(I had something up for today, but then I realized I couldn’t post it because I have to put it into a short story contest and lose first. So enjoy a half-length bit instead).
Once the thrill and overpowering demands of instinct had faded away from her, Small-five was near-frightened by the new world around her. The deepest waters she had ever swum had been the reef-rifts, explored with close caution and worriment in her every motion. Now she hurried over empty blue whose extent she couldn’t even begin to comprehend and whose exploration she would be unable to undergo, even if she desired it or had the time. The Fiskupids were small, but they were ceaselessly energetic. She had swum for something like two days straight at a pace that never slowed below a swift cruise, and they showed no signs of stress or strain. Small-five’s disadvantage was an unfortunate side effect of her near-starvation on the reef – where muscle should’ve bulged, it merely pulsed.
Still, she was optimally placed to correct this difficulty. She swam and ate and ate and swam, surrounded by a seemingly endless feast of the Fiskupids and their predators alike, untroubled by any needs save those of growth. At first she watched the Raskljens warily, but when she realized that they saw no need to hunt her when surrounded by so much easier prey she became less cautious, and by the time ten days had passed and the Fiskupid schools finally slowed their relentless pace she swam by most them as casually as they did her. Except for the larger ones, who still appeared to be slightly too interested in her whenever she saw them.
Other hanger-ons came in time. Slow-moving, stretched-out Skurromesh, elongated and entwined bodies formed of a mated male and female wrapped around one another’s forms. The disturbing Fjiloj – her first sighting of them, from a distance, filled her with useless hope; the shine, the glow, for a brief moment made her think of her sisters. But when she drew closer she saw the colours and tones were all wrong; this was not the bright and strong glowshine of her sisters, but something wrong, soft and ghostly and flickering, uncontrolled, unfocused, unreal. It bobbed in the water gently, translucent and wrong, and she had the sense to back away, confusion saving her from the whip-strong tendrils that spread out towards her with the speed of a darting Verrineeach, nearly invisible in the water. What appeared to be a jellylike sack of glowing innards a short distance away was housed inside the powerfully muscled frame of a bony predator, lean and savage, but thankfully slow-swimming. Small-five fled, and was wary of all light for a time, even to the point of dimming her own to almost unnoticeable levels.
Stranger still was another wanderer, one whose name she never learned. It was nothing more than a large-ish stretch of cloudy, murked water, but it held together in defiance of dispersion, and somehow moved against the current if it willed it. It followed the vast shoal for some days, and creatures too close to it tended to vanish without warning. Small-five never saw what happened to them, but that was enough to make her watch it closely. It vanished as suddenly and conspicuously as it arrived one day, along with a large and belligerent Raskljen that Small-five had long had to avoid. A reminder that not all dangers were dangers to her alone, or incapable of working to her benefit. Still, a relief to see it gone.
Of all of the denizens of the shoal, those that unsettled her the greatest were her own kind. After the attack above the chasm, she had no interest in making acquaintances – when she saw glowshine in the distance, she shut down her illumination and fled, and she didn’t light up until some time had passed without so much as a glimmer passing her eyes.
The Fiskupid’s slowing seemed connected to the temperature. Small-five had taken time to notice it herself, but they were in cooler waters than the location of the relatively warm reefcolony she’d grown up in. It had no immediate effects on her person besides making her appreciate (in some deepened corner of her brain) her added fat, but it had an effect on her surroundings, like it or not. Not all of the new denizens of the open ocean she saw were alien solely because of habitat – the Filijoj would’ve been sluggish and slower had it ventured far enough north to join the shoal in its earlier days. Its relatives that dwelt in that particular part of the world were smaller, faster, less aggressive, and far more wide-roaming. As new inhabitants of the shoal arrived, others departed: the few Skurromesh that had trailed in its wake to pick up leavings fell behind for good, both exhausted, sated, and reaching the ends of their temperature comfort zones.
What made this significant were the Ooliku. The Fiskupids were on the first and greatest journey of their lives. Small-five, the Raskljen, the Fjiloj, and the other, stranger things were there to exploit it. The Ooliku were coming home. The Fiskupids were merely a convenient food source for them to latch onto as they travelled, and if they were removed they would still constitute a mighty shoal on their own, albeit one barely a tenth of a fifth of a sixth of the size. They were moving with purpose of their own, a return to the bottom of the world, to the ice and cold and freezing black water that swarmed with nutrients and life. Their paths would diverge soon, and they would depart, bellies filled with nutrition and packed into fat that would have to last them the last and longest step of their great journey. Under the poles they would couple and breed and die and feast, only the hardiest returning to the reefcolonies to spray their eggs in warmer waters.
Small-five knew none of this, of course. All she knew was that the Ooliku were getting heftier, more aggressive, and clustering tighter together. That, and even the subadults had swollen into burlier adults by now. Preying upon any of them was now distinctly unfeasible – their beaks were sharp and they had no reserves whatsoever about pre-emptively driving off anything they thought might harm them, flying at anything from the largest Raskljen to Small-five herself in large mobs. The one predator that seemed to successfully stump them were the Fjiloji – more than once Small-five watched an Ooliku curiously swim all too close to that soft sinister glow, then jerk and die midwater before being brought to indistinct mouthparts, ripped, and swallowed.
Their departure was still a shock. One evening, as Small-five stirred from her torpor (swimming while resting was a new skill she’d acquired), she noticed that there wasn’t a single Ooliku left. Every single one had extracted itself from the shoal, presumably formed up into a separate school, and left for the pole, taking a substantial chunk of the shoal’s predator population with them. Not that it in any way reduced her perceptions of its size – the main change she noticed was that she didn’t have to carefully watch and brood over every lunge into a dense mass of prey, worrying about coming face-first into a clump of surly adult Ooliku. The sole remaining predators she knew of within the school were only the very largest of the Raskljen, and even they had gradually vanished, replaced by smaller, sleeker cousins less than a third again her body weight, that had no interest in any prey but the Fiskupids, darting into their densest swarms and devouring them ten-at-a-time. For the first time in what felt like forever, she had utterly nothing to fear. This newfound carefreeness backfired on her after what seemed to be a very short time, when she swam through a cloud of prey (it was impossible to remember a time when she hadn’t been surrounded by free-swimming food and suddenly found her eyes full of startled glowshine, her own and those of three others. That they were slightly larger than she was registered through the shock, but her immediate reaction after that had switched from flight to sheer terror-paralysis. Not that she was in a position where flight would do her any good – she would never be able to move fast enough to outrun them from less than a proboscis-length away.
They hovered there, all four of them. Glowshine codes flickered back and forth between the three sisters, too quick and complex for Small-five to grasp, variations on themes that she and her sisters had only just begun to grasp before their separation. But no hostility, no stabbing proboscises, no angry flares of light. Wariness, yes, but strange codes and signals that might have been curiosity. They were older than her assailants had been, as was she – practically juveniles, nearing full sapience.
Flicker-pulse-three-point-irregular-twinkle? flashed out the largest of the three sisters.
Small-five watched without comprehension. It didn’t feel like a name, but it felt impatient.
The pattern repeated itself. She didn’t understand it. Small-five-point-burst-of-light, she flashed. It was the only thing she could think of that was intelligible. That was what she was, and she didn’t know anything else.
It certainly got their attention. More flashes and flickers and maybe she was just guessing off of murky memories of her own sisters, but she could see something of interest there.
Dim-glow-bright-two-point-flare. A name. The other two lit up: All-fin-sparkle and Nine-point-glimmer.
Names. Names for all of them. She’d forgotten what this was like. With others swimming near here.
They turned to move away, and Small-five saw the lines of light crawl down Dim-glow from snout to tail, the call to swim, to fall together. Something old, something familiar, delivered by someone new.
Small-five fell in, unsure and uncomprehending, but grateful and with an odd budding of hope inside her. She hadn’t swum with others in a long, long time.