Things were managing to live, grow in the apocalyptic seascape — tangling together, building a new, terrible shoreline.

Water. Something she never even had a word for until Iliokai showed her not-water.

She couldn’t see anything, but a pervasive wrongness surrounded them. Invisible to her keen eyes, unsettling her.

Enter the vortex after even a moment’s hesitation and the cycle could carry them anywhen. The eternal present is always in motion.”

Those waters were familiar from ancestral memory, but they would never be home. Our home is in the movement, the migration, so we felt the call to return.”

That was beautiful, Ceph let her emotion and gratitude spill into the water, the biochemical communication pooled around the two of them, embracing them like an anemone. I wish … I wish I could dance to it.

They watched the silent movement of stars a moment, but Iliokai could hear them. Or she imagined she could. The stars’ static roar, as clear as ocean song.

There’s a deep above it falls at night to lift you up among the light the darkness dives the calm ignites the fishes sing and the words surprise the sky grows cold the ocean glows starlight remembers all secrets told There’s a deep above and love below the two are one and now we know

she attempted to process what it would be like to see and experience the sky through a thought prism which only considered the ultraviolets and infrareds.