Children: A Short Story

Children

The last time I saw Home, it was through crude and thick squares of false-water, and I was trapped in what the Invaders called a "ship".

Home was beautiful, as pure and smooth as a downpearl from the Southern Vents. I watched the great Causeways become fine lines, nothing more than ghosts of scratches spread across the entire world, as we sped up into the sky.

To the horrid rumbling of their chemical rockets, Home fell away until it hung in the black of space like the crescents of the Mother and her husbands.

The Gate was still far, small and powerful, as we turned away from the massive eye of Mother and toward it.

I asked for her protection as the light slid across me, but felt horribly alone.

It was bad luck to see the surface, to dare to gaze upon the Mother holding court with her lovers and the Gate shining brightly behind them.

Covering myself with my tail, I closed my eyes and tried to block out the rumble of the engines. We knew of the Invaders from the strange asteroids they had sent for centuries now, metal hail from the skies sinking down, blinding us with flashes of light before darkfins swarmed and ripped them to pieces in stupid anger.

Every possible bit of knowledge from every mangled wreck had been collected and funneled through the Causeways between the tribes, records of faint electrical signals told and told again as they were passed along from creature to creature, until the whole of Home knew what the first Elders knew as they passed the broken shapes from one to the other.

We Children may fight and keep our own reefs, but all three of our species know that we are ultimately the same: we are Mother's.

These Invaders were not.

Their asteroids' dying pulses spoke of chemicals and fire, of finely sculpted metal so unlike our simple veins of brightline cracked free from the trenches.

Their asteroids spoke of a species that knew no water.

And now they had come, ugly and gangly things, some pink and some brown but all finless, like the tiniest of young still in the egg. They had come and found me and taken me away.

A new, horrible thought came to me as I huddled in the false-water shell they kept me in. Is this Mother's punishment?

Had I angered her in some way? Did she allow these Invaders to catch me, like a toothsword letting us carry off their weaker spawn?

The ship's louder rockets cut out, and there was no denying it. We were definitely pointed toward the Gate, the place of heat and death, the place all Children's souls rise to even when their bodies sink into the deep.

There had been talk the Invaders came from the Gate itself.

I looked around at their metal and their strange false-white that everything was coated in. I took in all of the sharp, impossible angles. So many precise items that would have required so much heat.

Had someone, something finally crossed through the Gate and come for the sinners, as the oldest of stories warned?

One of my captors looked over at me as I continued to pray. I hoped at first he'd somehow understood me, but he turned back and continued to peck with his soft, flabby digits at something like a collection of scales.

All around me were other clear shells and other captives, but only I was one of the Children. The rest swam endlessly in circles or stared dumbly at anything that moved. These were lower creatures that had no idea what was happening. These were food for each other, or food for us.