Chapter Text
Tonight the wind was low and the three moons rode high, full with milk light. Elias was up in the crow's nest and there was no better place to be, not anywhere across the Inner Sea or Outer, not across the whole blue span of the wide world.
He was a ship orphan, born nameless on the docks and raised amidst the squabble of seabirds and stink of ork-oil smoke. He'd worked first on the great hauls of herring brought in by trawlers going out far past the barrier islands. Later, stars in his eyes, he'd won his first belowdecks job cleaning the bilge and killing the eider moths that infested the stores.
It was rough work, and more often than not days ended with tears and a bruise in the shape of the first mate's boot, but Elias hid those tears as best he could. Now, he was twelve- almost a man, he thought, testing his jaw for stubble. He was built plenty enough like a sailor, a rigging spider made of all arms and legs, his dark hair sheared near the scalp to prevent lice. Now, there were to be no more moths and no more tears. All was different. This was his first journey as night watchman.
“Watch- boy, ” Captain Guerlain said with a scoff, but even his derision couldn't dampen Elias's pride. He was night watchman on the grand trawler White Tern, three weeks east from Estara, three weeks over the great indigo expanse of the Inner Sea. Tonight he had the best possible view of it. Midnight had passed, and he stared out across the horizon, marveling. The ocean reflected the light of the three moons in ripples and swells, so the span of it seemed a constantly-shifting web of silver, the stars a blanket of pinpoints hard and bright as diamonds.
Even the stink of the herring-slimed decks below didn't reach Elias a hundred feet up on the crow's nest. He hung on, arms and legs hooked around the thick, prickly rope. The Tern's engines were still for the night, just the slow bass thrum of them like a second heartbeat in Elias's bones. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with salt air. Summer was coming in earnest, and the air was warm- he had dozens of night watches to look forward to, dozens of nights like this, where he might be the only creature in the world.
All the same, the sight of the sea to starboard made him shiver as a cold breeze played over his arms. The green running lights traveled across the water to a point, and then in the ship's shadow all became dark. A league out the waters of the Inner Sea shifted to a deeper shade of indigo, and the sea floor dropped by fathoms into the nothingness of the Great Blue. The Inner Sea was plenty landless, wracked with its fair share of storms, but the Great Blue was a different beast altogether. Past that point, there was nothing, an abyss if ever there was one. No islands, no land, nothing for vast unchecked miles both above and below.
Elias remembered next to nothing of his ma. She was a dock lady, a painted girl, whatever pretty names the sailors liked to call them as they drank and laughed in the canteen. Still, he remembered her stories, rasped on her rusty voice as she dabbed red circles onto her cheeks and breathed stick after stick of kaffa. The sweet smell of it filled Elias's head as it crisped in the censer. The stories made him forget the cold, the hunger. Monsters lived out there, she said, witches flying in on the storms and beasts bigger than ships- bigger than a dozen ships- cruised on cold currents, swallowing whole runs of herring in a go. Not just monsters, either, but gods, the Great Leviathan itself, sowing life and death alike in its holy wake.
Elias had listened, transfixed, the smoke painting wonders in his head. Now he scoffed with the other boys, of course. The Great Leviathan was dead, they assured one another with the confidence of experts, passing cigarillos around: it was a big stupid beast and it was rotting somewhere, eyes pecked to jelly by the birds. The King's Navy was mighty enough to repel any monsters dumb enough to come in Estaran waters. They'd blast them to the sky with their cannons.
Besides , Elias thought privately, if the Leviathan was really a god, if all the world really had come from it, it wasn't too impressive of one. No one had seen fluke nor fin of the Leviathan for nearly two centuries.
It certainly wasn't interested in war, either, the one that had taken Elias's ma away from him with one blow of an officer's fist. He'd shattered her jaw, and she'd died feverish and alone while Elias hunted for scraps in the gutter.
Now, though, he stared out across the moonslight road of the sea and felt a chill pass through his bones. He shivered, hunching deeper into his woolen cowl. Here, at the edge of the Great Blue, it was easy enough to believe in gods and monsters.
A light winked from the deck. Elias looked down.
“Boy!”
Elias winced. Falaize, the first mate, had argued with the captain about Elias's viability as night watchman, and now seemed adamant to catch him sleeping, or shirking, or even scratching his arse the wrong way- any excuse to toss him back in the bilge.
“Sir,” he called, and did his best to straighten. “Good evening, sir.”
“It's night, boy, as you should well know. What's the report?”
“Nothing seen, sir.”
“Nothing at all? You should watch harder-”
“A flight of cloud gulls an hour to twelve, sir, if that's what you mean.”
Silence. Elias winced again, heart pounding, sure Falaize was about to call him down for a beating.
“Make sure you aren't blinded behind that big mouth of yours, boy,” Falaize called. “Wouldn't want to miss a ship-load of pirates bearing down on us. They're not so kind to bilge rats like you as us civilized folk. Not so kind indeed.”
Elias had an elaborate fantasy he'd been constructing these long weeks in the crow's nest where he shoved Falaize into the sea, or perhaps slipped moth-poison into his bread, or beat him to death with an oar while the crew cheered him on. Still, Falaize knew pirates, Elias had to give him that. He'd served in the King's Navy before he'd lost his hand to brigands and been honorably discharged. Elias knew he must seethe at not being able to defend his country now against the Lapidaean armada, standing safe on a trawler deck instead of that of King Daval Belmont's finest warship, cannons blazing, alchemic bolts trailing arcs of blue fire through the sky.
Elias longed to work the herring ships for the rest of his life, to become first mate, maybe even captain, but the war was a hungry thing. At fifteen, he'd enlist like the rest. Maybe he'd come back. Maybe he'd end up like Falaize, angry at the world, parts of him missing.
“No, sir,” he called down, but Falaize's lantern was already gone.
Elias sighed and hunkered down again. He reached for his flask and sipped at the hot honey whiskey inside, spices burning in his nose. Not too much; it had to last the night. He licked his lips hungrily and stared out again, scanning the horizon. His mother's stories weren't all about storms and monsters. Sometimes they were lovely- orkwives with eyes like pearls, and the song of a witch, rumored to be so beautiful the winds would weave themselves to their bidding. An old man in a taberna had showed him a set of sharklike teeth on a cord and told him they were the fangs of an orkwife he'd caught in a net. Elias didn't believe him, but he knew witches were real enough. He'd seen their feathers: long and black and iridescent as oil. They were out there, somewhere. Now he was out here, too, in the night, vast and full of wilderness.
A cloud gull winged its way past, a tiny scrap against the face of the moons. Maybe that was a witch.
Don't be an idiot, he told himself.
The wind picked up, rushing past him, numbing his face. The Estaran flag, black on red, pulled and snapped at its moorings above. The sea became choppy, a thousand crescents of silver against the fathomless dark.
Elias shuddered. The air had turned electric, charged. He knew that feeling, but there were no storm clouds in the sky, nothing but the stars. They seemed now brighter, clearer, their brilliance astounding.
Elias glanced around, unnerved. His pulse pounded inside him. He thought about reaching for the alarm- but what would he say? That the breeze felt strange? It sounded ridiculous even in his head. As he turned it over the wind came again, and with it: scents, the salt of the sea concentrated, the briny smell of living things, the great heavy complicated mass of coming rain, a knife sharpness that reminded him of lightning. The moonslight poured across the deck, so thick he thought, in a sudden rush of fancy, that he might cup it in his hands and drink it.
Perhaps he'd had more whiskey than he thought. He rubbed his eyes and stared out again. He blinked, then braced the balls of his feet against the ropes and straightened, brow furrowed.
At the horizon, light flickered.
Elias tensed, hand on the alarm cord. One pull and the ship would blaze to life, men awakened, ready to gun the engines and brace for a storm.
But this didn't look like lightning.
It came again, strengthening, filaments of green and red, astral blue. Curtains of shifting light, great swinging arcs of it in constant, entrancing motion. An aurora, Elias thought, but they weren't nearly far north enough. The hairs on his arms were standing up straight. His pulse was so strong he could hear it in his ears.
Another gust of wind twisted past, so harsh he nearly lost his grip on the rope. He clung on, teeth grit, unable to look away from the aurora. It brightened, and seemed to touch the sea, or maybe it was coming from the sea, because the light was there, too: a tide of light at the horizon, sweeping closer. Elias felt the sea beneath the White Tern shift, heard the ship groan as the swell blossomed, the entire sea rising as the tide of light grew closer and closer. It was blue, vivid as summer, and with it came a rushing- the displaced sea, the wind, movement; it came from the ocean, from the stars, from inside Elias, the air he breathed, the blood circling through him.
His lips traced a prayer to Bellana, but no voice came. He was frozen. He couldn't have pulled the alarm if he'd wanted to.
Illuminated below the surface, no more than fifty feet down, he saw it.
A form. Massive beyond imagining. His mind struggled, failed, became a caged spectator, silenced by its scale. Not a dozen ships, it was so much more than that- a hundred, a thousand. Maybe it was like a whale. That was as close a comparison as Elias could get. He saw fins, saw the great fissures and knots of scar tissue rent through its black hide, saw the countless forms of other smaller creatures swimming around it as if pulled along in its wake. Entire schools of herring, shoals of sharks and porpoises, rays and skates and platefish, even sea-orks, all of them dwarfed alongside it.
The Tern rose. Waves crashed against the hull, lanterns swinging. The light passed below the ship, and for a moment Elias saw it all, the vast form of the creature, the White Tern a tiny scrap suspended over the ridge of its back. The light refracted in Elias's eyes: tears, he registered, somewhere far away. He was sobbing, heat streaming down his face, body so full of awe it hurt. The blue light surrounded the creature, streamed from it, and for a moment the stars filled the sea, too, sky and ocean all one vast abyss.
The Leviathan moved on. The swell settled, ribbons of light trailing through the sea. The brilliance of the stars faded, the wind dying down. Elias swung round, watching as the light traveled on, watching until the last of it touched the far horizon. He trembled, tears dripping down his face. He came back to his body, but could not stop staring, eyes wide, nerves on fire.
He did not know what he had seen. He knew nothing. He saw that now, all else cast aside. There was only one truth, bright as staring into the sun.
It had come back. It was real, all the stories, every scrap.
The Great Leviathan had returned.