Work Text:
Gem takes the things she doesn’t understand, the things that slip from her mind like a fish in her palms, and scribbles them into notebook pages and textbook margins.
1. She has no memory of her parents—not their names, nor their faces, nor the warmth of their embrace. She doesn't remember growing up at all.
2. She comes-to knee-deep in seawater in storms and cloudy days. She’s searching for something important— something that dissipates into seafoam when she tries to hold it in her mind.
(3. the pang in her chest when Fwhip laughs, so familiar, when they spend nights traipsing through the swamp— it’s nothing, it has to be nothing.)
3. Her neck aches. So do her ears. She falls asleep tracing the scaly patches on her arms into her journal. She searches for books on marine mutations and comes up empty.
4. The sea whispers to her in hymns no one else can hear. ocean queen, it sings, you must listen. you must find us, gem, find your way h—
5. The ancient book from the Elven library, written in her hand, reads: The Blue Axolotl will ascend to the throne of the Ocean Empire upon the retrieval of the—
—Ocean Orb shatters in her palms, its blessing sinking into her skin, love enough to drown in, to wash her away, a raindrop churned into a hurricane. It would show her the world—the flick of a dolphin’s fins, the seafloors of sand—and Gem holds on as it snaps her eggshell bones, holds on as it wraps her in nostalgia and abyss, because she’ll die before she gives up on unravelling the truth.
there you are, sings the sea to its goddess. Her head is clear when she raises it. Finally, she can see.
welcome home.