Chapter the Fifth,
The Third to Last Day,
In which two ends come together.
I. No Kin of Earth
Astray growled halfheartedly and cantered back to his bench in the prow, unconcerned that he had been hoodwinked out of three of his peculiar petals. Ceder was more perturbed. “What a crock!” she swore, her hands firmly clasped on top of her head as if to keep her body from blowing apart like an overheated teapot.
There passed a silent moment in which she and Jai did nothing but stare at the empty spot where the well had stood. “Actually, I think it might have been a turtle,” Jai added delicately.
“This isn’t what I wished for!” Ceder looked at Jai like she was going to cry uncontrollably or start shouting, depending on what he said next.
“Ummm, you’re right,” Jai nodded, pleased with his quick thinking.
“I bet that wasn’t a real wishing well at all.”
“Maybe not—”
“The Wishfish was a fraud! And he never told us one credible thing about the King and Queen—it’s as if he made that bit up as he went along. What a despicable, ugly, irredeemable, selfish—”
Jai put his hands up to hold her unrelenting stream of complaints at bay.
“You should have gutted him, after all.”
Jai raised an eyebrow. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” The glare she gave him indicated that no, she did not think that was a little harsh. “Maybe it takes time. Maybe they’ll still come true. The Wishfish did say something about ‘a thousand years.’ Maybe we just have to wait.”
Ceder adopted her most patient expression and Jai had to laugh. “Ceder,” he said a moment later, hoping he would not sound too transparent, “what did you wish for?”
She blushed, but quickly regained her composure. “If I tell you, it will never come true.”
“Wait. Wait. Weren’t you just saying that old fish was a fraud, or did my hair get stuck in my ears?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Ceder.
What she thought was silly about this, Jai had no idea, so he nodded complacently and feigned to concur.
She tapped him on the shoulder. “Will you tell me what you wished for?”
Jai smiled, locked her mischievous eyes with his own, then laid back with his hands behind his head, staring at the sparkles and pops of light that danced in the wake of the pink comet cutting its trail across the sky. He wondered if it could truly be the shooting star Sorid had spoken of so often.
“Jai, look,” said Ceder, pointing to the prow.
Astray was leaning as far forward as he could, staring into the east with the butterfly standing on his head. Why grabbed the cub’s ears like the reins on a team of horses. Astray’s flower necklace whipped up and down in the wind—the wispy glow of the petals shone like fire against his coal black coat. As the cub watched the horizon and the children watched the cub, a dreamlike shift occurred in the way they saw him, a foggy lens wiped clean. Their dark companion no longer seemed to be a bundle of shadows stitched together, for now Jai and Ceder could see clearly the hairs of his fur, fine as gossamer, and the pink of his nose, the size of a button, and the points of his claws, sharp as pricks of light.
A tall, thin entity emerged on the horizon.
“What do you think that is?” asked Ceder.
“Could it be Coral Wing?”
A blaring sound rang through the air like a chorus of sirens. The soaring notes that carried to the boat across the restless waves seemed to take on the shape of the seascape they prevailed over and the melody grew rugged and inconsolable, pitching to a storm.
An island rose out of the sea, halfway between the boat and the eastern horizon. It was no more than a dumpy, glistening mound, but the trumpeting chorus was swallowed at once by the crashing waves created in the island’s tumultuous rise.
The waves quickly doubled and doubled again. Jai and Ceder ducked in the bottom of the boat and wrapped their arms around the bench to keep from falling overboard. Astray kept his balance in the prow with the butterfly riding his head and shouting oaths into the newborn squall.
The rising island swayed from side to side as if made of jelly, groping upward to the heavens. The water that rained from its surface hammered the surrounding sea like waterfalls of shattering crystal.
“What is it?” Jai finally put to words.
“It is the dark road,” said Why, “but I didn’t know it came to a dead end here.”
“It doesn’t look dead to me,” said Ceder.
Neither of the children could count past their own fingers, so they could never have guessed how many hundreds of tails wide the monstrosity was, but they needed no astronomical sums to feel the sheer unreal power of the force they beheld. And still it rose, reaching for the clouds, the pinnacle of the broaching mass fifty tails above the sea.
The blaring music rang out from the north, drawing on new reserves to make itself heard over the din. An answering call sounded sharply from the south. The two majestic chords met in perfect unison, and then the sea split apart like an open wound and there gushed forth endless legions of mermen and fantastic armored sea creatures flowing into, over, and under one another with every lurch of frenzied waves.
Jai and Ceder clung to their bench. The pink boat skirted up and down the crests of the waves, a leaf on the wind. The torrents of water spilling off the top of the island-that-could-not-be-an-island diminished, revealing aspects of its surface to the light. Jai and Ceder, west of the island and directly under the sun, were granted an unobstructed view of the towering behemoth.
The children fell to their knees, then back to their bottoms as if the shock from the sight before them was overpoweringly physical. Their eyes stretched wide, they grabbed each other close, and their hearts shook with terror because this thing was no kin of earth and stone, no island.
The beast grew larger still. It wavered and leaned like a drunken sailor, ever rising, until its head broke through the clouds.
“I know what it is, Ceder,” said Jai.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Ghazahg,” they said together. This was the filthiest word spoken in the Land of Lin, according to Sorid, as well as the namesake of one of the sea’s most vile legends—a serpent large enough to wrap its coil around the world, a recurrent demon that some said had never lived and some said had never died.
“Jai, what if it’s here to attack the castle? What if this is the danger to the King and Queen—what if Coral Wing is their castle?—and we have to help?”
“The Wishfish told us we would know what to do,” Jai said matter-of-factly. Then, because neither of them knew what to do at all, they said nothing more.
As Ghazahg continued to wobble back and forth for balance the waves around the monster’s base reached a tremendous crescendo. At a hundred tails distance the uproar was powerful enough to throw the pink boat through the air like a tuft of thistledown. Jai lost his grip on the bench and went flying over the side of the boat, plunking into the choppy water without a sound.
II. A Drop in the Bucket
The turbulence forced Astray and Why to take cover under the foremost bench, although the cub kept his head poked out to keep a view of the action.
“Jai!” Ceder screamed into the storm. “Jai!”
There was no sign of him and the waves grew larger with every beat, carrying the boat up and down, back and forth, relentlessly farther away from where Jai had vanished below the surface.
“Jai!” she screamed again.
The calls of conch shell trumpeteers rang out louder than ever, delivered by the teeming masses of mermen soldiers. From the boat, the armies of the sea appeared no larger than grains of sand on a beach, for they were just as small—compared to the giant wyrm—and layered just as deeply. The waves rose and fell and as the ranks of mermen slid apart and shifted an endless supply of reinforcements appeared from underneath with perfect cohesion, all firing hailstorms of arrows at the serpent. Ghazahg ignored them as a tree the rain.
Ceder anxiously bit her lip, scanning over both sides of the boat for a sign of Jai, a hand, a scrap of his tunic, anything, but her search went unrewarded. She could not waste another moment. Fighting against the lurching of the boat, she retrieved the knife and rope from Jai’s satchel, stowed under the middle bench. She wound one end of the rope around the handle of the knife, crossing the line over and under into a hasty knot. More desperate than satisfied with her sudden plan, she stabbed the knife into the side of the bench, grabbed the loose end of the rope, and dove into the sea, praying the lifeline would hold fast.
Astray took his eyes off Ghazahg when he heard Ceder’s splash, then he turned back to the beast and let out a defiant roar.
The giant continued to pull itself out of the sea like the endless scarves a magician pulls out of his sleeve. It teetered dangerously from side to side, almost too heavy to support its own weight. It had attained such a staggering height that even the pink comet was no longer safe; the wyrm was tall enough to snatch the shooting star from heaven with no more trouble than a frog catching a fly.
Undaunted, Astray faced Ghazahg with a zealous snarl. The cub bit a grass-green petal off his necklace and let it fall into the water. The petal sank like a stone.
Jai and Ceder burst out of the waves like two harpoons, flinging themselves over the side of the boat and dragging themselves aboard, panting and shivering. Ceder clutched a fistful of Jai’s hair like a vice; having found him underwater in a miraculous instant, she had never let go. As soon as they could breath the children looked up. A shadow was overtaking them.
The wyrm craned its body. Its head descended from the clouds to hang into the west, so that the whole of it formed the shape of a skinny S, giving the unmistakable impression that it was posing itself to strike.
“What is it doing?” Jai had to shout to be heard. “Coral Wing is behind it! It should be leaning the other way!”
Ghazahg leveled its head and fixed on the approaching comet with unnatural concentration even as the rest of its body quivered and shook with the exertion of maintaining such elevation. From the boat, the shooting star seemed to trace its path across the sky with all the speed of a snail. Equally sluggish, the great wyrm opened its mouth, creating a vacuous black hole to intercept the comet’s trajectory.
Astray dug his razor-sharp claws into the prow of the boat, a formidable masthead standing strong into the storm. When he bellowed at Ghazahg the colossus hesitated for the shortest instant. The cub’s necklace flared.
Slowly, slowly, the wyrm began to change color: two glowing green tendrils intertwined around the giant’s body under the surface of its skin. Spasms of pain suddenly wracked the great beast.
Sensing a weakness, the armies of the sea blasted their trumpets once more, redoubling their assault. They shot their fish-scale-fletched arrows at the convulsing wyrm in hurricane-like assaults that ate away at Ghazahg’s outer layer of skin and flesh like a ravaging plague, but the damage to the beast’s bulk was but a drop in the bucket. Its dark green blood gushed into the sea, malfeasant waterfalls drowning scores of mermen at a time.
The monster lowered its head from the clouds, finally driven to distraction. The glowing green tendrils continued to braid their way around its body. Astray sprang into Ceder’s lap as she hid in the bottom of the boat. She could barely summon her arms to enclose him.
The wyrm trembled ominously, marshalling itself for an attack. Instead of directing its wrath at the armies that attacked from the east, Ghazahg looked back west, not into the sky at the comet, but into the sea.
“What is it looking at, Jai?” asked Ceder.
“For a second I was sure it wanted to eat the comet,” said Jai.
“Then why is it staring at us?”
Ghazahg dived into motion, swooping its head down over the pink boat.
“Jai!” cried Ceder.
“Ceder!” shouted Jai.
“RARRRRRRRRRRRR!” bellowed Astray, the loudest one of all.
III. Primal Challenge
Far behind the boat the wyrm’s rear end rose above the surface of the sea. The size of a mountain summit, the tail was flat and raw, a gruesome mixture of open flesh and half-healed wounds, as if it had been lopped off with a colossal axe a thousand years ago and left to scar over and decay.
The monster’s head, plunging down through the clouds, stretched farther west. Its tail stretched up and east. And still the filigree of green fibers spun around the wyrm’s body, head and tail alike, snaking under its skin like burrowing moles.
The wyrm passed directly under the sun and the sea was cast in shadow, a darkness broken only by the blush of the comet and the unhealthy glow of the green blood that gushed down in sheets from the holes in the serpent’s hide.
In the same moment that the monstrous shadow passed over the boat, Jai and Ceder saw a familiar marking upon the head of Ghazahg: a crescent of incandescent silver skin that pulsed with radiation, pale and soft.
The wyrm passed over the children entirely, indifferent to the ship without sails and its passengers.
Jai and Ceder exchanged a puzzled look. “It’s not coming after us,” Jai said thankfully.
“You’re right,” said Ceder. “It’s going to bite its own tail!”
They both saw what would happen. The loop the wyrm would form as it chased its own rear end was going to close around the boat.
“We have to get out of here, NOW!” Jai screamed. The din of crashing waves and falling water and arrows whistling in the distance was deafening.
“We’ll never make it!” Ceder screamed back.
Jai draped himself over the side of the boat and paddled frantically with his hands. Ceder did the same on her side. Why flew to the back of the boat and perched astern, facing west, using his film-thin wings to fan the boat forward for what little his strength was worth. “I think I can! I think I can!” the butterfly bellowed as he flapped for his life. His tiny face flushed red and he waved his walking stick at the tempestuous sea in a primal challenge. Only Astray made no move to escape the crushing fall of the great wyrm. Jai and Ceder paddled with such intensity that the boat picked up a shred of speed—although this may have owed to the wind—but the loop they were seeking to escape was impossibly wide and they were nowhere near the edge.
“Ceder, it’s no good! Stop paddling!” Jai shouted desperately. “Stop paddling!”
She stopped and looked up, and hope died. They would have to move a hundred tails in ten heartbeats to escape. She counted down their demise in her head: Nine… Eight…
She looked at the monster’s repulsive head, angry that it had not swallowed the merman army instead and gone on destroying the world to the east; that it had decided to wreck their little boat and ruin their lives when they had only been given one day to be free.
Seven… Six…
Ghazahg engulfed its own tail with one gluttonous bite. Its jaw unhinged and gulped down over the length of its own lower half, attempting to swallow itself like one long noodle.
Five… Four…
The noise of the waves turned into a cacophony like splintering glass and raging thunder as the loop tightened to a pinch, mere tails away from closing down onto the boat.
Three… Two…
IV. A Heartbreaking Roar
One truth that is undeniable in all stories is that no matter how big a thing is, no matter how strong, it cannot squeeze something into nothing; all that something has to go somewhere, and fast. As the coil of Ghazahg’s self-ensnaring body reached a critically small circumference, the sea swelled up inside the loop, packed with more pressure than the space would permit. Like a slimy pebble slipping out of a clenched fist, the water shot out of the closing circle faster than any wave in the Land of Lin had traveled in a thousand years. The pink boat skimmed along for the ride.
Jai and Ceder, holding the trusty rope to keep from flying out of the boat, looked behind to see Ghazahg disappear into the sea. For an instant, just as the children were turning away from the ghastly sight, they caught a glimpse of the waves rising into a thrashing imitation of a crab’s claws, clutching the wyrm’s body tightly and dragging it under.
In a final, infinite moment, the serpent that was big enough to strangle the world sank below the sea. Too big to go quietly, the impact of its fall sent a ring of tidal waves ripping across the sea in every direction.
Jai and Ceder huddled in the bottom of the boat. Had they peeked but a moment longer they might have seen that the wave they were riding was faster and higher than all the rest, that the surging crest did indeed display a strong resemblance to a crustacean’s curvaceous hand, that it was smooth and strong and safe.
Astray stared at the comet, trailing slightly behind them in the sky, and let out a heartbreaking roar.
The wave set the boat down gently and the great arm of the sea spilled back to its domain. The children looked over the side of the boat and found that they had been deposited in a decorative pool built into an outcropping on the side of a mountain of coral reef.
Resilient to the blaze of the sun, the coral soared above the water in tangles of strangely fortress-like formations. Set into the side of the reef not far from the boat were a pair of white pearl doors.
“I think we found Coral Wing,” said Jai.
“So all we had to do was wait it out and go along for the ride,” said Ceder, replaying what had happened to Ghazahg over and over in her mind. “I guess what we knew was what we had to do—nothing.”
“Yeah, and not fall out of the boat,” said Jai. “Ceder, you saved my life. I never would have made it back to the boat by myself if you hadn’t jumped in after me.”
She smiled and blushed. “You saved me, too.”
Jai knew she was referring to last night when he had carried her into the sea. He turned away from her; he had conveniently forgotten to tell her that the only reason he had to carry her—the cut on her forehead—owed to his own carelessly unsheathed knife. He was not sure there was any real reason to tell her, now.
The outcrop they landed on was decorated with lush plants potted in upright seashells. Two marble statues stood near the pearl doors—dolphins balanced on their tails. Neither was represented with a unicorn’s horn.
One of the doors swung open and a small glass ball rolled out. The ball looked to be filled with clear water, for inside was a dazzling blue and white striped jesterfish who moved about by swimming such that his ball rolled forward, back, and side to side. He maneuvered his unusual vehicle into the pool of water, where he bobbed up and down next to the boat.
The jesterfish stared at the sky, his expression rapturous. “By the Holy Sight of Silver, the comet, she prevails! She prevails! And blow my bubbles—two kids in a boat, sitting in the fishbath like they’ve been there all along.” He grinned from his widest gills and gave the children a stately bow of his pointy head. “Welcome, my friends, to the heart of the sea—Coral Wing. If you have no objection, I will escort you to the King.”