Page 59 of Leviathan's Song
He padded over to his backpack with as much concern for his nudity as a shifter and dug for a towel, pulling it out and beginning to dry himself.
“Thank you,” I said, “this is far more than I expected to retrieve.”
I studied the pattern changes on his wet skin, mottled shades of dull blues and greens across his back and shoulders, down the backs of his arms. There were darker grey striations across his spine, mostly concentrated around his lower back. The texture looked different too, as if he had a small ridge along his spine on his upper back. As he dried himself, the pattern dulled until I couldn’t tell if it was there or I was just imagining it in places.
I started toward him to take him his clothing and dropped my head to focus on navigating the mud squishing under my feet. When I looked back up, Levi was frozen, staring into the woods with wide eyes. I followed his gaze and blinked a few times, confused.
Standing a short way off among the trees was a large white deer with antlers that held spectral flames curling up between the rack. Every time he moved, the world seemed to flicker out of existence for a blink where he’d just been, giving a dizzying effect that made him hard to look at.
“Levi?”
“… Yeah?”
“Is that a spectral stag?” My voice sounded hoarse.
“I think so.”
My forehead drew down as I stared at it in confusion. Spectral stags were legendary, mythical. They were stories the dryads liked to tell occasionally to entertain their saplings. Legend had it they were always some kind of messenger or led children to safety if they were lost in the deep woods. This one just stood there, staring at us with eyes the same blueish white as the color of his flames. I swallowed thickly.
“What do you think it wants?” I asked. I wanted to look at Levi, to see his expression, but I was afraid that, if I did, the stag would be gone when I looked back.
“… I don’t have any idea,” he said, his voice hushed.
The deer lowered his head to sniff the ground, gave us one last glance, and wandered off back into the woods as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. His footprints left behind a blueish spectral glow, but each one only lasted for a few seconds before it faded away to nothing.
I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my thoughts. “Do you think it wants us to follow it?” Wouldn’t it have had a message of some kind? Did they just hang out randomly in the woods?So many questions.
“Uh…” I turned to find Levi staring back at the golem. “If it does, it’s probably gonna take us a while to get going.”
Right. Mud covered golem, broken equipment, a camp to pack up.I turned to see if the stag was waiting for us somewhere, but he was gone.
“You should probably… put some clothes on,” I murmured to Levi as I hurried about packing up our gear.
* * *
Even though we hustled,it took much longer than usual to load up, on account of having to attempt to fix my harness and directing Leothen safely out of the pit he was waiting in without it caving in further.
Levi wanted to follow the stag, but we’d already lost a day in our delivery schedule. He argued it wouldn’t hurt to head in the direction the stag had left, due to the potential for another cave in. It wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned to travel, but I decided it was probably the area least likely to suffer another problem based on the locations of known mines and natural caves I had access to. We could veer back toward our projected route as the day progressed.
Domm shuffled along behind us with his gorilla-like gait, still pulsing with his strange blue glow, radiating ancient magic with each pulse. Every once in a while, I would think I’d caught a glimpse of the stag, far ahead of us, on a ridge or in a clearing, but on closer inspection, there was never anything there. Levi wasn’t much help there because the midday sun was too bright for his sensitive eyes.
Eventually, I gave up looking and turned to something more productive, recreating some of the amulets I’d lost in the lake. They wouldn’t be perfect, because I didn’t have all my tools, and the extra stones I packed weren’t exact matches for what I was making, but they would do. And if I was honest with myself, they would more than do—they would be great. I needed to relax my standards occasionally.
We sat closer to the middle of the hammock today, our legs tangling as I worked with my gems and Levi worked on his music. I asked him to tell me about his childhood, and he described growing up on the ocean cliffs with his dad, wishing he felt part of any community.
“The mer look down on landlocked people,” he explained, “and even though I had friends around, and my dad, I always felt drawn to the sea in a way that no one else seemed to. Even Grim couldn’t really fill that hole.”
I frowned, imagining Levi’s loneliness. “I would have thought your enchanted lure would have surrounded you with friends.”
His laugh was bitter. “Growing up with that was a mind trip, having to learn to differentiate between friends and groupies. There were always people who wanted to hang out, but they made it feel like I had to be talking constantly or entertaining them somehow. There wasn’t that give and take that a real friendship has, and in the end, their fascination with me just felt empty.”
If he’d been part of mer society, he probably would have been insulated from that, since they were used to sirens and could have given him advice on how to handle it. It made me angry that he hadn’t had help navigating those aspects of his life.
I thought of my father, a pure-blooded elf, and the resentment I would feel if his people rejected me, a child born of a mostly human mother. “How is it that the mer will breed with landlocked people, like your father, and yet shun them at the same time?” That part didn’t make sense to me.
He shrugged as he took a moment to glance at the trees and gather his thoughts. “I think it’s just the drive to procreate, honestly. They can come out on land to barter and trade, so it makes sense that, occasionally, they’d develop relationships with people they meet, even if the ocean always eventually calls them home. And mer birth rates are so low that, when they breed with races that are more prolific—like humans—you’re going to see a rise in hybrid conceptions. But other than the desire to sow a few wild oats, we’re not of any interest to them.”
I scowled at that, feeling fiercely protective of Levi’s feelings, but he moved the conversation along to happier memories of finding treasures washed up on the beach and exploring crevices and caves in the cliff walls with Grim.
