The Sea is Full of Stars

But which one was she? Or did it matter? The real question was, would she remember? If so, this could present problems, since she might well revive old conditioning and become subject to other wills in a world that was growing more dangerous as the forces of darkness gathered and moved in the west. What could they do against an army of monsters who might overrun all the land by sheer force of numbers and had no worry about how many lives they sacrificed?

If only she could gain this one’s knowledge without risking her mind and her soul!

For now it would have to suffice just to train her and indoctrinate her so completely in the Amboran mindset that she might be an asset in the inevitable dark times to come.

The Overdark, the ocean had always been called. It was a fitting, perhaps prophetic, name.

She would send not Lema back to Zone, but an acolyte priestess with more requests. The Grand High Priestess was already supplying weekly updates to the clans on the state of the coming darkness, and everyone who was knowledgeable in any clan understood the gravity of it. But even getting the clans to agree on whether or not it was raining (or if females flew) was impossible. Getting them to band together in concert on a truly national scale was the Grand High Priestess’s aim, and perhaps the only hope Ambora, as a coastal nation, had.

For they would come one day. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, or even next week or next year, but they would come. If they faced three million individualists, as she feared they would, then none of the gods and spirits of Ambora could save them.

Mahakor, Kalinda

It wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it had, and a lot. Neither of them understood that it was because of their own telepathic links, suddenly severed when all of their beings were broken down into nothing more than impossibly complex and detailed code, analyzed, rearranged, and reformed on the surface by the great machine that operated and maintained the Well. The Well of Souls was not so much a creator as a processor, although only those long dead and gone could understand its logic.

Angel/Alpha, Ming/Beta, and Ari had all tried to enter at once, although they were assured it wouldn’t matter in terms of final placement. Alpha had winked out first, and Beta hesitated, feeling lost, and then the pain and jamming of the mental signals and implanted receptors kicked in and, for very different reasons, Beta and Ari clung to one another as their transformations began.

Beta clung to Ari because she had been using an unused part of his brain for hot swappable storage, and because she had made him subject to her. Ari clung to her out of fear, out of remorse, and because more than being controlled, he feared being alone.

He awoke, still with the echo of that searing pain, when somebody threw a huge bucket of water at him with enormous force, knocking him backward and almost out cold again.

He was disoriented and panicked, then saw that what had thrown the water at him was in fact a very angry looking ocean, and that he was on a rocky outcrop being pounded by tall waves and churning surf. He tried to get up and run inland to escape the next big one, but couldn’t get to his feet before it smacked him again. Then, without thinking, his survival instincts took over and he crawled, hand over hand, to the edge of the rocks and slid down into the ocean head first.

Instantly he was in a different world. A shiver went through him from head to—tail?—and he opened his mouth and took in water, starting a rhythmic motion. He felt it pass through the mouth, down through the neck, and then kind of ooze back into the surrounding water again. It was an interesting feeling, one he’d not had before, nor was it something he’d have tried on his own, but thankfully, the instincts worked.

Okay, he was breathing water. It still seemed odd, but only because, topside, he was certain he’d been breathing air. What kind of creature could breathe both so effortlessly?

He brought what proved to be a webbed hand with very long, sharp, curved nails to his face and felt it. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, chin, even two ears, although they felt like soft seashells. But the nose wasn’t a nose; no water was going in and out, and he didn’t think air had before, on the rocks. It seemed to be a nice little nose, but in fact the two indentations in the nostrils weren’t cavities at all, but ended just inside, at a pulsing fleshy tissue.

There was hair, too, thick and long, but it didn’t quite feel like hair, and when he reached up and took a little of it and brought it in front of his eyes, it looked colorless, not quite transparent but certainly translucent, and felt warm to the touch.

Continuing his self-examination, he noted gill-like organs in the neck, which accepted water as he swam and extracted the oxygen and expelled the rest in a simple series of automatic motions. His color was light brown on the underside; from what he could tell about his back, it appeared a much darker brown, and there seemed to be a fin, like the dorsal of a shark, just below the shoulder blades. If that was what he’d fallen against the second time, it was a wonder he hadn’t impaled himself. Reaching around and touching it, which was all he could manage, he could feel it was very hard, and with sharp edges that probably led to a knifelike point.

Now it was clear that he hadn’t been able to run because he had no legs. Instead, the humanoid torso blended into one more reminiscent of a sea lion or a porpoise; the large steering fins were parallel to his body, much like a mammal, rather than like great fish.

A hybrid of some kind, he thought with some sense of wonder, one so much of the sea that it probably lived there most of the time and breathed the water easily, yet able to breathe air if need be and operate on the surface, or even, to the limited extent his body permitted, on land. Part fish, part mammal? There were small, very tight, very firm breasts with nipples, but they looked and felt more like pectorals and he felt comfortably male, except…

If there s no crotch, how do I…? He brought his tail around and angled his neck down until he could see a small area where something bony barely protruded. That was it? Jeez, maybe they just laid eggs and then the guys swam over them and got off or something. Wouldn’t that be a disappointment!

There was a sense of warmer and cooler currents; he could actually see them as well as feel them. But though he was now in what was certainly a cold current, it was a matter of fact rather than a matter of concern. Fatty tissue, or something even better, was insulating him as needed.

Underwater, the colors he saw were vanishing with depth. Still, when he examined his hands or other parts of his body, the image looked crisp and sharp. He wondered about that. It seemed that his eyes were flattening, compensating for the distortion of light in the water.

Once his initial mental qualms were out of the way and he had experimented with how much turn or twist did what, moving in this element was like flying without wings. While you were aware of the water, it was a friend, and you could hold yourself at a given depth, go up or down with minor gestures, and go forward with only slight expenditures of energy. It was better than flying; it was a fully three-dimensional environment, and the more he swam in it, the more of a rush he got. Damn if this wasn’t fun!

As he descended still farther, he became aware of other senses that he was using. Sound… Echoes back to his ears and then to his brain were painting pictures for him. Down about a hundred meters he pictured a school of average-sized fish, and a bit farther down there were more. But sonar couldn’t give the level of detail he was perceiving; no, he was picking out each individual living thing and categorizing it by size and attributes. He realized that this ability had something to do with whatever it was that he’d thought was his nose.

But where in this wet place was he headed?

As it turned out, at about fifty meters depth an entire network appeared to him out of the gloom at the bottom—not in sight, but in that sixth sense he didn’t quite understand. But what did they mean, these straight lines going in various directions like some grand highway as seen from very high up? Each, when probed by sonar, had a different and distinct single tone. Once he tried it, the tone persisted until he changed to a different line.

They were roads! Not actual, physical roads, but grids laid out on the floor and perhaps broadcasting as well. Anyone swimming along who had his powers would see it, and if they knew what each tone meant, they would know which road went where, and maybe more.

He wasted no time choosing a road. They were all the same to him, and they all had to lead