(It’s been a long time since we last saw this, hasn’t it? I shouldn’t be leaving things unfinished. If you need a refresher, I’ve made a new sub-tag for this series, and the first segment is located here)
Small-five-point-burst of light learned much over the next few months, beginning with how to talk.
She had lost her sisters at a crucial point in her social development, and it was sheer luck that her unusual pre-juvenile years had opened her to flexibility rather than scarring her into rigidness. She memorized the glowshine patterns of her new family, ones she’d never imagined, learned to flicker and flash and sheen with subtlety and speed beyond anything she’d thought possible, and watched, watched, watched with all her heart and mind, shining little, observing much.
The breakthrough came unexpectedly, and in a manner that ensured she never forgot it.
She and All-fin were flitting around a particularly dense knot of Fiskupids, spooking them together while the slightly larger Dim-glow (the name still brought haunting memories of her first sister) and Nine-point dove in and out of the mass, each lunge skewing three or more of the little swarming creatures. Small-five and her new sisters would probably eat no more than a third of them, a third of an infinitely small fraction of the school as a whole – a cell in a body of impossible size. The incessant, unceasing predation had still failed to so much as decimate the Fiskupids, and after half a year swimming with them, Small-five had grown comfortable with a world which was almost exclusively alive. Part of her mind was still that of a reef-dwelling infant, and the replacement of the reefcolony’s shelled walls and pillars with mazes of flesh was a comfort against the bottomless blue that surrounded her – the Fiskupids spread for miles around, but never ventured deeper than a few hundred metres, and it was seldom that she went for a day or more without glimpsing the great depths; always earning a shudder before she swam away, eyes averted. Perhaps it was a relic of her more fearful past, or her youthful exploration of the canyons between reefcolonies, but she could never resist the impulse to glance down into those awful pits in her world that her new sisters’ eyes skated over.
It was precisely because of this that Small-five noticed the gap in the Fiskupids first, directly beneath them. This was typical, and not worthy of note. But there was movement in it, abstract, slow, at great distance but infinitely large and impossible to ignore.
The reproachful glowshine of All-fin flittered into the corner of Small-five’s view; she was now balling the entire swarm by herself, and it was already fraying at the seems without Small-five’s assistance. Dim-glow and Nine-point would be less than pleased if it ceased early, besides the two smaller sisters likely missing out on their own turn.
The moment where Small-five spoke for the first time – really spoke, not just broadcast emotions, intent, other immediate concepts, was here. Torn between expressing embarrassment, panic, apology, and warning, her glowshine flickered, wobbled, and sputtered into life, having settled on explanation: Sisters-there-is-a-big-thing-down-there-what-is-it?
Small-five’s question very nearly went ignored as her new-sisters burst in a torrent of overlapping exclamations of surprise and delight at her speech, but All-fin, already annoyed enough to forgo praise for the moment, looked down.
Run! she shone. Run! Flee! Away! Out and up!
The sisters scattered, Small-five keeping one eye aimed below, watching the darkness. The Fiskupids had sensed it as well; they were thinning upwards at great speed; the swarm compacting itself tight to the surface in an effort to move away from something that seemed to cover the entire ocean beneath them.
Small-five would’ve liked to ask what it was, but her new-sisters had no names to give her, and besides, her question was already answered by her instincts. There was only one creature that this thing below them could be, the shape so large that it covered half of her visible world right now as she strove for the surface: a Godfish.
Much later, Small-five would know many words and much more of the world itself, the Gruskomish Godfish included. She would know of the exact dimensions of the Gruskomish, a size so staggering that no more than a few dozen roamed the planet at any one time, each taxing any food supply it found to its limit. She could recite their life history: a rare egg, laid once every few centuries, which sinks to the bottom of the world and incubates alone in purest dark, before hatching into an infant that must feed its way from a size only a little bigger than Small-five the juvenile to a bulk large enough to ignore any obstacle as insignificant, a process of almost a millennium. Only when the infant Gruskomish grew its fins – twice the size of its unbelievably large body – did it leave the muck of the seafloor, ready to spend the next hundred years feeding and dodging its larger peers, who would happily reduce the competition a younger cousin might cause.
None of this was known to Small-five right then, of course. She just knew that unless she and her new-sisters swam faster than they ever had before, they would be killed by something that wasn’t even aware that they existed.
The water was humming. The Fiskupid school had long been a noisy place, even to the reefcolony-trained ears of Small-five; alive with the constant uproar of billions of beings on the move. But this new noise rubbed any of its peers into nothing, a long, smooth drone that was shifting upwards in pitch imperceptibly slowly. It made Small-five’s proboscis twitch and her membranes flutter, slipping over and off her eyes in an unusual sort of blink that made her vision slosh, adding to the disorientation of the growing blur of speed that the Fiskupids around her were becoming.
The whole world was the school, and the whole world was fleeing. But not fast enough.
Details were starting to swim into shape beneath her, the unseeable dark transforming into rough patches and skin, each tiniest of scales bigger than Small-five and her new-sisters put together, all coating a skull as big as a reefcolony. It was so large that it was impossible to guess its speed until it was right beneath them and Small-five was staring into an eye of impossible size, dyed a deep, startling murky green.
It looked right through her without acknowledgement, without notice, even as she bounced off its hardened lens – transparent, but sterner than stone. And as she thrashed in a desperate effort to remain stable, sliding uncontrollably upwards on the Godfish’s head, she felt air touch her for the first time. The light was harsh and cruel, and dryness all around her as the sun scattered its rays cruelly on the exposed skin of millions – the Godfish had raised perhaps an eighth of the entire school out of the water on the vast, inward-sloping valley of its skull. The rumbling hum of its voice was overpowering, a sensation that made Small-five’s skin vibrate and ruptured the innards of the Fiskupids all around her.
Small-five and her new-sisters were fortunate; stranded as they were on the very rim of the Gruskomish, they were able to witness what happened next as spectators, not victims. All moving in that same, slow-yet-fast speed that the Godfish did everything in, the valley rifted, a toothless chasm slowly unveiling itself down the center of its head. Down, down, down – deeper than they’d ever swum – spun the flopping, dying bodies of almost half a billion Fiskupids, into a digestive system that dwarfed caverns. The jaws shut again with a hollow thud that rattled Small-five’s bones, and then the Gruskomish was sinking again, dropping the thousands of uneaten, stranded beings atop the edges of its skull back into the water, unnoticed, uncaring.
They lay there for a while in the water, all four of them; dazed and injured, sorting out up from down and letting the newfound sensation of burning-dry wash away at the touch of currents they’d never appreciated so much as at that moment. Already far away in the distance, they watched the Godfish lift its head above the water again and swallow another part of the world. Its endless hum was fading already, but still overpoweringly strong .
It-didn’t-care, said Small-five, without thinking. Somewhere in the whirl of the last three minutes, communication had become the least puzzling thing in the world to her. Also, she now knew that these were her sisters. If they hadn’t been, she would’ve been a good deal less afraid to see them all caught on the edge of a Godfish’s maw.
No, agreed Nine-point. She shook herself briskly and ran through her glowshine in a staccato pattern, a wake-up call. Eat-rest. School-goes-nowhere.
Nine-point was right in more ways than one. By the time the Gruskomish Godfish had departed, fully half the Fiskupid school had been consumed; more losses in an hour than it had sustained over the entire rest of the journey. Four huge mouthfuls in all had been taken, cutting the school almost precisely in half down the centre, and for three days the two did nothing but attempt to reassemble themselves; their ceaseless journey of half a year brought to a full stop for the first time. Small-five and her sisters ate and healed and rested, shying well away from sunlight and watching the depths with a wary eye, obvious though it was that no two Gruskomish would ever mingle so close unless mating – and then, food would be the last thing on their minds.
After three days, the Fiskupids resumed their travel, and the greater accuracy of Nine-point’s statement was revealed less than a week later: at long last, their destination was in sight. Here in the colder waters of the south, a new sight came to their eyes, something bizarre in a way that none of them understood.
Very-white-what-is-it? asked Small-five, who’d gone from being the most withdrawn of their group to the most talkative with the acquisition of working language.
Not-known-find-out-All-fin, said Nine-point. All-fin cautiously moved up to the surface where the thing was lurking and poked it with her proboscis. It bobbed.
Floats-not-alive-very-hard-hurts-tastes-like-water-VERY-cold-not-dangerous, she flashed back.
Ice.
After no more than two days more travelling- very quickly, the Fiskupids were rushing now, knowing their travels were near an end – they were at the edge of the polar ice mass, surrounded by mountains and valleys of floating ice. The world was a maze again like the reefcolonies of Small-five’s youth, only one that hung down from above the surface rather than rising up from the depths.
For a time there was only wonder and exploration – and occasional surprise, such as when Dim-glow was nearly squashed by an overturning iceberg, or when Small-five tried to eat a small, scuttling thing with too many legs lairing in a great undersea icicle, which tried to pluck out her eye with a pair of claws almost five feet long.
But all around them, changes were happening; the last traces of home they had left vanishing. The Fiskupids were slowing down all around them, breaking up – the school only so recently reunited with so much confusion fragmenting naturally, splitting into a thousand thousand groups that swam to the edges of hundreds of bergs. The world made of life was gone, flowing into ice, where each tiny sliver-like individual burrowed and chipped and hummed its way into a tiny coffin, sealing itself alive.
Crazy-things, opined All-fin.
Make-us-hungry, said Nine-point. Find-new-foods-learn-new-hunts. Stay-close-no-knowing-what-hunts-here.
The sisters agreed on that, and they stayed close. It saved their lives more than a dozen times over those first few ignorant days; swimming nearly fin-to-fin, glowshines flashing in nervous chatter, the four sisters – none of whom could hope to hide in this strange world – passed as one bulky entity given a moment’s grace and poor eyesight, something that many of the polar predators possessed.
The food was strange here. Straggler Fiskupids kept them fed for the first few weeks, but soon none were left, every single one buried in ice or eaten by the mouthful. Instead, they searched for the markings of the Gible; long, gelatinous creatures that burrowed just beneath the surface of the icepack, fishing out tiny organisms from its crevices and pits, and returned the favour with their proboscises. They ate the flat, darkened, shapeless masses that were Eurenu, the floaters in the night-time that soaked up nutrients from the depths and drifted aimlessly in the currents, jetting away in a squirt of nauseating slime if you weren’t quick to catch them (but not too quick – a careless jab would puncture the sac that secreted those nauseating fluids into your mouth, where a more careful strike would excise it from the body, leaving an empty-tasting but filling mass). They even fed upon a small family-school of Raskljen – those strange, smaller migrants of the southern seas that were now barely half Small-five’s length at best, and she the shortest and most compact of her sisters. No amount of water-pounding with their strange eight-paired fins could let them outrun the dazzling flares of the sisters’ lights, and a particular strobing pattern that All-fin discovered seemed to send them into abrupt spasms if used head-on, making kills guaranteed whenever they managed to flush a school into an ambush. The flesh was sweet, made sweeter by the satisfaction of killing a close cousin to those predators that had haunted them so on the reefcolonies.
Such moments kept them sane, lights to remember in the dark night of the polar seas, when the world grew teeth bigger than you were.
The biggest surprise were the Nolohk. Wrapped in sheets and sheets of grown and re-grown armour, glitteringly opaque, the best way to tell them apart from any other icicle was to burst glowshine at them. A Nolohk’s glitter was only as deep as its first layer, and the sparkle didn’t reflect nearly as firmly. The other way was to get too close, and wait for the web of long, razor-sharp legs to snatch you out of midwater, where they would tear you to pieces small enough to fit inside its hundreds of tiny mouths. Dim-glow lost a third of one of her fins to the first they encountered, and with that reminder held close it was difficult to forget the risk.
The Crhheeh were more visible, less inclined to make you jump at shadows, but much more dangerous. They were eyeless, and no amount of bluffing with close-swimming glowshine would fool them into seeing anything less than four small meals: three for the Crheeh and one for its mother, who clung tightly to its back with fins merged into arteries, now both an extra maw and the resonance chamber that let the Crheeh sing its quiet, impossibly-high songs that made your ears ache and your eyes twitch. Of course, by the time that was happening, it was already charging at you, two slender mouths of slender teeth.
And of course, there were the Jarekindj. Far relatives of the wanderers of the deep tropics – fatter, less ferocious than her memory recalled – but still unmistakably close to the creature that had taken the lives of Small-five’s first sisters. Finless, a body that was one giant muscle, pulling their way through the water with brute force and strange sinuousness, with more teeth than were countable, studded from down their throats to across their heads, weapon, warning, and boast all at once. They were sluggish things, but they were not harmless, and Small-five fled at the nearest sight of them, often before her sisters had even glimpsed the first gleam of glowshine-on-fang.
The night was long, and it was dark. The world was more frightening than ever – full of teeth, scarce of food, with ice hemming you in at all sides and a bottomless chasm forever open beneath your fins. But Small-five was learning things, even when she wasn’t learning things – all unknowing, all by eating. As a youth, she had been nearly a creature of instinct. As a juvenile now, she knew thought, if mostly immediate. Her mind had grown steadily up ’till the present, slowly.
But now, eating her scarce new prey, fed upon strange things rising up from the deep polar trenches, which fed upon stranger things that brewed down below at the end of the earth, Small-five’s mind was blossoming, as were her sisters’. A tiny patch of glowing, growing brightness in the longest night in the world.