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. ]

Comments

[elfuego]

Though this is the exact wrong place for it, Zuko did his best to cover their retreat. Following Wangji, his fists, and feet sent out large balls of fire that collided with the floor below, trying to scare off the monolithic scale sea-horror that continued to sweep towards them. His fire didn't travel as far as it would have on dry land, but it as short-lived as the fire he could bend here was, it was ferociously delivered.

And it helped enough that their dive into the dense kelp forest went unnoticed, the creature's attention briefly pulled in the direction of a rising, milky cloud of rubble from just next to it.

Tensing when he's grabbed he knows enough to know the guy probably means well. He's abnormally warm to the touch, like someone running a fever so high and so persistent even the chilly waters that surround the bear of them aren't enough to quell it.

"Come on," Zuko turned his arm beneath Wangji's grasp, taking a hold of the man's forearm as he pulls him towards the ruins, certain he can make out a space just above where stones had fallen away. He didn't want to get stuck in some underwater cave, but he wanted to be on solid ground and decided it was worth investigating if it meant he could stand up again. Hopefully, his newfound deepwater diving companion felt the same.

[downswing]

Touch is intimacy in ways men explore sooner with slaughter — thieved, easier than lent. He spares the boy a glance, then his hand, then the streams of lost fire that survive past the swallowing thick of raging water.

And he means to say —

It will only lure it closer.

— but the creature comes already, they descend in a whirlwind of limbs and a tragedy of lost balance, and when Wangji breaks his fall on the sea's ground, knee nibbled by gravel, he spares the moment to appreciate the bizarre, residual transition of walking while floating.

Zuko, he remembers the name, between blinks that should weigh down his lids, each breath a dull ache over its predecessor. White. White anchors him. Between strands of long weed and agglomerations of coral, they start within the ruins, and he finds himself foolishly driven to linger in the boy's orbit, as if the approximation of steps apart might see them drift. ​

Farther out, the creature floats, dark and distant. Beneath his feet, he struggles to come down and clasp a cut of broken marble, broken off fallen walls. He unearths it, and the device that serves them for brush and tongue pulses awareness:

"...aravast." No, even he may deduce. "Taravast." And once Lan Wangji's fingers dig through the grave of rot and tangled debris, sweeping it aside, "Witches' quarters."

[elfuego]

Nobody would ever award Zuko the title of master strategist - at least not at this point in his life. Making something happen was usually the course of action he leaped for the quickest, for better, or for worse.

At least nobody got hurt - even though the chilling sensation of wet kelp sliding past his body while he moved through the water after Wangji made Zuko's skin crawl. Injuries weren't a more palatable prospect but pain wasn't creepy.

Sending an arm out to try and clear the way in front of him and stop the horrible stuff from brushing against his face he frowns at the other man's discovery, looking around, trying to see the outline of the creature they had retreated from returning his focus to what the other man had found.

"Can we get inside somewhere?" Witches quarters hadn't been what Zuko expected to find down here, but pressing on was better than contending with the thing they were hiding from.

[downswing]

Inside. Ocean's breath cool on their backs and the world dark, blued and bare, and he cannot say with certainty where openness lies and where lives the enclosure, how the bones of it build to suffocate them.

Ahead, no doors, barely walls. Weed and algae strapped on white stone like thickened braids, dispersed under the first wavered touch. He pushes them aside, crawled by the spread of ivory and marble, tasting the sculptures of carved filigree. No doors, but —

"Pillars." He finds his footing enough to swivel, to dart between columns and bide the boy Zuko behind him with a slow wave. If they cannot hide, they may yet run, and the creature's girth will impede it from giving easy chase. To be hunted, amid wafts of blue and green and each layer dark, to live as prey. He little abides it.

...but for one warning that strikes him, served neatly behind, for the boy's one notice. "If land succumbed, there may be bodies."

[elfuego]

"Bodies?" This place looked old, crumbling beneath the weight of the water and the passage of time. He didn't want to think about what bodies looked like after being underwater for this long, and he firmly put the thought out of his mind. They needed to find a way forward no matter what, going back wasn't going to do either of them any good.

Swimming fast after Wangji he followed the other man past the pillars, blinking down through the kelp below, half expecting a hand to reach up and grab them before he tore his eyes away and swam on. "We'll keep going. There's no going back."

And their time was finite. Zuko moved through the water, following the line of pillars that jutted up from the seaweed below like uneven teeth. Maybe it was a plaza, maybe they could follow it to a street. Or maybe it was nothing.

[downswing]

Cadavers, and the toll of submergence the dark, dragging rot of flesh at once deteriorated and preserved by water. Unless creatures of the sea have discovered it, nibbling or mercenary, with great or fiendish bites. The state of them, harrowing for the chilled reminder that, come what may, death is the only certainty — that they blaspheme, step slow and minds meandering, as they walk these lands with reverence, but lacking in kindness.

White, everywhere. Here, gate walls, introducing a — hall. Nearest, perhaps dearest, a delicately filigreed crown of windows, widowed of their glass, timid inscriptions disclaiming them for the shop of a chemist, peddling potions. Next, and Lan Wangji's fingers trail, unstradling coarse lichen from its perch: a showing of dwarf doors, dedicated to children sent to their studies.

"A district whole." Here, a frown bisects his forehead, carves itself deep. "To what end? Sorcerers have their halls above already."

The Bessis, after all, invited them to their abodes.

[elfuego]

Grim-faced Zuko turned in the water, sizing up their surroundings as he silently mulled over Wangji's question. "Was there a third faction? A disaster?"

It would have had to have been something cataclysmic to cause an entire district to yield to the water. The set of small doors turns his stomach, and while he doesn't protest just yet, he hopes the other man doesn't want to open them. He liked answers, but he didn't need them badly enough if risking the inside of that little room was the path to them.

He swam down the hall, eager to put space between himself and the thought of drowning children. Zuko's hand skimmed the cold stone of the wall thoughtfully, finally looking back to Wangji.

"Do you think this place is cursed?" They didn't have things like that where he came from really, but Zuko had learned curses were very much a thing in Taravast - something he hated.