THE CRADLE EEL
By L.R. Mckinney and M. A. Benner
The cavern was both wider and taller than any elven eye could see, and the city of Norafell sat inside it, around it, and yes, through its very earthen walls too. The line between the natural borders of the cavern and the city of Norafell was non-existent.
The magnificent capital city of the elves sat in an ancient, cooled lava chamber beneath the sea and covered every inch of its walls and massive pillar formations. Grand terraces of pale, coarse stone accented smooth black obsidian throughout the city. Deep natural canals ran between districts like streets; entire neighborhoods glowed up from the cavern floor where the water-district homes sat submerged. Out past the last bridge, where the cavern opened into the bay proper, shapes moved through the dark in loose, drifting schools, trailing threads of blue and green light and a high, warbling song that carried for miles and echoed back against the cavern walls. The various ocean wildlife returned to Norafell nightly to serenade the city of elves. Serat could have watched them for hours, and many nights, he did.
Tonight he only had time to notice them in passing. He was heading toward the lower Civic Assembly District, and he needed his wits about him, or he'd be late. Vareya would not wait long for him, and their little adventure would end. It had taken him a month to convince her to come at all.
His thoughts drifted as he thought about her warm, soft touch against his cold, hard scales. He still wasn't used to female contact, and Vareya's hand in his tonight would be gentle and comforting in a way his own could never be - no ridges, no scales. He could scratch her fair skin deeply with a simple touch of his hand if he wasn't careful - and some nights he still caught himself holding her hand as if she were delicate and precious. Her skin took the lamplight the way a cloud did: gold where the glow hit it, pale everywhere else. His scales didn't take to light at all. Instead, it ate it, dense black scales edged in bronze, but bronze only when the sun found it just right, which the sun never did down here in Norafell. He enjoyed watching her almost as much as touching her. Her gentle curves and bubbly personality made his heart swell unlike anything he'd ever experienced. A shallow sigh escaped his lungs, thinking about her long blonde hair and her kind, gentle eyes. No two elves were better suited for one another, arranged or not.
Serat looked around. Norafell was shutting down. It never closed down all at once anymore. That had happened before. The public panic that set in echoed about the cavern far longer than he would have liked. He was part of that project. Now, the city shut down in layers, the kind of changes you felt before you consciously registered them. Lanterns along the western district slowly dimmed from amber to a low dark blue and only came on as somebody passed. Then the same in the Northern District and so on around the cavern. Canal gates groaned half shut, grinding against the walls and sloshing against the water. The constant babble of the canal fell silent for the night.
Overhead, dozens of transit platforms wove between the pillar communities on their usual paths - sheets of clear crystalline glass no larger than a few body lengths. Some containing passengers, some shipments. Each platform had a ring of small quartz glyph-tabs around the bottom edge that pulsed with a slow blue-white light and left streaks of residual energy in the sky as they moved from platform to platform. The faint, high hum of the glyphs themselves was the only sound, and an occasional low warning chime sounded as one platform's edge passed close to another's. Norafell's automated systems neatly monitored and laid out each path to avoid collisions, just as it automated the city's dusk and dawn protocols, maintenance, and security systems. And it rarely complained about its job. Except once, but that was minor.
Serat shook his head to clear his mind. He always had a way of getting lost in matters of science, and the great city was a masterpiece of engineering thanks to his mentor Xpia-Yol.
One platform nearest him slowed in an unseen current, its ring of glyph-tabs dimming from bright blue to a dull glow. It settled to a stop, hanging above the black canal waters between two enormous towers. Its passengers exited onto the dock, and it sat there humming faintly, waiting for its next call.
He crossed the third bridge with one clawed hand on the side of the rail. The pale stones were smooth, cold, and damp under his fingertips. The gill slits along his neck flared once in the damp air, the way they did whenever the canal water sprayed upwards toward him.
The canal below him ran between two ancient volcanic stone banks, mostly black and smooth. It would have no glowing creatures swimming in it tonight. The inner canals rarely did. The canal water was calm on top, but never still underneath, because the city of Norafell lived below the waterline as much as above it. Gears and gates and old mechanical systems pumped the water through the districts like blood through a heart. A system that had existed longer than any living elf could remember.
Serat looked over the edge down to the water below and noticed a long dark shadow move beneath the surface. A series of small waves washed across the canal and slapped against the stone. He was far too close to the inner city for something that large to be in the canal, but it wasn't impossible. Though something about tonight just felt off; Norafell felt different, wrong. Not broken, really, just hesitant. Like the entire city was holding its breath and did not know yet what it was waiting for. A familiar tension crept up his back and made camp in his neck. Maybe he was just nervous about his date.
Ahead, the bridge let out onto a terrace where the district split three ways: upward, toward the guild spires; straight ahead, into the older heritage lanes; or down, toward the storage caverns and beast quarters where the polished city gave way to rougher and older tunnels and passages underneath. Serat hitched the satchel higher on his shoulder and excitedly took the downward road. Vareya was likely already fuming mad, but that didn't stop the smile that spread across his face.
He took a step off the bridge slope, awkwardly tripping over one of the old paving stones on the way, jarring his focus. The bag on his shoulder was too heavy for how little was in it, and it was throwing off his balance slightly. It only held three crystal tablets, a wrapped instrument case, a stoppered vial, and a sealed River Stone cylinder of iron dust that had taken him half the day to sign out of containment. He felt every corner of that strap biting into the ridge of scales along his collarbone, the leather already damp where it crossed the thin meat and bone.
On a normal night his veilbag would have swallowed all of it, weightless, a sliver of dimensional space folded into a thin leather lining - no strap, no bite, no ache. But he'd handed it to old Ilvex three days ago with a cracked glyph thread in the seam and got a promise of "end of the week, maybe sooner," and elven promises about repair timelines were, in his experience, aspirational at best. So tonight he carried the weight of this ancient pouch and its contents himself; his sleeveless robes doing nothing to cushion the strap. Serat continued walking after a quick check to ensure nobody had seen his discomposure.
He was halfway down the dark corridor when something small hit his shin at full scampering speed, screaming.
It came out of the dark with a shard of clear, polished river glass clamped in both paws as if something would steal it - a small round body, wings pumping and back legs that were still flailing as if the crash hadn't registered yet.
Bouncing off him, it hit the pavement, scrambled up, spun in place in a full furious circle without letting go of the glass, and only then seemed to notice it had run into something.
Serat looked down at it concerned, as it looked up at him with terror and confusion in its eyes.
An oyma. Alone, out here. That was strange. They typically couldn't wander the city alone, mostly because things exactly like this kept happening.
It was small-bodied, going a little soft around the middle, with gray-brown fur down its back fading to cream over its belly. Two short, backward-curving horn nubs. Ears too broad for its head, both pinned flat at the moment. Nothing about this creature was built for running, gripping, or climbing, but it managed to do all of that with surprising speed. It planted its feet, chirped something defiant at him - and then all the fight went out of it at once.
Its precious river glass dropped to the ground. The oyma didn't reach for it, though. That concerned Serat greatly.
Not only that, but oyma were never alone in Norafell unless they…
Serat urgently looked around the immediate corridor for a nest of baby oyma. This oyma wouldn't have gone far, and the elves did NOT need a nest of chaotic baby oyma loose in the city!
It grabbed the hem of his robe with both front paws, wings pumping for a lift, and started trying to climb him as if the ground were lava.
"Oh, no," Serat said. Those two simple words came out calmly, each vowel held a fraction longer than the situation should have allowed. Elven speech didn't rush, not even now - centuries of drilled precision made sure of that - and the split at the tip of his tongue gave the O a faint airy edge.
He caught the satchel before it could swing wide and peeled the oyma off his robe with his free hand before its claws could ruin the weave of his tunic. He held the oyma out at arm's length like a soiled child. It twisted in his grip - not biting, just straining upward, toward his arm, toward anywhere safer than where it currently was.
"Something chased you," he said to himself. Not really a question. Serat looked up and down the corridor.
The oyma made a sound that started as a word and gave up, shoved its face into the inside of his wrist, and went silent. That was the wrong kind of quiet. A frightened oyma usually talked until the problem sorted itself out - first person, third person, half-finished sentences, whatever came loose. This one couldn't even form a syllable. It was shaking hard enough to echo up Serat's arm and cause the contents of his pouch to rattle together.
He looked down at the oyma in his hand, then at the river glass on the ground. Bending to pick up the oyma's precious "treasure" he said, "I bet your name is something like, Riverstone, since you're not talking."
"For which I'm thankful," he added after a pause.
He looked down the corridor again, skeptical. It looked empty as far as the light reached. Very little down there. Tucking the oyma against his side and letting it grip the strap of his bag, he made his way down the dark passage.
The passage narrowed as he went, walls leaning inward, ribs of pale sedimentary stone breaking through the obsidian in long arches. Drain channels ran along both edges of the floor. The air got colder with every turn, but never any fresher. The air smelled of wet stone, canal silt, fish oils, and under all of it, something faint and metallic, something like freshly scraped copper. A lot of it.
The oyma went rigid against his ribs, eyes even wider than earlier.
"What is it?" Serat murmured to himself, squinting into the dark passage. "What do you sense?"
The corridor had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. No cart wheels grinding on stone. No voices from the nearby lower residences. No clatter from the local beast pens. He glanced up out of habit, toward the small glyph-node embedded above the nearest alcove door - amber for foot traffic, blue for maintenance work, a hard, flickering red for anything wrong. The node sat dark, dead as an unlit coal, and that bothered him more than the silence did. Glyph wards like this didn't fail quietly. They failed spectacularly, usually with an explosion of released energy, light, and startled screams. The city's maintenance systems hadn’t even detected its failure. That worried him.
Serat shook his head. The oyma was obviously just being dramatic in typical oyma fashion. There was nothing wrong except a broken glyph ward. That he could easily fix. He should have known. That thought restored a fraction of his confidence and courage.
Then, ahead, under the quiet, he heard a deep rasping breath. Slow. Even. Patient. Oddly loud at that particular moment.
He stopped at the bend, where one of the canal lamps had failed. A smear ran down the far wall behind it, dark enough at first glance to be blood, and something else - a glossy wet sheen across the stone in several long strokes. It was translucent except where it had dried along the edges. It was as if something large and soft had pressed itself there.
The oyma buried itself against his ribs so hard he felt its heartbeat through both of their scales and clothing.
He set the satchel down against the wall without taking his eyes off the bend ahead and took the instrument case out, thumbing the catches loose with one claw in one swift motion.
Inside: a slim glyph rod, black-handled, silver-tipped, quartz core. Built for glyph readings, field calibration, the simple kind of work that asked nothing of him but patience. It was not a weapon, but it would have to be one tonight.
He touched the activation glyph, letting it warm up. Pale light ran the length of the crystal, flickered, and then steadied.
The breathing stopped.
"Wonderful," Serat murmured, looking down at the oyma whose eyes were now shut so hard that its nose wrinkled.
Serat attempted to place the oyma with the satchel, but the oyma flailed and screamed so loudly that he quickly scrambled to pick him back up and tuck him under one arm.
From somewhere past the bend ahead came a sound too short and broken to really place: four clipped syllables, shaped like a statement. It sounded almost like his voice. Phonetically, it sounded a little like something he'd said only a few minutes ago. Maybe just a delayed and mangled echo, or some kind of mimicry?
There was a splash from around the corner as Serat took a small step forward to peek around.
The corridor around the bend had once been a service passage: a canal channel along the right, three storage alcoves on the left, and a loading platform at the far end. He knew the shape from memory. None of that memory matched what was coming into view as he slowly rounded the bend.
Each alcove had a small room at the back. The first alcove's room door hung, broken and at an angle, just barely holding by the top hinge.
A clear, glossy residue coated the walls in wide strokes everywhere. Two parts of the stone's lip along the canal looked crushed, powdered and broken fragments of stone scattered across the floor where something very large had repeatedly made its way up. He saw small white shapes caught in the residue along the stone, much like shells left behind by a tide.
Bones. Crushed bones. Too small to be elven, too large to be fish. Delicate hollow ribs of a flier, from the looks of it. Some still attached to wet bits of cloth or patches of fur, or a curled scrap of dried-out skin.
Oyma bones.
Above the bones, in the corner where the walls met the underside of an upper walkway, something squirming caught the light. Eggs? Serat thought to himself.
Dozens of them, glowing slightly, clustered together and stuck to the stone in a thick, hardened slime. Each one was pale and see-through, the size of a fist, and each one had a small dark shape curled, twitching inside it. Serat stared for a beat too long before making himself look away.
Serat noticed a ripped piece of ivory linen on a jagged patch of broken stone. The pocket of a traditional civics guild tunic. His mind went to Vareya, and he wondered where she must be. Hopefully, far from whatever happened here. Hopefully okay. Their rendezvous was only a couple of bridges away.
River Stone went so still he thought for a second it had actually died of fright, or lost consciousness.
Then the canal moved - no splash, just a slow, thick swelling on the black surface, visible only because the city lights caught the smooth, round reflection contrasting against the small natural ripples in the canal.
Serat brought the rod up. For protection or light, he wasn't sure exactly.
A head rose over the broken lip without a sound. No eyes that he could see. It had translucent skin and a long, slimy body. Clusters of pale nodules pulsed under the membrane along its head, resembling the egg sacs from earlier. Its mouth split vertically instead of side to side, like a jagged split running a few feet up its upper body. Fine inward-pointing teeth lined the split, and they moved independently, testing and feeling the air. Two low-set claw-like forelimbs hauled the rest of it up over the stone. Behind, its massive undulating body stretched farther than the dim evening light could illuminate.
It breathed out, and the sound that came with it wasn't animalistic. It was mocking - high, broken, almost like a word, and under that was a whimper, and under that a growl. Somewhere in that layered noise was a scream.
Then, clearer than the rest, separate from the garbled mess that had folded around it a moment before: "Something chased you." His own words, dragged back out of the dark in his own dry cadence.
"That's new," Serat said, in the tone of a man cataloguing something for a report he already partially dreaded presenting to the science guild later.
If there were a later.
The oyma made a noise but couldn't get it all the way out, then clamped both paws over its mouth.
Serat took a step backward. The creature flowed over the lip after him - not crawling, flowing, its body folding and unfolding inside its own slick meat sheath, dragging itself forward on pale limb-hooks. Leaving a ribbon of clear residue on the stone behind it. The sound it made as it moved made Serat's stomach churn, while piquing his scientific curiosity at the same time.
The rod was built for calibrating portal frames, but the creature did not know that. He could use that to his advantage.
Serat thrust the rod out between him and the creature at full arm's length. Covering his eyes with his other arm as he did so.
Light flared white-blue where the crystal struck the creature below its left cheek, and it convulsed sideways into the wall hard enough to crack the stone. The sound it made was three sounds layered together: a wet hiss, a chirr, and underneath both, something close to a child's laugh, none of them its own. It was creepy in a way Serat didn't know existed. Like it recorded its prey.
It sprang back at him faster than made sense.
Serat threw himself sideways, but not fast enough - one hooked limb caught along his bare forearm and dragged, scoring a line through scale and skin before he wrenched free of it, bleeding. He hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath half out of him; the oyma shrieked and scrabbled against his shoulder, wings hammering uselessly against him.
He hit the discharge stud with his thumb before he'd really thought about it.
The crystal didn't quite shatter like he thought it might, but it released a cone of white charged particles. It ejected all over the creature's head and upper body. For one frozen second, then a couple flickers, its body seemed to light from the inside: threadlike cartilage, pale throbbing sacs, rows of sensory knots down the length of its neck, and further back, deeper in, the dark shadows of everything it had already eaten. Some distant, useless part of his mind was already reaching for the right words to describe it later, if someone were to ask.
Frightened, it whipped itself backward out of the light and hit the water almost silently.
It was gone.
Serat stayed against the wall, chest heaving, blood running warm down the inside of his forearm, the rod smoking, almost dead in his hand. The corridor stank even worse now - like hot mucus, rot, salty canal water, and something sweeter underneath, something he didn't want to label at the moment.
Somewhere in the distant waters of the canal, he heard it try again - a chirr, a laugh, a few more clipped syllables of his voice. It was cycling through whatever sounds it had stored away. It hadn't found the right note. He had the strange, sick sense that it was still trying to mock them.
He should have left. He should have left quickly. Instead, he looked at the ruined doors, at the alcove where the residue trail seemed to begin.
Something scratched on the other side of the broken third door. Then a small, sad, muffled churr, almost a whimper. Something in there was still alive. Maybe an infant creature he could capture for study.
His guild oath didn't cover monsters, exactly. It covered knowledge, containment, and the betterment of the people. He could still feel the cold press of the oath-ring against his palm from the day he'd taken it, the hairline sting of its etched glyphs biting into his scales before they healed shut around the promise. Responsibility for whatever the Science Guild's own research created had been carved into that ring in letters half a finger tall, and a predator built from runoff and bad glyphwork fell soundly enough inside that clause. His hand was already moving toward the broken door before the rest of the argument caught up with him.
That was easier to accept than the truth underneath it - that he simply couldn't leave without knowing what was still breathing in there.
The floor near the alcove was worse than the rest of the street; he had to brace one hand on the wall and test each step to keep from slipping. Crushed crates lay against the back wall of one room. Maintenance netting hung caked in thick eel residue, and bundled inside it, in the farthest corner, were three small oyma. Serat tried not to think about what happened to the other five of River Stone's litter as he looked down at the poor, frightened creature.
Serat clamped the rod between his teeth, dropped the satchel, and tore the netting apart awkwardly with one hand while trying not to frighten the last oyma any more than they already were. The residue clung to his hands like paste.
One sat with its eyes stretched open in shock, not a thought behind the glassy black orbs. He had completely checked out mentally. Serat scooped him up and handed him to Riverstone.
One was barely more than a trembling lump, a young oyma with both wings glued shut around it by slime and a visibly broken leg. As he freed it, the oyma pressed one of its small paws against Serat. When Serat looked down at it, it was still shaking, trying to press something into his hand - a large, bent nail, warm from the oyma's tight grip. It offered it as if it were the only thing in the world he had of value. Serat recognized the symbolism of this. An oyma only parted with a shiny treasure in absolutely dire situations to barter for help. The Oyma did not know what else it could do.
He didn't have a hand free to take the offering. Instead, he closed his hand around the oyma, nail and all, and kept working the third oyma loose while the first oyma clung to his collar, suddenly trying to talk, but not managing a whole word. Then, all at once, a sentence, in true oyma fashion.
"Oyma stay," it said - not asking, all its weight thrown behind the name. "Oyma stay. Don't go water," it said, pointing at the canal, repeating the same five words twice more, as if repeating them might convince Serat not to go near the water. The oyma gave up on language altogether and shoved its face back into his tunic collar. Eventually giving up that hiding spot and squirming in with River Stone under Serat's arm.
He got the last one free - the one that had gnawed itself bloody on the mesh - just as the water behind him sloshed, then turned into a slow dripping sound. The strange eel was back.
The recently freed oyma caught sight of the rod clamped between Serat's teeth, still glowing faintly blue, and lunged for it with both front paws as Serat turned his head out of reach. He nearly dropped all of them, hissing around the rod's handle. Clinging to his neck, the small, idiotic creature stared at the shiny rod. It appeared to have forgotten that it had just watched half its nest-mates be eaten three feet away an hour ago.
Clutching his chest, Serat spun, all four tiny oyma tucked against his chest or under his arms, almost dropping the one under his arm.
He saw the surface of the canal change as a shape broke it. Two this time.
Serat could see the shape and size of them by the shadow they cast against the light of the glowing sea life in the distance. Then a head rose just enough that he could see the city's lights reflected along its back as it broke the water - bigger than the first creature. The surrounding water displaced in a slow, wave-form, giving Serat his first proper sense of fear from the entire ordeal.
Serat did not wait to see anything beyond that.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually run. Not walking briskly, not a hurried step - run, full out sprint, behaving exactly the way grown elves weren't supposed to behave.
He ran.
Not cleanly. He caught his knee on the broken doorframe going around the bend and nearly went down on the slick floor. Clutching the satchel’s strap in his fist, he drew all four small bodies nearer to his ribs. He used the other hand to catch the slippery, slime-coated ground as it raced toward his face. One oyma slipped from his grasp and clung haphazardly to his tunic, bouncing against his hip as he ran.
The corridor narrowed ahead of him. Good. Maybe too narrow for what was behind him. Maybe not. There wasn't time to find out.
Behind him came the sound of something dragging, of something pulling itself over stone, and under that, closer than it should have been, right at the back of his neck, he heard a small broken chirp - the exact sounds the oyma still clinging to his tunic were making.
But the sound came not from his group of oyma.
It came from behind him.
Close. Behind. Him.
At that moment, the streetlights flashed red, and he heard the faint, distant chime of the safety wards closing off the area.