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“She’s never where she is.
She’s only inside her head.”
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Calypso breeches the water slowly, fur blanketed in a veil of algae.
Dawn has arrived, and the familiar noise of chirping fliers begin to start again in their sweet aubades, the treeline coming alive with sound. The ground rumbles with her every step, and as the shoreline recedes when she comes onto the bank, her feet make massive prints into the sand. The sunlight filters through the trees sharply, its harsh gold pouring into her eyes. She blinks away, and peers back.
The sarcosiris she had displaced re-enters the water from the other side of the lake, causing ripples to bounce and disappear into the languid waves. Huh. What was she doing again?
Right. The grove.
Memory, or, well, a good one, was hard to come by these days. For the first thousand or so years, her memory retained its clarity, but as the centuries flipped by it had become blurrier and blurrier, once detailed faces becoming shapes. Names became jumbled, and soon she had given up on remembering them all.
How many years had it been, since she first hatched? Six…six thousand…and…
Gah! The grove!
Her trudge quickens, slightly, but the change in pace is narrowly noticeable of you weren’t squinting. Being so large and burdensome has its drawbacks, after all, and being terribly sluggish is one of them.
Still, she’s moving faster, which is an effort that can be commended. Even if there’s no one to commend her, with her (mostly) solitary lifestyle.
Uprooting trees in her wake, she eventually looms over onto the meadow with two keen eyes. Her sense of smell and sense of hearing have dulled over the ages, but at least her eyes have remained roughly the same, able to see thirty leagues out and pin-point small fractures in the riverbed rocks in front of her. Here he is!
She makes a great rumbling sound, startling two Brequeweks from the nearby branches, and towers over him with a friendly grunt. He rises sleepily from his rest with unsmiling eyes, and his ribbons rub his neck in comfort.
“Hello, Odysseus,” she croons.
“Good day, Calypso,” he says, as if biting back shrieking words.
She tilts her head. He was in a bad mood today — again — and she was certainly old enough to recognise why. “You know you can’t leave without me,” she states, with her silvery, booming voice. “I’ll water you now.”
“I can’t remember the last time I got the water myself,” he blurts, indignant. “Or the last time I felt it coolly running down my throat. I’m fine on my own, Calypso.”
“I’m sure you are,” she says, derisively. “But you lost that privilege when you tried to run away from me. I’m keeping you here so you don’t make mistakes like that again.”
The Coniferon’s ribbons tense, but then relax. “Give me the water,” he demands, dryly.
Calypso hums in victory and shakes the water out of her mane. His leaves absorb the brunt of it and everything else sinks into the ground.
She doesn’t understand why he insists so much on being a bad friend — her other Coniferon friends weren’t like this, she reasons, so rebellious and stubborn. Maia was kind and chatty, and Glory was standoffish but calm. Odysseus was just rude, and the two others had died over two thousand years ago.
Now, to keep her friends, she had to encircle them with logs and have them as close as possible, or else they’d all leave. Had the way Coniferons made friends changed? Is that why they all run at the sight of her, instead of coming to greet?
More importantly, why do they keep leaving?
At midday, she glosses over the area again, looking down to espy a morose Odysseus, wobbling in the wind with an expression that screams yearning.
“Your mate won’t be coming back any time soon,” she informs him. “Why won’t you talk with me instead?”
He glares, hatred oozing out of his every pore. She loathed when he got into these moods. He was talkative less often now, always so silent and brooding.
“Why won’t you ponder with me?”
Silence.
She harrumphs. “Fine then. If you don’t want to talk to me, then you’ll talk to nobody at all.”
How strange Coniferon are, now. Did they not want the protective presence of a docile herbivore too large to be predated on in their midst? A few thousand years ago, and they’d approach her, serenely, come bearing tales of births and deaths and new beginnings. She loved the sound of their bells, and the elegant crane of their tall necks, and the song of their bellows. What was Sonaria, without the Coniferon? Emptier, most definitely. Emptier, and less magnificent.
This was why they made the greatest friends! The only time she felt joy was when looking upon the Coniferon, and what wonders they made of themselves. She could recall it now, yes, the first time she had gazed the sight of a Coniferon, when she truly regarded their beauty — there were four of them, crossing a stream with a grace no other creature could replicate. The matriarch, the female with the most bells, shook her head as to ring them. Then the others came with her, and slinked into the shadows.
How old was she then? She couldn’t have been more than a calf, for then she couldn’t see above the trees. Now, in her eldest, she dwarved them, and knocked them down as a Puffwump does with pebbles.
Her mother, for all Mufolium knew their mothers, but not their fathers, had maintained a Garden of Coniferon herself, and when she had hatched they all gathered around to watch her break free of her shell. They sang their ballads, of course, and shared their songs, and by the time she was grown she knew their culture as she knew herself. How much had changed since then?
But this excitement, this bliss, this had not changed! How she wished she could go back to her youth, when she had first laid eyes upon them!
Her thoughts were interrupted when she glimpsed the sight of a stalking Magnarothus.
It couldn’t have been focused on her, surely, with her size and might. Any predator fifty leagues out would die before they could land a fatal hit, and the predators who could once kill her all died out due to their largeness. A moment later, she comprehended.
Her tail whips through the air with swift efficiency. The first crack staggered the creature to the ground, a crimson lash marked on its body, its bones crippled. The second crack broke its neck, and it laid there, dead.
How dare it try to kill her friend? How foolish it was, to think she would neglect her friends to allow them be killed! What a sorry mistake it was, when it first occurred — she had only been a hundred years old, and it had been in the night, while she slept. Her friend, her dear friend Maia had wandered off, bells jingling in the darkness. She had not been able to react in time, and the Dyaelatura pounced.
She closed her eyes, and focused. She had no time to think of dead friends. She had to take care of those in the present, and reassure him. That’s right, she should reassure Odysseus!
She trots on over to him, and he meets her eyes dead-on.
“You should’ve let it kill me,” he says.
She considers her response for a moment, and then two, and then three. “Well,” she replies. “What kind of friend would that make me?”
At nightfall, she tucks her friend close to her side with her tail, keeping him near and safe. The night was most peaceful, and it was when the Coniferon herds would bristle and rise from their slumber to wander the lands of Sonaria again. It pained her, to not be able to see them as she had used to, but Odysseus would do. And she would always be grateful for every friend she had.
Nightlife was much harder to deal with, however, and with the Moon so came its dangers. The lake — which she could see from this position — glittered seafoam white under the stars, but she did not want the lake, or the nightlight, or the stars.
“Good night, Odysseus,” she murmurs, resting her head on the ground.
He blinks, and deigns to rest as well. No matter. He would sleep soon enough. “Good night, Calypso,” he acknowledges.