I have been waiting for the chance to see these stars again, and now it has come, and now I may go. They are good stars to die beneath. And finally, it is time.

oOo

The stars are very good tonight.

The shapes of the constellations are drawn aching-crisp and solid across the sky, marking a thousand stories played out to their ends. The Lady of Tides stands just past the horizon, in the shadow of the Storm, following the trail of the First Hunter. His prey is the Sleeping Dragon, which waits for his arrival not so far past the place where the fading moon exposes the more delicate lines of the Three Daughters. The Fisher swims forever above the curving face of the world, his net spread to trap the School of Thousands. All the sky is open, and is waiting. They are good stars tonight. They are the right stars.

The stars look down on me, on me and on the world that has come to pass since the sea-that-is last saw this pattern in the sky. Twenty years have come and gone, reckoned as landers reckon time, and the sky has been different, and the stars have not been right for me. Landers make their sky-shapes by the stars themselves; they never see the patterns of the Nyimi sky. We keep our constellations in the space between the stars, the ever-changing black, and while their stars move only slowly, ours shift with every night, changing with the turning of the years and the rising of the tides. Sometimes the Lady of Tides weeps and sometimes she smiles; tonight, as I had hoped, she merely watches.

It is a good sky, and they are good stars—very good stars. They watch and understand, and do not hate or fear or judge the things they see. That has never been the way of stars. I have been waiting for the chance to see these stars again, and now it has come, and now I may go.

They are good stars to die beneath. And finally, it is time.

There is sorrow in the parting; there is always sorrow in parting, especially when one knows that there will be no reunions. I know the way of the last long swim, for I have gone now more times than I care to count, although it was never mine to know the end before, only the journey; I have gone with my sisters, with Fukitsu who was my second mother, even with my brother Kuro, who I loved beyond all reason or measure. I have followed them long enough to see their intent as true and their stories finished, and I remember the way, for all that I have known it under different stars. Now comes the time for me to swim that course myself. And I am not afraid.

The Lady of Tides smiled down upon my brother, these ten years past, and she will smile now upon me, who loved him, and will now follow him home along the last road of the sea. I know the path the tides will lead me down, and that this swim must not be made alone, but in the company of the ones who love but will not interfere. The ones who will carry the story home. I’vae thai moriah nyou.

It is time for me to go.

If I am honest—and I must be honest here and now, when I go to meet the stars, for they will stand no dishonesty—it is past time for my departure. I should have gone three full turnings of the tide ago, but I was proud, and pride sustained me. Now pride is not enough, nor love, nor any other force upon the land. I am tired. Always and forever tired, so tired my bones weep in the morning chill and my hands are never straight or strong, but always bent and weary. I have stayed on these shores for too long. I have been a burden to my family and to my children. I have been a source of worry to those around me, and I am tired of that as much as I am tired of the coldness that rides always now beneath my skin.

I remember swimming freely; I remember leaping from the water for the sheer pleasures of being alive, and basking on hot sands, and feeling the joy of being a part of every tide. I remember learning and loving and losing, and fulfilling all the parts of my purpose in this world, in the seas-that-are. I have spent a long life on these shores, longer than the lives of so very many others, and well lived in the span of it. I am done. I am ready for the seas-that-were, where our spirits swim forever and never tire, where the storms are easily weathered and the waters are filled with light. And I am very, very tired.

When night came, I went to the bed I have shared now all these many years, slipped beneath the coverings and stretched myself long and cold and alien against the warmth that waited there. Ho stirred but did not wake, turning towards the coldness, warming it; he has done his best to warm me, all these years, and it has never been enough. I have loved him; not as soon, perhaps, as he believes I did, but any lies I told, I told for the sake of the children. I have been faithful. I have kept my place, and I have been a wife to him, as true a wife as ever my blood allowed me to be. I have lived half my life in an alien skin on alien shores because of my love for him, because of the duty from which he could never release me. When night came, I went to him, and I kissed him three times, once for each gift that he had given me—my life, his heart, our children. He did not wake, not even as I rose and left him for the final time.

It has been six years since I could last from dusk until dawn without a trip back to the comforting weightlessness of the sea; Ho has learned to sleep through my departures. He has been kinder than I had any right to wish, and never asked that I spend my nighttimes elsewhere, but welcomed me back with every morning. I almost wish he had not learned—that he had wakened, and returned my kisses, and said goodbye. But some wishes are foolishness, and I have learned to see them as such.

He has seen me and mine, and he understands that time has been less than kind in its dealings with me. The Nyimi are tidal creatures—more tidal, I suspect, than the landers, who live and live and tire only when their lives are coming toward an end. The sea is kinder to us when we are young, giving us an endless home through which to fly in our innocence, and so we grow old faster, and fall back into the foam like memories of better stars.

By now he has wakened to find me gone, I am sure; wakened as the bed beside him cooled, and realized I had gone to find the comfort of the water, and returned to his sleep. He has no way of knowing that this time, the comfort I seek is the kind from which I never will return. In the morning, our children and their children will greet him singing the song of our life together. The call will have gone to the other schools by then—word travels so fast and so well on these currents—and the children will come home, at least for the day, at least long enough to sing. It has been so long since all the children were together…

But in the end, it is always the last long road that unites us. Enemies, lovers and kin, we all swim this way together, when the end arrives. I am sorry I must leave him now, for I have lived with him and loved him for so long, but this is the last secret the sea keeps from the land. This is the road he cannot save me from. All my kisses are spent now, and my smiles; what remains is between myself, the sea and the Lady of the Tides.

I can only hope the sea is merciful, and someday lets him come to me in the seas-that-were. Our eternity is not the one the landers dream of, but it is all that waits for me. If the sea is kind, he may join me there. Perhaps. Avashou vry norza.

The sea is rarely kind.

I walk to the rim of the waters and step into the waves, wading deeper until the sea is wrapped around my hips like a mother’s hands. I have left my robe on the edge of the beach; I have scattered my hairpins each step of the way, abandoning them for the tides to take. I go back to the sea as naked as I came from it, as clean as sea foam … but no longer quite so careless, I think. No longer quite so innocent. I am tired. I am ready to rest.

I am going home.

This is not the way of the landers. I have learned so many of their ways over the years—more years spent living between sea and land for his sake, for my sake, and for the sake of our children, than ever I spent with the sea alone—but I have never understood the way they can live and live, long past the point when the tides have gone out and the waves have called them home. I have learned to dress myself, and to walk in their places on shod feet that never feel the earth, and to smile. I have lived well enough to move among them in their home places, and in return, I have perhaps helped to bring about an end to the slaughter of my people, in my own small way. There will be more children in the sea, someday, because the school I loved most dearly has lived. That is enough for one lifetime; it would be enough for ten, and I am no lander, to keep living past when I am finished with my work; I can see that this is so, and that I am done. It is time for me to go, under these good stars.

Ren is waiting in the shallows, standing frozen like a statue on two strong legs. She smiles when she sees me coming, swift and sad; she smiles like her father once taught me to smile, and for a moment, looking at her is like looking deep into my own past. The white stripes have appeared above her eyes and down the sides of her throat; she will be a mother soon, before the stars shift in the sky and the Lady of Tides smiles again, but I will never know her child. I do not smile, but bow my head in the Nyimi way and offer my hands. Her fingers are so warm, and mine, so cold.

She pulls me into her arms and then into the arms of the sea, her fins unfurling as we fall together. For years now, the change has come to me painfully, slowly, as my body resisted moving between either of the shapes it knew. Still. I will make this last change with swiftness—some have drowned entering the sea to take the tide-road home, but I will not dishonor my family by placing myself amongst them. I will not.

And I do not. My gills open as my air runs out, and it is on one tail—not so strong as once it was, perhaps, but still strong enough to carry me—rather than two legs that I follow my daughter from the shore, and leave my life behind. We do not speak. There are no words left that need to pass between us: all the things I had to teach her, she has learned. She has come to be my honor-guard and escort, and for that I am glad; I have taught her, guided her, and shown her what I knew of the sea, and for that, she has always been grateful. That is love, for the Nyimi. The open hand and the silence at the end of the longest road.

We pass the rock walls that guard the coastal shelf from the harshness of the sea, and she sings a long, low note through the water—a summoning. Now Natsuko and Michi come hand in hand, as alike as once my spawning-sisters and I came before Fukitsu, and behind them the ghost-pale shape of Kazuo, my stripeless son, born a living phantom and so like my brother Kuro. Males do not escort females on this road, but he is dead, and may do as pleases him, even as Kuro was able to call me for his escort. Of the children in these waters close enough to come for me, these are the ones I love best, and I am glad they have come to join me. I am glad I need not swim alone. It will be a long road we swim tonight, and the sea has never granted mercy to those who swim it.

Ren pulls me to them, and for a moment, we are nothing but a single swirling embrace moving through the water on the strength of ten arms and five tails. There is joy in such a meeting. If there is anything I will regret must end on this last road, it is the joy.

But still. There must be some joy in the seas beyond, that we swim once we have known the Lady; there must be some way back to these waters, to swim again, for I have known wise men and sea witches who had known these seas before. This is not an end to joy; it is the beginning of a new story, and a new viewpoint on older happiness. I hope I will not need to forget, but even if I do, I will not be forgotten. The sea will sing my songs forever, as it sings the songs of my mother and her mother, all the way back to the Lady of Tides. Once your song is sung in the deepest waters, it never dies.

Michi is the first to pull away. She bows in the water, fins splayed to honor me, and drops a few feet below my hovering-place, followed by her sisters, until only Kazuo and I are on a level. He offers me his hand, and he smiles his father’s smile. I do not smile back. I wonder if Ho knows what he has done—that the Nyimi will smile forever, because he pulled us so close to the land. It is a small price to pay for our survival. It is a change that will haunt us forever.

Bowing my head and slicking my fins in acknowledgement, I take Kazuo’s hand. My choice is made, and I have chosen to go. There is no going back; even if I survive this night, my school will see me as one of the dead, and will never reach for me again. But I have been a daughter and a warrior, a hunter and an assassin, a woman and a wanderer and a wife. I am done. I am dead. And yes, with the sea set now before me, I am going home.

At first we swim side by side, Kazuo and I, the others spread around us with their fins in full display. Others, passing, come to swim and sing with us for a while: we sing a lifetime. We sing birth and death and the storm that cast me from my home and began this long, long journey to the final road; we sing love and penance and birth and sorrow. We sing everything I have been, and for the first time, the verses are closed; nothing will be added. I am over. Avashou vry shym n’vor. I will sing no more forever.

They listen, and they add their own phrases to the refrains, and they are away, beginning the singing of this last song. Does he know yet, on the shore? He has learned to listen to the sound of mermaids singing in the night. Does he hear them, and understand what they mean when they sing that Sorrow has gone home?

If he does, I only hope that he will understand. He has lived with the sea for as long as I have lived with the land, and he knows our ways; he knows that I am tired, and that the Nyimi are tidal creatures. We do not linger when the tide flows out, but follow, and let it bring us to what waits beyond. He will understand; if not tonight, then in time, he will understand. Our children will sing to him, in all the hours when I do not.

They will sing forever.

My chest begins to ache, dully at first, building into a burning pain that is numbing and bitter at the same time. I pull ahead of Kazuo, and he drops back to pace his sisters, reading my intention in the shape of my dive. I know what I look like, for I have seen this sprint before: my fins are flattened, and I cut through the water as though I were new-come to this world, as a star shoots through the sky. The pain is worse with every stroke, and still I swim, and still my speed increases. This is the secret of the last road, the road that we all take, at the end of our lives: it is anywhere where the waters are deep and unbroken, where you can swim until you see the stars. It is the road that comes to us when we seek it, and is nowhere to be found before that time.

And I see them: I see the stars. The pain is greater now; I am slowing, I can feel the currents starting to pull me from my chosen course, and I do not care, because I can see the stars beckoning me to join them, calling me home. I see the faces of the Three Sisters, and they are the sisters that I have lost; I see the School of Thousands, and they are those that we came too late to save. They are close now, scattered through the sea around me, burning brightly, undimmed by the waters. I am almost there.

The current lashes me from my swimming, and the pain is greater now, so great it steals the water from my gills, steals the strength from my limbs, and I tumble into the arms of my children, eyes closed, gills open and finding no air to fill them, no breath to sustain another rise of my internal tide. It does not matter. I have found my ending. It is done. The Lady of Tides is smiling at me, and oh, her eyes are sad, and oh, I think we have met before…

They were such good stars tonight. Such good stars to lead me home. Avashi mo lor, avashou mi rearna. Avashou…

Goodbye.

END

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