23
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The vast stretch of water between Marazion and St. Michael’s Mount was no longer blue or green or any unique combination of the two colours. The beach was hardly visible. The shallowest parts of the bay were no longer transparent, granting a subtle peak into the land below.
No, everything was black.
The water was thick, weighed down with an opaque darkness, stretching as far as the eye could see.
And amongst it were floating bodies, some tipped upwards so their last sight was the sun climbing over Saoghal, some were downwards where all we could see from above was the blanket of coal over their backs.
A few had managed to get themselves out of the water, dragging slow and contaminated bodies along the shore-line on the Choilltean side, where they either lay with laboured breathing and stiff chests, or ultimately had died.
“Oh my gods,” Niamh cried out as she guided Sonus down towards the land, the others following close behind us.
When I spared a look over my shoulder to see what my friends thought of it all, the only one I could focus on was Raegan.
Murder was in his eyes as he drew his sword, his teeth gritted and his body rigid as he prepared for a dismount.
There were more living bodies than I expected as I swung off of Sonus, hardly waiting for him to finish landing before I was tripping my way across the infested shore, my eyes pinned on the first body in my sights.
I slammed down next to them, a male pixie who was layered head to toe in the thick gunk, and tried my best to free his mouth, nostrils, and eyes of the contaminant. As my fingers dug into the thickness of it, my fear was confirmed – it was oil.
Trying my best to lift his neck and brace it against a nearby stone, I leant forward and listened for breathing from his nose. It was faint, hardly recognizable, but there.
“Can you hear me?” I muttered just as the others sprinted towards me, horror in their eyes while they scanned the carnage around us.
“Y-yes,” he croaked before letting out a heart-breaking cough.
“What happened here?” Raegan drawled, his anger not for the pixie but apparent nonetheless.
The pixie said nothing. His chest was no longer lifting, no longer falling. Feeling with my fingers around his neck, I let out a sigh when I felt a faint thump against my skin.
“Soap…” I murmured, scanning the world beyond for any evidence of such a thing.
“What?” Shea barked.
“Soap… Dish soap. I think we could help them.”
Raegan seemed to have lost his bed-side manner, not that he had one to begin with. “Not sure what use it would be. If that’s oil, then the iron within it will be absorbing into their skin with every second. They’re being poisoned, slowly and surely.”
“Not helpful, Raegan,” Shea snarled.
“Niamh… Shea… Could you go into the human shops? Ask for dish soap?”
They shot each other a nervous look, the latter more so. But they both nodded, taking to Milis and Sonus without further question and lifting into the sky before I could so much as blink.
“I’m going to try my best to get as many of them out of the water as possible,” I panted as I lifted to my feet, scanning the low tide and the floating bodies. “You two – can you touch them? Or will it poison you, too?”
“No, we can’t–”
Raegan cut Killian off by storming his way into the infested water, his movements jagged and slow as he began to pull at bodies. Killian chased after him, all the while crying out that he was going to get himself killed.
One by one we tried our best to retrieve as many as we could. By the time Shea and Niamh arrived with enough soap to fill the entire ocean — and me not feeling brave enough to ask how they got it — we had hundreds of bodies sprawled out amongst the land.
I dropped back down beside the first one I had seen, and got to work pouring drizzle after drizzle of soap on his body.
Even as he wiggled beneath my touch, I scrubbed and massaged it into his face, his chest, and his arms. Anywhere his flesh was showing, I doused in soap and didn’t stop moving my hands until the faint-blue hue of his pixie skin was visible.
Shea and Niamh jumped in, helping the males coat body after body in soap. I made to stand up, to move on to the next one, when the pixie reached out and grabbed my hand. He yanked me back down to his side and coughed up a mouthful of black water.
“T-thank you,” he murmured before turning onto his side and heaving into the sand.
“Don’t mention it.” I tried a smile but my heart was too heavy for such a movement. “What… What happened?”
He tried, and succeeded, at pushing himself up and onto his knees. With a spindly finger he pointed out towards the water. “A tanker flipped.”
I narrowed my eyes, struggling to believe that any tanker would have dared to dock in such treacherous weather. When I finally saw what he was referring to, my hesitation to believe that was confirmed.
The tanker was there, but it wasn’t flipped. Instead, along the length of the tremendous vessel were long, deep slices where the oil had been freed and spilled out.
Amongst them I saw movement. Tiny, perhaps not even real, motion amongst the tanker.
“Raegan!” I shouted out, earning the Prince's attention immediately as he shot up from the body he was working on. Instead of saying anything, I simply pointed out to the tanker. “Someone’s out there!”
Without needing further explanation, Raegan summoned Rìoghail and took to the skies, Killian not far behind on Milis.
Trying to lift to my feet again, I heard the rasp of the pixie in front of me. His wavy, verdant hair was caked to the sides of his head, but the brightness of his misty-lavendar eyes shone in spite of it all.
“How can I help?”
I couldn’t help but to chuckle at him. “By lying back down and recovering your strength.”
“I cannot,” he groaned, trying his best to lift himself up.
Niamh appeared over my shoulder, her eyes wide as she looked at him. “Tadgh?”
“Ah,” he croaked. “Niamh. Tell me, what can I do to help?”
She didn’t question him or object to his offer as she passed a bottle of soap over to him and pointed at the many doused bodies still laying across the shore.
Once he had taken off towards them, I frowned at Niamh. “He should be resting.”
“He will not rest.” She smiled, small and sorrowful. “That is Tadgh Righ’Mar’Rugadh. The heir to the Uisge throne.” She patted my back and squeezed my shoulder. “You, my friend, just saved the son of the Queen.”
~
While Niamh and I continued to work at the bodies around us, Killian and Raegan still somewhere within the tanker, Shea got busy trying to figure out how to transport all of the pixies who were still clinging to life.
She made quick work of it, sending birds into Choilltean only to return an hour later with leaf-crafted hammocks stretching from one bird’s talon to the next, capable of hoisting dozens of bodies up into the air.
We filled them, slowly and carefully with as many as we could, sending batches of birds and pixies back into Choilltean.
“Will they be able to treat the poison?” I asked Niamh as we worked on two pixies, side by side.
“Hard to say. It’s always fifty-fifty. Our healers are skilled, but they can only do so much. One either survives iron-poisoning or doesn’t.”
I hated how defeated she sounded.
“Are you making sure to coat your hands in the soap before touching them, Niamh?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod, allowing me to release a long breath.
I called for Shea, offering her the next pixie as I finished scraping as much of the oil from their body as possible.
Between movements from one to another they ushered words of thanks, light prayers to their god Cernunnos, or the faint whisper of goodbyes to loved ones not here to hear them.
There was no saying how many died on the side of St. Micheal’s Mount. Too many to count. Too many to even try.
It was with a heavy heart that Niamh and I finally finished the last of them. But I couldn’t help looking out to the water, my eyes lined with tears and my arms burning.
“What is it?”
“What if there’s more out there? Deep in the water?”
There was no point in sugar-coating it, at least that was what Niamh thought. “There probably is.”
“Can’t we get down there? Can’t we do anything more?”
She stepped to my side and pulled me into a tight hug. “You’ve done so much already, Olivia.”
“It’s not enough. There’s more out there, I can feel it.”
“Look—” Niamh lifted her hand to the tanker across the water. “It’s Killian and Raegan. They’re coming back.”
But I wasn’t listening.
“I’m going in,” I finally declared, peeling off the shirt that Raegan had offered me less than a few hours ago.
“Olivia no! You can’t—”
The rest of her sentence was lost to me as I dived into the oil-spilled water.
I knew it was a bad decision almost immediately.
I hadn’t been brave enough to peel my eyes open just yet, but my skin was blistering instantly with the abrasive contact of the oil against me, burning and scorching the outer layer of my skin.
But I kept kicking my feet, kept moving deeper and deeper into the depths until I finally felt brave enough to open my eyes.
I shouldn’t have. They nearly melted the moment the oily water coated them, but I blinked and blinked and blinked until I could see the muggy water all around me, the shadowed tinge to my surroundings that made seeing anything, let alone a pixie, nearly impossible.
But I kept kicking. I kept paddling. I kept swimming, even though the water was like molasses and my body was burning from the inside and the outside. Nothing mattered — nothing mattered but the fact that I knew there were others down here.
I collided with a body not a second later.
It rebounded off of me, gurgling and spitting against the water as they recognized someone in their midst. Without thinking, I latched onto their body and began to kick upwards, seeing a faint light against the darkness that I directed my movements towards.
Seconds later I breached the water-surface, a half-alive pixie in my arms that I immediately passed to Niamh, who was hovering over the water on Sonus.
Behind her was Raegan on Rìoghail, who had just started to shout at me to get out before I dove back down into the water.
That pixie wasn’t the only one. It was as if my soul reached out and called to those beneath me, like my body was alive and pushing to get to them even if it meant my own demise.
I tried my hardest not to swallow any of the water, instead blowing bubbles from my nose as I kicked around, feeling aimlessly with my hands out in front of me.
The next one I found was a young pixie, half my size and limp in my arms. Only because she stirred ever so slightly when I scooped her up did I push off of the rocks and emerge once more.
I passed her body to Killian this time, who leant off the side of Milis and tried to grab onto my arms. Yanking away from him, I took another deep breath and dropped below the water again.
The next body that I found was a male, his arms wrapped tightly around a female. Though I was certain she was dead, I helped haul them up to the surface. This time when Raegan roared out at me, I heard every word.
“Olivia, you’re going to get yourself killed. Get out, now!”
I dove once more.
And again.
And again.
It was on the last one that I felt something shift within me. A pain, like none other that I had felt before, erupted beneath my skin and seared my insides, setting my blood boiling within my flesh, my bones grinding as I fought to keep swimming, deeper and deeper.
There were more. I knew there were more. I wouldn’t stop.
Darker and darker the water became the farther I went.
I was dizzy. Everything blurred around me, the solid wall of darkness puddling into ripples in my vision as I fought to stay conscious. My lungs burned more than my skin did, my head ached more than my muscles did.
But that’s when I found them.
Twins. Tiny, so tiny. If they had been humans, I thought they were little more than four or five years old. They were huddled against one another, their last acts in the horror that befell them being clutching to each other in a final attempt of serenity.
Right as I grabbed on to them, I finally passed out.