Topeagler ✰ [ESSENTIAL]

She swam back to the surface. The white machine still hovered above her spire. But without its sphere, it was blind. After a few minutes, it turned and hummed away, retreating toward Port Glimmer.

Only one remained.

All of it.

Kaelira felt it. A sonar wave, but wrong. It didn't just listen. It probed . It scraped against her mind like a fingernail on slate. Images flashed unbidden: her mother, her mate, the harpoon, the stuffed chick in the guildhall. The sphere was not hunting her body. It was hunting her memories. topeagler

It was an engine. Not the old, clanking submersibles of the Port Glimmer scavengers. This was something new—a high-pitched, crystalline hum that made her teeth ache. She surfaced slowly, just her three eyes breaking the water like a cluster of wet amber stones. She swam back to the surface

The water embraced her like a cold, dark mother. Her gills flared open. Her feathers slicked flat, becoming a seamless hydrofoil. She became a torpedo wrapped in myth. After a few minutes, it turned and hummed

It was not a bird, though it had feathers like tarnished brass. It was not a fish, though it had gills that pulsed softly behind its jaw. And it was certainly not a mammal, though it nursed its single young with a milk that smelled of riverstone and lightning. The Topeagler was the last stitch in a tapestry of evolution that nature had long since unraveled.