The life of Small-five-point-burst-of-light, or Small-five for short, began as her mother hunted down her father.
It was a great chase over the reefcolony, back and forth, her father using every inch of the greater manoeuvrability his smaller frame gave him, her mother carefully conserving strength and waiting for him to tire, taking each turn with caution lest her greater bulk cause her to overshoot her quarry. It was a great chase, but in the end her father’s strength began to flag, and he twisted just a little too little, made a tight turn too loosely, and the bony proboscis of Small-five’s mother caught him in his midsection. He screamed that whistling cry that males used to stun small prey, but it was useless against the thickened and reinforced hide of his captor, and his protest soon faded away as the numbness of her toxins set in, a pleasurable paralysis.
The docility of her mate now assured, Small-five’s mother dragged him – gently – down and into the shelter of the reef, out of sight of any predators that might happen by. There she began the business of implanting her eggs, each packet of them guided gently from their nestling-spot on her underbelly to the male’s receptacle by her rear fins. Exposed to the currents for several days now against her skin, their shells were toughened enough to resist the corrosion of the male’s insides, yet not so thick as to prevent fertilization. Before long the last egg was in place, and Small-five’s mother withdrew her proboscis and moved off, her duty done, her appetite awakened by the energy she’d expended over the past hour.
Small-five’s father hovered there in the water for a brief while as the venom cleared his nervous system, as its nutrients were absorbed into his bloodstream. His mate might not be around to care for their young, but she would ensure that he was fit enough to protect them as they matured. There were strange catalysts and triggers hidden inside that sedating fluid, ones that would alter him significantly over the course of the young’s maturation. Not that he knew it, of course. He was a male, and nonsapient. All Small-five’s father knew was that he felt very good and wanted to go lie low somewhere for a while so he could rest. So he did.
For the next nine days Small-five’s father lay low and rested, hidden in a small coral chamber in the sunnier part of the reef, close to the surface, dreaming. What finally brought him forth was sharp, itching hunger – and for something bigger than the small fry that he’d devoured for the bulk of his life. He squirmed his way out of the cave and into the wide and whirlingly chaotic world of the reef again, his sides ablaze with new colours triggered by strange hormones and odd genes, movements quickened with fresh hair-trigger muscles. He ignored a school of his old favourite food, soft-finned, slow-swimming, immature Ooliku, and chased a lone Stairrow around the corals, its wide-eyed, blunt body suddenly too slow to escape his new speed. He ate it quickly – he did everything so quickly now – and moved on, hunting, nosing.
Small-five’s father ate and ate and ate for days with barely a rest as the eggs matured inside him, every bite and sup of nutrition going to his young and to fuel his own gradual transformation, day by day, leaving him hungry and fierce. His bulk grew along with his quickness, transforming him from a predator of the meek reef-dwellers to a powerful hunter of the swift in the open seas, where he swam boldly now, far from his old home grounds. Tusks grew from a mass of little prickly teeth, giving him long spears to grip and pierce with, to mash his prey into those now-serrated banks of needles inside his mouth before his jaw movements shredded its skin and flesh apart. He ate and ate and ate, in the heart of great swarms of darting Ooliku as they mated, under the chillier cold of the poles where things that could consume him in two bites lurked, and once even in the panicked wake of a Gruskomish Godfish. He was insatiable and bold.
Come two-hundred-and-fourteen days after Small-five’s father had been hunted down by her mother, his hunger calmed. He was nearly thrice the size he’d been before, all bright colours and sharp teeth, and he was ready to give birth. He eschewed his canny and elusive prey and set his fins for the softness and colours of the reef he’d been born in, a swim he made with slow and sure strokes, saving his strength for the birth. His arrival sent schools of smaller life careening away in alarm, sending tremors of worry and fear up from the fringes down into the bustling heart of the slow-growing shell-dwellers whose corpses built the reef upon their backs. He ignored them, careless of the chaos his path brought as he reached the sunniest shallows, so slight in depth that the flatness of his great red back, broad and bent with muscle, nearly broke the surface.
Small-five’s father gave birth to her then, along with some eight-hundred-and-forty-four brothers and seventy-six sisters. He showed little emotion other than concentration and some discomfort throughout the twenty minutes this took, and when it was finished he took his leave immediately, setting out back to the deep waters, where he could feed again and regain his strength. But this was not his fault. Behind him he left many confused and disoriented young lifeforms, operating on instinct and wonder. Before the day was done there were five-hundred-and-twelve brothers and forty-three sisters of Small-five hidden around the reef in small places, operating on instinct and fear. The reef was a small, soft place only for their father. For them it was a dangerous and very large world.
Small-five’s brothers dispersed far and wide, and she never saw any of them again. They hid in dark corners and nooks and fed upon the tiny particles of matter and meat in the water, timid and fleeting and alone. Small-five’s sisters were closer – they banded together in small companies of three-to-five, keeping as many eyes as possible on all sides and angles, each ready to flash out a warning to the others from the bioluminescent jelly-filled tubes that snaked around their bodies, just under the surface of the skin. At this age all that the sisters could do was shine brightly or remain dim and hidden. The former they used to startle predators and prey alike, the latter they used to hide or wait in ambush.
As they fed – on larger prey that their brothers did, on the slow and the dying and dead – they grew, and as they grew they learned small semblances of control over their glowshine. Names came soon afterwards, half-thought-of patterns of habit that came to mind whenever their sisters lit up as they each flexed and turned and tumbled into their own particular patterns and habits. Before this Small-five-point-burst-of-light had been in company with three of her sisters, but now she was in company with Three-second-glimmer, Dim-glowing-four-point-pulse, and Pulsing-two-point-fin-shine.
By this time they had begun to grow past the living detritus of the reef as their prey, and they started to feed upon the small and the slow. Their small proboscises were now strong and hard enough to poke small holes in the shells of the young of the great Gloudulites. While they sat, firmly attached to the invincible carapaces of their parents, the company would descend upon them and jointly crack them, eating their flesh from the inside out as they squirmed. Eventually the cleaners of the Gloudulites would arrive to quell their feasting – the multi-legged, cadaverous Kleeistrojatch – and then it would be time to flee, shining brightly to dazzle their assailants and halt their sickle-scything limbs as they swam out of reach. If they were quick and daring enough they might dart past those claws in that one moment of shocked surprise and snap their proboscises into their soft and vulnerable eyes, snagging a fresh if lean meal as they escaped.
The one downside of preying upon the Gloudulite young was their small size and the effort involved. If the Kleeistrojatch were particularly hasty in their defence of their host’s offspring, Small-five’s company might depart with naught to show for their shell-drilling efforts but a few nibbles of flesh, or maybe nothing at all. Still, they were an excellent fallback food, and easy to find – an elder Gloudulite, shell-spire grown so massive as to erupt out of the water, ponderously heaving its way across the reefcolony floor with a cacophonous scrabbling of its many gripping legs against frail and crumbling shell-matter, was scarcely difficult to locate, although they ranged far apart and wandered constantly, if slowly. Small-five and her three sisters grew to memorize the positions of the giants, and note the directions of their wanderings.
They were growing still larger and stronger by then, yet were still young. They were now larger than the Kleeistrojatch, and would often linger to sup over a meal until the cleaners arrived in overwhelming numbers, gleefully flaring at them and sending them scuttling back with pained black eyes. Secure in their youth and burgeoning strength and cushioned by time from that traumatizing first day of life, they’d forgotten fear. Oh, they were careful of predators, taking to the nooks and crannies when a Stairrow cruised by, a flat, stupid mouth attached to a sharp and predatory brain, or worse still, the sleek and delicate forms of a school of Verrineeach, each individual in the hundred-strong school linked firmly in thought and motion to each other, tiny brains sparking with electrical impulses against each other to create something larger and more dangerous. But they avoided them by route, by instinct, as a precaution rather than the very real hazard that they were.
This changed the day Small-five and her three sisters meandered their way out to near the edge of the reefcolony and found themselves hungry.
This was neither scarcely rare nor scarcely alarming. There was a Gloudulite near, questing in its eternal trek of bottom-feeding, a truly exhaustive kind that ate the actual seafloor out from under it. With the ease and practice of familiarity, the four descended upon the upper reaches of its swirling shell and flew upon its young, wriggling in excitement as shells cracked apart and soft meat was exposed to the air and snapped up into underslung maws. In this brief, practiced blitzkrieg they could claim perhaps two each if fortune and speed favoured them, rippling lights on their sides suggesting thinly-defended targets or incautious young that yet peeped from their lairs. This was a good one; the cleaners were slow, buffeted back from their advances in the rippling currents that breathed their way up from the deep edges of the reefbed. New pulses rippled in the water, even throwing some of them free from their host’s back, claws waving wildly and tails flapping as they attempted to return to home. Small-five and her sisters thought little of it, then sparkled in alarm as they too began to bob uncontrollably in the water. The Gloudulite was turning under them, faster than they’d ever known one of the plodding behemoths to move, spinning towards the blue wall beyond the reef. As their eyes – their large, sensitive, oh-so-vital eyes – turned to it, the maw appeared, so quickly that it could not be seen approaching. One moment it wasn’t there, the next it was.
The next next moment it slammed into the Gloudulite’s side, a blade of teeth backed by tonnes of muscle and flesh. The giant’s shell fractured and shattered, splinters of fang-sharp calcium-based protective armour slicing through the water and impaling young and cleaners alike. A large sliver sped by Small-five’s right fin, and it neatly clipped off its tip. She was filled with such momentary shock at the injury that it took the flow of blood in the water for her to notice that the same shard had struck her sister directly – her head hung on a tiny strand of meat, body limp and twitching as its lights shut down.
The terror she felt probably saved Small-five’s life. She fled – somewhere, anywhere else – and was aided in her panic by a chance of current, a byproduct of the struggle occurring beneath her. She had never met a Jarekindj before, and it would be years before she saw another or learned anything of them or their habits, but she would never forget that moment, where there was nothing to be see in the whole universe but a gaping mouth, ring-shaped, studded with silvery tusks.
Small-five swam a long way in her panicked flight, unguided by anything but instinct, which served her well, directing her away from the reef-verge and the cataclysmic struggle that consumed it, away from the deep places and towards the softer shallows, where the world was smaller and warmer and there was less food but it was far safer, oh so much safer. When she stopped, trembling with exhaustion, there was nothing left to do but think, and her thoughts did not please her. She did not know where her sisters had gone. She was alone, for the first true time in her life, and it terrified her. No eyes to watch for hers, no strengths to aid hers, no reassurance, no soundless exclamations of light and thought to be passed back and forth. The loss of the group was a blow to her chances of survival, but far greater injury was dealt to her psyche. The sun rose and fell four times before she overcame her newfound timidity and poked her head out of the cranny where she’d shoved herself, a chink between two great masses of reefcolony that was barely wide enough for her to fit through.
It took her some time to extract herself, slowly and fearfully, tensing at every sound, not a single light showing for fear of what might see her. Only quiet and darkness met her worry, and she swam silently and slowly until the sun rose, belly empty and screaming for food. That problem, at least, was solved rapidly – a school of Stairrow larva swarmed into her face as she nosed about the reef floor, startled and alarmed. Small-five lashed out, and her instincts once again saved her, bringing her three or four larva as a meal in several passes before she had the time to think about exactly what was happening. The larva had been hiding, yes, but relatively out in the open for the day – they were night dwellers, who took refuge in tiny crevices during the daytime for fear of predators like herself. The reef was quiet even for these shallow strands, and she felt an inkling of puzzlement.
A full belly gave her mind strength, and with effort she was able to force back both despair and apathy to rest her thoughts on a cause: she must find her sisters again. For all she knew the other two had been sent spinning any-which-way just as she had. The best thing to do would be to return to the last place they’d been and search, as she was sure they would. Fear rose, crawling along her light-tubes like an infestation of worms, but she overruled it. She was full, she was as rested as she could expect, and she had a goal. There was no room left for fear at the moment – it may have saved her life, but now it was inconvenient and must be ignored. With difficulty.
The swim took some time – more than it had to arrive. Small-five had no wings of panic, no strange currents to aid her, and the daylight had flown out of the sky by the time she drew near. She had mustered the courage to draw a little glowshine from herself, enough to light her way without making herself obvious, and felt it drain away with her courage as she approached that blue-black void ahead, the murky wall that had given her the mouth. Yet it was not without detail or feature, not anymore. Shapes of all sizes flittered and eeled across it, surged and cruised. The reef’s verge was aswarm with predators from the smallest to the largest, the missing bounty of the reef, and they were ignoring each other, streaming over and about in their haste to swarm over the gigantic, broken husk of the Gloudulite’s shell. Even half-shattered it seemed indestructible, – its smallest fragments thicker than her entire body and then some – even as it bared its secret insides to the world. The Gloudulite itself was missing but for small shreds, the last bits of a feast that must have feted the entire reef’s carnivores for all the days of Small-five’s retreat into herself. The Jarekindj had fed upon it thoroughly by its standards, leaving only what it must’ve dismissed as tiny scraps. All things are relative.
Small-five hovered there on the edge, watching as the last bits were cleaned away. She saw the truce of bounty beginning to fray around the edges, the first snaps, first aggressive movements, first threat displays, and she knew that she must leave before the second, violent feast began. But she lingered for just a moment longer, searching for lights that she could not see.
