The plesis were the first warning when the wave came.
It must’ve been something in the water, some tingling pressure they could feel from afar. They honked their long calls and swung their long necks and dove and all of a sudden Tarci was the most alone she’d been while fishing in a very, very long time.
And she was also without fish. They knew what was up too.
Then the pteros were screaming and all in the air at once and if that hadn’t been her final wake-up call, the water vanished.
Yes, ten minutes ago had been time for Tarci to do something. Now was the time to be too late.
***
She was running uphill, and she wasn’t going to get far enough, and for some stupid reason all she could think of was her dock.
It was a good dock. Tarci had pulled it together herself; sunk the piles amongst curious marine saurs, turned straight trees into trim planks, seasoned it and proofed it and guarded it against rot and worm.
Hell, it was a good day, too. Blue, blue, achingly blue sky with just enough wispy white to contrast and flavour it pleasant. The sun was strong but not deadly. The breeze was light and happy. What a miserable thing to have happen on such a good day! You finally got yourself some room to… yourself, you turned a piece of mesospace into a place, a home, and what happened? Some little tectonic belch a thousand miles away sent god’s ripple hurtling at you.
Ah, her legs were hurting and she was smacking her feet into rocks. She shouldn’t look back now.
She looked back now.
The horizon had risen and was growing clearer.
Tarci tripped, spun, and accelerated. Too slowly.
***
The dock had been the last thing she built, really.
The hou – the home was an ongoing project, but that wasn’t a work of ‘building’ by now, not really. Just accumulation and the odd bit of subtraction. There was a roof, sort of, and there were walls, kind of, and she’d been responsible for some of them and the jumble of stone on the hilltop had taken care of all the rest. Now she removed leaf litter, evicted any fellow tenants who starting trying to bite her or leave over-smelly messes, and put in shelves.
The cache had been something she’d built, but it wasn’t really hers. The important pieces of the boat were sealed tight and safe under earth and boards and cloth, where the world couldn’t touch them and she could reclaim them if the need came. It was a ship-place, a cradle.
And the tools and odds and ends like rods, spears, splints and spars weren’t really ‘building’ things. That was just practical fidgeting. Keeping her hands busy.
So Tarci was surprised to find herself realizing, at that very busy moment, that she had an awful lot of investment in that dock and she was going to be very very sad to see it wiped off the face of the world.
There was a sound like surf, but walking closer.
She tried to run faster and couldn’t.
***
It wasn’t lonely.
Tarci had neighbours, just not the talkative kind. Stand-offish, but not impolite. They did their business and she did hers. The pteros fished over the shallows; the plesis foraged the reefs and snuck fish from her line; and the odd passing therasaur island-hopping generally stayed out of the rocky heights she’d made her principle home, so there was no need for unfriendly business. In the end everyone was comfortable ignoring each other at almost any range. She knew the nesting rookeries of the pteros almost as well as they did by now; and they would sun themselves on her roof. She’d fished next to a birthing plesis pod for hours without them so much as raising a flipper to her. She knew every tree that would inevitably ram into her face on her midnight walk back from her makeshift still to her home, and thinking of how all of that was about to be very very different was so suddenly painfully sad that it almost drew her mind off the change in pitch she was hearing in the roar of the oncoming surf.
It was peaking. It must have hit the shallows. Maybe the reef would block some of the worst of it ahahahahahaha no.
The heights were still ages away; had she really walked this path so casually just this morning? Dying out of breath and sweaty was just embarrassing.
The trees would go, the brush would fly, and she’d be swept clean off the island and out the other side in whatever number of pieces would seem appropriate except there, to her right, was the cliffside.
And there, in the cliffside, were crevices.
Tarci was already dead if she thought about it, so she didn’t bother thinking about it. Just turned, lunged, twisted, dropped, wheezed, shimmied on her belly, plunked into a cranny in the rock that seemed tall enough to just barely hold a fat lizard. And had frequently, judging from the smell. Something edged in fluff scraped at her palms. Feathers. Maybe a juvenile therasaur had moulted in here.
The roar was too loud to hear anything, but she felt the snort of warm air in the cramped space as clearly as if it had been a bellow. And that was when she saw the glittering eyes.
Oh. A juvenile therasaur WAS moulting in here. A good-sized one too; bigger than Tarci and with its adult teeth coming in; proper and sturdy serrated blades to carve through anything it could hunt, fish, or beachcomb. Amazing it had managed to fit into this crevice. Maybe it had been using it for weeks and weeks as it grew up; how had she failed to notice it, anyways? Maybe one of the passing adults had left a clutch. Maybe
And then the wave came.
***
There were three parts to it and they each lasted ten thousand years.
First the shadow. Pitch black in the afternoon, sudden as a thunderbolt. The therasaur’s eyes were the only thing in the world, shrinking back as it hissed and bared its teeth.
Then the push. The air, the ground, everything vibrating, a drumroll that refused to die down until it drowned itself out and there was nothing left but
The water.
***
It’s tearing claws.
It’s solid stone.
It’s a hand the size of the world squeezing.
And it’s in every single cranny corner and crack of Tarci and the therasaur’s little nook; trying to carry them with it and tear them apart and smash them together all at once and after another.
Her leg might be broken. Or torn off. Or buried knee-first in the therasaur’s stomach.
It might have drowned. It might be alive. It might be chewing on her.
Her hand is holding something and it could be the stone walls she was clinging to for dear life or empty iron-hard currents or just her own fingernails as she was abducted by the sea.
***
But life can get used to anything anywhere, so after one thousand years by her mind’s reckoning and about ten seconds by her heartbeat’s Tarci started to relax a little.
She was holding something. It was probably stone. Her back hurt. That was probably stone. Her foot felt like it was being torn off and smashed into pieces. It was probably poking out of the crevice. Something very heavy but slightly malleable – and occasionally pointy – was smushed against her torso. That was probably the therasaur.
That was probably the only reason both of them hadn’t been sucked out along with the rest of the water, gentle and kind though the current that had slid in with them had been. They’d combined their meager body masses into a sort of impromptu cork.
Nose to nose, actually. She thought. It was still sort of hard to find anything, but there were some bubbles flowing over her face that could be it panicking quietly.
Oh right. No air.
***
The current was reversing. The wave had passed over the island entirely. This was just the backwash. Just a little longer with her muscles aching, with her hands scrabbling for new grips as the ungodly pull at her body turned backwards and tried to drag her away.
Just a little longer.
A
Little
frustrating that her mother had been half-right and she was going to die alone and unhappy alone she didn’t mind unhappy yes but she wasn’t alone she had a terrified drowning animal with her if it didn’t claw through her trying to keep its own grip lose her grip lose it lose it lose it lose ah ah ah
Ah, there it was! A gasp, a shudder, an inhalation that shook her down to her toes, and she was coughing violently into the face of a wheezing therasaur, choking to death on her own newfound breath. If her throat wasn’t already-occupied and didn’t feel like it had been rubbed down with sand she’d laugh at it, poor squawking thing, as damp and feeble and half-dead as a newborn.
So instead she kissed it on the nose. Then it made the most horrible undignified snotty sound and she kissed it again and it did it again and finally she was laughing, really laughing, and it was the absolute most painful thing imaginable and the best thing she’d ever felt in her life.
***
The therasaur was more distressed than she did. It clung to her as dead, shivering weight, only moving itself at last when she (slowly, painfully) began to eel her way free of the rock crevice. Then it scrabbled after her with terrified haste, clawing her foot somewhat badly on the way.
She swatted its nose and swore at it. It chirroughed wetly and ducked low in the universal subadult symbol of I’m Very Sorry, Mother.
“Fine,” she said, looking around the denuded, shredded remains of what had once been a perfectly tangled hillside. Yes, she reckoned this was as close as anything could come to being born twice. Out of a cramped wet safety in a wide horrible place, weakly. “Come on home. Let’s see what shelves are left standing.” Something silvery flopped at the corner of her eye, then the other corner, then all over the place. Fins. Gills.
She grinned. “And I hope you like fish.”
Wrong again, mom. Wrong all the way.
***
It did. A lot. It was a good thing she had time to work on a new fishing rod.