Stewards of the Sea

At first there was nothing. An empty plane, nothing to feel, and no one there to feel it. Then there was just darkness. And then, in the darkness, there became something. The feelings that it could perceive were at first dull, almost nonexistent. Only the most vague pangs of sensation could be perceived. Everything was safe and warm, its entire world small and secure. It had always been this way, right?

Drifting in and out of consciousness, it only took notice of its surroundings occasionally. They barely mattered to it. Yet it could feel, just barely, that it wasn’t alone in them. Every so often it became aware of someone visiting, taking notice but not interacting. By the time it realized it had been there, the presence had always already gone.

There were no days or nights or frames of reference to track the passing of time in this world, yet they were waking up into it more and more lately. The visitor was now far away, and began to be forgotten, blurring into a swirling, unclear sea of dreams. But still it wasn’t alone for now it was aware of a much stronger presence, one unfamiliar and yet comforting, and always near. New sensations started to be noticed… muffled sounds, a sense of motion even as it stayed still in its little place. Was the world becoming more complex, or was it only taking more notice of it? And could everything be becoming… smaller? There was now little room to move… wait. Could I always move?

And then it all changed.

The shock of the cold came first. In an instant it was all so different. Pushing and prodding, lifting above the surface and into the air. What was that? What is this? Where am I?

Who am I?

Air filled lungs, an unfamiliar feeling. Eyes held closed tight until now loosened, opening for the very first time. A dark curtain rose, and a window was revealed. A face peering into its own with soft eyes. It had never seen those eyes before, and yet recognized them innately as the source of comfort he had already come to know in an earlier time. She had always been there, even before it felt her. As she gently propped her calf at the surface of the calm sea so it could breathe freely, a child looked around at a world big, bright, and beautiful. Colors and sounds and sensations flooded the senses, the first glimpses of a new story that was just beginning to unfold.

It was a lovely day to start living.

To view life through the eyes of a child, when everything is new, is a thing of magic, but you don’t realize it until it’s over. This was truly a world of wonder, a splendid place in which to grow up. At just a few weeks old he already sought to explore it, but his mother was adamant that he was not yet ready for too much adventure and quickly pulled him back close when he dashed away in pursuit of some new curiosity. Soon, but not yet. It was true there was little danger here in the world they helped to create; their family was a large one and they were always together, many eyes to guard against threats. The days where they lived in fear of bigger teeth were now distant cultural memories, but instinct still told her to keep her young son close. Let him stay this way a little longer.

But every child grows, and it cannot be halted no matter how strong a mother’s wishes may be. And time flew by, and soon her son had found his words, and so it was time to give him a name befitting his specific nature. Curiosity now took the form of questions, the how’s and the why’s of life, and her son was insatiably curious even for his age. So she called him Seeker. And seek answers he sure did.

“...does grass get sad when you eat it? What does the sky taste like? Have you ever seen a really, really big fish? Like, super big, Mom. Mom! What would happen if I grabbed a bird’s tail and flew away? You would miss me right? Do you like worms… I kinda like worms…”

His mother knew much, but she didn’t know all, and she guided Seeker to reach out to others in the community who’s specialties differed from hers (and maybe it wasn’t so bad to let him run off for a while after all… the idea now sounded pretty good…) Her son would grow up surrounded by varied perspectives and people with different sets of skills and abilities, and among them he would find the role best suited to his own. To get there one day though, she would have to let him start to go now and learn first-hand how the world works with other peers his own age. He was now a well-started youngster, quick on his flippers and eager for a bit of freedom. So under the watchful eyes of a close-knit and secure community Seeker was allowed his first ventures out into the world, with the other youngsters, to find some answers to his endless stream of questions for himself.

So with his mother’s blessing at last, he was let to run off and play in the meadow. “Stay in the short grass, and with the other children! Don’t cross the flow.” There were a lot of other kids, some around his age and others older. It was rather hard to tell though, since some were so much bigger than others anyway. Those were the hunters. He wasn’t sure what made them so large, but it was probably because they ate so much. There were some in his family, and they could tell the best stories, but they had very questionable tastes in meals. There was another type of kid in the meadow too, and they were really crazy. The walkers kind of looked like hunters, but they were even smaller than grazers like him, and they only spent a little time down here, but they could leave the water… like, really leave it and not just sit there stuck, but just keep going! They could even sleep out of it! Their flippers weren’t very good because they had sharp teeth on them that slowed them down, but the spikes let them hold things in them like having extra mouths! He had never met one of those up close yet, so he wasn’t sure what they liked to eat, but he hoped to find out.

There were some walkers on a ‘boat’ in the middle of the meadow, talking to a little hunter. His mom told him boats were like pieces of the land that walkers made so they could live on the water, but he didn’t know what a ‘land’ was yet. Seeker was brand new to everything still, but he wasn’t shy, so he went to them first. He swam up to the boat and popped his head up above the surface. Four walkers looked back, two big and two small.

“Hey! Hey. My name is Seeker, and we’re friends now so. So what do you eat? Do you eat gross stuff? My uncle eats-”

“FISH!”, one of the child walkers quickly yelled back enthusiastically lifting part of one to show exactly what she meant, as if Seeker had never seen one before.

“Pebble… you don’t need to scream. They’re two steps away.”, one of her parents mumbled under his breath, his feathers raised up as if in alarm before they slowly dropped back down sleek against his form. He turned then back to his own meal as Pebble prepared to finish the last of hers in one ravenous gulp.

Except she slipped, and her fish tail fell into the water, where the hunter, who had been resting at the side of the boat talking to Pebble before Seeker interrupted, quickly ate it instead. She got a disapproving glare, but didn’t notice.

“Hey you two are done eating so why don’t you go play with this new friend of yours? Your mother and I have a lot to do today… very boring stuff you would hate.”, Pebble’s dad told his daughters while winking surreptitiously to his partner.

“OKAY!”, yelled Pebble.

“Sure!”, replied Pebble’s sister, Patch. They both slid off the boat and into the water. Despite their relative clumsiness compared to their fully aquatic neighbors, they still floated easily on the surface and dove beneath using their arms to paddle with decent speed.

“I think you’d best go too, Whirl. Make sure none of the little kids gets into trouble.”

“Okay Pebble and Patch’s dad!”, replied the daydreamer. She was already so much larger than her friends, and she was older, but she was not quite as “grown-up” as them because hunters grew up slower than walkers. She turned around too quickly and accidentally hit the boat with her head, knocking the fish that Pebble and Patch’s dad was about to eat off the side, which she also ate before following her friends. He stood there for a moment, staring at his empty dish, and sighed.

“Hey kids, take your boards if you’ll be out there long. You’ll get tired.”, the other adult gravedigger yelled as she tossed two very small, light rafts to the children.

“Mom! We don’t need them! We can swim all day!” responded Patch, but already by the time she finished the sentence she was reconsidering, and she took her board anyway, as did Pebble. They got on top and then could lay on their bellies and paddle along the top of the water. Seeker was over-the-sea excited to see these mundane walker interactions unfold, for he had no experience with the gravediggers before.

“You are so cool! What’s it like? Walking!?” exclaimed Seeker to both of the gravedigger kids, mostly ignoring Whirl even as she got unnecessarily close, and casually put her jaws around his entire body, and slowly applied the most gentle bit of pressure to his blubber. “He’s so squishable!!!”, she squealed delightfully after determining he was, indeed, pretty squishable. She was incredibly amused, but a voice from across the meadow was not.

“Whirlpool! What did your mother just tell you earlier about using your teeth on strangers! Ask first!”. A very large hunter with uneven teeth - a large fang on one side but not the other - was scratching herself against some stones in a clearing not too far away, turning over onto her back to reach an itchy spot.

“Sorry Auntie…”

When Seeker turned to her with his own disapproving glare, she quickly backed up a little bit and gave her new friend some personal space…. but then started coming closer again, unable to resist gently poking him one more time (mouth closed this time.)

“I dunno. We just do it. Wanna play Giant Killer Sharkbirds?”, eventually answered Pebble.

“Oh okay, whats-”, Seeker began.

“YAS Giant Killer Sharkbirds! It’s KILLING TIME”, Whirl interjected loudly, now distracted from poking. She flashed her teeth… very big, rather sharp teeth. Even her tongue had teeth on it. Her mouth alone was nearly as big as Seeker’s entire body, and the sight instilled just a twinge of some sort of primordial fear in the porplet. But when Patch called out “Seeker’s the sharkbird! He’s going to eat us all! Flee for your lives!!!”, and everyone screamed exaggeratedly until their yells became giggles, and rushed to escape him, most of his worry was quickly erased.

“That’s right, I eat walkers AND hunters, all day long! Breakfast, lunch, dinner… second dinner… nighttime dinner…”

…herbivores had to eat a lot, after all.

And just like that they were friends. At such an age it did not take much - seemingly large differences didn’t really matter at all. They could all play Giant Killer Sharkbirds, making the rules as they went along. Seeker wasn’t as fast as Whirl, but she adjusted her abilities to his and still let herself be caught because that was the fun part. Patch and Pebble were slower than both underwater but got to work as a team of pack-hunting killer sharkbirds, and so could work together to corner their victims. When Whirl’s turn to be the chaser was up, Seeker was still a little nervous. Sharp teeth… big teeth… but she caught him with just a gentle flipper-tap.

“Boop. You’re dead! Now just TRY to eat me, you’ll never manage because I have SUPER POISON SPIKES now! One touch, and you will DIE!!”

“So we’ll just hit you with our boards! Then we’ll knock off the spikes!” Patch responded matter-of-factly as she and her sister lifted them up, and prepared to whack their friend in the head. It wasn’t hard to get along.. Well, Seeker was pretty sure this counted as getting along anyway. He was still new to it. But he could definitely get used to it.

~~~

Months became years, and children grew. The carefree days of childhood were not forgotten, but now there was responsibility too. The world was bigger than any of the four friends, and everyone played a part. Seeker, Pebble and Patch grew up at a similar pace and were nearly adults now. Whirl however lagged behind, and a once small age gap grew bigger like Whirl herself. She didn’t understand why it was so, and pushed herself to prove she was just as capable as her friends, but often needed help. It was nothing new to the grown-ups; it was an inevitable result of a society between people with disparate life cycles and something that every hunter dealt with at some point in their childhoods. But it didn’t mean that her friends abandoned her completely. They had growing responsibility, but there was still time to play, and games everyone could be involved with. Whirl was still a child when Patch had already a litter of children of her own, though neither Pebble nor Seeker was very inclined to have offspring (she didn’t really like males… he didn’t have much of an interest in settling with anybody.) Patch’s children too grew up, briefly matched Whirl’s developmental stage, and then matured all the while she was still growing. As a teenager she babysat the grandchildren of the friend who was her playmate just a few years before. To the other peoples the hunters seemed to keep the spark of childhood joy forever, a fact that they envied. But to the hunters, they often felt left behind. And when they finally were grown, childhood friends would be well into middle-age. The hunters got used to many of their relationships being ephemeral. The grazers and the walkers in turn viewed the hunters as almost immortal and infinitely wise creatures, living to twice their own lifespans and seeing through many generations.

They were so different, and yet they were still so alike. They shared common goals and together achieved them. In the night they all gathered and told stories, new and old, of today and a million years ago. Their peoples’ lives had been interconnected since the beginnings of recorded history. No-one knew when exactly they all joined. Hunter’s oral history suggested that they were the first race, the walkers second, and the grazers third. Each of them had influenced the other, the walkers uniting the hunters and the hunters taking in the ancestors of the grazers, freeing them from the threats of their world and cultivating in them the spark of personhood they now hold. Living together could complicate matters. But it also made life greater than the sum of its parts.

~~~

The grazers, or greenskeepers, were the seas’ gardeners, tasked with maintaining the meadows they relied on. Bordering each meadow they would allow a tanglewild to grow, a patch of tall vegetation left alone which provided cover for the benefit of the wild fishes and other animals. Every so often they made flows, clearings totally free of grass and vegetation, where the currents could run and the hunters and the walkers’ boats could move freely. These three habitats, in a matrix, still covered the habitable ocean as they had since time immemorial, but were now actively maintained at the densities most conducive to the needs of both plants and animals. Furthermore, plants were no longer forced to fend for themselves against competitors and the grazers could select for more nutritious ones even if they grew less aggressively, planting them and removing undesirable forms, making the gardens of this undersea environment more productive.

The hunters or daydreamers, and the walkers or gravediggers, were its predators at the top of its food chain. They couldn’t eat grass, but by selectively hunting the wild creatures of the sea they ensured that each remained in balance with the available resources, and the environment’s carrying capacity was not overrun. The grazers owed their safety to the two hunting-peoples filling this role instead of the primordial beasts that they tell once swam these seas, mindless and blood-lusty and killing everything that moved before the daydreamers drove them to extinction. As there was no predator larger than the hunter or more coordinated than the walker alive today, the grazers were freed of the threats that ancient predecessors faced.

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Collectively all three of the sea’s people were ecosystem engineers, balancing each other’s skills and weaknesses and maintaining their shared home over the long-term. To do so also required maintaining it for the countless other species that shared it. All of them had by now evolved for a very long time here and so picked up a great deal of knowledge on the principles of ecology and the foundations of how their environment kept functioning. They knew that water movement via the equatorial current was key to the sea remaining open. They knew well of extinction and how the loss of a single species would bring growing ripple effects along the food chain and ultimately affect them, and to remove one as the ancient daydreamers did with the predator burdles required that they fulfill its position forever after to prevent ecological destruction. Except when absolutely necessary for the well-being of the three people, the loss of any component to the system, no matter how small, was to be avoided as much as possible.

But there were some things that even the three stewards of the sea could not control.

~~~

Many years after Seeker, Patch, and Pebble, Whirl had finally grown. Her friends’ lives had progressed so far in the time it took her, and yet there was the same length of life experience between them. It was funny how it worked like that. Seeker had left his family clan and pursued a life exploring the sea to the north with a band of oddball hunters and walkers, always seeing new people and places. It was an unusual life decision for a grazer, for they were as a rule closely connected with familiar territory and closely bonded to their relatives. But Seeker was never quite like most grazers, and from his very first sought to get out into the world and explore, and so this lifestyle suited him more than settling down with a family. Pebble found an outlet for her high energy and had become a skilled hunter herself at the southern ice ledge, working with a few other gravediggers and a lot of daydreamers to corral the swimming molodont herds, culling the weak and the ill and so maintain their vigor while providing food for their peoples. She and her party were regularly gone for months at a time, but would return with a feast and abundant supplies for the other walkers to use to craft their tools. Patch, always more reserved than her sibling, became skilled at textiles and house-crafting, and helped to add on to the floating villages they crafted over the meadows, tethered to stones on the sea bed, which had freed their society from its coastal origins. Whirl’s talent however was to relate to children in a way they could understand. She was an excellent caretaker, and so watched over an ever-revolving door of new youngsters from all of the sea’s people. She watched some of them pass milestones and grow up, while others were left trying to catch up. She knew how it felt and was empathetic to their troubles. She made sure they knew that one day they would be grown up too, and to cherish the journey there because once it was over you can’t go back. Life isn’t a story you skip through to see the end; it’s about the time spent getting there.

The four friends’ stories took them down different paths, but every so often they still made time to see one another. Years often passed before they could all coordinate, and so when they did they shared stories of what they’d seen and done. They were usually light-hearted occasions, four people each very unlike the other and yet firmly tied together with common ground. But this time the tone was different. Pebble was reporting an ominous development.

“The ice shelf has reached the peninsular islands, it’s covered some of them over just since last season. Icebergs have clogged the strait. The flow is cut off, and the water all around has gone stagnant. The animals are already leaving.”

“Icebergs this far north? And in the summer?” Seeker was alarmed. Ice was unknown at this latitude, though it was known to cover the world eventually to both the north and the south. He had heard from walkers on the northern shores that in recent times it was coming closer to the sea and pushing down new kinds of animals from previously uncharted lands, including aggressive wildwalkers that unnervingly resembled the walker-people but lacked the power of speech, but was not expected ever to reach the water. The open sea-band that they lived in was not supposed to freeze.

“Yes, and the current is being blocked. That current is responsible for the distribution of warm water west to east. Without that water movement, the ice ledge is going to come even further north on this side of the blockage.” she replied.

Whirlpool, not well-traveled, didn’t know as much about the wider world as her two friends, but she could tell from their demeanor that it was not good news. Finally she spoke too, though she felt she already knew the answer before she asked it.

“What does that entail for us?”

Pebble was still for a moment, but then her sister answered for her.

“The destruction of everything our peoples have ever known.”

And at that moment, Whirl felt the last essences of childhood innocence flake off of her flippers, like raindrops into the sea. Her friends had felt it already, long ago. And now they all knew that there was no going back.