Chapter Text
Senna swims out to the new island because her cousin says she's too cowardly to do it. She swims out there, and her heart pounds the whole time, and it's hard to breathe around the salt-water, and at one point she almost starts crying in terror when the waves get really rough and she's not sure she can swim through it.
But she does.
It's not smart. With all the melting, with all the warm currents, it's dangerous out here, so dangerous that the Elders are starting to talk about needing to move inland. To start learning from the other tribes how to hunt for land animals, instead of fishing from the Ocean, the way the People were meant to.
Every time she hears them talk about that (when she sneaks out of the summer-tent and down to the gatherings, hiding in the shadows and wishing hard that no one will notice her), Senna feels sick. The People are supposed to live with the Ocean. That's how it is. That's how it should be. But even the benders, the ones who control the waters - even they can't make the Ocean safe enough now.
Some of the elders are saying that the warmth is the fault of the benders, anyway. That humans aren't supposed to be able to use that kind of power. That the benders have thrown everything out of balance, and if the People just got rid of them, things might go back to normal.
Senna's pretty sure that's wrong. But they say it even louder now that there's an island where no island should be, covered by plants nobody knows, sitting outside the inlet.
Senna keeps dreaming about it, the kind of dream that almost feels like a memory. Dreaming about going out to it, and of a great light there. When she tells her cousin, Turik laughs at her and says she'd never have the guts to swim all the way out there, by herself, so she should always know it's a dream.
That's when she snarls at him. That's when she strips off her leggings and her summer-weight coat; that's when she ignores his shouts and takes a running dive off the lowest of the little cliffs and hits the water - the too-warm water - with a shock, like a knife. That's when she starts swimming.
But now that she's close, there's no shallows; now that she's close, she sees the island has to be floating, and there's nothing, no way that she can see, to get out of the water and onto the island. And she's tired, far, far too tired to swim back.
Now Senna stares at the island, tries to tread water against the waves well enough to stay afloat and to stay in the same place, and tries to stop crying.
Until under the water, something moves. Until under the water something touches her feet and then (as she shrieks and then cuts off the sound) pushes up, closes around her, like the pull of a song-crab net, and then lifts her out of the water.
It's soft. It's warm under her body. It has fur like a seal, wet and oiled. Senna struggles to her feet and then falls over, as it moves; struggles to her feet again and holds onto one of the - one of the huge claws, that's what's arched over her, huge claws in a vast paw, oh spirits please be kind - and tries not to shiver in the air that's cold on wet skin and hair.
She falls over again when the massive claws open, leaving her on the flat of the paw, and looking into the eyes of a leviathan. Numbly, awed, Senna realizes it's not an island. It's the creature's shell. The island is the creature's back. She stays where she fell, staring, with her mouth open, as the head rises further out of the water and looks at her for a long time.
You have come, it says, at last. Senna can't tell if the voice is in her ears and so deep and great that she feels it in her bones, or if the creature is speaking right into her spirit. It doesn't matter. Whichever it is, her entire being resonates with the words. It is good.