Chapter Thirty-Eight Wayland #2
What would you rather dine on? Wayland asked, although he did not wish to hear the answer.
He wished to swim away as fast as his fins would take him, until precious sunlight brightened this poisonous water.
He wished to climb out on that stinking beach and put on his sturdy boots.
He wished to find Idris between the lofted dunes and curl himself around his lean, beautiful body, to suck his bottom lip into his mouth and—
Stop that, he snarled.
Can you not guess? The Bright One retreated, but barely.
We wish for Folk, with all their selfish choices and tortured bargains and violent desires.
They are discord and delight; thieving and hoarding; envy and obsession.
But the Folk of the sea have fled for distant waters; the Folk who once lived in my city return only for rare revels that amount to nothing more than a snack. We are hungry!
You are a blight, Wayland said, disgusted. You are the dúil of water, the Bright One of the sea. You are meant to be serene as still waters, slow as a glacier, steady as the tides. Not this ravenous, overgrown brute.
What is the sea if not hungry? laughed the Bright One, shudderingly.
We swallow ships and drown sailors. We erode shorelines, gnawing away at the land.
We feed on the creatures swarming our depths, predator and prey in an endless, devouring cycle.
We hoard lost treasures, summon lost souls.
We claim sunlight and absorb storms and conceal the deepest secrets.
We are infinitely wide and unknowably deep. And we. Are. HUNGRY!
They lunged toward Wayland, their enormous tentacles coiling possessively around him. Fear froze him, even as something like kinship rose in him like a tide. Wait.
The Bright One paused.
I will feed you, Wayland began, bitterly.
I know hunger—and the utter pleasure of gluttony that comes after.
I know vainglory and I know covetousness.
I know wrath and I know sloth. I breathe envy.
And lust? Oh, how I know lust—in all her alluring disguises, each one as perilous as the last. He steadied his will, eroded as it was.
You wish for selfish choices? Tortured bargains?
Violent desires? I am all those things and more. I will feed you. In exchange for magic.
We will give you magic, promised the Bright One, enticingly. Feed me all your sins, and you shall have magic beyond anything you could conceive of. Your famine will become feast. You shall have all that you covet. I can make all your desires come true.
Not like that. Wayland shifted back into his Gentry form, brandishing Fáilsceim as he did.
The leviathan shuddered away from the trident.
Wayland’s breath already burned in his lungs—he would not have long to complete this bargain.
I will feed you. But in return, you must feed me.
You are a source. I am a vessel. It is as it has always been.
And someday, if I can, I will set you free.
I will set us both free from this terrible hunger.
Still the leviathan recoiled, even as their tentacles wrapped around Fáilsceim. They wrung the haft brutally in Wayland’s grasp—he fought to keep hold of it.
Or we could slit your soft belly, they roared. And suck up your insides.
With the last of his breath screaming in his lungs, Wayland kicked sideways, pivoting as he twisted the trident through the churning water.
Still, the leviathan grabbed for it. The trident’s tines blazed in the dark depths, cutting a long, brutal slice along the Bright One’s squirming tentacle.
A shudder rippled through the creature; ichor thick as blood but blue as a calm sea poured from the wound, swirling like spilled ink in the darker water.
Wayland pricked his own finger on Fáilsceim, his blue-black blood mingling with the Bright One’s.
A brisk ripple of current caught the billow.
Cast it in expanding splotches upon the trees of coral.
By fire and by sky, by fast water and by ancient tree.
No. The beast thrashed and floundered, expanding even further. Around them, the seas began to churn, cold water sucking at Wayland’s legs and strangling his throat with his hair. You do not know my name.
I do. My father whispered it over my cradle, and my mother sang it as I slept. Wayland said this with a certainty he was not sure he believed. I promise my willing heart to thee… O Un-Dry Cauldron. Muir.
The Bright One suddenly deflated, more turquoise ichor spilling from their limbs as the current quickened.
Wayland lost control of his straining, stretched lungs—the last of the air punched from him with painful force.
He gripped Fáilsceim’s shaft with all his strength, desperately trying not to give in to the instinct to—
He opened his mouth and swallowed the ocean.
Wayland had almost drowned once—when he was a boy, testing the limits of his abilities in dangerous, twisting currents. He remembered well the choking crush of seawater in his lungs. The taste of salt on his lips as blackness hammered out his eyes.
This time, there would be no furious father to haul him from the shallows. To push on his chest until he gasped and coughed and vomited black water onto the sand.
His lungs bulged, bags filled to bursting with too much seawater.
He struggled as he drowned, his limbs vainly fighting the enormous strength of the ocean.
The reef had disappeared; the leviathan with it.
Streaks of their cerulean blood followed him, dissipating in the water with brilliant clarity. It looked like—
Fresh water.
Wayland stopped fighting the current. He reached out and cupped a single drop of blue water in his palm—a whole world full of seething ocean.
He lifted it to his mouth and drank it.
Sheer panic gave way to sure surrender. He suddenly wanted this—yearned for it with a hunger depthless as a night-black trench in the deepest corner of the ocean.
In briny seawater and devouring darkness, in fickle tide and terrible maelstrom, he would be reborn.
Unmade, remade. This ocean would not drown him, would not swallow him—it would simply strip away the pieces of who he had been, leaving only the core.
This was a cauldron of tides: pressure, turbulence, and unrelenting currents, cleansing and remolding in its swirling depths.
He drank in the sea as if he were a man parched. It coursed through his lungs and burst in his chest and swirled along his bones. Brine pickled his veins and permeated his skin. He curled in on himself, winding tight as a nautilus.
He was the infinite depths, calm yet consuming, haunted by the vast, unknown reaches that stretched beyond his farthest tides. He was a riptide, all salt and storm, his breath swelling into cold mist. He was the tempestuous ocean itself: a boundless ancient force with no beginning and no end.
The tide began to turn. A sea change, slow but inexorable, like light blooming beneath the waves.
The sea—dark as wine with salt and sorrow mingling in the depths—grew restless, twisting, swirling.
Then exploded forward, a vast, ecstatic surge rolling back toward the shore.
Water that had been murky and opaque was suddenly alight and alive, rippling in translucent undulations of emerald and azure.
An unseen weight was lifted from the depths: schools of fish darted close to the surface, silver bodies flicking in the shallows, and the sand below shone pale and clean, each grain revealed in the crystalline scintillations.
Wayland danced along the crest of the wave, his frame curved like a prow and his limbs like the foam that split before it, and he laughed as the beach rose to greet him.
Laughed with joy but also amazement—for a wonder wrought and a miracle enacted.
A Treasure, reborn and reforged.
He had not been sure he could do it.
The vast wave crashed high upon the beach, slamming him onto the pebbled strand with bruising force.
It retreated slowly, dragging away all the rotten seaweed and rusted detritus.
Wayland fumbled for the shaft of Fáilsceim, gripping it tight even as he swiped sodden hair from his eyes and spat great gushes of brine upon the glittering sand.
When he looked up, Idris was standing there, silhouetted against the bright morning, Hog perched questioningly upon his shoulder.
“Did you do it?” Idris asked, tremulously.
As if the brilliant shallows teeming with flickering schools of silver fish, the golden beach, and the deep blue expanse sweeping away toward the horizon were not answer enough.
As if Wayland himself, wet as a seal and naked as a baby and miraculously alive after what must have been hours underwater, was not answer enough. “Did you reforge the Un-Dry Cauldron?”
“I did.” Wayland levered himself onto his knees.
Distantly, he registered that his heavy arms were inked now with whorls and waves in a blue so deep it was nearly black.
He stood, hefting Fáilsceim, which hummed faintly with a melody Wayland knew.
From his childhood, from his dreams, from moments he had yet to encounter.
Once, it would have filled him with dread.
Now it only seemed to fill him with a contentment, a satiation, he had not experienced in a long time.
Perhaps ever. A smile spread over his face, joyous and rueful.
Hog fluttered over to his shoulder and nuzzled a few toothy kisses on his jaw.
“Although I fear we may have to rename it.”
“Oh!” Idris matched his smile. “What’s the equivalent of the Un-Dry Cauldron? The Forever-Wet Trident?”
Wayland barked a laugh and surged forward to catch Idris around the waist. The other man yelped but did not push him away.
One of his hands braced himself against Wayland’s warm, bare chest; the other slid idly over the curve of Wayland’s shoulder, tracing the recursive pattern of his new markings.
Hog squeaked in annoyance, then hovered off to chase sandpipers over the damp rippled sand.
“If that is the best you can invent,” Wayland said softly, “you are not allowed to say another word on the matter.”
Idris smiled. “Then I shall speak no more.”
His chin tilted toward Wayland’s face, the fine sheet of his hair gliding off to reveal the furrows and pleats of his scar, glazed golden by the risen sun.
Wayland’s gaze slid over it, then skimmed over the unmarked side of his face, before coming to rest on Idris’s lips, parted slightly in anticipation.
He inhaled, expecting the familiar varnish of lust to paint itself flinchingly over the dark lacquer of his endless hurt and shame.
For the first time in forever, Wayland felt only ease. He knew that whatever happened—in this moment, or the next, or the one after that—he was enough. He was as constant as waves crashing upon a silent shore. He could be empty, or full, and still be complete.
He was not alone anymore.
Idris’s body pressed his; his face was inches away. Wayland asked, “Do you want this?”
“Yes,” Idris said, simply and without hesitation.
Wayland’s hand slid up Idris’s throat and fisted in the spill of his crimson hair.
He closed the last few inches between them, tilting Idris’s jaw to his as he captured his lower lip between his teeth, sucking it gently into his mouth.
Idris gasped, and Wayland inhaled the sound as if it were oxygen, drank it as if it were fresh water, devoured it like the delicacy it was.
And when he bore them both down onto the glittering, shimmering sand, he knew:
He still wanted to give Idris something of himself. Something he now knew he had to give.
So he did.