Work Text:
Moray had spent the better part of her morning staring at the pale, iridescent floors of the Deep Sea Palace, wondering if the stains would ever truly vanish. She was a mortician for the SeaWing aristocracy, a grim but necessary profession in a kingdom where the pressures of the abyss could crush a clumsy noble or a sudden predator attack could leave a royal court member floating belly-up in a matter of seconds.
She was running catastrophically late. The morning tide had shifted, and the nobility of the Deep Palace waited for no one, least of all a dragon who spent her days massaging the scales of the deceased. In her haste, she had nearly forgotten Urchin, her daughter, whose scales were as pale as a mossy green shell and whose energy was far too high for the suffocating silence of the palace halls.
“I can’t do it, Urchin! I simply cannot!” Moray had hissed, her bioluminescent stripes flashing a frantic, jagged sea-moss yellow. “If I am late for the preparation of the Archduke’s remains, Queen Coral will have my head, and likely my tail as well!”
Luckily, Whirlpool was there. Her husband was a dragon of slower rhythms and softer edges, a scholar of the currents whose day off had arrived with the turning of the tide. He had stepped in with a patient, rumbling chuckle, wrapping a massive, dull green-colored wing around Urchin to usher her toward the school-pods.
Moray had pressed a hurried, salty kiss to their snouts, the scent of brine and old whale-blood ink clinging to Whirlpool’s scales. “Be good, Urchin! Don’t chew on the anemones!” she had called out, her voice echoing through the vaulted ceilings of the palace before she sprinted toward the morgue, the cold, dim cellar of the palace where the water felt heavier and the silence was absolute.
The workday had been, by all accounts, agonizingly dull. For hours, Moray had worked in a state of meditative boredom, stitching the torn membranes of aquatic casualties and arranging shells over vacant eye sockets. The slow drip of the ocean's pressure seemed to sync with the ticking of the palace clock. She had spent three hours on a single royal guard who had succumbed to a freak encounter with a giant trench squid, meticulously cleaning the ink from his gills. It was a slow, rhythmic process that left her mind wandering to the dinner she would prepare and the stories Whirlpool would tell about Urchin’s progress in school.
Around the time of the midday current, the heavy stone doors of the morgue groaned open.
Piranha, the manager of the funeral wing, a sharp-featured dragon with a gaze like a needle, swam in. Usually, Piranha’s arrival signaled a reprimand or a new, difficult corpse. But today, her expression was unreadable, her bioluminescence dimmed to a ghostly flicker.
“Moray,” Piranha whispered, her voice sounding like grinding pebbles. “Your husband... and your daughter... they are here.”
Moray froze, a scrubbing brush still clutched in her talon. A surge of genuine confusion washed over her. “Here? In the morgue? Why on earth would Whirlpool bring a dragonet to a place of death? It’s completely inappropriate!”
Moray looked up, expecting to see Whirlpool’s sheepish sly grin or Urchin’s wide-eyed curiosity. Instead, she saw Piranha’s eyes welling with shimmering, salty tears.
“There’s been an accident,” Piranha choked out, her voice breaking as she stepped aside to reveal the two figures being floated in on a stretcher of woven kelp.