Work Text:
"He poked about with a bit of a stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a vagrant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers. He made little runnels that the tide filled and tried to crowd them with creatures. He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things" (Lord of the Flies, 61).
I.
She is alive but not, breathing with the slick wet slimy fluid of water between gills as though whittling a wooden figure, but she does not feel herself breathing, she feels a whoosh of lung and hiss of gill as though she were in a void of space, breathing out into an internal nothingness.
Her name is Orca, it is the name her mother coos at her. It is a frank, disinterested name. It means nothing to her like everything else, fades into the background of the nothingness she's fabricated. Another inch of muted darkness on the ocean floor, where the crawly things lie sleeping. She files Orca between mother and father, picturesque in their stillness. Her mother stares out from her mind's eye, royal blue and pearl-laced, her father solemn, earnest, green as stonewort. Her father always closes his wings a little tighter, the press of his jaw more angular in portraits. Orca notices this, notices her father's precarious position on the fringes of existence, like herself. Notices the propensity they share, the acumen, the quiet power, the elevation to a new plane.
The nothingness.
It lives and breathes as microorganisms live and breathe on algae, reflected in her father's eyes. He tries to escape it, tries to run and is captured by Scarlet, is made an example of in her infamous amphitheater.
Orca never sees her father again. Her mother weeps nightly, and the mornings bring her ashy eyes and a new preoccupancy for her writing. The ink stains on her talons grow darker, darker in a metaphorical way, maybe, something Orca read in a scroll once, something that evades her now. Something she might laugh at, if she could remember.
Simply another moment in the vacuum of nothingness.
Because Orca is different. She has power. She feels the thrumming in her claws like fire runs through her veins rather than blood. And maybe it's so, maybe she has no blood—maybe she is an infinitely existing creature in a cosmic mass of empty space, creating for itself the world in which it sees. Nothing else is real but her, she knows this and reminds herself every night before bed. Nothing is real but what she creates.
And she has power. Yes, yes, power. Power gives her purpose. Purpose, gives her power. Either or. One and the same. They blend together until they are indistinguishable from each other, like two dragonets in one egg fusing limb to limb, or how scavengers look, alike in their strange crop of head fur and muddy, ubiquitous pelts.
She's only ever seen one. Her mother isn't flippant anymore about letting Orca get too far away, ever since her father disappeared. Now she trails behind her in the Deep Palace, lives vicariously through the silver dolphins passing by on their way to the Bay of a Thousand Scales.
Occasionally, she kills one. Soft gray flesh gives beneath her teeth, and the scent of blood awakens the patterns on the undersides of the wings, riles her until she's forced to hunt down the rest of the pod, one by one, methodically and brutally, even the calves with their sweet round eyes and smiling faces.
It isn't any different, killing them. Blood flows hot under her claws, even in summer waters, and flesh is flesh and meat is meat.
The interminable aching pull of the nothingness never abates, but it does begin to grate.
II.
When she is four years old, a plan begins to build itself, as though it comes from nothing; as though it comes from the deepest watery abysses and not the recesses of her mind. She fabricates it slowly, with meticulous precision, never dares to write it down on a scrap of scroll or slate.
It is imperative that no one knows.
Not that it would matter. She has power, and power gives her purpose. It doesn't change anything but the fear that it strikes in other dragons. This power—this unknowable, unthinkable purpose.
No other dragon will ever know. She buries it in the furthest fathoms of rationale and bides her time, eats octopus rolls and garnished crab and the primest cuts of whale at the royal banquets and doesn't complain. Her mother is pleased with her noncommittal politeness, with her etiquette, with her studies.
The classics are exceedingly important, dear, her mother tells her always, so much so that she begins to get the feeling her mother only does it to see the flashing of her own scales, you must study them well. I expect you to take up writing, too. Perhaps when you're a bit older.
She's disconcerted by that. Writing is no good. Words don't come to a scroll or slate the same way they come to her mind, eloquent and analytic. They jumble and spill over crumpled parchment and don't fit right with her thoughts. And to think—what if she were to accidentally scribble something down that revealed her plan, even minimally? What if her mother were to know?
It doesn't matter. It never matters. She has a purpose, and that purpose gives her power.
There is nothing anyone else can do to take that from her.
In nothingness, there is no light, but there is also no darkness. She feels much the same way: there is no light in her, but no darkness either. She only is. She exists in the fragments of time and will exist until the end of time, for she is time. She is creation and destruction. She is genesis and terminus.
She is the line that connects the beginning and the end, the end and the beginning. The line that exhales forever and always.
III.
She is seven years old.
She knows what she will do.
Power gives her purpose, and purpose lends her power, and these things become as indistinguishable as two dragonets in one egg, amalgamated in their viscous prison.
There will never be another. She will be Queen until the end of time and then again when time doubles back. She will be forever and always, existing in her nothingness, in the space between dreams and reality where things slip through the cracks.
She knows this as she sharpens her claws. She knows this as she files down the edges of her teeth into deadly points. She knows this as she steps into the arena, when she sees her mother's grave expression, her cowering form, the wet, unadulterated fear in her eyes. Fear of her own dragonet. She could laugh. She will. She will when this is all over. She will until the end of time and the beginning again.
There will be no one to tell this story to, no one important, at least—no daughters. She made sure of that.
Her mother's tail twists around her decorative narwhal horn, trembling. She paces into the arena.
The terror drifting under her mother's usual, calm milky flower petal scent likens the blood in her veins to fire, to burning magma, as though she isn’t a SeaWing at all. As though she is something incomprehensible and unindentifiable. Something that had crawled out of those deep ocean abysses and made herself out of clay into the shape of a dragonet. That had snapped the neck of Coral's real dragonet and taken her place.
She smiles, feels real delight shatter through the nothingness.
In a few hours she will be Queen Orca, cleansing her mother's blood from her stonewort green scales.
She is her father's daughter, after all.