Living

Before Arista could fully process the moment, Thoth's claws closed gently around her shoulders, and he lifted off the ground.

"...Thoth! What are you doing?!"

"Living," Thoth said, wings carrying them both steadily out over the coastline, the shoreline shrinking behind them.

"...That's not an explanation!"

"It is precisely the explanation," Thoth said, adjusting his flight path toward open water. "You stated you wished to spend the remaining time living, rather than grieving. I am ensuring that occurs immediately, rather than allowing further delay."

They flew for fifteen more minutes in silence, Arista slowly recognizing the trajectory, the familiar stretch of open ocean where the Drowned Court sat, ten kilometers out and hidden somewhere beneath the waves below them.

"...Now I know how Bram felt," she said. "I think I prefer flying on your—"

Thoth descended until only a few meters separated her from the water, then released her without warning.

Arista's stomach lurched as she dropped, shrieking, straight down into the water below. Selen, already swimming toward her, having spotted Thoth descending, reached her within seconds.

[Status Effect: Water Breathing — Applied]

Arista hung there a moment, disoriented, half-laughing, half-outraged, staring up through the water at Thoth still circling overhead.

"...He asked whether I would help, if he managed to bring you here," Selen said, grinning, hovering easily beside her.

"...Did he mention dropping me?"

"He left that part out," Selen admitted.

"He dropped me into the ocean!"

Selen only laughed, and Arista's outrage, try as she might to hold onto it, began slipping sideways into something closer to helpless amusement.

Squishy arrived within moments, rings pulsing bright at her unannounced arrival, one massive tentacle curling gently around her in familiar greeting.

They spent the next few hours exactly like that. Selen taught her the same easy, minimal tail-flick the settlement's children had once demonstrated to a clumsy new player. Arista, lacking a tail, did her best to mimic the motion with her legs instead, kicking in some rough approximation of the rhythm, to Selen's open amusement. Squishy delighted in every clumsy, improving attempt, occasionally scooping her up just to watch her shriek with laughter.

They played some improvised, chaotic game of tag through the open water, Squishy an unfair advantage on whichever team he happened to favor at any given moment. They explored a nearby coral formation Selen had always found particularly beautiful, its colors shifting in the filtered afternoon light. They simply floated, at one point, doing nothing at all, watching sunlight ripple down through the water above them.

"...There's something else," Selen said eventually. "Follow me."

"...The celebration?" Arista asked.

"We agreed to wait until the end of the week, to see if you came," Selen said. "After that, we would have held it without you." She smiled. "I'm glad you dropped... by."

Arista stared at her. "...That was terrible."

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Selen only grinned wider and led them deeper into the City of Worship, where dozens of mermaids had already gathered, arranged in a loose crescent around the open tribute court, every face turned toward the center where Squishy drifted.

Arista had never seen the whole pilgrim school assembled at once like this, the crescent stretching further than she'd expected, a whole rainbow of scales catching what little light reached this deep. A hush settled over the water the moment Squishy began to move.

He turned toward his collection first, surrounded by everything the pilgrims had brought him across the past months, and began lifting items one by one for the gathered crowd to see. A polished shell, held up and slowly rotated. A twist of old brass, examined with obvious fondness before being set back down. The mirrored stone slab, tilted until it caught the ambient light and threw it rippling across the assembled mermaids, several of them murmuring in delight at their own reflections scattered across the water.

Then he paused, drifting slowly along the front of the crescent, one enormous eye studying face after face as though searching for something specific. The murmuring quieted. Several mermaids straightened, hopeful.

He stopped before a young one near the front, barely more than a child by the look of her, and studied her a moment longer. Then, without warning, he turned and swam off into the dark water beyond the court.

A ripple of confusion passed through the crowd. Several mermaids glanced at each other, then toward Selen, as if she might know where he'd gone.

He returned a few minutes later, carrying something roughly a meter across, small only by his own standards, a torn fragment of cloud material from his own crevice home, its surface still carrying the shallow impressions of where it had been wedged against the stone.

He extended it toward her.

She stared at it a long moment before wrapping both arms around as much of it as she could hold, and immediately began drifting upward, the fragment's buoyancy tugging her steadily toward the surface. One of Squishy's tentacles shot out, catching her tail and holding her in place.

He studied the situation for a moment, then took the fragment back, tore off a smaller piece, roughly the size of a ball, and offered that to her instead.

She accepted it, looked up at him, and found herself speechless. A ripple of soft sound moved through the gathered crowd, mermaids turning to each other, several reaching out to touch the chosen one's shoulder in congratulations.

"...The first gift of this new pilgrimage," Selen murmured.

"...Why her?" Arista asked.

"I do not know," Selen admitted. "Perhaps he will tell me eventually. Perhaps there was no particular reason at all, beyond simply wanting to give something to someone who had never received anything from him before."

Squishy's rings pulsed warm and bright, clearly pleased with himself, and then he turned, finding Arista in the crowd. His mouth opened and closed several times in rapid succession, the same exaggerated motion from his earlier joke, his whole massive body wobbling in the water, still delighted with the memory of having fooled her once.

"...Yes, yes, very funny," Arista called, laughing despite herself. "I'm never going to live that down, am I."

He wobbled harder, rings flashing.

Eventually, Selen offered her a hand. "Hold on."

Arista took it without hesitating, and Selen took off toward the shore at a speed nothing like the steady, sustained pace of the pilgrimage, the water tearing past them both. She opened her mouth to shriek in delight, and her cheeks simply puffed out instead, full of seawater, the sound lost entirely to the rush of their passing.

They reached the shoreline, and Selen released the spell with a small gesture just as they broke the surface, ordinary air rushing back into Arista's lungs. She came up breathless, spitting water and laughing at the same time.

"...I didn't know you could swim that fast."

"I contain multitudes," Selen said, pleased with herself.

Thoth had already descended, settling at the water's edge to wait. Selen waved once, already turning back toward Squishy and the lingering crowd, and then it was only the two of them.

"...You were correct," Arista called up to him, treading water, smiling. "I needed this."

"I am aware," Thoth said. "That is why I dropped you into the ocean."

She climbed out, wrapped in a towel Thoth had somehow thought to bring, watching the last of the light spread warm and gold across the water.

"...There was a secondary reason I wished for you to come today," Thoth said.

Arista glanced up. "...A secondary reason?"

"Since you told me about the ending of this existence, you have been occupied almost entirely with that fact." His dish tilted slightly toward her. "I did not wish for my final memories of you to consist solely of grief."

She went still.

"...Thoth."

"You stated that you wished to spend the remaining time living. I wanted that for you." He paused. "I also wanted it for myself."

"...You planned this for yourself too."

"Both were true simultaneously."

Arista reached out, resting a hand against his cool, familiar plating.

"...Then we'll have to do this again," she said.

"I would prefer that," Thoth said.

"...Thirty-one days," Arista said after a while. "I did say we should actually live them."

"You did," Thoth said.