BPL2 - Chapter 8

Lylan slipped it off her finger and placed it on Smythe’s palm.

The Oracle studied the ring for a moment, then turned over her hand, letting it fall.

How rude. Lylan caught it before it hit the ground and placed it back on her finger.

“Magic only,” said Smythe, dismissively. “A patch.”

“Yes.”

“Hydra would not care about patches.” The Oracle shrugged. “Why regrow what is inferior—foreign and broken.”

Lylan took a slow breath to calm her rising panic. “I understand why the hydra might think that, but I need these memories to regrow.”

“Perhaps they did,” said Smythe, continuing the theme of being contradictory and unhelpful. “A patch. It is a patch. The stitching may be the problem.”

Lylan tamped down her frustration again. This was important, but the woman seemed allergic to any form of clarity, about this subject and about how to subdue the hydra. What good was thinking up the right questions if the Oracle would only answer them in riddles? At least when Uncle Ress had spouted riddles, no one’s life had been on the line.

Lylan froze. Uncle Ress..

Not only had he been almost annoying at the Oracle sometimes, but now that she thought about it, some of his fixations and language had been similar to the Oracle’s.

Her intuition wanted her to think more about that, so she did. The stupid Oracle could wait. Lylan closed her eyes and thought back to cool, serene evenings on the porch overlooking the dock. To wide-ranging conversations about stars and seas, love and death, under the haze swirling up from her uncle’s pipe…

She must have been about twelve years old at the time, and her uncle would die soon, though none of them knew it.

The sun had just set and she and her uncle sat on their wooden porch watching sailors and hired hands loading a ship for a long voyage that would depart early the next morning.

“You really don’t think those men will come back?” asked Lylan.

“I’d say it’s fifty-fifty,” said Uncle Ress. He was a giant of a man, with unruly hair and whiskers, and dark blue eyes never free of mischief. “There’s a leviathan between here and Malth’s north shore. I’m too old to offer to go along and show them how to beat it, so they’ll have to manage the best they can alone.”

Lylan rolled her eyes. Uncle Ress the leviathan slayer. Sure. Telling absurd lies about ghosts and monsters and derring-do was a favorite pastime of his, so she didn’t bother calling him out. “I don’t understand why they do it at all,” she said. “The pay isn’t worth it when there’s work and safety right here.”

Uncle Ress laughed, a deep and raspy sound that warmed the bones. “They don’t do it for the coin, girl.” He laughed again, then choked on his pipe smoke. “They do it for the view.”

“The view of your ‘leviathan?’” she said with air quotes. “Charming.”

“Not that view, no.”

Lylan waited. Uncle Ress required no encouragement or leading questions to keep talking.

“A clear night on the sea is unlike anything you’ve ever seen,” he said. “Someday you will see it, that much I know. You’ll get yourself a spot on the upper deck and just look out. Right there…” He pointed out at the darkened horizon. “That place, there, where the stars meet the depths. Right there. It’s transcendent.”

Lylan looked where he pointed. “I can see it from here, thanks. And I don’t need to get in bed with the Merchant guilds to do it.”

He looked at her. “You just say that because you’re young and foolish. Those who have seen it will risk whatever it takes to be there, to make it a part of them.” He turned his face back to the sea. “The tide comes for us all.”

Lylan groaned. “Not that again.” She’d heard that stupid family motto often enough for it to lose its charm.

He grinned.

“You know,” said Lylan in a cheeky voice. “If death is always hunting everyone as you say, maybe the view isn’t so important? Maybe those guys should stay safe on land and stretch out their time here like sane people. A little beauty isn’t going to console their families when the Priest comes to give them the news of their wreck.”

He looked over at her in surprise. “Your thoughts are dark tonight.”

She shrugged.

“Tell me,” he said, sitting up straighter with a groan. “What makes you think that ‘the tide’ means death?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Yes. But it’s wrong.”

Lylan lifted her eyebrows in surprise.

“Well okay,” he said, coughing again, “it does actually mean death.”

Lylan laughed.

“But the tide is also life. It’s sadness and also love.”

Oh geez. Lylan didn’t shake her head, but she wanted to.

“It’s all coming for you, Lylan, and you need to remember that. It comes for us all.”

“Like I can forget,” she said. “You say it, like, every day.”

“Hmm,” he said, disgruntled. “Must be getting old. Repeating myself.”

“Sorry,” she said, smiling at him to make up for her snotty words. “Didn’t mean to remind you how ancient you are.”

He winked. Then looked at her for a while, slowly brushing his beard. He sat forward suddenly. “I need you to understand what I was telling you.”

She leaned back, surprised. “I got it,” she assured him. “I did.”

“I don’t think so.” His magnetic eyes caught hers and kept them. “There is nothing more important than who you are and what you’re doing when the tide finds you. You must live your life so that when death comes for you, you can look back on your actions and be at peace.”

Lylan’s chest seemed to constrict at his words and she looked out at the sea to avoid his stare. He seemed to be asking a lot, especially of someone like her. Shockingly, she seemed to get in trouble a lot.

“Live your life,” he continued, “so that when love comes for you, you receive it and have the strength to give it back.”

Lylan nodded at the ocean.

“If you do all that,” he said, “the tide holds no danger for you. Let it come. If you do things right, you’ll even welcome it.”

Lylan looked back at him, her chest still hurting. Then she smiled. “Okay. But I still don’t see what any of that has to do with the view.”

Uncle Ress barked a laugh. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Har har,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “Okay. Educate me, O Wise One.”

Uncle Ress leaned back in his chair and relit his pipe. He thought for a while, puffing all the while. Finally, he stuck his arm out toward the water, hand flat like he was tracing the horizon. “When those men lay down their heads tomorrow, they’ll be at sea. Floating on the surface of the water and riding the tide. That’s the spot, Lyl. It’s the perfect…midpoint, I guess you could call it, between sky and earth. The heavens stretch out above, steady and predictable. The chaos lies below. You get to be part of both and suddenly, in that moment, things make sense.”

“What things?”

“Everything.”

Insane as it sounded, something of what he was saying called to her. When he described it like that, she wanted to see that view, too. To be a part of it.

“If you can be ready when the tide finds you, you might just discover what happens when the sky and sea meet up. That’s where the magic happens. Not spells, real magic.”

Lylan watched the dark landscape with him for a long while, then said, “Wait. Didn’t you say that’s where the leviathan is?”

Uncle Ress choked on his pipe again.

Lylan shook her head and pushed away the grief summoned by the memory. She missed him. She wished she could have known him as her adult self, as a person capable of appreciating his wondering view of the world. He could be pretty wise when he wasn’t being foolish, and that wisdom had served her well many times.

What would he have thought of the pickle she was in now? Trying to figure out a way to “stitch” back a memory patch and slay a real-life leviathan hiding in her head. How was she supposed to confront problems that were only mental and seemingly unreachable?

Unreachable. Like the stars. Like the depths.

Lylan’s eyes flew open. “The Underworld is the midpoint. Isn’t it?”