and shape of her tongue. The sudden chill prickling her exposed skin—was she naked when they put her in the pod? why would she have let them—raising goosepimples in its wake, and then searing pain. Wet hair suddenly dropping to her cheeks and neck in slimy hanks with a damp splat. “Greetings, Lady of the Lake,” says the boy crouching before her. It’s not Lin. Her sluggish brain dredges up his promise,

as he personally sealed her into the pod what feels like mere moments ago: “I’ll be there when you wake up.” “Will you still be alive?” she had teased, light ribbing that belied the genuine panic pulsing beneath her flushed skin. He was already twelve years older than her; the scruffy mentor would be downright grandfatherly. When she had asked why he wouldn’t also be undergoing the freeze, his mouth had quirked up in that familiar self-deprecating half-grin. “I’m not nearly as precious as you are, my dear.” “I come to you seeking wisdom,” the boy says, his voice cracking embarrassingly on wisdom, to the point where his acnepockmarked face flushes bright red. Noemi’s gritty eyes take an eternity to blink, but it does little to ground her in this bizarre situation. There were no children aboard when they left Earth. No pregnant crew, either. “Wisdom,” the boy says again, with an impatient edge giving her the sudden sharp sense of the man he will grow into. All Noemi can think of is the party the night before launch, sour gulps of champagne and grandiose speeches from the captain, foolishly optimistic. Wisdom certainly bandied about, but also the unspoken sentiment that they were offering themselves up as test subjects. Herself more so than anyone. Movement at the corner of her vision, as one of the silent bodies jerkily steps forward. Her reflexes are too slow to flinch as the stranger roots around in the cryo-liquid as if they have

misplaced a lucky coin in a fountain. Their hand sweeps impersonally along her petrified ass-cheek and right thigh until they shove something metal into her ice-clawed fingers. As the ship’s air slowly warms her skin, Noemi’s arm begins to quiver with the effort of holding it up. Gingerly, the youth pries open her fingers and takes the wrench. Blood climbs up her face in a warm, spiky flash, and her lips part. “Thank you,” he says, and then shoves her back into the pod. Muscles still rusty from disuse, Noemi flails in the shallow cryo bath, her spine hitting the bottom of the pod with a dull bang that makes her torso seize up in sudden agony. She struggles to push herself up on shaky arms, but the pod cover is already sliding into place with a pleasant, ominous hum. The surface ices over in beautiful, deadly fractals like every nightmare, paralyzing in its shocking familiarity; she thinks, desperately hopes, that maybe she’s only dreaming. Time enough to snatch at those words—what did he mean, Lady of the—before her consciousness refreezes mid-thought.

𓆟 “Two truths and a lie: You might’ve heard me called ‘Lady of the Lake’ in the lab; that’s because I’m always finding the shit everyone else seems to lose.

There is a protein in my brain that has already spelled my doom; one day I’ll wake up and never be able to go to sleep again, an insomniac until I die. I love the water.” A corporate ice-breaker that, when delivered by her, is a dead-weight mood-killer. Only Lin huffs a quiet laugh, because he’s heard this one before and is primed for her dark sense of humor. The almost-quaint childhood tale of the lake ice buckling beneath her booted feet, Noemi slipping beneath the surface before she could so much as gasp. The slow-dawning horror of watching the ice stitch itself back together above her head, slowly obscuring her brother’s face screaming at her don’t just watch! break it! as he frantically smashed at the slushy would-be coffin until it gave her back up. The polar plunge had been about reclaiming her relationship with cold—but not icy—water, about jumping in and out on her own terms. Lin yelping beside her, his waterlogged hair and shouted blue streak making her double over with laughter that warmed her from the inside, better than the foil blanket draped over her shoulders.

𓆟 —Lake? Noemi’s question thaws itself out the next time she is unceremoniously dragged back into wakefulness. She retches not-water directly into the lap of the same boy, who recoils clumsily, all gangly limbs. Noemi braces for him to push her away again, but instead he regards her with wary… Is that reverence?

“What,” she croaks around an excruciatingly dry throat, “the fuck is happening.” His Adam's apple bobs in his spindly neck. “Lady of the Lake, I come to you humbly to ask for your guidance.” He’s mad. “Why are you calling me that?” she demands. They are in fucking outer space. Just this chamber—Noemi cranes her neck, muscles seized up like too many late nights in the lab hunched over slides—filled with identical pods standing at fortyfive-degree angles. But even with her limited range of motion she can tell that the other pods aren’t fogged over with condensation. They are clear. Open. Empty. All except hers. The youth’s voice snares her attention. “Because he told us to search for you.” The shiny lure of a puzzle, her brain snagging on he. “Only you possess what I need to guide the ship.” “You’re the…” She eyes him groggily. “Captain?” He puffs out his thin chest. “I will be. It’s my destiny.” She is the Lady of the Lake. He needs her to help him rule, which makes him… Arthur? Her stomach drags up bile past a hammering heart. This isn’t happening. “Who told you?” His eyes go wide with uncertainty, a child realizing too late that he has misbehaved. With all of her strength she grabs him by the lapels of his tunic—this style nothing like what they were wearing when they blasted off, not even the mission-supplied uniforms. Her slimy hands slide over the rough fabric; it doesn’t feel like sleek crepe,

more like a hand-me-down washed and worn to anonymous nubbiness. “What year is it?” “Year 30!” he shouts, fingers locked around her wrists hard enough to bruise, if there were enough blood circulating in her arms. Noemi is so shocked that her hands unlock. She was supposed to be woken up in only a decade. Did the pods malfunction? But no, everyone else seems to have woken up on time. Why not her? Why—here another swell of nausea—only her. She ices over her voice. “Where. Is. Lin.” The spark of terror in his eyes tells her that he knows to fear her reaction. But that trepidation is anchored by something deeper. Grief. “He died, before my time.” The knowledge shouldn’t surprise, but Noemi hadn’t let herself fathom the reality that she is well and truly alone, everyone she has ever known now long dead and gone. “The me before me knew him. He passed his teachings on.” Noemi can’t stop shaking her head. Or maybe her head is still, her entire body wracked with ugly shivers. “But it was only supposed to be ten years.” Impossibly, he is crying. Fury sparks within her; he has no right. “Please,” Arthur—a supposed king, an expected captain— whines. “I can’t do the spacewalk without the hook. I can’t do this without you.” “No!” she snaps, appalled that she has to mother him.

Klaxons screech, drowning out even this small bit of power she wields. The room is plunged into red light—the hue of the myriad false emergencies they drilled so frequently that Noemi dreamed of them up until blastoff. But this is no drill, as the ship lurches so sharply that Noemi is pitched half out of her tank, her ribs bashing into the open edge of the pod hard enough to knock the remaining air out of her. The surrounding crew’s breath-held reverence dissolves into action, hands slamming control panels, shouted orders. The never-ending sirens reverberate through her head in an anxious echo, until they have melted into the wail of the ambulance that couldn’t revive her mother once she was well and truly gone, open eyes boring into an impossible distance. “Lady!” Arthur snaps, the leader shining through like a sudden light through cloudy ice. “The hook!” Fumbling, she thrusts the metal hook at him, anything to stop the awful blaring. The moment his fingers close around it, the klaxons stop as if a switch has been flipped. Noemi tries to take a step, but slips on spilled cryo-liquid. Back into her tank she tumbles, the familiar whir of the lid shutting back over her head, and she is sinking back, helpless.

𓆟 Each wake leaves her more and more sluggish. Noemi resolves to collect her thoughts like treasured pebbles, worn smooth by repeated rubbing and turning over. She will keep her

wits about her, so that next time she will emerge fully from the cryogenic liquid, mind clear and able to break this strange spell. But after the near-disaster of that second wake, they seem to have learned their lesson. They only barely thaw her, just enough that she is able to offer up whatever tool she’s been buried with the time before. One time, she awakens to a needle in the crook of her arm. Whatever she gives this generation, they don’t even pretend that it’s not against her will. Water. Arm. Sword. King. What choice does she have but to hand it over?

𓆟 She has always been Nimue, she decides, and it was just that brief interlude on Earth that was the dream. That sounds more like the fairy tale, after all: girl survives near-drowning, only to discover that there is already a time bomb implanted in her family’s genetics. Stumbles upon it when her mother wakes up one morning, then never goes to sleep again. Woman changes jobs, transforming from city planner to scientist, in order to study the prions that stole her mother from her. Woman undergoes magical spell (blood draws, so many minute invasions) to find out what she has secretly always suspected, that she has inherited the same sleepless curse. Loses her brother, unwilling as he is to unlock the same answer, sinking beneath his own ignorance.

Instead, Noemi dreams herself backward in time. She meets Arthur in feudal Japan, bestows upon him a naginata. In the Dark Ages, she places a quill into his hand. A flash drive! In the not-so-distant past, when information was the most precious and cutting blade. She has always been the Lady of the Lake. She must have, for them to come to her like this, over and over. To trap her like this.

𓆟 “Some are born great,” she burbles in a cryo-waterfall as she lurches upright, “some become great, some have greatness thrust upon them. But”—and she can already see them stealing glances again at the readout, wondering if they should refreeze her before she’s fully thawed out—“but some exist only to thrust greatness upon others. What of them?” Her dreams can’t fit around Lin. If she has always belonged to a lake—even if it changes form—then how can she explain meeting him in the lab? Him singling her out, praising her prion research. Encouraging her to apply for the mission. “There is nothing left for you on Earth anymore,” and it hurt, but it was true, her mother’s body long-cremated save for the spliced brain cells she still stared at through the microscope lens, her brother lost to her so that she had no idea how he slept at night, if he even still did.

“Trust your body to the cryo, and your mind will be able to solve this in a future your body would never have made it to.” Trust. Thrust. Trust. Thrust. She cannot stop rhyming the two, is in fact screeching them like some twisted siren forcing people to recoil away rather than lure them to her. Except that she must have thrown out some bait without meaning to, because the air before her sparkles and flickers, until… “Noemi.” Suddenly Lin stands before her, between one drenched blink and the next. Except it’s not his body, not his broad-shouldered bulk or shaggy gray-streaked hair or penchant for surreal Hawaiian shirts. Those are all rendered in three dimensions, but it’s a projection at half-size. A hologram, her mind struggles to process. Like something out of science fiction. “Lin?” she gasps, and is furious to discover her cheeks are suddenly hot with tears that she didn’t even feel slipping down her numb skin. “Lin, what did you do?” She should be mortified that she’s naked before him, but she has the odd sense that he isn’t actually seeing her. His gray eyes seem to stare through her body as if she is the insubstantial one. “My dear,” this not-quite-Lin says, “I made you immortal. Or as close as I could. You are the most important part of this voyage. This ship literally cannot keep turning without you.” His words don’t make sense; it’s his usual bullshit spin, first to procure funding, then to secure their spots on the mission.

So instead all she can think to ask is, “Why is he always the same? You keep waking me up later and later, but he never ages.” “He does age,” Lin corrects her, “while you’re asleep. But every time you wake up, he must be the same age.” But that can only mean… “We have almost perfected the cloning process.” And then she realizes why Arthur looks familiar: he has the same shadow of the jawline that belongs (belonged) to their captain. The boisterous bravado with which he boomed out his big speech, their last night on terra firma, about how they would be the first of many generations venturing forward into the inky black. How they would humbly set the course and then give way to the next generation. She thought he was overdoing it a bit, even for a night where they all were putting on brave faces for one another. But the real act must have been obscuring how vital he thought he was to the mission, to copy himself over and over. No wonder they make such good company. “Why clone him and not yourself?” But Lin has never been interested in repetitive cycles. He was always thinking himself forward. She answers herself: “You figured it out. How to map your brain. Your consciousness.” He’s nodding, smiling proudly, the beaming mentor. “It was my life’s work.” It should have been their work, side-by-side. Her lips tremble despite her best efforts to clench her jaw until she feels like she’ll break a tendon. Yes, her specialty had the personal dimension

of racing a clock to save her own brain and then her body, but the solution was the same: map the human consciousness onto a digital framework, smooth out the proteins that fold themselves into fatal knots. “The ship needs this,” Lin explains. She keeps her mouth shut because every minute that he talks is another greedy gulp of ship-air. Her skin is finally beginning to warm. It is a welcome agony. “This pageantry. A familiar figure. A myth built into the framework of the ship itself from liftoff. That never changes. A clear quest to fulfill.” We have an entire mission, she wants to spit back. Or we had one. What comes out instead is the thin, reedy plea of a child: “How could you let them do that?” “You let them do that,” Lin says. But as she unleashes outraged screams upon him and claws at the spot where he’s projected, he simply, infuriatingly, disappears. And then she’s back on ice.

𓆟 Woken once a generation. Some useless trinket, more symbolism than utility, placed within reach. Sometimes she is just a hand and an arm, held aloft, offering. As the generations go on, more and more empty-handed; Excalibur is a pass-key, a string of code: 13XC958. What is the point? She is but a conduit, passing on

obscure information. Choosing someone already chosen by the powers-that-be. Tossed back into the water like a fish, an act of mercy that’s anything but. Her mind, wasted. Her body, misappropriated.

𓆟 She dreams Lin into a crystal cave, glittering facets of chunky quartz hanging from the ceiling or jutting up from the uneven ground. Locked inside a tree, his fingerprints fused with the whorls of wood. Buried in an empty pit, fated to stare up knowing that no one will climb in after him. She kicks kicks kicks her feet as if they are webbed with fins, or fused into a tail. She clenches her hands into fists, pounds pounds pounds like knocking on an icy door. Except that one hand is wrapped around something cold and hard, a promise forged in metal and myth.

𓆟 The idiots buried her with an actual sword this time. Noemi lunges forward, putting all of her momentum into lifting her arm. Her fingers are already wrapped around the hilt; it feels more like an extension of her hand, like something that has always belonged to her. Excalibur slides into Arthur’s midsection like his flesh is water. She would feel guilty if she didn’t know there were a half-dozen of him waiting on ice. In all of the yelling frenzy she hauls herself out of the pod. Though the momentum in her

sleep was mostly in her mind, the mantra propels her forward onto shaky, atrophied legs. She leaves the sword wedged in there, for someone else to pull out. She drunkenly stumbles through the ship’s corridors, a clumsy ghost. All these decades—over a century since her feet last touched this ground. Her skin can’t adjust to the thermostat; constant chills crawl across her flesh. Her steps are plodding, heavy when she is accustomed to buoyancy. She is humiliatingly naked without the opacity of the cryo-freeze. Whether it’s the design or the orbit, everything seems circular; she never doubts which direction she is meant to go, toward the center. When her muscles tremble, she pushes herself to take just one more step. She conjures up memories, wraps them around herself like a blanket. Bedtime stories, curled around her mother’s warm body, lulled by her deep and steady voice. At every turn, smoky panels bounce light back from every available surface, above and below and at eye level or within arm’s reach. This is how Lin moves through the ship, how he projects himself from surface to surface. She knows now where to find him. The ship archives didn’t interest her on the tour as much as the labs (single-minded fool), but to her flooded eyes they dazzle: tricks of the light conjuring up Lin’s form in his true-to-life size, towering over her. Wracking full-body shudders as she struggles to stand her ground before him.

“Noemi.” He doesn’t look surprised in the slightest. “You found me.” “You can’t put me back to sleep!” She hates how shrill her voice sounds, not even dipping a toe into hysterics but completely submerged. Panic is an anchor dragging her back down into those dark depths. Except that then Lin says, “You’ll never sleep again,” like an infuriating riddle. “What are you talking about?” she snaps. “Every time, you put me right back to—” A single tone cuts her off, as her own image materializes between them, in miniature: A hologram of her and Lin, shot at such an angle that she must not have realized he was recording this for posterity. “How long?” the other Lin asks—tender, concerned. Resigned. Her hologram-self’s face is haggard, bruise-purple circles beneath eyes that already look glassy. Noemi’s heart clenches around the anxiety, but this happened long ago. “Three days,” the other her says. “It’s early,” Lin tries, striving for the authority that came to him so easily on Earth. “Your body is still adjusting to the lack of a circadian rhythm—” “Mine and no one else’s?” she retorts, voice ragged with fatigue. “I’ve tried everything, Lin. Melatonin. Booze. Exercise. Orgasms.

I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I’ve been walking the corridors every night. Staring out at space.” A tremble that starts in her chin and ripples throughout her slumped frame. “I was supposed to have more time.” Lin hanging his shaggy head in grim acceptance. Then— the spark of an idea. “You can have more time.” Hope animating his frame as he steps closer to her. “Trust your body to the cryo.” “Again?” she asks sardonically, but this younger, living Lin nods emphatically. “It’s the best chance you have.” Daring to hope, beseeching. “Can you—” “I have to stay awake,” he says gently. “I’ll make sure there is a world for you to wake up in. I promise. No matter what.” The hologram tableau flickers, then snuffs itself out. “Why don’t I remember any of this?” she challenges. He shrugs, the rare concession of not possessing every answer. “You might have had a poor reaction to the sedative that we injected you with. Or it could be the cryo liquid itself.” “Especially since you’re not supposed to defrost and refreeze people,” she snaps. “I didn’t give you permission to do any of that!” “I kept you alive,” he snaps back, the first time he’s lost his cool. “I kept my promise. And now that you’ve decided on this, it’s time for us to resume our work.” The fucking gall. “When has it ever been ours?” He abandoned her in their lifetime. “You’re just a shadow, old man.” It’s saying it aloud that makes her realize the one bit of power she has over him: she is alive—for however long she has left—and

corporeal. This room is temperature-controlled against moisture. She is drenched. “No!” Lin shouts as she touches her hand to the nearest panel. All it takes is the merest press of her frozen fingerprints, and one station sputters out. Lin’s avatar tries to intercept her as she lunges out of the entrance to the archives, her bare feet smacking wet footprints along the floor. Lin hops from panel to panel, but only manages to materialize briefly before she short-circuits it. Stubborn to the end, he trails her from one sparking panel to the next, halfway down the ship, before he finally stops reappearing. Noemi pauses, hand outstretched, and clenches it in a fist, drawing her rage back in. She slowly retraces her steps back to the archives, toes and heels pressing back into her slowly-drying footprints. Inside, Lin hovers sullenly over one of the few remaining panels. “This is what you get,” Noemi tells him, gesturing around. “If I see you anywhere on the rest of the ship, I will force you into an even smaller cage.” “You can’t—” he starts, but she cuts him off. “Yes. I can. You got whole generations on this ship. It’s my turn.” Her voice wobbles. “You owe me this little bit.” His face softens, which makes it worse. “But what will you do now?” he asks, voice horribly gentle.

She takes a deep breath. “I will tell you when I figure that out. Maybe.” And she leaves him behind in his crystal cave.

𓆟 She will never sleep again. Today is the last day of her life. How long it lasts is out of her control—a matter of space-time, of time dilation, of ship rotations. But she will remain awake for every minute that is hers.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

“Jackrabbit Jive” Entropy

To the Sea and Stars Rian Moneypenny Content Warnings: References to Postpartum Depression

Buck lived two lives, and one needed to end. This is not meant in a figurative sense, as in Buck had a double life or another part of himself the world never viewed. No, Buck literally lived two lives, in two different parts of the world, and he didn’t know why. He also couldn’t precisely pinpoint when these divergent narratives began, and why they shared similarities. But he knew this: he was cracking under the pressure. See, Buck believed for many years he must be clinically insane. This existence, living one life in Los Angeles and another in London at the same time, didn’t make any logical sense. It was physically impossible, he knew that, but it was happening all the same. If these were hallucinations, they were of a variety that knocked back steroids and LSD in equal measures. He’d tried talking to his parents, and his wife, Persephone, about this

condition, but always in limited detail. For fear they would think he’d gone utterly mad. And he was mad. Furious. Afraid. Afraid that he would always be living half a life because he couldn’t juggle two.

𓆟 Buck used to dream of being a sailor. Some of his earliest memories were of his mother reading The Sea Wolf, Moby Dick, and Treasure Island to him as a child before bed. He imagined himself a pirate, an oceanic wanderer that visited strange and unusual islands, gaining gold and the love of beautiful women, but always returning to the tide. The water was the greatest mystery in the world, he thought: unfathomable, ever shifting, and tethered to its own set of rules. He knew his body was its subject, and occasionally he considered that this was why his being had split: the sea inside of him had been irrevocably altered. Something about the salt and stardust in his veins had mutated, made him a human who stepped through the door of Foyles on Charing Cross by morning and left via The Last Bookstore on South Spring Street by evening. This was the only common denominator between his lives: books, and the art of selling them to tourists. Well, perhaps not the only common denominator: there was Persephone, his parents, and, most recently, Martha—a

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daughter—also known as the newest fracture in his mental state. Because while he couldn’t exactly denote the time when he began his exercises in teleportation and dual realities, he knows it started approximately around the time he met Persephone. And that his periods in one place or the other had become increasingly erratic since Martha was born. Buck met Persephone at Cole’s French Dip in Los Angeles one night after he got off work at the store. She had the longest and blackest hair Buck had ever seen, like ink stains on his fingers from a burst pen, and high, pale cheekbones. They contrasted wildly with that hair: the same shade as words on a page. And stylish, he thought, in her black corduroy midi dress and matching ankle strap heels. He was immediately drawn to the sound of her laugh, the loud freeness in it, and her love of reading. When he asked her name, she smirked and took a long sip from a can of Hamm’s. “My mom loved Greek mythology,” she said, twisting one of the gold buttons on the front of her dress. They were shaped like flowers, and this one had the form of a rose. “She used to say that with this name, no matter how long or far I traveled, I would always find my way home. Back to her. Underworlds were temporary, that was her motto.” “Do you still see her much?” he asked. She’d already told Buck she moved from Las Vegas to LA two years ago to pursue a career in screenwriting.

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“She passed away last fall,” Persephone said. She continued to twist the golden rose between her fingers. Buck, unsure of how to proceed at first, ordered another round of beers with the flick of his fingers. Then said, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I hope—well, I just hope I haven’t–” Persephone settled a hand on his knee and looked at him with a soft smile. “I like talking about her. Underworlds are temporary, remember? We’ll find each other again.” Buck tried to return the smile, and the warmth of the beer in his stomach almost allowed it to happen. He placed his hand on hers, and with the other, raised the fresh can. “To liminal spaces, and reunions with the ones who will always be home.” Her smile widened, though the corners of it trembled. “I’ll drink to that.” After the toast, Persephone shook her head and snorted. “What?” Buck said, grinning. “Oh, I was just thinking I like my name now, but high school? Do you know how much shit I got for it? It never stopped, especially after half of my English class read Edith Hamilton.” Buck laughed, and everything changed. Time, place, and all that he believed was upended, thrown to strange currents, unnavigable rivers, and he awoke the next morning, or maybe it was the following week—month?—in a one-bedroom flat in Croydon. What followed was a disorienting panic of how did I get here, why am I here, and what parts of my life are still mine? He

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drifted in a haze through the shabby little space, stumbling over secondhand furniture and walls he didn’t remember purchasing. He called his parents in Virginia, and their number was still the same. His dad congratulated him on the move, and said his mother was overjoyed about the engagement. Engagement? He listened to familiar voices in his ears while his eyes stared out on streets that couldn’t be more foreign. When Persephone walked inside with her hands full of groceries, he went through the motions of helping her and she was telling him, wasn’t he going to be late? It was his first day at Foyles, he shouldn’t be late on his first day. And the motions continued: he dressed, brushed his teeth, took the coffee she placed in his hands, and miraculously sorted the mysteries of the public transportation system to place him at the doors of Foyles. Where he supposedly worked. He sold books and sweated, breathing heavy and heavier still, but he did his job. Then he went home (home?) and lived in Croydon for a week, rinse and repeat, until the rehearsal dinner. He drank copious amounts of champagne that night, passed out, and woke up on Venice Beach. There was a diamond ring on Persephone’s finger as they walked into the Fig Tree for lunch, and she asked him if he was okay. He said yes and held back the urge to vomit on the boardwalk. In many ways, his business became his greatest source of solace. Books, fiction and everything in between, must hold the answers to his condition. He read The Time Traveler’s Wife a dozen

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times at least. But was he moving in place more than time? Things moved fast, but that was just nature. He worked in two different continents, two different jobs, but loved the same woman, the same family, in both. He studied the Fields of Asphodel extensively. Purgatory. Its name by every denomination. He studied ways of escape. But then, he wanted to be with her. He wanted to live abroad. Was it still purgatory if you prayed for it? He dreamt of tadpoles growing in the River Styx and woke one night at a Sheraton in Pasadena to find Persephone’s water breaking. But on his way to get their hospital bag from the bathroom, he stepped out into the stands of a Bristol Rovers game with two meat pies in his hands. Persephone was on a bench, cheering, her belly enormous beneath a blue and white jersey. He took a pie to her, reeling, and sat. He evaluated the notion that somehow he existed outside the domains of space and time. Granted, he’d been grappling with it for years, but now he moved between what had and hadn’t happened. Here, Penelope was still pregnant, and in Pasadena, their child was being born. He thought of something his dad said to him after he graduated college: “I wish I’d spent more time in life being mindful and less time being mindless.” But wasn’t he mindful? He read. Christ, did he read.

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Wasn’t this supposed to offer mindfulness? Wasn’t he more self-aware as a result? Then he held Martha, at Croydon University Hospital, and realized he knew nothing. He never would. This ocean was immeasurable.

𓆟 One night, at their two-bedroom apartment in Koreatown, Buck looked up their flat on Scarbrook Road in Croydon and discovered it was for rent. No one lived there—at least not in this moment of time. He did the same search for South Kenmore Avenue while in Croydon and found the same results: their K-town home was available. It was as though his family existed only within these bizarre pockets, pockets only he seemed to be aware of, and he just couldn’t make sense of the phenomena. He continued his voracious reading habits: Gödel, Einstein, and Hawking. Wells, Vonnegut, L’Engle. Fact and fiction, one and the same to him. All these authors practitioners of a faith, a science, and he believed deeply in their medicines, placing equal stock in everything they wrote. Every sentence, a possibility, a potential explanation. But nothing concrete. Nothing told him why he honeymooned in the Canadian Rockies with Persephone at 12 PM and rocked Martha to sleep at 12 AM in Kenmore Towers. Nothing could explain why he was on his second date with Persephone Wednesday evening at Griffith Observatory, then

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going for the first ultrasound appointment Thursday morning in Thornton Heath. He would call his mother and ask if there was anything unusual about his birth, his childhood. But she would only say no and then ask if he was doing okay. “I’m not sleeping much, but hanging in,” he said. “Well, babies are known to restructure sleeping habits,” she replied. And he would think, right, in this second I’m a dad. It was hard to keep track of all the befores, afters, and in-betweens, and which he currently called his position. In this hour, he was Martha’s dad, Persephone’s husband. Soon, he might be neither. Or maybe he always was, always would be, and he took comfort in those passing thoughts. Again and again, he considered spilling everything to all of them: I live two lives with you. But fear of how it might damage or alter these relationships always held him back. Plus, his state of being was so fraught with demands that he was typically just trying to hold on for dear life—he might get married and see the birth of his daughter in the span of a sunset. Not to mention the endless slurry of minutiae that still had to occur. Diapers must be changed, dishes must be washed, and the floors must be swept. He might disappear from one world for an interval, but it marched forward regardless.

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𓆟 He was in bed with Persephone. It was close to midnight in Los Angeles, and he’d just come from dropping Martha off at Magdalene Preschool in Addiscombe. It was her first day, and she cried when they got out of the car. Buck hugged her tight, told her she was going to have a great day and make lots of new friends. She was going to have so much fun, it would feel like she just blinked, and he’d be right there to pick her up. “You promise?” she said, sniffling. “I promise, honey,” he said, pressing his hand against her dark curls. “I’ll always come back.” Martha lifted her pinky. “Pinky swear?” Buck smiled and intertwined their fingers. “Pinky swear. I love you, sweetheart.” “Love you, Daddy.” After, on the drive to Foyles, he started crying and couldn’t stop. Somewhere in that film of tears, he was pulled into bed with Persephone, returned to K-town. Martha was back inside her mother, safe, and Buck had his palm pressed to Persephone’s stomach. He felt his daughter kicking—envisioned her floating, at total peace, protected by the water. He gently rubbed Persephone’s belly beneath the sheets and asked, “Have you ever been to London?”

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Persephone lifted her head from his chest and looked at him. “When I was younger. My mom took me.” A faint smile grew across her lips. “We rode on the London Eye, and I remember her saying, at the very top, ‘It’s like we’re everywhere. We can see everything and we’re part of it.’ I think it was the happiest I’d seen her.” She settled her cheek against him again. “Why do you ask?” The tears had followed him across the ocean, across the country. They wouldn’t stop. But in the dark, she couldn’t see them. He felt at once exhausted beyond reason and full of a bursting, manic energy. “I was just wondering. Maybe we should visit sometime, after the baby comes.” Persephone yawned. “Mm, sometime.” Was there any way to tie these realities by a common thread? To make them one? “Persephone?” “Yeah?” “Do you ever feel like you’re living two lives at the same time?” “I mean, yes. Everything has been so busy lately, it’s hard to keep up.” “Sure, but I’m talking actually living two lives in the same day, every day. Does that make sense?” She patted her middle, and he felt their fingers touch. “Yes, Buck, it actually feels like I’m carrying two lives. And after a long fucking day at the studio, it feels like even more.” She shifted, still unable to see the pools forming around his eyes. “Are you

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alright? Is there anything you want to talk about? Because I’m here. You know that, right?” He took her hand, squeezed it. “Just tired.” Persephone sighed. “Okay. But if you change your mind–” He kissed her forehead. “I know—you’re here.” She drew her thumb softly across his knuckles. “Love you.” When he whispered the same to her, his eyes slipped shut and he slid into another dream. He dreamt of being a woman, becoming pregnant, and giving birth to a boy that resembled the child he used to be—then watching that boy grow up in one place, watching him grow old, raise a family, and always being right there in that singular location. A motion linear, straightforward, locked in the present. I know you’re here, Persephone, he often thought. But am I?

𓆟 “You did say some odd things when you were little,” his mom said on the phone. Martha fed at Persephone’s breast across from him. They sat outside the Green Bird Café in Bath. The family had taken a day trip to see the Roman Architecture and Buck reserved a session at the Thermae Bath Spa for Persephone. Postpartum depression took its toll on her, and he believed a vacation, time to herself, was needed.

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He watched her grimace as Martha struggled to latch. Persephone gazed out at crowds passing in the street, her stare vacant, dark half-moons under the eyes. “Like?” he asked. “You used to say that you loved me and your dad, but you missed people from before.” “Before what?” “Who knows? Kids say strange things. I didn’t think too much of it.” When he hung up, Persephone began sobbing quietly. Martha cried. He wrapped them in his arms—the salt shared between them. A common weight. I’m here, Buck said.

𓆟 He couldn’t remember a time before this, before he split in two. And he didn’t know if it would ever end, and maybe that was ultimately okay. There were days it was overwhelming, and he didn’t think he could continue, but Underworlds were temporary. As a wise woman once said. He returned to Cole’s French Dip, on their first date, and Persephone asked, “What about your name?” “What about it?”

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“You’re the first Buck I’ve ever met. Any history behind it?” “Well, I was named after my grandfather,” he said. “He was a sailor, a captain, and my mom said he was the bravest man she ever knew. Said they got caught in a storm on the Chesapeake Bay one time, and he used oatmeal to fill up the cracks in the boat, cause they took on so much water. She said they rose up high on the waves then would plummet, into their mouth, and it grew darker than any night she’d ever seen. But Grandad got them through.” “It’s a good namesake.” “I thought so.” They had one more toast. To the sailors, and the stars leading them home.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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Buckwheat Flower of the Ocean Vy Lieu

Kissed first by the ocean and then the sun, the descendent of the dragons, Lạc Long Quân, clenches the sea pearls between his claws. Each pearl was handpicked from the finest of oysters within his watery realm. He then strung the pearls, perfect spheres as designed by his waters, onto a handwoven rope. It is his gift to her—his wife and the gentle daughter of the tiêns¹, Âu Cơ. Her huddled figure rests in the farthest corner of the cave they call home. After she gave birth to their children, the family moved here as a compromise: a home close enough to the ocean so Lạc Long Quân and the children, who still resided within the egg sac at the time, could hear the waves crashing against the beach, but also a home far enough from the sand. Âu Cơ, his beloved wife from the mountains in the north, hates the sand. She’s hated it ever since she descended the mountains to marry him, hated how the grains entangle themselves

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into everything, everywhere. No matter how many times she soaks in the water, they never completely wash away. Until now, Lạc Long Quân has never realized how much he misses feeling the sand between his claws. But even if a home without the sand feels foreign, he is willing to trade the sand for barren rocks if it means Âu Cơ will be comfortable. He settles beside her and runs a hand through her hair. “Feeling better today, em²?” She groans. Her chest still rises and falls in time with the tide. “Please don’t look at me.” Lạc Long Quân shakes his head. “Nonsense. You just need to get out of bed, swim a little, relax. Let anh³ brush your hair.” Huffing, Âu Cơ sits up and hands him the bamboo comb, one of her prized possessions. The strands of her hair, between Lạc Long Quân’s claws, are coarse and weighed down by the sea water and sand. The back of her neck has been burned by sun, and her hands that no longer hold her love or any of their children, are pruny and gaunt. And her eyes— Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t meet them. His wife is not the tiên he met from all those years ago: graceful, powerful, and so light on her feet, the sand could hardly capture them.

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Back then, she didn’t need any protection. She was already transformed into a crane, ready to escape when that monster ambushed her. Still Lạc Long Quân threw the rock and when the monster launched its stinger in her direction, he took the monster’s stinger to his chest. She scolded him and insisted on checking the wound afterwards. Her hands, sweetened by the mountain soil and the fresh water that flowed through, brushed against his scales. As she treated the poison, she told him about her home—the jade undergrowth, the golden meadows that grew out of the rocks, the fresh water that cut through the rocks in rivers and waterfalls, the buckwheat flowers that bloomed despite the weak sunlight, despite the barren land. “They won’t grow anywhere else,” Âu Cơ admitted to him when she finished bandaging him. “They need the mountain soil to thrive.” Lạc Long Quân fell in love with her at that moment. Saw himself in her too—for the ocean was his home and he could never leave it for anywhere else. Even if he understood all the wonders she saw in the mountains, it would never compare to the coral reefs of ten, twenty colors, the fish and the sharks, and all the life that thrived beneath the surface and even the warmth of the sand. How it glimmers within a shred of sunlight.

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Brushing out the last of the knots, Lạc Long Quân picks up the pearls. He grips it tightly, rolling the beads between his fingers. And then he lets go. “Em,” he says, softly, adoringly. She looks back at him. “Yes, anh?” He loses his breath. She may not be recognizable now, but she’s just as beautiful as the first time he saw her. Lạc Long Quân swallows the lump in his throat. It is not just the sand that she cannot live with—it’s the salt in the water, it’s the harsh sunlight, it’s the creatures that take both for granted. Maybe it’s even the ocean itself. “Do you want to go back home?” Lạc Long Quân forces out, calmer now. Âu Cơ stills. “What do you mean?” “If you wish to, I will not stop you.” Âu Cơ faces him fully now, cautious. Hopeful too. “But what about you and the children—” “If any of them wish to go with you, you may take them. I will not ask you to return either.” “…Are you sure?” The last time he got her full attention like this, he had gone inland and came back to their family with buckwheat flowers. She treasured the bouquet, even more so than their own children, even after it wilted.

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A buckwheat flower cannot stay in the ocean, let alone salt water, if it is to bloom. He nods with a heavy heart. “Yes, I am. I want you to be happy, em.” It is small, but a watery smile appears, a single buckwheat flower within an ocean. She takes his hand and leans into his shoulder. “Thank you, anh. Thank you so much, my love.” And though the grief tastes sharper than the salt in the water, Lạc Long Quân knows he has made the right choice.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

Translation Notes: ¹ Tiên: Vietnamese version of an immortal, think of a giant as an example. ² Em: Gender neutral pronoun for those who are within your age bracket and are younger than you. ³ Anh: For males who are within your age bracket and are older than you.

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“Combarro” Giulio R.M. Maffii

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To have, to hold. Julian Content Warnings: Mentions of Violence, Brief Descriptions of Injury and Death

I believed in kraken, sirens, the like. It wasn’t hard to believe that the stories that had been told had to come from some form of truth. But as my ship sailed on its own for the first time in a decade, I didn’t expect to come face to face with such a creature. Gently, softly, I was lured. His eyes of a blistering blue and hands reaching out as I passed. It was far more tempting than I’d expected. The tales of Odysseus, being drawn in by an image of his wife. Or of Orpheus, whose singing granted passage through the infested path. None of the stories of the beasts mentioned just how at peace I would feel. For the first time, my mind was quiet. My breath was calm. My hands were steady. My lungs didn’t beg, my joints didn’t ache.

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I’d made it. Back to him, somehow. Someone I’d never met, and yet I knew everything about. It was a face unknown to me, but a spirit I recognized. And he saw me, too. His scales and feathers dipped into the water. The glittering feathers of an angel matched with a smile that put the sunlight to shame, I had no choice but to fall. No, not just fall but to dive in headfirst. If he could love me for all my flaws, my human mistakes, I could love his monstrous talons and fangs. My crew was horrified. All I had worked for, all I had sacrificed to bring me on this journey, it was thrown away in trust. Tossed aside without a second thought, not caring for the collateral. The crew watched as their once strong and fearless leader gave up his life of stability on a whim of the unbelievable. A fantasy. A lie. I jumped into the arms of a creature who’d never known love. I knew what he was. What he’d done, what more he was capable of. I fell for his trap. But I was at peace. As he sang his siren song, my vocal chords were torn from my body and my human blood filled the water. I was finally his. One could argue that it was all a ploy, that the affection we’d quietly shared in those moments weren’t real. And maybe they’re right about that. He got what he was after. Yet so did I. I was finally wanted.

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For my life, my body, yes. He may have been holding my lifeless body with the talons that had shredded my skin moments ago, but at last, I was held.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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The Lights of a Hunting Party Sirius Content Warnings: Blood and Drowning

Frothy brine as black as ink encroached on the sides of the pier. One more large swell would be enough to break against the edge and spread a thin gray pool over the battered boards. Clouds gathered overhead, blotting out the moon and any stars that might shed pins of silver light onto the rolling waves. The only patch of revealed sky hosted a cluster of stars that were just enough to dapple the water, nothing that served well to irradiate. The only real light came from underneath the waves—bright, pulsing circles of red, blue, and yellow that had changed their position three times since Gregory had left the shore. The pier was not the problem. If he walked carefully, he could make it back. It was the fact that the little strip of land the pier was connected to had been swallowed entirely, and the lights were edging closer. He counted a dozen, at least, and every time he

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shifted, they changed. He did not know if the colors meant anything, or if they were just meant to keep his interest. He had followed one of them out this far—an intriguing reprieve from photographing albatrosses and stranded jellyfish. He thought it was bioluminescent algae at first, but algae did not change colors. As soon as he stepped onto the pier, the circle he had been following changed from blue to bright red. It sped up and shot back towards the ocean and of course, he went after it. He almost fell off the pier—stopped only by the head of a screw that jammed his toe and brought him to a halt. He was still bleeding, and his toe throbbed, but that was the least of his worries. His camera hung around his neck, trapped in its waterproof case, but he still gripped its sides to keep from dropping it into the water any time he leaned over the railing. The water kept rising, and the salt stung his open wound. The soles of his feet were starting to prune in a briny puddle and the lights were getting closer. Gregory saw some of his blood swirling in the puddle underneath his feet. The waves lapped at the side of the pier again and washed some of the blood out to the water. The lights began to pulse, flashing green, yellow, blue, and red in rapid succession. The water began to churn as if something was writhing underneath it, creating more waves and kicking up foamy peaks. A lump formed in his throat and Gregory took a step back, moving as far away from the edge as he could. He clutched his

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camera so tightly that a jolt of pain rocketed up his fingers and shot across the tendons stretched over his knuckles. He thought he heard something splash, but it was difficult to discern over the roar of the ocean. The ashen clouds above his head began to close up, wiping out the last of the stars. Now, the only light came from the startling, primary colors that lurked underneath the roiling surface of the water. He could still see the pier, but just barely. It hurt him to walk. The water rose over the top of his foot and made it so that he had to slog through with every step. He paced back towards the end of the pier—away from the shore, but he had a better view of what he was dealing with. He heard another splash and turned his head, raising his camera and popping up his flashbulb. He aimed towards the sound and clicked the shutter. White light flashed like lightning across the pier and bounced off the hide of something silver. The sudden light nearly blinded him, and when his vision swam back into focus, whatever he had seen was already gone. Gregory glanced down at his camera screen, but there was too much floating across his eyes for him to get a proper look. There was another splash and he rotated on his heel, hitting the shutter again without really thinking about trying to get a good picture. This time, he caught sight of what looked like a tail—thick and long, like an oarfish, with deep red fins as big as sails. It barely broke the surface—water rolled along its back and then it vanished

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once again. Gregory’s throat dried up, and his knees began to tremble. Gregory’s steps rumbled the pier as he backed up, moving as quickly as he could. Going back towards the shore was still not a safe bet. Once he left the pier, he would be entirely in the water, and after that he might as well be food. The lights began to follow him, and every time he saw one get close, he snapped another picture. The white flash illuminated more of the strange creatures’ tails as they moved smoothly through the water, like ribbons rippling on a breeze. At the end of the pier, something broke the surface of the water, and Gregory’s head came up. Wreathed in red light, a silver tail flashed across his vision. It arced over the end of the pier, its red fins fluttering in the air like flags. He strained to see what it could be—a serpent, maybe, which was all that his brain could conjure. But at the end, he could have sworn he saw the shape of a person. When the creature dove back underneath the water, every light turned red, and one by one he saw what looked like heads popping up. Dozens now, far more than before. They stared at him with milky-white eyes as bright as lanterns and as cloudy as eels. They were human in shape, some with ragged tendrils of wet hair clinging to their skin. They had teeth like knives jutting out from their gaping mouths in all directions, and they threw their hands against the wooden boards. He saw webbed fingers and long black claws that left deep runs in the pressure-treated pine.

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Collectively, they shrieked. The sound sent a steel spike of fear through his heart. It echoed over the water, a cacophony of shrill, devilish howls that—somewhere underneath—sounded like a woman screaming. How they melded together to form such an evil harmony, he could not guess. He did not want to. Gregory felt like he could not breathe. They scrabbled at the pier, digging in their claws as if they could pull themselves up and crawl across the boards to get to him. Gregory pushed his camera against his chest so hard that it hurt and he turned, running for his life towards the beach. There was so much water in his path that it was like trying to cover any ground in a nightmare. He could not gain any momentum, and he could not even tell if he was getting closer. Still, even if it meant getting in the water, once he was off the pier it was a short distance to swim before he reached the shore. The creatures’ hands drummed against the wood as they followed him, holding onto it like the sides of a swimming pool. Some of them slipped back into the water and surged back towards the shore, following his path, their lights flashing red and blue as a warning or a lure, he was not sure which. And then a voice cut through the air—shrill and panicked—it called out his name. “Gregory!” His head snapped around. He skidded to a halt, jamming his foot against something—the same screw as before, or a barnacle, or something else. He could not see through the water. It

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raked down the underside of his foot, slicing open his sole, and he could feel the warmth of his own blood spilling from the gash. The cut burned, and on either side of him, the water churned again. The creatures who still had their heads above water lapped long, gray tongues against the boards closest to their heads—ingurgitating his blood. “Gregory!” The voice drew out his name in a long, mournful wail. Gregory twisted his head from side to side, unsure of what he expected to see, trying to pick out a human face in the midst of the ghoulish, demonic visages that were staring up at him with dead, white eyes. Standing in the water between the bottom of the pier and the beach was a man. His long black hair obscured most of his face, and his eyes were silver. They glowed like a lighthouse beacon, and when he smiled, his lips stretched a little too wide. He extended his hand. In the darkness, his skin looked as gray as a stone slab. Gregory could not pull his attention away from that handsome face or those long, winding fingers that looked like they were rotting at the tips. “Gregory,” the man tilted his head, and Gregory was captivated by those silver eyes. “Come here. Come to me. I can help you.” He wanted to believe it. Gregory’s next step sent pain up to his hip, and his knees shook, but he had to make it across. Once he hit the water, he would be safe. He could swim. And this man

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was here to help him. He released his hold on his camera and let it thump against his chest. Its encased edges jabbed his sternum furiously. “I can help you,” the man said again. Every word that slithered out of his mouth made sense. A salty breeze brushed his hair away from his face, revealing even more of it—and his winding lips twisted and turned as if holding back laughter. It seemed amusing, to him, like they might joke about this afterward in a diner over some piping hot coffee. That was all he wanted, Gregory realized, some dry clothes—and some coffee. He could taste it even now. Once they got to the shore, maybe this man would join him. They could share apple pie taken from one of the rotating glass cases on a sterile white countertop. He could hardly feel his injury, now. It would be easy enough to bandage. He stumbled a bit over his last few steps, and his legs felt heavy, as though he had been running for miles. As he got closer, a pungent smell assaulted his nose—a putrid stench like rotting fish that had been left to fester in the sun. Gregory stopped inches away from the man. He looked up, and he smiled, reaching out to take the hand that was being offered to him. “Thank you,” Gregory breathed. “Thank—” Before he could finish, a silver tail came flashing out of the water. It wrapped around his midsection and dragged him down. Water swallowed his head as he was submerged, and for a moment,

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all Gregory could see were bubbles streaming from his mouth. Then, he could see nothing at all. The tail coiled tighter around his torso, and his ribs splintered under the pressure. Gregory screamed and water filled his mouth. It burned his nose and the back of his throat and he thrashed, but all he could feel was sand and shells scraping against his skin as he was dragged away from the beach. The water got colder and his lungs felt like they were going to burst. There was only darkness, and the memory of the man’s face. Gregory tried to close his eyes, but they would not obey him. His limbs became heavier and then stopped heeding his commands altogether. He could no longer thrash, and he was starting to lose feeling—something he only knew because when he began to see blood, he could not tell where it was coming from. Red lights. Blue lights. Yellow lights. They surrounded him, along with dozens of pairs of cloudy white eyes. He was floating in the water, suspended, and sinking quickly. His head was the last thing he was able to move, and it froze in its upward position—staring at the eyes that filled the ocean’s darkness like hundreds of stars.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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Phantom of the Brine Bella Vedder

In a world which is unbound by lichen-covered land or seething sea, roiling waves were quelled on shores of gold sand by a holy covenant, ancient as the stones of the cragged pinnacles towering above the swell. Upon the algae slicked rock, salty froth was dashed, splattering a spray of delicate droplets into the air, sparkling in the waking dawn like a chain of glistening diamonds. Stretched across the dwindled heavens, clouds of filmy gray cast a faint veil, to which the sun, the moon, and the stars reel above, ceaselessly spinning, aging the world as the eras elapse. Each new age heralds in the rebirth of human kind; the young are brought into the world, and the elders pass away, and with them, knowledge that was failed to be passed down to the youth, vanishes entirely. The knowledge of existence, of the promise of peace, and of a war that occurred centuries ago. It was, as it were, buried beneath the thick folds of time, banished from the minds of the descendants, who were kindled from a people of noble purpose.

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Above the ashen heights and dark churning sea of gurgling spume, a citadel rose—its narrow towers stabbed the silverstreaked sky like double edged blades. A mantle of gloomy mist, brought in by the dreary weather, clung to the keep, shrouding the limestone walls in a ghostly cloak. The lofty parapets were set with the withered bodies of blindfolded women, whose stone feet were fixed firmly upon the wall, and whose pale cheeks were bedecked with briny tears. They stood, arranged along the ramparts, confronting the wrathful squalls to the East with open arms, draped with gowns that rippled and furled about their slender forms. The name of this sea-bitten citadel was long etched into the minds of those who dwelled there, whispered between tightened, salt nipped lips; Runeloráth, the fortress of the Knights of Daystar. This brotherhood of cinder and flame was long since devised during the War of Kindling, borne from the ash of a thousand fires. By their oath, they were bound to the weathered towers of Runeloráth, to guard the keep and hold back the devouring water; cursed to raise the sun from beneath the depths of the sea with each dawn. Their fists of steel and iron were seared by the flickering blaze, sparked between their bloodied fingers— their hearts pounded with an internal fire, mere pyres for their smoldering bodies. Of these sons of Ember in Runeloráth, a knight of scorched palms resided, whose armor was as dark as the night

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amidst a storm, lined with a shower of shining gold. His helm and pauldrons were set with curling flames on the sides, intricately twisted in a fan of flying sparks. He was of the Night Watch—one of the knights who guarded Runeloráth against the rising waters, when the silvery sickle emerged from her slumber. There he stood, erect upon the lower ramparts, motionlessly turned towards the ocean, and the rumbling tempest before him. Wisps of a frigid gale nipped at his neck and arms through the thin gaps in his plates, heavy tendrils blowing quickly from the West. In his iron glove, he clasped a creaking lamp, swinging hither and thither in the wind. The encased, trembling light casted a feeble halo of orange glow around the stone, failing to push back the smothering gloom. This lantern nursed the only means of protection that the knight had against fabled beings that dwelled deep, beneath the foundations of Runeloráth. The knight patiently lingered, composedly awaiting the signs of a quiet, gray dawn to manifest in veins of faded yellow. His brothers would raise the sun, just as they, and their fathers had, for numerous generations; harnessing the inferno with withered hands. Through the growling of distant thunder and the howling of the breeze, the knight faintly heard a moanful wail cut between the lashing of the waves against the precipice, haunting, yet horribly beautiful. He hardly quivered, breaking from his solemn drifting and coming to attention, straining his ears to discern the aching cry.

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Raising his lantern, he peered over the parapet, gazing into the violent swell of spray, the dim light glinting off of his armor. Darkness enveloped the ocean, restricting his vision in a way that caused him to squint, leaning as far as the wall would allow. The sound immediately died away, swallowed by the furor of the storm. “Ah, I must be hearing things,” he mumbled unto himself, resting his gloved hand on the top of the stone. Studying the ill-lit murk, he attended to the occasional shriek from the East squall, searching for the mortal, or being, who had emitted such a moan. When there was no glimpse of any living being, he nearly withdrew from the parapet to restore his post, when lo!— —upon a collection of jutting rocks several paces from the beach, he caught sight of a trembling form, swathed in a gown of pearly foam, desperately clutching the sharp sides. The waters rolled around the figure, despite the swirling surf around, gently lapping at the rim of the rocks instead of crashing into them. The form raised its shadow cloaked face in his direction, revealing a pair of glinting, wild eyes. Immediately seized by the unblinking lights, he wobbled forward, his glove unconsciously tightening into a fist. His hand trembled beneath his armor, quivering from a forbidden passion which startled and amazed him at the same moment. He had not realized that he had let go of his lantern, until the sound of the metal smashing into the rocks below caused a

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shiver to run down his spine. The lamp vanished from sight as it plummeted into the sea, extinguishing the fragile fire with a sharp hiss. His cinder suffused heart thrashed inside of his breast, scorching the blistering skin on his chest. Grinding his teeth, he sucked in mouthfuls of chilled air, never once breaking eye contact with the strange being ahead of him. An overwhelming urge fell upon him, beckoning him further atop the wall, until he found himself, dangling precariously over the side, gripping the stone. The flashing lights flickered, and the figure drew itself up, enchantingly swaying with the waves. The breath in his lungs and the pounding of his heart was suddenly stilled, and he waited, bewitched by the presence of this haunting being. Lighting exploded across the sky and— —he plunged downwards, toppling head over heels with a smothered cry. Rushing wind roared in his ears as he heavily fell, dropping several feet from the lower ramparts hanging above the waters. Pain erupted in his shoulders as he struck the rocks at the base of the pinnacle, tumbling dizzyingly into the frothing sea. He was tossed around before being quickly sucked below the surface by the weight of his armor, slipping into the abyssal, salty liquid filling his eyes, nose, and mouth. The knight struggled desperately, kicking and clawing blindly about him, trying to resurface before the ocean consumed him, suffocating as his burning lungs shrieked, and his heart was

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infused with water. He miserably needed air, but there was none to be found in the wet, stifling grave. Several, dreadful seconds ticked by as he sunk, and darkness began to prod at the corners of his bleary vision. His mind began to swim and his muscles stiffened, weakened, arms floating limply at his sides. Water streamed through his lips, burning his throat and flooded the flame in his soul. He was on the brink of losing all consciousness, when an ethereal voice rang soundly around him, wrapping him in the mantle of momentary stillness. Tranquil calm washed over him, rolling across his body into the churning seas, lulling the wrathful waves. He was no longer sinking, but merely floating, held up by the hand of some invisible force. All that he was, was quieted, silently listening to the chant as it drew closer. A rush of bubbles engulfed him, and as the final tendrils of consciousness succumbed to the water, he felt gentle arms grasp him tightly, and tugged, pulling him swiftly through the dark. Hard sand piled underneath the knight as chilly hands dragged his limp body onto the gray beach below Runeloráth, tenderly cradling his motionless chest. Slender fingers ripped the black helmet from his head, and tossed it aside, placing the thumb and index over his parted mouth. The water that had filled his lungs came spilling out, splashing onto the damp sand, causing him to sputter and choke.

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A spasm shook his form, and he eased into the shore, the cursed fire reignited in his breast, throbbing life back into his wearied limbs. The watering eyes of the being beheld him with a look of agony and longing, tracing the lines of his cheek with the tip of a finger. The knight’s dark curls lay tangled in a matted heap on his cheeks, framing a paled complexion, brightened by the fire that coursed through his veins. Flames flickered beneath his closed eyelids, the inscription and curse of the sons of Ember. His features were twisted in look of a quiet anguish, the ache of life returning to his body. He stirred, lids fluttering as he was aroused from his unconsciousness. “Cecílidaín.” The being whispered, pressing her damp lips against his forehead, and laid him down upon the sand. With a final look of yearning, the being slipping back into the ocean, adorned in a frock of ivory foam. The knight remained there long after the sun had been risen, and the lights of dawn had flushed the darken hues from the sky before his upturned eyes, laying in a daze as the tide delicately lapped at his thighs. He was enthralled by the mere shadow of the unearthly being, who had tugged at the folds of his heart and drew him up out of the mouth of the sea, whose face he had hardly seen. He knew not if he would ever see her again.

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“For she, she must certainly be, no male could ever replicate such haunting beauty and grace,” he mused—and a sickened feeling began to creep from the pits of his stomach. A gnawing longing was all the thought he cared to nurse in his mind, craving for just a glimpse of his angel of the sea, “Oh, if I only had a way to which I could find her, then perhaps I could extend my profuse gratitude for her assistance—but, oh ashes— why did she not let me drown? This devouring ache shall swiftly consume me, all the more rapid than the waters of the sea. A mercy it would have been, I think, to be engulfed.” After wallowing in his sorrow for a spell, he gloomily suspected that the rest of the brotherhood would be missing him if he did not go back soon, especially as he failed to return to his post when the Watch Officer would come for the morning debrief. The superior, whose grave countenance and keen eye for anything amiss, kept the Night Watch attentive, would have arrived to the lower ramparts, immediately sensing that something had gone awry. When he came to discover that the knight’s post had been abandoned, swiftly, he would call forth the guard, and begin a thorough search until he was found. Or confirmed dead. As if in a trance, he massaged his stiff muscles and retrieved his flame-ornamented helmet, which had drifted a little way away, and after donning it, he trekked up the steep, sandy slopes. Damp and clammy, he came to the grimy, cobbled road

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that led the citadel gates, oak doors bound in rusted iron. At his appearance, an alarmed cry rang from the guards on the top of the wall. The knight raised his arm into the air, sparks of orange flame seething in his gloved hand, attesting to the mark of the sons of Ember within him. The gate was raised just enough for him to pass through, and a few of his brothers crowded around him, inquiring with a flood of questions on how he ended up on the road, and why was he not at post. They quickly dispersed when the Watch Officer, bearing a plumed crest of gold upon his head, approached, demanding an explanation. “Brother Cecílidaín,” he croaked sternly, standing a whole foot taller than the knight, “your post was left abandoned with no trace of your whereabouts, explain now, why you have come crawling back in such a miserable state?” The knight wearily told his story, or rather, an altered version, excluding the particulars of the being he had seen; it was late, he had been drowsy, and before he realized, he had taken a tumble into the ocean and was tossed about, eventually thrown onto the beach, half drowned. For this, he was scolded for carelessness, but was let off without punishment and a warning to be more cautious in the future. The Watch Officer dismissed him, silently ordering those around to go back to their posts, leaving the knight to stand woefully in his sorrow. Numbly, he visited the chapel, mumbling

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his morning prayers to the Father of Ember in a weak voice. He then returned to his barracks and began a melancholy meal in silence, listlessly nibbling coarse bread with a small bowl of thick pottage. He finished his breakfast, ignoring the probes and teases from his brothers, who had nicknamed him, “Wall-diver,” in good humor. Removing his armor, he wrapped himself in a humble quilt upon a straw mat on the barracks floor, his mind a confused war ground, unable to find rest in his afflicted soul. The day passed slowly, he enveloped in thoughts of the alluring being, and of her voice ringing hauntingly in his ear. He could still faintly hear the sound of his name rolling off of her tongue, as if uttered in a dream, beautiful with each syllable. He was determined to see her again. Dusk soon came, and darkness crept back into the world as the Brothers of the Daystar lowered the sun back into the watery depths, shrouding the citadel shadow. The hours dragged by, and he waited impatiently, until his shift was called for the Night Watch upon the lower ramparts. Swiftly slipping into his armor, he retrieved another lantern from the storeroom, lighting it painfully with his fire. He took his post, with the faint hope that the being would return, tightening his chest. The ceaseless rumble of the storms to the East growled in his ears as he strained them, listening anxiously for the voice of her sorrowful cry. It was, as it were, similar to the night before;

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gloomy, grim, and thickly foggy. His breath rattled in his helm, muffled in the gale, sounding empty as he stood, alone upon the wall. The miserable knight nearly gave up in dismay, crushed by the disappointment and the stabbing pang in his heart. He wondered in earnest how he could go on, forever plagued with the memory of his angel of the sea, bewitched by the shadow of her graceful figure. Gripping at his chest, he lowered himself to his knees, dropping the lantern beside him. “Why am I afflicted so? Should I not simply be relieved that I did not suffer such a death, instead torn apart by my own yearning for the mere shadow of such a being? Why is there such a sickness inside, ugly and pounding, at the thought of never seeing her again?” Through his wretched lamenting, the knight faintly heard a low wail, rising up from the billowing waves, filled with the notes of deep grief. He scrambled to his feet, coming to the edge of the parapet and leaning carefully over the side. Squinting his eyes, he vaguely made out her elegant form, silhouetted through the mist and spray. She swayed slowly, turned in his direction. Silently, he listened to her cry, the unfamiliar utterance soothing his misery with every rise and fall, similar to that of the tide. When dawn arrived, she vanished, diving back below the surface, and gliding out to the East. Clinging to the fading memory of her voice, the knight slept peacefully through the entire day, his

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dreams waterlogged with frothy brine, waking only to take his post and wait for her to come back. Several months passed by, and he began to fall further in love with the being, going about each day in the same repetition. The knight would seclude himself from his brothers, tiding himself with books and sleep until he was called to the Night Watch, where he would listen quietly to the voice of the being, casting glances at the rocks in hopes to catch a glimpse of her shadowy frame—then, restarted to begin again the very next day. Those closest to him became concerned with his wellbeing, inquiring about his absence during sparring practice, chapel service, and suppertime; to which he would dismiss with short answers or a silent shake of his head. They eventually left him alone, considering it a lost cause, whispering amongst themselves about head injuries obtained from his fall. For a while, the knowledge of the being’s presence was enough to console him, but soon her visits became fewer, and the ache returned, and a sense of utter helplessness grew inside of him. One particular morning, he was especially downcast, reflecting on the loneliness he persistently felt, “When she is away, I am alone, and when she is near, I am yet, still alone. Is this what it feels like to love a mere shadow? Empty—so utterly, and wretchedly empty? How long until she vanishes entirely? Oh, I wish to touch her, to feel her skin beneath my withered hands; to see the lips to which such a moanful voice falls from; to hear my name whispered so

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fondly. But I cannot—for she disappears before the strength of the sun fills me, and I do not know where she resides.” A foolish notion laid hold of him, and after he considered and meditated on the idea, the more it made sense, and appeared all the more agreeing to the urge to find his angel. Taking care not to draw attention to himself, he gathered his things; his books, what little coin he had to spare, and a lantern, stuffed inside a brown satchel, and tucked away in a crevice of the outside wall. He gave a desperate prayer to the Father of Ember, before, under the cover of the night, taking his satchel from its hiding place, and slipping out of the supply door. Adorned in his black armor and a thin cloak, he hurried down the cobbled road to the docks only a mile from the citadel. There was an inn there, where he paid the dumbfounded innkeeper for a small room, claiming to be on a secret errand for the Knights of the Daystar, and would be taking off at the first lights of dawn. The knight hardly slept that night, kept wide awake with determination for his success. He left before the sun rose above the horizon, imploring for a ship to take out East. The docksmen eyed him in silent awe, mingled with looks of suspicion. “Does he not know we are not to cross into the East?” They muttered to each other, “tis’ back luck to do so—better not mess with the ways of the sea folk.” “Fabled folk,” he corrected, “is there truly none who will grant me passage? Is there no longer respect for the ways of the

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Brotherhood in these lands? Come, I say! Shall no one lend me a ship?” It took a bit of convincing, but an elderly captain with a white, speckled beard and sloped hat, offered his vessel: a medium sized ship with large sails, trimmed with the curling fire emblem of the Brotherhood upon its furls. “I had been considering putting her up for sale, leastways,” he said, “—I am old, you see, and can no longer sail as well as I used to. As long as the weather holds until you reach the Squalls, you should be fine. I am afraid I cannot offer any of the crew, though, for they are too frightened to accompany you. May the Father guide you safely to your goal, flame-blessed.” With many thanks, the knight set out, fueled by the vigor of finding his angel, managing the wheel, anchor, and line trimming with adamant speed. The steady ship rolled swiftly across the waves, rapidly approaching the dark storms that seethed the near distance. He never faltered, even as the pale sky faded from gray to a deep black, and the rumbling became a loud roar that crashed about him. With difficulty, he steered the vessel straight into the heart of the storm, fighting against the ship’s urge to turn away. Lightning struck the sky like a brilliant whip, calling forth the immediate flood of rain that fell from the heavens. Heavy winds pulled at the large sails, tugging the reluctant ship deeper into

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the tempest. He scurried and tripped upon the deck, correcting the direction, and attempting to hold the wheel as steady as he could. Choked prayers were cried out, smothered by the furor, desperately calling for deliverance to find the one who he had so long yearned for. Surely, she was beyond the thunder and waves, he just had to reach the other side. Large waves tossed the ship up and down, as if it were a plaything of a vexed child, throwing it about in a temper. The planks groaned in protest, threatening to splinter as swells of water bashed into the sides. The bow plunged and rose, sending an icy spray splashing onto the deck, further drenching the knight. He gritted his teeth as he fought the rudder, which snapped back and forth, through the surging sea, thoroughly doused to the bone. Shivering, he allowed himself a single glance out into the horizon, hoping to see clear skies ahead, and was instead met with inky darkness. He lowered his stare to the waves, scanning the broiling froth, and jerked forwards when a heavy creak sounded from below. The ship let out a deep groan, followed by a series of cracks breaking along the lower hull as it splintered, trembling in agonizing fear. Water gushed into the opened wounds, quickly filling the bilge with salty spume. The vessel screamed as a monstrous wave flung the broken frame upwards, crashing it down, ripping into two.

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The knight shouted as he was thrown against the deck, and clung tightly to the rail. Planks wrenched from either side, breaking the once humble ship right down the middle. After letting out a final, shuddering crack, the ship sagged, bow and stern lifting separately before being swallowed, sucked beneath swell; taking the miserable knight with it. He was pounded and thrown about, once again at the mercy of the unforgiving depths, swiftly sinking in a flurry of bubbles. The air was forced out of his lungs, and water flooded his throat, causing him to cough and choke as more liquid entered. Everything burned, and knots were quickly tightening his aching chest. His limbs weakened, stiffening to float helplessly at his sides. His vision darkened, and he quickly succumbed to the sway, lifeless as he plunged further into the abyss, until— —he coughed, eyelids fluttering open. He blinked rapidly as his vision cleared, his senses disoriented as he attempted to figure out where he was. A gasp strangled in his throat, and a cascade of small bubbles flew from his mouth. Immediately he noticed that his chest was stilled, and there was no air to which filled his lungs, but he was alive—or rather, awake. Water surrounded him, and he floated just above a sandy floor, carpeted with rippling seagrass. He glanced up, and saw that all was shrouded in a deep blue, with faint rays of light filtered from above.

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A swish caught his attention, and he beheld a familiar set of shining eyes. These eyes belonged to a being swathed in sparkling foam, wrapped around a slender body of pale and dark green skin. From her torso, long fins and tentacles drifted behind her, the flesh colored similarly to the waving seaweed growing on the floor. Algae clung to the long, jet-black locks, floating gracefully above her head. A shy smile tugged at the corners of her sharp lips as she hesitantly snaked about him. “Oh, my angel—!” He croaked, his voice sounding oddly muffled in his ear. Relief flooded every fiber of his bones, causing a tremble to seize him, “Long have I been yearning for you, and—oh ashes, my chest aches so!—but my journey, oh, was it ever successful. Please, I have so many questions.” She flicked a tentacle, holding a finger to his lips, “Yes, yes, I know you have, and I mourn how you were captivated by my voice, so! It was my own doing, the sons of Land have never been able to resist my peoples song, and with my dreadful mistake, you have succumbed to the sea.” “Though I am alive now, am I not?” “You are not living as you once were; fire and air no longer fills your spirit and lungs, and your heart no longer beats beneath your breast. Your heart now lies beneath the brine, engulfed by salt and sea, forever held by a watery vault. It was all I could do to save you, I fear—I could not bear to see you disgraced by my error! You are now, as it were, a soul of the Living Dead.”

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The knight fell silent, feeling entirely cold throughout his body. The fire of the Father of Ember no longer coursed through his veins, scorching his skin and smoldering every inch of him. Finally, the curse was extinguished, from inside, and he no longer felt the throbbing of a living flame, for it was snuffed out for all eternity. “Oh, my angel,” he said again, “for the first time in my life, the curse which has seen me suffer all my years, has been smothered, and now, I believe, I can now remain happy. I may not be living, but perhaps, I never really was anyways. You, my angel, have delivered me from spending the rest of my age in utter agony. Now, tell me, what is your name?” She trailed a finger along his pauldron, “Isírse.” “Allow me, then, lovely Isírse, to remain by your side for as long as you live.” She took his gloved hands in her own, fondness dancing in the pools of her eyes, “Then we shall stay together, my love of Land, until I, too, succumb to the sea.” For many years they remained together, residing in the darkest depths of the Eastern oceans, in foundations carved from ancient rock foundations, secluded from the folk of the water, and the mortals on land. Their love grew, as affection does in the arms of one you care so much about, and they found comfort in just being beside one another. Years passed, and the soul of the angel of the sea eventually departed, leaving the knight, once again alone.

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His armor soon became waterlogged and empty, covered in sea moss and barnacles. No one knows what became of the Cecílidaín, but it is said that, on particularly stormy nights, when the winds are shrieking and the ocean is churning, if you stare ever carefully into the East, out onto the sea, you can faintly see the ghost of the vessel he sailed, rolling slowly upon the horizon: the Phantom of the Brine.

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“On a Lost Marsh” Maeve Chapman

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Red River Zenia deHaven Content Warnings: Death and Blood

The poets relish in describing the unfathomable beauty of the Nereids in painstaking detail. They write sentence upon sentence, the papyrus bleeding with ink, of how their hair shimmers like a gold sunset over an ocean horizon, of how their voices are crisper than forest streams slipping over smooth rocks. Galatea wanted to ring those poets’ necks. Her ethereal form attracted greed, jealousy, and ire that could fill the depths of Tartarus and then some. The poets conveniently left that part out. She swam through the sea, carving through the Sicilian waters with powerful arms. Though the sculptors tended to chisel her likeness into fragile limbs thinner than seaweed, her body was built for the ocean. Her shoulders were broad, apt for long, clean strokes. Her legs alone could propel a three-masted ship. Despite her sister Thetis’ constant teasing, many mortals worshiped Galatea as the most gorgeous daughter of Nereus.

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As much as Thetis seethed at Galatea’s fame, being considered the most beautiful of the Nereids drew in a myriad of unwanted suitors. Even leagues from the Sicilian coast, Galatea could feel the mortal eyes squinting at the horizon, at the faintly womanly figure swimming through the cresting waves. She kept her distance from cities bustling with mortals. She preferred the coastline, dotted by the occasional vineyard and fisherman’s hut. It was where she met Acis. Her beloved stood beneath the shadow of the cypress tree where they first met. She remembered how his breath had caught as he watched the powerful, immortal woman step out of the sea without a drop of water on her clothes. Later, he confessed to her that he had thought she was Aphrodite herself. Galatea had laughed, folding her fingers around his palm, and said: “Aphrodite’s soft hands wouldn’t survive long in the sea.” Galatea blinked back to the present. Acis stood with his back to the sea, bent to scratch the head of one of his flock. She inhaled, shuddering at the salty air filling her mouth, and moved towards the land when the water beside her churned. The surface bubbled and groaned, like an ancient, watery behemoth yawning awake. The cyclops surfaced, mightily but without grace. Galatea would have been swept away in the ensuing wave had she been any less of a swimmer. The monster shook his thick hair clumped with

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flotsam, spraying water everywhere. He was twice the size of a mortal man, with rippling muscles along his thick arms and a muscular chest donned with battle scars. His single, green eye blinked from its socket centered in his forehead. The white of his eye was red and irritated. Any other nymph with half a mind would have fled, and Galatea was certain that every fish, bird, and other semi-intelligent thing had dispersed at the moment of the cyclops’ surfacing. But his presence wasn’t unusual for Galatea, even if it was mildly unpleasant, and she offered a lukewarm smile. “Are you having a good morning, Polyphemus?” Despite herself, she pitied how his hard features softened as his one-eyed gaze found her. He drifted a bit closer to her, and she shook her head in warning. He stopped. She almost would’ve preferred if he’d charged ahead, ignoring her signals that she wasn’t interested, but the great monster was strangely respectful of her. This interaction would have been less awkward if he were a brute, but instead, he mustered all of his limited social skills into resembling something adjacent to a gentleman. “It’s going far better with you here, Galatea,” he said. He looked away, almost shy. The whole scene would have been endearing if one ignored that cyclopes were known to tear heads from shoulders when they were displeased. Galatea was not concerned for her safety, though. Polyphemus was a monster, this she would not and could not deny,

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but she was in her realm, not his. Any act of injustice wrought upon the daughter of Nereus was an affront to her godly father himself, and even Polyphemus wouldn’t risk the ocean’s wrath. “My answer to your question, great cyclops, is the same,” Galatea said for the umpteenth time. She had lost count of how many times they had this weary conversation. “Please, lady Nereid,” the cyclops pleaded, his words wavering like a wave splintering before crashing against a shore. His cracking voice didn’t suit his monstrous body. Not for the first time, Galatea wondered if his whole behavior was a front to hide the beast beneath. Had anyone else told Galatea that a cyclops repeatedly confessed his love and respected boundaries, she would’ve thought that Pan had driven them mad. Even witnessing it for herself, the whole thing was strange. If Polyphemus truly wanted her for himself, he could have abducted her, Nereus be damned. Gods and monsters incited wars for less. Instead, Polyphemus didn’t seem to want to take Galatea for himself, but rather for Galatea to want him, as bizarre and disturbing as it was. “Polyphemus,” she said slowly, “I do not want to be tied down as someone’s wife. I am a spirit of the ocean, boundless and free. Nothing you can offer me would replace that.” “I can give you whatever you want,” he stammered, as if the door to their relationship was still ajar and not firmly slammed in his face. “I have farms, cheeses, goats, servants—” “No.”

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Polyphemus’ mouth opened and closed, like a fish sputtering on the end of a hook. He searched for the impossible words that might convince her otherwise, but cyclopes were known for brutish strength, not star-dazzling wordplay. He was at a loss. “Please leave,” Galatea said. His bottom lip trembled. “I will go,” he said. “But know that I will always love you, Galatea, daughter of Nereus.” She watched as the dejected cyclops submerged into the waves, the bubbles slowly fizzing out as his massive shadow disappeared into the deep. Galatea shook her head, once again feeling the urge to wrestle every poet that spouted the joys of physical beauty, and wished she could impose a cyclops’ unreciprocated love onto them and see how they felt. She swam ashore. Acis was ignorant of her encounter with Polyphemus. He watched his flock, assuring that they were grazing only upon innocent grasses and not something that would block up their insides and cause terrible deaths. Sheep, Galatea had learned, were hardly more intelligent than the dead-eyed fish that ate rotting corpses of their brethren, not realizing that they were consuming the same parasite that doomed their meal. Sheep were far more adorable, at least.

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Several of them plodded over to her, baying in welcome. She visited Acis and his flock regularly, and the livestock were comfortable with her presence. If anything, they might have been a bit too relaxed. They clamored over each other, demanding her attention with intensified bleats. She laughed, rubbing the space between their ears at their request. Sheep were far softer than any denizens of the ocean. As much as she loved dolphins, their slick, leathery skin was far less enjoyable to pet than the dense, warm fleece of sheep. Acis turned around, a smile cresting his lips at the sight of her. Though they had known each other for nearly two mortal years, he always looked at her as if it were the first time: with unfiltered admiration and awe. Galatea wondered if this was how the gods felt when mortals prayed at their altars: all-powerful and loved and full. He ran towards her, and she dashed to meet him. They collided in a mess of gasping breaths and tangled limbs. He picked her up by the waist, laughing as he spun her in the air. Galatea’s laughter entwined with his, and, for a moment, she forgot about any worry that had ever plagued her mind. Heartbroken cyclopes be damned. This, this twinning of souls in the glory of reunion, was all she wanted to feel for the rest of her immortal life. Finally, their spinning slowed. Acis placed her down, both of them breathing heavy with exhilaration. She took in his tanned face, the offset of his nose that never properly set, the scar on the

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corner of his lip from his bloody tangle with a wolf that threatened his flock. “I have something to tell you,” he said. His face was rosy with color, the crimson spreading to the tips of his ears. “Oh!” Galatia said, taken aback. What could this be about? He had mentioned finding a small farm where he could settle instead of wandering wherever he could find greener pastures. Maybe he had gotten a deal on some goats. He always talked about selling cheese alongside his supply of wool. “Galatea,” he said, his tone now low and serious. A shiver snaked up her back, gooseflesh rising along her arms despite the warm rays bathing her in gold. Gone were the playful curves of his smile; the boyishness of the moment they had shared was dead and buried. “Galatea,” he said again, and she suppressed a shudder as he took her hands in his. “I would like you to marry me.” Marry… him? Galatea stiffened so suddenly that Medusa may have turned her flesh to stone. Marriage? To a mortal? While she loved Acis, his kindness, his gentleness, his relentless optimism in a world that was so obviously unfair, the thought of marriage made her stomach churn. She was immortal, destined to live until the sun imploded or the oceans ran dry, or whatever disaster the gods decided to wreak upon the world first. Acis’s beard was already

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flecked with shimmering gray. Thanatos wouldn’t reap his soul just yet, but Acis’ name was on Death’s list. Had they ever discussed their future together? They had shared daydreams about owning a proper farm, with coups of clucking chickens and horses with glistening, fine coats. But all of those daydreams ended with her returning to the sea, resting beneath the foaming waves. To stay on solid land until Acis’ mortal life withered away, to debase herself as not a spirit of the ocean, but the brood mare of a human man? Her sisters would never cease mocking her. Thetis might manage to end her immortal life dying from laughter. Acis did care for her, but she wasn’t a human woman. She didn’t crave domesticity. A rogue wind sprayed salt water across her cheeks, a taste of home. She would rather live one human lifetime at sea than a thousand stranded on land. She realized that she had not responded, and that Acis’ brow furrowed in concern. “Oh,” she said. It was a pathetic non-answer. She didn’t want her relationship with Acis to end this way, but she sensed from the desperation in his eyes that he would never stop pining for her hand regardless of how many times she said she was uninterested. The whole situation was bitterly familiar.

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“I’m sorry, Acis, I just—” she waved her hands about, as if she could grasp an acceptable answer from the air. “I understand that it may be sudden,” Acis said softly, squeezing her hands. Had his hands always been so clammy? “But I love you, Galatea. I can’t imagine myself without any other woman. Would you make me the happiest mortal and be my wife?” The word grated her skin like coral. My wife. She would no longer be an individual, but someone’s wife. She bit her lip. Was she the fool for letting Acis believe something about their relationship that was untrue? Her sisters, of course, had dabbled in romance, both with mortals and other, more divine individuals. Most of them preferred briefer encounters that occasionally yielded offspring. There were exceptions, like Amphitrite, who married the newer god of the sea, Poseidon, and she was content. But Amphitrite wedded one of the most powerful deities of Olympus, not a common shepherd. She winced at her own line of thought. Deeming Acis as no more than a shepherd was unnecessarily cruel, even if he was misguided. Would you be my wife? “No,” she said, so quietly that the sheep’s constant brays masked her voice. “What?” he asked. He hadn’t understood her; his face was still too alight with joy. And she was about to stamp it out.

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“No, Acis,” she said. Acis’ mouth opened in a surprised “o.” He let go of her hands, dropping them limply at his sides. Her heart twisted. She would rather deter Polyphemus’ advances for the rest of her life than shatter the heart of Acis once. “Is it because of my station?” he asked slowly. “Because I’m making more profit than ever, I swear. I nearly sold out of my stock at the last market.” “Acis, it’s not that—” she started, but he interrupted her with a cutting look. A dark shroud clouded his gaze. “Is there someone else? Some undersea lover you haven’t told me about?” It was Galatea’s turn to be at a loss for words. He was pacing, now, huffing like a caged animal. The jealousy brimming in his eyes aged him by decades. She reminded herself that he was angry and frustrated. He was lashing out, trying to find the source of her hesitancy like a thorn he could pry out and burn. He could not fathom that she simply did not want to be married, because wasn’t that the goal of every fair maiden? “Of course not!” she said. “Then what is it?” he said, his voice cracking. Some of his rage slipped, revealing a broken man who’d poured everything he had into a well only to watch the contents drop away into an abyss. “I just… I don’t want to be married,” she said. Acis was about to answer when a deep voice bellowed:

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“Leave her alone!” Acis’s head whipped toward the sound. Grateful for the distraction, Galatea stepped away, creating distance between her and the man she had wrought unimaginable disappointment. Polyphemus stood along the craggy shore, his shadow casting ghastly proportions along the stones. His chest was bare, dripping with water, his thinning hair sagging against his scalp. The single eye in his forehead was locked onto Acis with the intensity of a shark chasing down its prey. The sheep brayed in terror, scattered, white, fluffy blobs streaming out into the countryside. To his credit, or absolute foolishness, Acis shoved Galatea behind him, as if he were any obstacle to the monster that could rip a ship’s hull in two. “Leave us, monster!” Polyphemus snarled, his teeth flashing yellow. “The lady said no,” he snapped. “Let her go.” “This does not concern you,” Acis said. His voice wavered on the last syllable, but only for a moment before he steeled himself again. “Galatea does not want to be wed!” Polyphemus bellowed, stomping his foot. The stones beneath him crumpled into dust. “Hardly to a petty mortal like you!” “She does not know what she wants!” Acis retorted, that jealous shadow crossing his face once more. Galatea knew that it was the wrong thing to say.

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The cyclops’ eye narrowed into a hateful iris. “I do,” he growled. He moved with more agility than a monster of his size had any right to. With his massive hands, he scooped up a boulder the size of a chariot and hurled it at Acis. The immense rock followed an almost angelic arc, blotting out Helios’ light as it eclipsed the sun and cast the world in darkness. Galatea couldn’t bear to watch where it landed. She hid her face in the curve of her arm, blinding herself to the horror. There was a thud, a sickening, wet squelch, and then nothing. Galatea blinked, and the space where Acis had just stood was gone, replaced by the boulder. Rivers of crimson leaked from its base. Acis’ blood spiderwebbed across the earth with a perverse beauty, like a winding river at sunrise. She collapsed to her knees, her breath ragged as she drew in air. Sobs shuddered through her. What had she done? The shadow of Polyphemus blanketed her, but she was too numb to fear him. Exhaustion weakened her to her bones. She couldn’t manage any emotion aside from utter despair and selfloathing that flooded her. How could she have ever thought that Polyphemus was harmless? “Lady Galatea?” he said from somewhere close to her. He sounded confused. “The man was disturbing you, I thought—”

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“To murder him?” she rounded on the creature, this insolent, entitled thing that deemed itself an executioner. Polyphemus stepped back, his eye wide. “He wouldn’t leave you alone,” he said slowly, as if Galatea was the one gravely misunderstanding the situation. “I thought you wanted him gone.” “I wanted to reason with him, not kill him,” she seethed. “I want you gone.” The mighty cyclops stooped low, shoulders caving with shame. He seemed genuinely regretful, not because he killed a man, but because he had wounded Galatea. “As you wish, Galatea,” he said, shuffling back to the sea. She didn’t bother watching, instead staring at the bleeding rock as a splash confirmed Polyphemus’ departure. The streams of red were thickening, flowing towards the sea. She had never witnessed death this close. It felt wrong for a life that shone so bright to be diminished with something as crude as stone. She recognized the short lifespan of humans, but forgot how fragile their bodies were, too. It was not right for Acis’ life to end like this. He didn’t deserve to pour his heart out to her, receive her stunting rejection, and then be killed by a cyclops with the emotional intelligence of a sea cucumber. She didn’t regret telling Acis no, as it would be unfair to both of them to entrap him in a marriage she wanted no part of.

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She had hoped to let Acis down easily, but Polyphemus had not given her the chance. Sensing that the imminent threat had disappeared, some of Acis’ sheep strayed back to their grazing. They sniffed the air, taking in the coppery stench of blood intermingled with the salt of the sea, trying and failing to find their shepherd. One of the braver animals approached Galatea, baying a question she could never answer. She patted its fluffy head, her body moving on its own accord. If she couldn’t comfort herself, she might as well offer comfort to something else. The red rivers continued to flow, as if the stone itself had a heart pumping out blood. She was not her father, who could reverse the flow of the tides or drown a man by filling up their lungs with water. Galatea’s talents were meek by comparison, but she needed to do what she could to alleviate the guilt drowning her whole. Standing, much to the sheep’s chagrin, she pressed her palms into the boulder. She reached out into the world of spirits and half-remembered things, searching for the golden light of Acis. His spirit was not hard to find since it was so recently cleaved from its body. It hummed at her presence, confused as it hovered on the border between the living and Hades. She tugged it back, pulling it away from the river Styx. He was a wayward ship at sea, teetering uncertainly, and she anchored him back to the world of life.

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She could not restore the dead. That power lay beyond the might of even the fiercest gods. She could, however, offer a new life for Acis. His soul was firmly in her grasp. She partially expected it to squirm and try to flee towards Hades, but it rested in her palm, warm and contemplative. She exhaled and channeled Acis into a new being. The rock stopped bleeding. For a moment, Galatea fretted that she had accidentally committed a horrible mistake. She had never tried to use her powers this way. Had she accidentally infused his soul with the rock, and he was trapped in it for all eternity? Did she somehow annihilate his very soul? The stone shuddered, then split in two in a thundering crack. From the crevice, a river of glistening, clear water burst forth. Galatea stepped back, stunned at the water rushing past her in a gushing flow. It wound through the countryside, snaking towards the ocean, carving a new estuary into the earth. Already, it was brimming with life, with fish darting around under the surface, crabs scuttling along the sandy ground, and water striders skating the surface. The stone continued spouting water, the river stretching until it was several meters deep and even further in length.

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Some of the sheep shuffled closer, bowing their heads to the water and drinking. Galatea wondered if they could somehow sense that their shepherd’s soul was infused with the newborn river. Galatea trailed her hand in the water, letting the current flow between her fingers, and wondered if she felt an unseen hand grasp back, or if it was her imagination.

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Queen Jurata and the Amber Palace Robin Zubek Content Warnings: Death and Suicide

Jurata was the first god to die. She did not die in battle, and she could not die naturally. Jurata died as peacefully as a god has ever died. Jurata loved the Baltic with her whole heart. From her golden palace under the surface, she ruled over all of its inhabitants, from the nymphs and the mermaids to the smallest clams. She cared for it with a watchful eye, and though she let the fishermen take what they needed, she never let them take too much. When they went to sea in the early morning, she would keep the waters calm, and watch over them as though they were a part of her kingdom. She liked to listen to their songs. They knew that she was there, and would call out to her for luck, though they could not see her.

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One day, when such a fisherman cast his net, his foot was tangled within it. Trying to free himself, he fell overboard, and could not swim to the surface. Jurata heard his call, and was already nearby. She freed his limbs from the net and gave him air to breathe. She brought him to the shore, where she laid him on the sand to rest. “Who are you?” He asked her. “I am Jurata,” she said. “Who are you?” Frightened, the fisherman scrambled to his feet and bowed to her. “I am Toś, your Majesty.” “Toś,” Jurata tasted the name on her tongue. “What a beautiful name.” From that day on, Jurata found herself looking out for Toś whenever she watched over any boat. He was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. But he was never there. Until, far away, Jurata heard a song she had not heard before. It was unlike anything the mermaids sang and more beautiful than any fisherman’s song. It had her name in it. Queen Jurata of the Baltic sea Kind and brave and beautiful she Mortal Toś of the peninsula Naive, foolish in waiting for her Yet he waits for her every night Hoping to see her one more time

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“What a beautiful song you wrote for me,” she said. He looked unsure of what to say, unsure of whether she was even real. That uncertainty, the shifting thoughts behind his eyes, it made him all the more beautiful. She reached out to the edge of the boat and put her hand on his. The thoughts behind his eyes solidified for a second, and he took her hand and pulled her up into the boat. Her hair dripped saltwater onto the deck and she wrung it out into the sea. He reached out, the uncertainty returning into his shaking hand, and touched her face. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for until he did that. Leaning forward slowly, as if not to scare him away, she pressed her lips to his. He tasted like earth and air. He closed his eyes and let his hands travel from her face into her damp hair. After that, they met every day. They spent whole nights on his boat, talking. She would take him down to her golden palace and they would lie together in her chamber. She loved him more than she ever thought possible, though it hurt her heart that he was mortal. Soon the other fishermen sang his song too, like a good luck charm. Though none sang as beautifully as her Toś did, she would reward them handsomely for singing it. The song reached the ears of the king of the gods, King Perkun. He had heard of Jurata before, and decided that he must

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see who inspired such a beautiful song. He travelled to her golden palace and was received warmly. Before the evening was over, Perkun had fallen in love with Jurata’s beauty and kind soul. He asked her to marry him and move from the sea to his palace on the land. She smiled graciously as she denied him, explaining that she was already in love, and that she couldn’t dream of leaving the sea. “Which god has stolen your heart?” Asked Perkun. “He must be very beautiful for you to choose him over myself, when I could give you power over every mortal and every god.” “He is not a god,” she told him. “He is a fisherman. And it is his heart which captivated me, though his beauty is beyond any god I have seen.” “A mortal?” thundered Perkun. “You dare choose a mortal over me? You insolent woman!” Perkun stormed off, creating a hurricane like no one had ever seen. The lightning was so powerful that it split the sea to the very bottom. Each crack of thunder reverberated through the entire Baltic and could be heard in all surrounding lands. When the storm started, Toś was fishing, and Jurata barely managed to get him to her palace between the rods of lightning. They lay down in her bed and held each other. “The storm will stop soon,” said Toś. “Yes,” lied Jurata, “we are safe here.”

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Her voice trembled, and Toś must have known that she was lying. But if he had any doubts, he did not voice them, only held her tighter. Far away, Perkun howled in rage and sent lightning crashing down onto her golden palace. It came tumbling down, crushing them under its weight. Jurata was the first god to die, but she did not die then. She held her lover in her arms as he drew his final breath. Then, with a sharp piece of stone which she drew from the rubble, she pierced her own heart, staining its golden edge red. The storm raged on for three days. When, after the storm was over, the fishermen returned to the shore, they found small golden stones littering the sand. They began to gather them for all sorts of decorations, and named them “bursztyn.” Amber. Jurata came to be known by another name, “Bursztynka,” for this gift that she had given them.

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The Sea Bride Jules Leclercq Content Warnings: Themes of Death, Violence, Drowning, Ritualistic Sacrifice, Blood, Suicidal Ideation, and Gender Dysphoria

They said the sea had to be married, or else it would turn bitter. Long ago, a storm swallowed twelve boats, and the next day a widow rowed into the ink-dark water with nothing but a knife. The sea took her whole, and the waters turned gentle, the nets ran silver, no soul was lost. Since then, once every twelve years, a bride is chosen. She walks to the tide, marks her cheek with blood, and drifts out in a small boat while the Elders chant. The sea demands its offering, and the village obeys. The bounty of the next twelve years depended on it, and our village's life clung to the sea like barnacles to stone. This was the year the bells rang again, and our hearts beat with a fear older than us.

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The Grand Elder pointed at Elin, and all light went out of the world. I watched her shoulders tremble beneath the white shift, the garland heavy with dew and brine. In front of the gathered crowd, she held the knife, fingers white against the dark handle. When she pressed it against her palm, blood welled between her fingers. She lifted the hand to her cheek, leaving a red smear on pale skin. Murmurs ran through the crowd; the ritual had been performed correctly. A cabin with a chair, a table, and a modest meal awaited her. She would have until sundown to prepare, and after that, there was no daylight for her. Later, behind those closed doors, our exchange would take place. The swap that would save her and be the death of me.

𓆟 In the small cabin, lit only by a single candle, Elin and I faced each other like reflections in water at night. We were often mistaken for siblings, sometimes twins, though we shared no blood. Both of us were the same height with the same brown eyes; lean and angular, shaped by the same hungers and brine-thick air, our hair long, bleached by the sea and sun, and our faces kissed by it. But I could see the differences only we knew. Her cheekbones were softer, her jaw more delicate. My shoulders were broader, my hands larger. Her movements carried a grace I'd never learned,

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while mine held the careful watchfulness of someone who had always known they didn't quite fit. “Turn around,” Elin said softly. I pulled my shirt over my head, the rough fabric scraping against my skin. I untied the cord at my waist and let my trousers fall to the floor. For a moment, I stood there in nothing but a knife in my hands, vulnerable, but safe with my Elin. “Senan knows,” Elin whispered as she lifted the shift. “I told him about the swap.” Fear and shame clutched at my chest. “You told him?” “He will be the ferryman, Finn. But he won't say anything. This is his first year. He said that he understands why you want to save me, to swap places with me. He will be the one who…” She couldn't finish. The shift hung between us like a ghost, then I thought, scarier than death were the minutes before. Would the people realize it was me? Stone me before even reaching the boat? Would Senan see right through the veil to the boy underneath? “What if they laugh at me?” The question slipped out. Elin's hands stilled, and when she looked at me, her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “They won't laugh, Finn. You look beautiful. They'll see a bride walking to the sea.” Her hands trembled as she tugged the shift over my shoulders. The fabric, still damp from the tide, slid down my body like a second skin. In the small mirror, I caught my reflection and

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felt my breath catch. I looked like a bride; in the mirror, I did not see myself but Elin, or else the bride the sea was waiting for, not myself, but someone who belonged in the white shift. She settled the garland over my hair, sea-grass and wildflowers, each strand brushing my neck like the ocean’s fingers claiming me. Last came the veil, pinned with unsteady care until my face was sealed in white. “Now the blood,” she said. The knife lay still in my hand. I pressed the wound to my cheek. The blood held fast, thick, and warm. The bells began to toll. The sound rolled across the village like thunder; each note heavy with the weight of centuries. The ritual was beginning, and the sea was calling. “Remember,” Elin whispered, her hands lingering on my shoulders one last time. “You're not Finnean anymore. You're the bride. You're what they expect to see. And you're brave enough to carry this. I’ll forever be grateful, and—Finn, I—I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you—” I whispered the words back to her, again and again, as if we were casting a spell that could carry us out of the cabin, away from the shore, away from the fate ahead. Outside, the villagers gathered, their voices mixing with the crash of waves, hiding the sound of our own voices and tears. The ocean breathed against the rocks, and I took my first step toward the door. Toward the shore. Toward whatever awaited me in the dark.

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The path to the shore was lit by fire and smoke. Torches hissed in the wind, throwing wild shadows across the rocks. Each step was a fight, my knees threatening to buckle. The veil stuck to my lips when I breathed, tasting salt and smoke. Behind me, the villagers followed, their eyes burning through the thin fabric. Above us, the wealthy families leaned from the cliffs like vultures, and foam licked at the rocks with urgency. And then I saw him, the young ferryman. Senan, tall and broad-shouldered, stood at the water's edge beside a small dark boat, his cloak thrown back despite the cold spray. His hair was damp and clinging to his temples. Even in the uncertain torchlight, I could see the steady line of his mouth and the calm of his eyes. He would kill me. Gently, perhaps, but kill me all the same. The knowing weakened my legs. I stumbled once, then again, and the crowd whispered like a tide behind me. Brides always broke near the end. I was no different. Terror hollowed me out, yet still I moved, one shaking step after another, my eyes fixed on Senan. His bearing was changed, not as I remembered. Then Elin’s words returned: I was the first bride he had ever ferried. Perhaps that was why he had agreed; a small mercy that it was not Elin, nor any other girl, bound for the sea. And unlike the brides before, I had walked to my own execution by choice. The Elders lifted their hands, and the chanting fell away. Only the waves kept moving, and my own pulse, hollow and loud as thunder in the hush. Through the veil, Senan’s eyes found mine.

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I held my breath, waiting for his hand to reach for the rope that would bind me. I had seen Senan before. Our village was small enough that everyone knew everyone by sight, and he was impossible to miss: tall, dark hair sun-caught at the edges, arms strong from hauling nets. He moved with confidence, like someone who belonged everywhere. Elin sometimes worked alongside him repairing the larger nets, and she told me stories of his steady hands, his competence, the way he treated her with respect rare among the fishermen. When they passed each other, he would smile at her, something genuine, warmer than the polite grimace he gave others. There was mutual admiration there, born from shared labor and a shared love of the sea. In the torchlight, his eyes weren't cold nor filled with the casual cruelty I'd grown used to from other boys. Instead, there was something I had never seen directed at me before: gentleness. It was the first time another man had looked at me without scorn or anger, without that gaze that cut deeper than hatred, the first time I'd seen kindness in eyes that belonged to someone like me. “Easy,” he said softly, his voice barely audible over the crash of waves. His hand reached for mine, not for the rope yet, but for me. His fingers were calloused from years of working the nets, rough and warm and sure. When he touched my hand, I felt

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something I'd never felt before: the careful restraint of someone who could hurt me but chose not to. The veil fluttered between us in the sea-wind, and through the thin fabric I watched him study my face. I waited for recognition to dawn, for kindness to curdle into disgust. But he only looked at me, and I looked back. For a breath, there was nothing but his face: a small scar rested above his left eyebrow, while his dark lashes cast shadows on his cheekbones. His other hand cupped my elbow when I swayed, steadying me with the same ease he'd use to guide a sail. The crowd pressed closer behind us, but they felt distant now, unreal. There was only Senan's hands, his eyes holding mine, the sound of his breathing mixing with the rhythm of the waves. Even if he was only being kind to the bride, he pretended I was, even if this tenderness was an act that would evaporate the moment we got into the boat, it was more than anyone had ever given me. Certainly, more than I'd ever dared to hope for. “Ready?” he asked, like I had a choice in what happened next. I nodded. The rope was in his other hand now, but even as he lifted it, his touch remained soft. Whatever may happen, I realized I trusted him to drop me gently to my death. The Grand Elder stepped forward, his gray cloak billowing like the wings of a carrion bird. His voice cut through the crash of waves, ancient and merciless:

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“She walks into the dark water. She gives her breath so we may breathe. Her blood calls to the deep, and the deep will answer with Abundance.” Senan's hand on my elbow kept me from collapsing into the foam. The crowd pressed closer, and above us on the cliffs, the wealthy families leaned forward on their stone parapets like vultures waiting for the final twitch. We used to whisper among ourselves: never the rich. Always the small ones, the orphaned ones, the ones whose lives were already measured by the sea. Oh, the people on the cliffs; they would wake to warm bread while my body fed the fish. I curse them to burn. May fire consume them all. “The sea has waited twelve years,” the Grand Elder called above the waves. “Let the bride be blessed, let the ferryman seal the covenant.” A kiss. I'd known it was coming. The crowd began to chant, their voices weaving together like a funeral shroud: “Oh, the sea remembers. Oh, remember what the heart forgets.” Senan stepped so close I felt the heat of him through the brine-thick air. His hand lifted, brushing the edge of my veil. I ached to lean into that touch, to press my face into his palm and beg him to stop, to change everything, to spare me from dying in someone else’s garment. But I was frozen, shaking like a tree in the

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tempest, caught in the dark softness of eyes that were not meant for me. “Look at me,” he said, his voice rougher now. “Just look at me.” If this was the last gaze before the sea closed over me, I wanted to remember it: eyes black as tidewater, the thundering of my own ribs, the taste of salt and terror on my lips, and something close to longing. “The kiss of claiming,” the Elder cried, his voice rolling with the waves. “Let her be bride, let her be sanctified. The ferryman shall kiss her, and all the tides shall witness.” Senan’s hand slipped beneath the veil, fingers finding my jaw. His thumb grazed the dried blood on my cheek. Around us, the crowd waited in silence, torchlight burning their hunger into my skin, stripping away every lie I had left. Any breath now, someone would point, laugh, expose me before the deep claimed me. But Senan leaned closer, close enough that I could taste his breath that carried the bitter curl of burning leaf, pipe smoke, and the sea breeze between us. “I’m sorry,” he whispered against my lips, words sinking between us, and then his mouth touched mine. My first kiss without violence, nothing like I’d imagined in the hours I let myself dream of such a thing. I wanted to memorize every second, the tender press of his lips and the way his hand cupped my face. I

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wanted to hold it in my mind, to carry it underwater, so that when I lost consciousness, I could return to this moment. When he pulled back, his eyes held mine through the veil. His thumb brushed across my lips, brief, quick, and fragile as a blink, and I found the salt of tears I had not known were falling. The Elders whispered approval, their voices rising in renewed chanting: “Oh, blessed be the bride, blessed be the sea, blessed be the vow they carry.” “The kiss is given. Now let the binding begin, for the sea grows restless, and the tide will not wait.” The Grand Elder spoke, and before I knew what was happening, Senan had me in his arms. He lifted me as though I were nothing but air, one arm under my knees, the other across my back. I pressed against him, the warmth of him sudden, my face buried against his shoulder. The shift fell around me in folds, soft and certain, and through the veil I saw the crowd part before us, a pathway opening toward the yawning mouth of the dark water. Crushed flowers and seagrass were thrown by weathered hands, landing soft against the fabric, against Senan's shoulders, against the stones beneath his feet. Then, a familiar face, Old Marta from the bakery, her face streaked with tears, pressed something into the folds of my shift, a small piece of honeyed bread, still warm. “For the journey,” she whispered, her voice breaking on the words. “Safe passage, little one. I swear to tend to your

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brother.” Others came too, pressing tokens into my lap, iron, silver, rosemary, both blessing and bribe. These were the people who’d watched Elin and I grow from barefoot children into two fragile figures, and now they looked at me with the sorrow reserved for those already lost, claimed by death. They cared about Elin, I thought, just not enough to save her. Tears came hot and shameful behind the veil. I buried my face deeper into Senan’s shoulder to muffle my sobs. We reached the edge where the small boat waited, the border between land and sea, between life and what waited beyond. Senan stepped into the boat, the wood creaking under our combined weight, and settled me carefully against the narrow seat. The ocean stretched before us, black and endless, and I felt it calling like something alive and hungry. He took up the oars, and with each stroke we moved further from the torches, further from the crowd, further from anything that resembled the world I'd known. Tears came soundless, rocking my shoulders while Senan rowed us toward the darkness beyond the edge of the light. The sea whispered beneath the hull, patient as death. I thought then, perhaps this was what it was to be carried to your own funeral. The torches shrank to dying stars. I knew they were still there, still watching from the cliffs, waiting for their sacrifice to be swallowed. Around us, the water began to shift, waves rising where calm had been; the sea grew darker, more violent.

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My whole body trembled. I wanted to beg Senan to make it quick, to swear that drowning wouldn’t hurt, but my tongue was heavy, my throat locked. All I could do was sit in my borrowed clothes and wait to die like every girl before me. Then he paused. From beneath the seat, he drew an oil lamp and struck a flame. Light flared between us, gilding his face and painting the ink-dark water in quivering gold. He lifted his hands, slipped the veil from my head, and set it aside. And in that moment, our eyes met. “Keep looking at me, Finnean, keep looking up,” he said, and then he pushed me over. The cold swallowed me whole. My vision graying as the rope dragged me deeper. I forced myself to look up like Senan had told me. Far above, impossibly far, I could see flames spreading across the surface, burning like a funeral pyre against the dark water. Orange light danced above me, flickering and wild. The fire above grew small and dim. My arms wouldn’t answer me, heavy, pulled down, not mine anymore. Salt filled my mouth before I could close it, scorched my throat, clawed down into my chest. Salt water shoved into my mouth, down my throat, burning like hot iron. I thought of Senan's gentle eyes, of Elin's love, of dying poor and expendable in a village that fed its children to the sea, and all the girls who’d gone under this same dark before me. My chest convulsed, heaving for air that wasn’t there, every breath a knife. I

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swallowed more of it, choking, and the warm iron turned to burning ice. My ribs trembled, sharp pain under each bone, and something burst behind my eyes, and then I went heavy, sinking. The sea filled me, pressed into every hollow, curling inside me until I thought my head would burst. This was death, then—this quiet dissolving of my body. My chest had stopped burning, my heart slowed, and each beat further apart. I thought I had become one of them, another girl consumed, another name the sea would never return. I held to consolation and pictured Elin safe and far away, but the waters were unforgiving, and my mind slipped away immediately. Light thinned to red, then gray, then nothing. Death was long and brutal. Darkness folded me in, thick and endless, as time bled out of me. And then—warmth against my mouth. Breath being forced into a body that had already given up, and my mouth remembered these lips. I tried to gasp, tried to speak, but salt water poured from my mouth instead, bitter with brine and blood. Strong hands rolled me onto my side, helping the ocean drain from my body. My chest burned like fire again, my throat felt raw as an open wound, and every breath was relentless agony. And yet, at last, I breathed, wrapped in voices I knew. I heard Elin sobbing somewhere above me, saying my name over and over like she couldn't believe I was real. “Breathe, Finn, just breathe,” Elin whispered, and I could hear tears in her

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voice. “You're okay. You're okay.” My eyes opened to the sky, pale with dawn, not the black water that had swallowed me. I was lying in a different boat entirely, nothing like the small ritual vessel. This one had a mast, proper oars, and a sail that caught the morning breeze. A boat meant for living, not dying, I thought. Elin’s face appeared above me, streaked with tears and seawater, her hair now shorter than mine, ends ragged where she had cut them. Behind her, Senan knelt with his chest bare, his body trembling from whatever it was he had done to bring me back. “I died,” I whispered, my voice nothing but a scrape. “I felt myself die.” “You did.” Elin wiped her face, trying to steady herself. “Your lips were blue. You weren't breathing.” She stopped, jaw tight, like she was forcing herself to hold it together. Senan's hand found her shoulder, steady and warm despite the tremor in his fingers. “I cut the ropes fast,” he said quietly. “Got you free, started swimming to where Elin was waiting with this boat. But you'd been under too long.” I looked between them. Elin stood beside me, leaning close, breath uneven. Senan’s chest rose and fell hard and quick, muscle and bone moving together. “How long?” Neither of them answered right away.

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“Oh, and the fire,” I said, because I remembered that much, the last thing I'd seen before the water took me under. “From the water, I looked up, and I saw flames—” “A distraction,” Elin explained, her voice soft but steady. “The villagers saw it, the boat catching fire. They were busy watching the flames; they didn't see Senan dive in after you. By the time the fire went out, you were already gone. The villagers saw only smoke and flame, never the dive beneath the surface. They might think Senan died, that I drowned, that you ran away… That was the plan from the beginning. We couldn’t tell you because—” “I had to believe I was about to die,” I said, and the words came out like release. “Yes.” Elin's voice went small. “The walking, the trembling legs, can't be faked. There hasn't been a bride who walked without fear. I would have walked myself.” She looked down at her hands. “I'd have told you how to steal the boat, taught you the way through, and I'd be standing where you are right now. There would still be three of us here, but the fear, the fear had to be real.” Her eyes lifted to mine, bright with tears. “We've never lied to each other, Finn. Not once.” I found myself smiling, faint but real, and I brushed her wrist with my fingers. A small, bittersweet smile appeared on her lips. Then I looked down, the shift clung to my skin, sea-stiff and torn, my hair matted with crushed flowers and dying seagrass. “I died in these,” I whispered.

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Elin touched a crushed petal caught in the fabric. “Beautiful,” she said, and heat rose in my face. Senan's voice came low and steady: “Beautiful.” I looked upon him. No mockery dwelt in his dark eyes, nor disgust, only tenderness. The boat rocked gently beneath us, carried on a calmer breath of sea. Elin’s hand lay on mine, soft and sure, caressing me as she had when we were children. Senan was quiet for a long moment, his gaze moving between me and Elin. He stood tall above us, even when kneeling, though the weight of the night pressed on him. His thighs were still slightly trembling, glistening where the water clung to him. Most of his ferryman’s garments and shoes were lost to the tide, though the knife that had cut my ropes still rested at his waist, bound fast by a strap of rough leather. He wore nothing else but the weight of the tide and a scrap of dark cloth bound at his hips, a fragment torn from what remained of his cloak. The lean line of him bare and unguarded, every breath slow and uncertain, vulnerable, yet here with us. When Senan spoke again, his voice was low and breathy, barely above the slap of the waves. “Never have I known such happiness, never such ease of heart, as now, seeing you both safe,” he said. “But I keep thinking… I should tell you to close your eyes, then wait for sleep to claim you, and vanish before you wake.” His hand moved to touch his throat, fingers shaky against

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his skin. “Take my knife and cut right here. I trusted you, Elin, to get you both back to land. For I needed to let my blood pay what we owe.” Tears started cutting tracks down his face. “Because we cheated it, did we not? Stole you back from the sea. And someone must pay.” His voice gave out entirely, tears still cutting down his sun-kissed skin. “I was ready to do it. Ready to give my life. My life for both of yours. For that felt… Fair. Fair, it felt. My blood to balance the scale, to pay for your lives.” Elin tried to reach for him, but he kept talking, the words pouring out. “All those years, all those girls our village gave to the waves. I thought we had broken something holy, sacred. Thought the sea would turn bitter, would take its anger out upon all we left behind. So, you see… I would hold the blade here.” He touched his throat again, this time with the knife, “—and cut deep, hard, and quick. Let my blood pour into the sea as an offering.” His whole body trembled, the words spilling out fractured and raw. Elin watched the knife with frightened eyes, and when Senan looked up, his gaze locked onto mine. “Do you know how far I bore your body through the water? No soul should have lived through it. The water was as cold as the grave. You were dead weight. And—I had nothing left. My arms gave out. Again, and again. And I thought—I thought we would sink together. I could not feel my legs, could not breathe. I

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knew you were gone, and I thought I'd killed us both trying to save you. Finn, Finnean, I thought you were—I thought you were—” A wave broke over us, white foam curling and spilling against our skin. Clouds scudded above, catching the light, the sun warm upon our bodies, keeping us alive. “But the currents… They turned. Turned, as if unseen arms had taken us. Carried us when I could carry no more. Held us up when we should have drowned together.” Senan wiped his face with the back of his hand, his voice raw and broken. “And I don't know what that means. Perhaps we have it all wrong, and the sea never cared for those girls. Maybe the first bride cast herself into the deep because sorrow was too heavy to bear. Maybe that is all it ever was.” His voice grew softer, hollow. “Maybe we've done something unforgivable for no blessing at all, for years and years, only for fear that we might be wrong.” He looked up at us, his eyes red and empty. “But I know, I know the currents bore us when they should have let us sink, and that must mean something. For if it means nothing… If it was only chance, only blind water…” His voice cracked. “Then I cannot bear what we’ve done. What I have done, what we have all carried.” He wiped his face, breath trembling. “So maybe the currents wished to save us. Tell me it is so that we survive, that I have saved you, that the sea wanted us alive. Together.”

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The boat drifted with the waves, and in the hush that followed, Elin held me close, her hand warm on mine. Then she reached for Senan, holding us both, hands gripping tight and tears falling until our faces went numb. Senan looked to me, his eyes bright and breaking, and whispered, barely more than breath: “May I hold your hand?” Without a word, I reached for him. His fingers found mine, salt-rough, shivering, warm at last. We sat there, the three of us, carried once again by waves that had chosen to be gentle. And we chose to believe they were.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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“The Sea Bride” Jules Leclercq

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Eternity is Terribly Dull Without Company sumedha

“The sky looks delicious when it burns,” I said once, and I still mean it. The crackle of their own cleverness is frying them alive. What a feast for the eyes. Fire in the skies, water climbing where it shouldn’t, screens still blinking though no one’s left to squint at them. It is obscene, and it is beautiful. “You always say that,” says the other voice. I almost forgot she was here. Almost. She surfaces like an echo from another cavern. “You said the same thing when the mammoths went under.” “And I was right,” I murmur. “Wooly giants felled by spears and hunger. This… Um,” I wave at the ash hanging in the sky, “this is more… Deliberate.” We’ve wandered the world too long, she and I. We used to write letters, back when parchment and couriers made such things charming. I once wrote from Rome as it burned: The city is a bonfire, and the fiddler is smiling too wide. She replied centuries later from Constantinople: The walls will hold, but not forever. They never do.

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The first crawlers from the sea, I remember watching them with her. They dragged themselves out, blinking, coughing up salt. Later we argued over the dinosaurs. “You adored them,” she teases. “I respected them,” I correct. “Though you must admit, no empire of man has ever matched the thunder of their footsteps.” “Nor their feathers.” She laughs softly. “Your precious humans drew them naked as lizards. They never imagined them as jeweled kings.” We keep a running tally of civilizations like gamblers noting debts. “The Cholas?” I ask. “Magnificent bronzes,” she sighs. “But they thought permanence could be cast.” “The Mings?” “Silk walls, crumbling like paper in the rain.” “Rome?” She smirks. “Which one?” Even their Holy Roman Empire (neither holy, nor Roman, nor much of an imperial empire either) amused us. She sent me a letter then, centuries gone: They are drunk on titles. Let them sleep it off. And now, here at the end, she leans closer. “You mourn them.”

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“I do not.” “You do. A little. You carry their laughter like seashells in your pockets. You hum their hymns when you think I don’t hear.” I stay silent. The wind does the talking for me. Humans thought themselves eternal. They bottled stars, dug holes through their own planet’s ribs, stitched their world with wires so taut it snapped in an instant. The collapse came slowly, then suddenly, like a bridge groaning for centuries before tumbling in one sharp gasp. Famines stoked, wars courted, air turned poisonous by their own engines. A clever current, undone by its own cleverness. “They always write their obituaries in advance,” she whispers. “Every myth, every prophecy. They knew this ending was possible.” “And yet they rushed toward it,” I reply. The silence after is heavy, almost tender. She looks at me, as if remembering some half-finished letter. “Shall we go on, then?” she asks. “Where else is there to go?” The water flows on. Always has. Always will. Whether it carves new canyons or carries their bones out to sea, we remain, humming to ourselves. Eternity is terribly dull without company.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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A Song of Silence for the Mother of Grendel G.J. Brillante Content Warnings: Murder, Violence and Implied Assault

The giantess could hear the tranquil song of the lake echoing throughout the underwater cave, her home, as she watched the reflection of the blue water dance across the walls. By listening with more than her ears, she devoted her entire soul to the unspoken words—the song of silence. (Hush, hush, shh) I’ll give you a home (Hush, hush, shh) by the whispering foam (Hush, hush, shh) of the lake throne (Hush, hush, shh) from our dreams sown. Her long and sharp nails, like a bird’s talons, sank into her skin as she lay as still as a corpse on her sheepskin bed. Her chest rose and trembled while she drank in the cold and stale air, allowing it to temporarily occupy herself, only for it to burst from her gaping mouth—the pressure too great to be contained.

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(Hush, hush, shh) My sole child be (Hush, hush, shh) carried by dreams and free (Hush, hush, shh) while you rest. (Hush, hush, shh) My sweet child, goodbye. As the song kept playing in her mind she tried to give herself to the voiceless echo of the dancing water, for here she was alone. Nothing could disturb her, save for her mind, because her home was deep in the bowels of a lake where no man would dare go without great need. And what man would have a need so great as to brave the depths of a lake festering with the hatred of surly sea-dragons and serpents whom man had driven from the surface following the banishment of the giants? There was no need for any man to risk his fragile life in combat with the sea-dragons and serpents except to brew more misery by adding to the echoing songs of woe. Still, the giantess could not sleep. The song did not comfort her today. “Oh sword, fall not in my hands but on my heart.” She glanced up at the pointed blade as large and thick as an elephant’s tusk that hung above her head. The hilt of the sword had shining sun kissed gemstones. It was her prized possession, her sole heirloom passed down to her by her kin when the giants, her forefathers, had roamed the surface land of the West-Danes. The sword had been her sunlight ever since she was forced to flee into the dark of the marsh where she was hunted by a man banished

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from the halls and hearths of men. The thief had robbed her and left her with an unasked for token of men’s wicked cruelty. She had then turned to the lake, resolved on death, but the song of silence saved her and her son’s life. The recollection of her past was a sword in her mind, hewing the boundary between good and evil, mother and monstrous. However, no memory of hardship could compare to the feelings she was now experiencing. Loneliness weighed upon her as her scars awoke and refused to rest. Her raw flesh was coated in thick clumps of her own blood from her nails sinking into her arms; yet, no matter how tight she held herself to feel an embrace, she felt nothing. There was only the cold sting of her tears kissing her cheeks farewell and a fiery pain burning in her heart. The pain was worse than she had ever endured, and she had suffered wounds before. She was marked with the honor marks of battle, white scars surrounded by crusts of mineral bathed dirt, that bloodthirsty warriors had etched onto her skin along with the damning title she was given by the men who feared her strength: Monster. Yet, she did not feel that she was a monster despite what the Shieldings or Geats claimed. Although she was the daughter of giants, she was not numb to the suffering of humans. She had never killed before this day. She had always aspired to save life, healing the sea-dragons and serpents of their physical hurts with her poultices produced

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from her frail underwater garden. She was a mother, and had given life. She was a mother, and she had watched the life she had birthed die. She was a mother, and with her own hands she had torn the life out of another mother’s son but could not keep the life she had stolen, nor could she restore it to the frail body of the poor Dane. She had not even tried to kill the man. She had let her pain and anger guide her to the grand hall of Heorot, and, in a wild wrath, she had burst into the celebrated house of heroes to demand her son’s killer; however, as swift as her anger had come, it had vanished. It was the flighty sensation of panic that made her seize the closest Shielding and flee from the society of man before they could stab her through the heart. When she had seized the man, she had no intention of killing him. She had no need for a wergild and had only intended to question him to learn the name of her son’s murderer. However, the man’s unguarded flesh was too fragile to withstand the grip of her talon-like nails that pierced his body, and, in an attempt to hush his cries, cut off his head. “Oh sword, woe-begotten of fell power, my hands are marked with blood while you remain clean. I should have cursed you rather than filled my son’s head with the fantasies of your long dead masters. Yet, for all that you stand for, you still hang on the wall of my home.

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“You have outlived my son and shine purer than the unclean marks which stained him. And you still dare to gleam as if to say, ‘Take me up and let me seize glory and honor!’ by your desire to fall into my unclean hands and hew mortal life. Yet, foolish sword, you should know that glory is hollow and honor is empty for a giantess banished from man’s society. What honor is there to be had when your title is ‘Monster?’” She rose from her bed and drew away from the sword. Her vision was overtaken by her tears as her legs gave way and she collapsed before a figure stretched across the floor. Her hands tried to grasp the figure’s hand, but she clasped only empty air. There was no hand to hold, not even an arm for that matter. I could have saved you. If only I knew… “Grendel!” she screamed. She could feel the coldness of his skin as she cradled his body. No song of hers could reach him now. There was only the song of silence. She had thought her son was content until she discovered too late that his sighs had masked his longing for another life. Oh, she had heard the rumors that Heorot had welcomed a great warrior from Geatland, but she had not suspected that the warrior had come to slay Grendel. Thus, it had been a terrible shock to her when she saw her son return bloodied from a late night outing. He was brought to her cave on the back of sea serpents, his legs too

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weak to stand, for the giant in him gave way first while his yearning to be human lasted until the very end. At once, the giantess had rushed to her small garden and prepared a poultice. She remembered the way Grendel had watched her as she weaved spells in vain while denying that her son had already lost too much blood, too much of the blood that had cast him out below mist and moorland, the very blood that made him both of man and an enemy of man. He had looked at her then with glimmering eyes full of destroyed hope, misbegotten spirits of woe and terror, begging to know the answer to one question only: Why? Her lips had trembled and her voice had failed, for she was overcome with the song of silence, the song her son had been refusing to accept. Grendel had then shut his eyes, frowning with the regret that he should have lingered in Heorot to die in the company of men, the company that he had longed to belong to. “Grendel! Come back to me.” She screamed again. (Hush, hush, shh) I’ll give you a home The water began to sing in a disturbed whisper as the seadragons cried their last tears. (Hush, hush, shh) by the whispering foam The song of silence reached her ears and held her for a moment, pulling the giantess away from her son’s lifeless corpse. (Hush, hush, shh) of the lake throne She stood before her bed in a matter of seconds and glared at her reflection in the mirror of the sword.

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(Hush, hush, shh) from our dreams sown. “I am ready to do what you ask,” she said, swallowing fear, “but I will act with my heart, not the hatred you were forged from.” Her hands were already marked by mortal blood, having slayed Æschere, a retainer close to King Hrothgar. Although she did not know the dead man’s name, she knew that the death of a mother’s son would again lead to the pursuit of vengeance in accordance with the ways of man. But she would be prepared. “Let them send their best warrior.” She was ready to embrace whatever fate would come her way. Yet, she refused to let the thirst for blood be in the forefront of her mind. Instead she chose to venture upon another avenue to settle the grief that burned inside of her. She understood that her son had taken an invaluable kind of treasure from the men of Heorot. He had taken mortal souls. She, too, had taken a life. Yet, she was not a monster. She would reason with the man fighting in the lake above, though she knew deep down in her dragon sized heart that the man was no ordinary warrior, for she could hear the screams of the seadragons and the serpents as they fell one by one. The song of silence began to die. The water clashed against the walls of her cave. The dancing reflection became a whirlpool of chaos.

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“I know who is coming!” she shouted, speaking to her sword, the sword of the giants. “And he is no regular man. He has come from afar, from Geatland, for I can picture the golden boar offering its protection to his helm. I know that symbol. I fled from it long ago! Yet, I will now make my stand. From this warrior, I will glean what a true monster is.” She leaped upon her bed and pressed her lips to the cold blade, letting her wild reflection speak for itself before she pushed her bed aside to make room in case a fight ensued. In silence, she then crept to her kitchen and searched through the strange bottles that lined the shelves, choosing a glimmering golden vial. It was engraved with a boar’s head on a wooden cork and it was full of bubbling hope. This fey vial she placed to her trembling lips, and she drank the sweet potion crafted from the sun’s tears. Why should I not be blessed by the golden boar and sun, too? After all she did not choose the darkness of the lake; she was forced into it. Then, from a crude chest made of warped wood, she pulled out a whetted knife, for she knew the man who sought her was not unarmed based on the cries of the sea-dragons and serpents and the horrible screeching of a metal blade hacking at metal scales. Thus armed, Grendel’s mother knew she would not fall by any man’s weapon now. To this knife she spoke in a soft whisper, sensing her foe sinking into the dark depths of the lake, “I will have my son’s killer

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see what he has taken from me. He will know my grief and I will know his.” She attached the knife to her leather belt. The warrior was near the bottom of the lake now, having breached the realm of eternal darkness. She felt the pain the warrior’s sword had brought upon the sea-dragons as if she had been the one stabbed through the heart. She turned around, careful not to make any more noise than a silent mouse scampering through a field. Mortal terror filled her, but she pressed on and came to the entrance of her cave where the song of silence was at its greatest. She listened for a moment before giving everything to the melancholy song, letting it take her tears as she dove into the water—into the darkness. Her hands, like claws, stroked the water, and her feet brushed away tangled weeds. She could feel the unseen sea-dragons and serpents clawing at her side, snatching at her clothes and pulling at her hair. They were warning her to turn back. She, however, was determined to reach the mortal warrior before he reached her. At long last, after struggling against the water, swallowing the silence, and floundering in the dark, she stumbled upon him. He was a faint sliver of gold wrestling against shadows. She looked at him then and pitied him. Yet, her pity soon turned to horror as she witnessed a red cloud surround the warrior as another serpent fell.

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Red flashed before her eyes. Her entire lake seemed red with blood. The giantess propelled herself forward, seizing the warrior while he was unaware of her. Hurriedly, she swam to her den, nails pressing against the man’s webbed mail to keep him from slipping from her grasp as she shielded him from the sea-beasts that were attacking. If it was not for her, surely the sea-dragons and serpents would have eventually overpowered the warrior and torn him to shreds. His life was in her hands. For the first time since she had buried herself in the depths of the lake, she moved against the song of silence and entertained pleasant discord, breaking the endless dance of the water as she surfaced in her cave. She set the warrior down on the rock floor of her home and stepped back a pace to observe him. The man had strong webbed mail and a helm blessed by gold boar-shapes that to her seemed no different than the potion she had drank or even the sheepskin she wore. He was beautiful, but so was she standing there in the darkness of her lair with her hearthfire blazing. She was at loss for words, though, looking at the mortal man, because she had forgotten how similar mankind and giantkind were. They had the same eyes that bore the same shadows. By the look in the warrior’s eyes, the very gleam of his tears, the giantess knew this was the man who had killed her son. The man, likewise, saw in her eyes that she was the one who had

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killed Æschere. They were both trapped in an endless loop of revenge, but they were singing different songs within. The warrior broke from the silence first. He sprung from the floor and slammed down the sharp edge of his sword on Grendel’s mother’s head, which would have been a fatal blow if it had not been for the blessing that the potion had bestowed upon her. The giantess roared in surprise but had no time to recover from her shock before the warrior seized her shoulders and tossed her to the floor. She kicked him off of her and in the span of a heartbeat regained her stance. The man charged with his sword willingly discarded, but the giantess refused to be knocked down again. Instead, she gripped the warrior and flung him as easily as one would toss a bouquet of flowers. The man fell. In the spur of the moment, she drew her whetted knife and prepared to take her revenge for her son’s death. Yet, she hesitated. She did not want any more blood to be spilled. She knew she could not take the life of this warrior and bestow it to her son’s lifeless corpse. She knew that Grendel was gone. And she was not a monster. She sighed as she released the man. She then closed her eyes. The song of silence returned to her, and she was ready to join it. She gave the song her voice, so it could be heard echoing throughout the lake and beyond. She imagined her son and herself

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playing under the light of the sun. He was happy and she was more than content. Grendel and her were not monsters. Then, the warrior, Beowulf of the Geats, came charging at her, lugging the giant’s sword he had taken from the wall of her home. She could faintly hear the scratching of metal against the cold stone floor, but it sounded distant in her mind so she did not care. She had no use for heirlooms anyway. She wanted to be with her son. Thus, she smiled, letting the knife in her hands drop as she took her final breath. Then, she was gone to find her son in a place where giants and mankind roam the heavens.

𓆟 Beowulf roared in celebration of his mortal triumph as he waved the giant’s sword, coated in blood, in the air while boasting to himself of his great victory. He then scanned the cave, searching for a worthy treasure to take back to King Hrothgar as proof that he had slayed the vile she-monster. His eyes zeroed in on a figure laying across the floor that excited him beyond rings of gold. He laughed, exclaiming that Grendel’s head was a worthy enough token. With the giant’s sword he cut off Grendel’s head. Yet, as soon as Grendel’s blood touched the blade, it melted into a pool of red tears, leaving only the hilt of gems whose sun-like splendor was extinguished. The hearthfire, however, swelled and burst into a

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radiant beam of light greater than the very sun to the surface lands of the West-Danes. Beowulf smiled while looking upon that fire and raised the hilt of the giant’s sword, boasting that the light was good and a sign that the monsters had been purged from the world. He wondered what treasure he would be given in return for Grendel’s head as he left, treading on the hollowed chest of Grendel’s mother. He did not know that the light of the hearthfire was the melancholy flames of Grendel’s mother’s dragon-heart, nor did he understand that the fire’s crackling was the laughter and cries of a mother swearing, ‘You will know the wounds of my dragon-heart before your end.’ Thus, Beowulf left the cave with the bounty of men’s glory without once stopping to listen to the unspoken song of silence at the murky lake bottom where the sea-dragons sulk no more and a lonely mother now eternally sleeps.

𓆟 (Hush, hush, shh) My sole child be (Hush, hush, shh) carried by dreams and free (Hush, hush, shh) while you play (Hush, hush, shh), my son, in sunlight.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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“The Aquatic Galaxy of Hehór” RUNA

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𓆝 Biographies 𓆞 The Icarus Writing Collective Staff

Editor-in-Chief, Elizabeth “Liz” Zarb (she/her) is a writer, editor, and content creator based out of New York. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in 2021 and her MSc in Literature and Society: Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian from the University of Edinburgh in 2023, and now splits her time between writing and making literature-based videos on TikTok under the handle @liz_zarb. Her debut collection of flash fiction stories, “A Meditation on Mortality,” is available on Amazon, and she runs the blog: twentybluffing.substack.com, a place dedicated to twenty-somethings who are feeling lost and aimless as they navigate this decade of their life. Editor-in-Chief, Kyle Ross (he/him) is an award-winning author who specializes in creative nonfiction. As a graduate of Emerson College, he received his BFA degree in Creative Writing. A copywriter by trade, he is also a regional Writing Juror for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Continuously grappling with his past, Kyle explores themes of childhood grief, love in all its forms, and trans identity. His published prose can be found in The Underground, EveryDayFiction, Gauge Magazine, Wack Mag, Vocivia Magazine, and The Hooghly Review. You can visit him at www.thekyleross.com. Production Associate, Anna Tindal (she/her) is a writer, designer, artist and producer. She received her BFA at the University of Denver with a double major in Emergent Technologies and Creative Writing with a minor in history in 2019. After graduating, she worked at the American Numismatic Association where she worked as an editorial assistant on their magazine, the Numismatist. With the call of the gaming industry continuing to tug at her heart, she decided to continue her education at Laguna College of Art and Design where she received her MFA in Game Design and

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Development. There, she executed her own thesis game, “Je Me Souviens”, with a small team of 15 which was showcased at the Game Development Conference in 2023. She also has worked at Obsidian Entertainment, where she worked on Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed in production in addition to Electronic Art’s Maxis where she worked on Sims 4 expansions, “Lovestruck” and “Life & Death.” Now, she pursues creativity in every instance she can and is excited to continue to pursue her art even further. Publishing Associate, Lindsey Simmons (she/her) is a writer and bookworm with a degree in Comparative Ancient Civilizations and Language and Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where she developed a deep appreciation for history, myth, and storytelling traditions. Her love for historical-inspired fantasy guides her writing, mixing echoes of the past with imaginative new worlds. Lindsey’s published short stories can be found in two Creative Writer’s Guild anthologies: “Tarot: A Story in Twenty-Two Parts” and the 2024 Club Anthology, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. When she’s not writing, she can be found sewing costumes and indulging in fantasy novels. Social Media Associate, Kacie Broadfield (she/they) is an actor, creative and barista from NJ. Despite carrying just a certificate from The Institute for American Musical Theatre in NYC, she keeps herself immersed with creativity whenever she can. Kacie is an alumnus of the NY Ren Faire as well as an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, always finding the whimsy in storytelling and convincing character work. Notable stage credits include Ghost Quartet (Pearl), Matilda (Mrs. Wormwood) and Cabaret (Lulu). When not working on costumes or serving the perfect latte, Kacie can be found with her darling cat sons watching paranormal investigative shows.

𓆝𓆟𓆞

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𓆝 Issue 04: Currents Contributors 𓆞 Natalie Zutter (she/her) is a playwright and pop culture critic living in New York. Her nonfiction work has been published at Reactor (formerly Tor.com, where she was previously a staff writer) and in their collection Rocket Fuel, as well as NPR Books and Lit Hub. Her SFF short plays have been performed at geek theater festivals in New York City and elsewhere; her immersive romantasy play “Garters” premiered at Chicago's Otherworld Theatre Company during Pride 2024. She has been a writer-in-residence with the Amtrak Residency and is an alum of Viable Paradise 2025. Find her online @zutsuit (Bluesky/Instagram) and @nataliezutter (Twitter). Robin Zubek (they/them) is a UK-based Polish writer who seeks to put the experience of second generation immigrants into words. Their stories explore loss, longing, and the feeling of never quite being home. When they aren't writing, Robin reads, paints, and goes on long walks to collect wildflowers. Bella Vedder (she/her) is a homeschooled junior in high school who writes epic fantasy fiction. Her debut novel, “Of Fallen Crows and Wolves,” is forthcoming with Trilogy Christian Publishing. She is a Junior Editor for Polyphony Lit Magazine and finds inspiration in medieval history, fantasy literature, and the landscapes she dreams of exploring. sumedha (she/her) is a queer, brown storyteller and researcher. Her work wanders through cultural memory, mythology, and history, while asking how identity is shaped, fractured, and remembered across time. Her work explores the porous borders between self and the collective as well. Sirius (they/them) is the author of The Dread South series, the Draonir Saga, and The Gentleman Demon series. When they are not writing, they are doting on their beloved dogs and spreading false prophecies.

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Ocean (he/him) is a disabled poet, novelist, and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. His poetry, essays and fiction are known for their resuscitation of the mythic and their contribution to literary animism. His visual arts, informed by proto-language and asemia, have shown internationally. For selections of his work, navigate to: www.mirrorflower.org. Muze (they/them) is a fiction editor at the Portland Review and a grad student at Portland State University. When not writing, reading, or sleeping, they enjoy cooking, flailing around on the bass guitar, and practicing Japanese. They have words in Space Wizard Press, the House of Long Shadows, and Fiction on the Web. You can find them on Bluesky @muzetrigger.bsky.social where they post the fantasy flash series #DiaryOfNana. RUNA aka Rute Norte (she/her) was born and lives in Lisbon, Portugal. She graduated from the University of Lisbon, and later received her Master's degree in Painting, at Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon (2022). Her master's thesis focused on the theme of artist-travellers and is titled “The experience of place: its influence on the pictorial production of the artist-traveller, in the 21st century”. Additionally, she studied Photography at Cenjor, the Professional Training Center for Journalists, in Lisbon (182 hours of classes, 2018). RUNA was awarded a European Union Mobility Grant to undertake a one-month artistic residency in Armenia. She also completed an artistic residency in Bulgaria, as part of her approach as an artist-traveller, supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. RUNA has participated in more than thirty exhibitions, both individual and group, in Portugal, Spain, UK, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Armenia, Colombia, South Korea, Turkey and the USA. Website: rutenorte.com

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Rian Moneypenny (he/him) works at Fern Montessori School in Taylors, SC, and lives in Campobello, SC. He received his BA from College of Charleston with a concentration in creative writing and is in the process of receiving his MFA from Converse College. His work has been featured in Ode to Dionysus, Livina Press, Persephone Literary Magazine, and Wild Willow Magazine. Ginny McSheehan (she/her) is a queer pagan storyteller with a lifelong love for history and folklore. During the summer and fall, she can be found at Nyr Jorvik Viking Village, where she teaches Viking history through inclusive historical reenactment, and tells the stories of the Norse gods and goddesses. She holds an MFA from Emerson’s Popular Fiction and Publishing program and is querying her second novel. Her contact info can be found at solo.to/ginnysquillpen. K. Martin (she/her) is a queer disabled writer of colour from Canada with a Bachelor’s degree and gold medal in Faculty of Arts from WLU. She's published poetry in ImageOutWrite Vol. 5, short fiction with Torquere, and erotic fiction in NSP's Erato and Duck Prints Press’s Many Hands anthologies. When not writing, she's on Tumblr as @queerfictionwriter, or talking about writing over on Patreon.com/K'sCorner. Giulio R.M. Maffii (he/him) was born in Florence (Italy). His work focuses on poetry (linear, experimental and visual) and its dissemination. He has been published in numerous international magazines, also as a visual artist. He collaborates with the theatre company “Bubamara Teatro” and teaches at the University of Florence. He enjoys playing with photography and collage. Vy Lieu (they/them) is a Viet-American writer based in NYC. Their work has previously appeared in Variety Pack and The Hemlock Journal. If they are not stuck in a narrative or making art, they are paying compliments to their cat, Layton. Catch them on Instagram @tvy.lieu.

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Jules Leclercq (he/him) is an amateur writer and visual artist. Solstice Lamarre (they/them) is a French, non-binary aroace writer. They write queer, neurodivergent stories in various genres, but always come back to themes of monstrosity, found family, and all sorts of queer love. Their work has previously appeared in Unthinkable: A Queer Gothic Anthology. When they’re not writing, they work as an English teacher for French teens, read an unholy number of books, play video games they never finish, and cuddle with their cat. Julian (he/him) is an anonymous, unpublished, fantasy author who simply enjoys creative writing. Leonie Jacobs (she/her) is a 23-year old writer from the East of Germany. When she is not at university or at work she likes to dabble in different literary genres. Her writing has appeared in iamb as well as Troublemaker Firestarter. Entropy (they/any) is an emerging Indian artist, whose work wraps whimsical and quaint elements, which are rooted in deep cultural introspection and personal narrative. Their art invites the viewer into moments of stillness and self-reflection, encouraging the viewer to look beyond the surface. Zenia deHaven (they/them) is an author of short stories and essays. Their work has been published in Fruitslice, As Alive Magazine, SIEVA Magazine, and NoVA Prism. When they're not writing, they enjoy video games, group exercise classes, and petting their dogs.

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Edward Daschle (he/him) is a queer writer living in Maryland. He has attended Clarion Workshop and Disquiet Workshop, and earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, where he now teaches. His stories appear in Apex Magazine’s “Robotic Ambitions” anthology, After Dinner Conversation - “Best of 2023” anthology, and Washington Writers' Publishing House among other venues. D.J. Clark (he/him) is a writer drawn to stories of liminality and epic myth. A longtime reader of science fiction and fantasy, a nonpracticing pagan, and registered nurse, he aspires to craft stories that are both inclusive and mythic in scope. Maeve Chapman (she/her) is a playwright, director, video game developer, and visual artist. She has directed over 30 productions, had over 20 of her plays produced, and won the 2021 Oscar for the film CODA. Taylor Catalana (she/her) is a museum professional who received her graduate degree in art and theology from Kings College London. Her forthcoming debut novel will be published in Fall 2026. She currently lives with her dog in Brooklyn, New York. G.J. Brillante (she/her) is a warrior of words (aka a writer) and a bookdragon with a BA in English and a minor in Creative Writing. She has had a short story and a poem published in a zine. When she's not wandering in faraway worlds, she can be found playing with her dogs or crocheting. To read more of her work, you can visit her Instagram at gjb.creates. Richard M. Ankers (he/him) is the English author of “The Eternals Series,” “Britannia Unleashed,” and co-author of “The Poetry of Pronouns Books 1 & 2.” Richard has featured in Daily Science Fiction, Love Letters To Poe, Starspun Lit, and feels privileged to have appeared in many more. Richard lives to write.

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1moretale, Nikita Dhulekar, (she/her) is a bilingual writer who enjoys writing in Hindi and English. She finds inspiration in daily musings, society, and museums. Creating art and writing stories are her means of destressing. You can find her artwork at @1moretale on Instagram.

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