and breathe -

[downswing]

WHO: Lan Wangji, your fine self, Zhou Zishu, Lan Sizhui
WHEN: all things underwater during Macaluso’s dragon capture attempts
WHERE: the bay of Taravast
WHAT: in which Lan Wangji loves underwater silence, and sea creatures, dragons and basic breathing don’t love him back
WARNINGS: Sea creatures, underwater claustrophobia




i. open | sea creature served raw

[ Hunt, if you mean to be caught. Later, he will remember.

Now: waters dark, clean. Roiled mourning. Where boats lance above, the skies weep in wake with empty translucence. Below, the smear of golden striations sundering sands Lan Wangji's feet only tease at stark distance. Enough of light yet percolates to know he has not broken to hard depths, though the flickered swell of crowding froth whips and scratches his lungs with each shallow breath.

Trust the thrall, they said, and Gusu Lan trains deft swimmers, but habit and reason prevail over the comforts of sorcery, of artifice. An hour’s time, bought at the cost of instinct that woos him to grasp the beaded string of nearby coral and propel himself up, minutes into the excursion.

He roams farther than the fishermen require it: past schools of stuttered silvered fish, past the dregs of algae and ripped debris, southward into the hungry mouth of the teasing abyss, until the cold magicians send in crepuscular mists of ice pellets and sedative wafts disperses.

Until he drifts, limbs slack, cutting waters blue and deep darks bluer, and thinks, more fool of a man — the creature is only a conjunction of shadow shifting in mimicry of the midday hour’s sun, changing. It rips itself in movement, slow with the grandeur of every predator that knows its survival inexorable: too big to fall, and a tired deluge of yielding fish, plankton and rubble pulled into the gravity of its unshackled mouth. As if it were a tectonic plate, alive.

Retreating as slowly as his limbs may paddle without injecting fresh stream of bubbles in the waters, Lan Wangji does not know when he encounters another silhouette, cannot say when he concludes, this, then, is the warmth of fellow man. Cannot look away from the enormity of the blindly searching creature.

Survival strikes late; he mouths aside, through the peculiar sorcery: ]

Keep still. Stay low.

[ To alert it now is to risk their hides. ]

ii. Zhou Zishu can rescue mermaids too

[ The arrogance of magic: exertion, when breath takes toll and stokes to burn, when whatever sorcery lent him the hour’s time underwater begs leave of him, and he is yet stranded below and beneath water and a quivered, senseless thing, remembering the motions of natural biology. The cost of stabbing sea depths with impunity.

There are mercies: enough of the light of the braziers litters speckles of hot white at the surface that Lan Wangji can yet tell land without losing direction. Whirlpools of fish round the great, stilled shadows of fishermen’s boats like beggars and bruises: green and yellowed and ripening to purples, crowding to ask the alms of any spare morsels, thrown in.

By the end of the ascent, pressure deafens him, water is only a haze of milky whites and butter, light distorted. He heaves — coughs around water, and more fool he, a man of Gusu Lan, learned in swimming, experiened past negligence of the basics — and latches onto the flank of the nearest boat, mindless when his weight and the despair of his pull nearly imbalance it.

Waves lash his face in a rush of spume, the start of sick, stormed unrest, when he breaks surface. He clings on to the bull, the thick knots of net and rope intended for the catch of lesser things, now bound to his wrists. If he knows Zhou Zishu, it is after countless, blind, slicked blinks, lashes steeping. When he reaches a hand out in quiet asking for a pull. ]

...apo... a... ah... [ Give him the moment, the guttural, wrenched breath, the cleanliness of air that seeps the wet and salt the very water absents, at great depth. ] ...apologies.

[ There. Hello. ]

iii. Lan Sizhui goes to the underwater zoo

[ All villagers know this truth: if a lord wishes it done, it will be so. And Macaluso Spina intends to have his dragon.

Sorcery intervenes: the cold’s spread, sticky underwater, part and particles that cloy and crowd and thicken the depths, a great dark stewing. Earlier, the limpid waves had shared the feverish secret of their fish schools, their starvelings, their gossips, the little, curious creatures that tackled boats as if to beg a word.

Now, magic bides Lan Wangji an hour’s endurance underwater. And his knees know, his bones, his fingers: remember from the streams of Gusu Lan how to coil and retract, to curl and contain what licked scarcity of warmth his body possesses in the face of ice terrors, the swarm of white formations, great slow sheets that groan under their own heft.

The canals cannot survive ice magic long, he suspects, not with the traffic of vessels, the people unaccustomed. But Lan Wangji can have this: a moment, his son yet at his side, when there is only the prickle of wet and cold, and the white of them, drifting, and then —

The bright, swirling strike of lightning, serpentine, the dragon at distance. He sees it, and first assumes it only a cutting of ice, sinking, drowned — but it traverses, rounds, turns into itself, seeks out. It appears to chase nebulously, whatever chilly sorcery they drip from above dulling its wits —

And Lan Wangji’s arm comes up, signals Sizhui at ease, to yet stand his ground, as the dragon surges to break the surface, then collapses back down, slabs of gelid thickness crashing back with it into grey waters, their silence depths now a battlefield before its trashing. It does not seek them out, only slithers, scales long and slick and returning motes of distant light.

It aches Lan Wangji, to speak underwater, body distressed by sorcery. Still, Sizhui must have his instruction: ]

Do not stain your hands with its capture.

[ Let it be witnessed, let them learn the creature, how it shifts and turns and tatters water — let them remember, and assist it later on. ]