Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(20) Sar: Old Stories

I never thought I'd ever see Roshaska. It's been Ashianti protocol for centuries that we don't come here. It's not respectful. And with so many Shalda people in Rapal and living or sheltering in our territory, we want to make sure we're honoring that.

I never thought I'd see Roshaska, but I've always wished I could. My mother told stories of it back when I was little, before war made her and my dad so busy, they didn't have time to raise a child anymore. I'd pester Ruka for those stories when she visited. She'd pass me off to Denizel, saying she didn't have the skill to conjure images of places she'd never visited. Denizel did. He'd have me sitting almost still for hours, captivated by soaring descriptions of flowing streets and coral-block walls, beneath a sky so black, it almost turned blue again.

I saw that sky when we arrived here. It wasn't just a story: there was a blue tint to it that the waters of the true Shalda-Ki-Tu didn't have, like we're just far enough above that depth. It was a gorgeous color. Like black, but softer. I'm sure I'd have seen it before if I'd stopped at just the right depth, but there's something about the sky over Roshaska that feels like it couldn't be replicated anywhere else. Or maybe that's just the combination of that sky and all of what's beneath it.

It's both awe-striking and bone-deep terrifying to see a city that was once destroyed like Rapal, but was never reoccupied.

Rapal rebuilds itself. The city itself is alive, in a different way than Roshaska. Corals grow on broken coral-stone, and over the millennia, the city's top continues to rise. It chases the sun. Roshaska is a picture of decay, crumbling slowly over the millennia. It's lasted several, but if it's left to the ocean like this forever, eventually it will disappear. Not for a long time. But eventually. Something about that puts an ache in my heart. I know it's not my place to be here. But now that I am, it hurts to see this place neglected, when it was once a home and shelter for so many people. It's bigger than Rapal. Far bigger—ten times the population, and that's just my estimation from the little that I've seen. It could easily be double that.

This might be the last I ever see this city. I don't see how circumstances could be so dire again as to justify me returning. And so I drink up every word I can pick out on the walls, their sentences pocked with unreadabilities, but still coherent enough for me to piece together what they're trying to say. I can read the stories on these walls. They're just like in Rapal, only older: great events and heroes, demigod sightings and messages from Andalua. I keep seeing mentions of the demigods' songs. I knew they used to sing. I know they've been stopping. But even the records in Rapal don't contain this many mentions, and it makes me wonder just how much more magical this ancient ocean was.

I want to read everything, but I also have a duty here, and I don't want to overstay my welcome. I follow Taiki in resignation down the length of the caves. The last one is the second-smallest, with plaster that, despite its preservation, has begun to flake through sheer age. That's another tragedy. It means the writings here will be the first to fade—and I have a feeling they're the oldest of everything in the city.

I approach the block of a story and attempt to read. It's near-impossible. The script is different, with annotations where newer eel-Kel writing doesn't have any, and a second round of markings underneath that have meanings I do not understand. Reading even perfectly preserved sentences is like reading off a seaweed scroll that's been eaten through by the nibbling of coral-snails. There's no punctuation in any format I can recognize. I can only decipher one word in five. I know one person in Rapal who might stand a chance against this writing, and I don't even know if xe made it out of the city.

That's a lie. Xe didn't. There's no way xe'd abandon the library until it was obvious Arcas was a foul player and xir life was under threat. By then, it would be too late. And that's almost the worst part, really.