World Warden, page 30
Elias looked at all of them in turn, then down at Tristan in his arms.
Is he going to be okay? he asked the wurl.
They did not understand the question fully, but they did settle down around the two of them, still projecting reassurance in waves. Night fell, but the wurl did not move from where they were. Elias realized they were acting like guards again, protecting both of them from the night.
No, more than that, he corrected himself. They are acting like friends.
Elias tried to stay awake, but exhaustion got the best of him. He was so tired that not even his nightmares were able to wake him up. He only blinked his eyes awake after bright daylight disturbed him the next morning.
Tristan.
He panicked when he realized Tristan was not lying next to him. He sat upright, heart hammering, and looked around the platform.
“Good morning,” Tristan said. It looked like he had been petting Vanor.
Words failed Elias for a moment. “Tristan? Tristan!”
Elias jumped to his feet, ignoring the wave of dizziness, and all but ran toward Tristan. He stopped short of crashing into him, still concerned.
“Come here,” Tristan said to him, opening his arms wide.
The two men embraced, and Elias was relieved to see that Tristan was no longer trembling. “How are you doing? How are you feeling? Does your stomach hurt? Have you been ill again?”
Tristan chuckled. “Slow down, slow down. I’m okay, I think. Nothing hurts anymore, although I’m really thirsty. And hungry. That’s nothing new, though, right?”
“Are you sure? How about your throat? Do you have a fever, or do you feel funny in any way?”
“No, Eli. I’m fine.”
Eli. It’s the second time he’s called me that, Elias realized. Only his family had ever used that nickname for him.
Elias closed his eyes and gave a silent prayer of thanks. “I’m so happy, Tristan. I thought… I thought the worst yesterday.”
“So did I, to be honest,” Tristan admitted. “I’m not doing great, mind you, but I don’t think I’m going to die because I tried to eat something that I wasn’t supposed to.”
“I’m so sorry I offered you the fish. I thought—”
“Don’t do that to yourself. I decided to eat it. We had to know, right? And now we do: only you can eat meat. I suppose the rest of us normal humans on New Skye will have to remain vegetarian. Can’t say I’m sad about it either. That fish was slimy and gross.”
Elias laughed nervously, releasing part of the tension that had kept him on high alert ever since the previous morning. “It is kind of slimy.”
“And you should be really thirsty,” Tristan told him. “I don’t remember much from yesterday, but I do remember you giving me water. You didn’t drink anything, did you?”
Even the mention of water was painful. Elias shook his head.
“I suspected as much. Come on, let’s check the condenser. Whatever’s in there, that’s for you.”
“You were sick,” Elias argued. “You probably lost a lot of fluids, and dehydration is a big danger. You should have it.”
Tristan sighed theatrically. “Fine. Fifty-fifty.”
They each drank some water while the wurl milled about, projecting happiness at Tristan’s recovery. It was such a pure emotion that Elias could not help but smile, thankful that his family was safe.
My family.
The thought was surprising as he first put it into words, but it rang true. He had a deep connection to each of the four beings that had decided to accompany him on his desperate journey. Every one unique in their own way, he felt connected to them all, even if three of them could not speak.
The happiness and relief faded as the hours bled into one another, a haze of thirst under the searing overhead light of the sun. The reflections on the surface of the water were blinding, and when Narev offered part of his catch of that day to Elias, he realized he was far too thirsty to care about food anymore.
He and Tristan sat together, sheltering in the shade of the wurl and fashioning improvised hats out of their shirts, which they put over their heads to protect themselves from the heat. They held hands, but Elias could tell that Tristan was very weak. Tristan napped intermittently as the unbearable hours of midday went by and only woke up fully when the sun was already close to the horizon in the west.
When Elias realized Tristan was awake, he opened his mouth to ask him how he was, but his own lips were so parched that he could not get words out. He contented himself with a faint smile, squeezing Tristan’s hand. He received a weak squeeze in return.
The three wurl, but in particular Narev and Vanor, began to radiate concern again. It was hard for Elias to explain to them why they had not eaten any of the fish Narev had caught, or why they were so thirsty when the wurl themselves did not have that problem. A tired part of Elias’s mind attempted to consider the interesting scientific question of discovering how the wurl were able to remain hydrated in the salty environment of the ocean, but his thoughts were disordered. He found he was having a hard time concentrating.
Dusk brought some relief, but neither Tristan nor he moved from where they sat. They shared what little water the condenser had been able to procure, but having a few mouthfuls of precious liquid was somehow worse than enduring the thirst in quiet resignation. The two of them sat down again, their backs against each other providing mutual support. Elias clearly felt Tristan’s warmth on his own back and perceived also the steady rise and fall of his boyfriend’s breath. They did not speak. Elias watched the interminable slate of the ocean water stretching out forever, featureless, dark. He wrestled with resignation, with more guilt.
This was a mistake, he thought miserably. There was not enough water. Simply not enough. The ocean—the world itself—was too big, too dangerous.
He would have cried if he had been able to, but all he did was shut his eyes tight, utterly defeated. The reality of their situation crushed him with its overwhelming weight.
We are going to die out here. We are going to die, and I can’t do anything about it.
He realized he felt disappointment most of all. He had been so certain he could save his brother and Sizzra’s daughter. He had been so confident in his own strength. Now that his luck had finally run out, he realized his bravado had been foolish, perhaps from the very beginning.
A choked sound escaped him, halfway between a grunt and a scream.
“Don’t beat yourself up too much,” Tristan said, his voice barely above a whisper, responding to Elias’s thoughts in that uncanny way of his, almost as if he had been able to read them. “We tried.”
“I should have planned better. I should have considered so many things.”
“We did what we could,” Tristan responded calmly. “We got far.”
Not far enough, Elias thought, but something about the tone in Tristan’s words stopped his self-destructive train of thought. He fell silent for a while, thinking about what Tristan had said. Eventually he experienced a shift in perspective and realized Tristan was right. This was out of their control. They had tried.
“Yeah,” Elias said at last, his tone both rueful and accepting. “We got far.”
The absence of the sun submerged them in the familiar inky blackness of the ocean at night, and the welcome coolness made the thirst less of an insistent scream and more of a background drone. For a while, Elias and Tristan watched the night.
The wurl suddenly jumped onto their feet, their eye clusters flashing in the dark. Almost as if they had rehearsed it, all three jumped into the water simultaneously, with a big splash that made the entire ocean maw wobble. Elias had expected to hear the familiar bubbling sound of them diving to the bottom to hunt, but instead he clearly heard all of them swimming away from the platform, due north, so fast that it was less than a minute before he was not able to hear their splashes anymore.
It had been unexpected, and it somehow hurt. Elias had the distinct impression that the wurl were abandoning them at last.
“Where are they going, do you think?” Tristan asked quietly.
Elias shrugged. Even that motion tired him out. “Maybe they’re going to try on their own now. Maybe they understand that this last part of the journey is for us alone.”
“Good for them,” Tristan replied, with no hint of resentment. “They protected us as much as they could.”
“Yeah. I do hope they’ll try to save Oscar, as well as the new Spine queen.”
“Do you think they’ll have a chance? The three of them, on their own?”
“They’re strong. Intelligent. I think they learned a lot during this journey with us, so yeah. They have a shot.”
“Good.”
More silence. None of the moons were out, so the blackness was particularly dense. The stars overhead were the only things that gave Elias any sense of direction, of where they were.
“We never did name any constellations,” he said eventually. “A few of these are not visible from Portree.”
“Any ideas?”
“I’m not sure. You see that red star over there?”
Tristan shifted, very slowly, so he would be able to see in the direction Elias was pointing. “Yeah.”
“There are two other stars nearby, fainter, but also kind of reddish. The three of them make a kind of triangle.”
“I see them.”
“What do they remind you of?”
“Maybe…,” Tristan began but then fell silent for a few seconds. “It’s like their eyes. Like the eyes of a wurl.”
“That’s what I was thinking. And look, I think there’s a nebula surrounding the stars. Kind of looks like a crown around the eyes, doesn’t it?”
“Kind of.”
“It reminds me of her.”
“Sizzra?” Tristan asked.
“Yes. Maybe we can name the constellation after her. We can call it the Spine Queen.”
“That’s a great idea, Elias. You should add that to the stellar cartography charts when we….”
Elias reached for Tristan’s hand. “That’s okay. The two of us will know.”
The stars were a seemingly endless canopy that appeared to shelter them. Some of them were reflected on the water itself, faint lights in the distance that shimmered and swayed in ghostly shades of purple and pink. As the ocean currents carried them onward, the lights on the surface of the water got brighter, blinking lazily, almost beckoning.
Wait. Those aren’t stars.
Elias sat up straighter and looked again, squinting. He was not imagining it. In the distance, there were faint blinking pinpoints that phosphoresced very close to the water.
“Tristan, look.”
The two of them sat side by side so they would be able to observe the strange phenomenon together.
“What are those?”
“No idea,” Elias replied.
A few minutes later, they reached the first of the lights. Elias watched, entranced, as he realized that the glow was produced by bioluminescence from some kind of slender and immobile organism that poked out of the surface of the water, almost like the stalk of a tall reed growing in a river. A thin tube or stem rose about three meters into the air, where it ended in a starfish-like cap with many glowing and swaying tendrils that produced the same ethereal light, pink and purple and light blue. The tendrils floated gently in the air like leaves in the breeze. Under the water, the stalks of the plants were visible for quite a distance, bioluminescent as well. The entire structure pulsated slowly, going from full brightness to dim nothingness, and then back to its wondrous shine.
It was also not the only one. There were dozens upon dozens of the structures all around them now, and the currents took them through a veritable maze of the strange trees that would briefly burst with even brighter light if touched accidentally by their floating platform. As Elias and Tristan went deeper into the bioluminescent forest, the soothing light appeared to suffuse the atmosphere around them with a pleasant floral scent of growing things blooming.
“This is amazing,” said Tristan with unmistakable awe.
“It’s so beautiful,” Elias agreed, noticing small fluttering specks of light among the trees. One of these specks floated closer, swaying in the air, and landed on Elias’s knee. It was a small insect of some kind, with three V-shaped wings that gave off a magenta glow. Elias smiled, marveling at the beauty of the tiny creature as it took off into the night after a few moments. More creatures like it darted in and out of sight, like Terran fireflies or fallen stars from the sky above come to illuminate their way.
The forest appeared to be never-ending. Within it Elias saw other creatures in the water, darting in and out of the roots of the ocean trees. Some of those beings glowed in other shades—yellow and lime and violet. Many did not, but their shapes were clearly visible in the water nevertheless. Elias knew a brief moment of vertigo as he realized he was floating above an endless expanse of water, an entire world within a world with secrets he could never hope to understand. He had thought the things he had seen so far had given him an idea of the vastness of the planet he called home, but he now understood that there was no possible way to comprehend everything that surrounded him. Oddly, the idea gave him peace. It was okay to be a small individual human. Somehow, the majesty of nature reassured him.
Elias’s link blinked once and then beeped with a very specific ringtone, the electronic sound completely at odds with the natural wonders around them. Elias silenced the link with a tap and smiled.
“What was that?” Tristan asked.
“A reminder of something important.”
“Something important?”
“It’s past midnight now,” Elias explained. “And today is July the fifth.”
“Today is….”
“Happy birthday, Tristan.” Elias leaned forward and kissed Tristan on the lips. “Today you turn seventeen. You’re officially an adult.”
Tristan appeared not to know what to say. The bioluminescence around them allowed Elias to see Tristan’s face as it broke into a bittersweet smile. “Thank you, Eli.”
“I didn’t get you anything,” Elias apologized.
“You’re here. That’s the best coming-of-age present I could ask for.”
Elias thought for a moment. “On the plus side, you are one of only two humans to ever see the Forest of Light.”
“Nice name,” Tristan commented. “You’re right. This is a very nice present. And Eli?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Elias gasped.
“Tristan, you—”
“I mean it,” Tristan interrupted. He touched Elias’s cheek gently with his fingertips. “You’re my soulmate. I was scared to admit it before. I’m not sure why. But these past few weeks with you have been amazing and scary and wonderful, and I’m not afraid anymore. Life’s too short to keep hiding how I really feel. If this is it for us, I just wanted you to know how much I love you. I want to be with you always, if that’s okay.”
Tristan gave him a shy smile.
Elias’s heart overflowed with love.
He kissed Tristan and held him in his arms as he experienced pure joy.
“I love you too,” Elias whispered into Tristan’s ear. “With all my heart.”
They shared another kiss and then admired the trees that were slowly thinning as they appeared to be exiting the forest. Elias’s happiness went deeper than the exhaustion and thirst. He felt at peace.
“How old would I be in Ionas years?” Tristan asked after a bit. “You know, like on Earth.”
Elias did some quick math. “You’d be about twenty years and, uh, four months old.”
“Gotcha. We should have a party when we get back. Celebrate your birthday and mine. Yours is in November, right? The seventeenth.”
“You remember?”
“Of course. You used to invite me over to your house for your birthday parties when we were little. You know, before your antisocial, sarcastic loner phase.”
Elias chuckled softly. “I deserve that. And you’re right. We should have a big party when we get back.”
They fell silent again as they left the Forest of Light behind. The night was completely quiet, so it was easy for Elias to notice the sound.
“What’s that?” he asked. It sounded like splashing in the distance.
“Don’t know.”
The two of them remained alert while the splashing got louder. Very soon, glowing eye clusters intermittently visible in the dark revealed the fact that wurl were approaching.
“Are those Singers?” Tristan asked.
A faint mental message reached Elias. It was full of urgency.
“No,” he replied. “It’s the guys. But they’re in a hurry. In a big hurry.”
The three approaching wurl raised a ruckus with their splashing and reached the platform in a few minutes. Siv remained in the water while Vanor and Narev jumped up and rushed to where Elias and Tristan sat.
Elias received the urgent emotion much more clearly now, from all three of them.
Vanor and Narev lowered their bodies.
“They want us to ride them,” he told Tristan. “And we have to hurry.”
“Why? What is so—”
At that moment, the night stillness was rent by a sound. It was a huge noise of rushing air and bubbling water, but on a scale that Elias had never heard before. The entire ocean appeared to tremble, and a wave reached them, coming from the north.
Hurry, the wurl echoed, almost shaping thought into words. Hurry.
“We have to get on,” Elias told Tristan. “Now.”
“But—the equipment. The condenser.”
Another sound, alarmingly close this time. Something was moving over the surface of the water, distant, indistinct in the darkness.
Something big enough to block out a large portion of the stars in the sky.
Hurry.
Elias stashed the condenser in his pocket.
“We need to go!” he said.
There was another wave, and the sound of rushing air repeated itself, much more clearly.
It sounds like breathing, Elias thought as he used the last of his remaining energy to climb onto Narev’s back, securing his position as best as he was able to. The only thing he took with him was Sizzra’s spine.
