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

They knew there were seven spots in the world’s oceans where the currents curl in on themselves, that the center of these vortexes marked the entrance and exit points of an interdimensional network. Creatures of the sea had used these portals in time of need. When whaling practices threatened to eradicate humpbacks, they fled to a safer time, too

She couldn’t explain how sound could be like blood in the water, yet every creature gathered there was responding to it. She howled her hymn, and every splash of their fins and click of their teeth added to the complex rhythm.

Instead of remaining awash in the never-ceasing circulation of always, Fin believed it could be possible to position oneself at a fixed point in time and migrate with purpose to another.

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.

This was why singing wasn’t an accurate description. Something closer to childbirth could describe the euphoric agony, the body’s automatic convulsions that expel the song into the world. Maybe it wasn’t much of a surprise then, that whale riders neglected to care for their young. Hope and sorrow were always meant to be released into the sea, to

seafolk understood that one does not move through time, the flow of time was what moved everything.

She had the sense of a bubble. An image of a bubble. Then the bubble popped.

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