By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2025 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
When the Sunlight Glosses Over the Sea
__________Ears ringing from the screeching of saws and the dinging of hammers, Navigator Tramais steered the Nervidia down the throat of the Laughing Cat. Sculpted into the rockface by warlocks’ chantry, the stone-fanged maw of the conspicuous cove arched about a gallows’ height above the royal yard of the ship’s mainmast. From the crow’s nest, the ship’s Daybreak Lookout forever joked that he narrowly missed the hangman’s noose, whenever the ship passed between the Laughing Cat’s most prominent fangs.
__________The rookie sailor claimed that the knotted loop of the nonexistent rope scraped his neck rawer than the finest roast beef, but none of the elves aboard understood the half-elf’s bloody reference. “Ah, death’s grip!” Mangst shouted. “She burns hotter than the coals embedded in Sparklers’ eyes!”
__________For his flabbergasted chagrin, the older and wiser Eventide Lookout, swallowed his laughter, as he stepped off the uppermost rung of the ladder and into the crow’s nest. “You beached calf!” Kenseid retaliated. “The fire’s not in their pupils.”
__________The younger sailor wrinkled his nose, as if he suddenly whiffed the pungent stink of the Chief Cook’s onboard livestock pens. “Cowpies!” Mangst wrangled. “Where is it then?”
__________Mangst disliked how his elder reversed his slur, but the older man was clearly more practiced at insults. The Daybreak Lookout merely namedropped a sectional slur to pad his long-running jest. The Eventide Lookout clapped back with a personalized jab.
__________Even though Querathoskatheermor swapped between windpipes and gills like amphibians, they nursed their young as mammals. Beached whales were marine mammals at death’s door, whose physique smooshed their organs, if they stayed ashore too long.
__________Beached or swimming, baby whales were called calves. The half-elf offspring of a human parent and a Sea-elf parent was chided as beached, because humans habitually lived on land and were not inborn water breathers. Clever Kenseid insulted wily Mangst’s youth, physique, and sense of humor with an oral smackdown of just three words.
__________“Blazing behind their pupils,” Kenseid informed. “Their irises combust in fits of rage.”
__________“Where’s the wick for their infernal irises then?” Mangst challenged.
__________Navigator Tramais whistled. His shrillness cut through the shipwrights’ noisy repairs and intercepted the lookouts’ feud. On the main deck, everyone’s skeleton lurched under their skin. All eyes turned to the bow, as the Nervidia neared the lively, multicultural seaport that was lodged in the Laughing Cat’s throat.
__________“Captain on deck!” Navigator Tramais saluted.
__________Stand-in Captain Raimie stood beside the wheel. Almost avariciously, a wicked grin stretched across her slender face. She dipped her tricorn hat, until it shadowed her face and obscured the reddening of her cheeks. Ill-acclimated to her title and its honors, she clutched her hipbones, until her knuckles whitened. For Captain Herksun’s pride, she steeled herself for what may have been the thousandth time since his disappearance. Before she addressed the crew, she cleared her throat and deepened her voice. The she-elf pirate dared not show any feminine softness while she posed as the hardened captain of the Nervidia.
__________“Lower her anchor and bind her to the dock!” Raimie commanded.
__________“Yes, Captain!” the crew readily answered.
__________Meanwhile, Mangst scurried down the ladder. With an almost criminal peppiness, he leapt off the ladder before he descended the last few rungs. He hastily assisted the ship’s designated crank turners, as they positioned the anchor and lowered it. His playing dice jangled in his coat pocket, as he leaned over the rim of the main deck.
__________When the anchor splashed into the sea, it yanked its burly chain tautly. The crank turners tightened the hawser at its hawsehole and tossed the opposite end of the long rope overboard.
__________“Anchored!” they declared. “Tie her down, Rookie!”
__________Mangst grinned and unfurled a rope ladder where he stood along the rim.
__________“I’ll have her nested in this bay as a clownfish in an anemone!” he promised.
__________As Mangst secured the rope ladder and descended to the dock, his tongue tingled, and his mouth watered. Surely, a hardy meal and a strong drink awaited him at the portside tavern tonight! His human half tired of the elves’ mushy vegetables and spiced wine about as much as the elves wearied of his irrelevant jokes.
__________Mangst marched across the dock to the bow, where he grabbed the dangling end of the hawser and knotted it to a bollard. As the enthusiastic minnow wrestled with the rope, Raimie spied him below. She pushed up her hat and cocked an eyebrow.
__________A wannabe seadog scratching at his fleas, she determined.
__________“Itching for shore leave, Sailor?” she guessed.
__________Mangst looked up, as he tightened his knot. “Willing to scratch that itch, Captain?”
__________“Aye,” she retorted. “Douse those fleas in a cold bath while you’re at it!”
__________Mangst dropped the rope and dashed towards the shoreline. “Thanks, Captain!”
__________“Not so fast!” Raimie halted. “Another matter first…”
__________The sailor stopped in his tracks and pouted. “Argh! What is it, Captain?”
__________“It’s in their blood! Same as going ashore is in yours.”
__________“Uh, sorry… What’s in whose blood?”
__________“The wick! Gale’s irises smoldered… Like an orange star in an overcast sky.”
__________Mangst scratched his scraggily mop of kelp-green locks. “Who?”
__________The she-elf pirate scowled bitterly and turned her back to her junior. She shut down their discourse with a thinly veiled threat: “Don’t let me catch you spitting on the Fire-bound for sultry snickers ever again, or I’ll leave you flopping on the dock and gasping for air!”
__________The half-elf sailor touched his neck. His fingertips rubbed the gills underneath his skin.
__________“That’d be… Unpleasant,” he admitted.
__________“You’re dismissed, Sailor,” Raimie reiterated. “Begone for the night!”
__________Mangst picked up his feet and ran ahead, stumbling like a startled alley cat.
__________Stand-in Captain Raimie’s gaze leapt towards the sea. She peered across the main deck, over the bay, and through the Laughing Cat’s gaping maw. Colored as sparkling red, orange, and yellow flames, a fiery sunset danced atop the thin, admiral-blue line that marked the oceanic horizon. As if her heart was hooked on a fishing line, the mesmerizing scene tugged painfully at her chest.
__________As her captain’s understudy, she tipped her tricorn hat again and grinned vicariously, while salty tears dripped from her cerulean eyes. Two Fire-bound, two Water-bound, she recounted,and too few leads to their whereabouts.
__________Suddenly, the gentle hand of a quiet man settled between Raimie’s shoulders: Navigator Tramais patted her back. “If they’re out there,” he ventured, “we’ll find them.”
__________Raimie’s tears dried. She lifted her hat and spun on her heels.
__________“Yes… All four of them!” she resolved. “Let’s convene in the map room.”
__________Tramais nodded solemnly. “Indeed,” he seconded. “Shall I call for Talsis?”
__________Raimie smirked. “Nah,” she expressed. “He beat us to the punch.”
* * *
__________While Kimio slept, the ice chips that broke his fever melted into mushy lumps. Submerged in frigid bathwater, Kimio’s gills flittered, while the cold nipped at his flesh. Goosebumps puffed out the usually invisible hairs on his forearms, his shins, and the back of his neck. His tan skin drained of color, until it was sickly pale. Nevertheless, the bioluminescent highlights in his hair shone luminously underwater.
__________From topside, where Glaiven and another man supervised the slumbering elf-child, those bright streaks twinkled like shooting stars. When Kimio stirred, his senses reawakened in phases. Garbled and distorted from the mushy and melted ice chips layered between him and them, Kimio heard the men’s voices before he saw their faces.
__________The stranger laughed spiritedly but spoke shrilly. “So, the Little Selkie dove straight into frostbite,” he observed, “and you’re trusting me to see that it doesn’t gnaw on him?”
__________“We chipped the ice from your berg,” Glaiven reasoned.
__________“For preservation or torture?”
__________“His forehead burned to the touch, like cast iron over the cookfire.”
__________“The delirious otter must have fancied himself a seal when he jumped!”
__________“Perhaps, but wishes won’t pad a furry pelt with blubber.”
__________“Agreed! So, tell me again why you want me to take him in?”
__________Kimio cut the water and rubbed his eyes. His gills closed, and his locks dripped. Since his soggy uniform weighed heavily upon his shoulders, he sat hunched over his frigid bathwater. The cold, dank air of the unheated and poorly insulated barracks brushed his face, tousled his hair, and prickled his spine, like a ghost passing through.
__________Teeth chattering between panting breaths, Kimio resolved, “I’m not… going… anywhere with… anyone!”
__________Glaiven chuckled, patted Kimio atop the head, and then dunked him. With a downward thrust of his muscled arm, the Dark-elf commander shoved the Sea-elf boy underwater. As he went under, Kimio kicked and flailed. The mushy ice chips sloshed. The melted ice chips splashed everywhere; onto everything and everyone within range.
__________“Refreshing,” the stranger responded when a wave doused his attire.
__________The commander fished for the boy’s chest and held him down. “His spirit is, isn’t it? Fierce and frosty, like your spellscript,” he enticed, “and you’re both Water-bound.”
__________As Kimio’s gills fanned out again, the frigid bathwater bubbled on either side of his neck. Trading me like a slave? he decided. I’ll show you!
__________Oftentimes, Sea elves spoke with their hands when the ocean stilled their tongues. Kimio was not raised aboard any of his forebearers’ diving ships, but before the Dark elves kidnapped and recruited him, he learned a handful of nautical signs from Sea-elf bootcamp. Without cutting or splashing the surface of the water, and without bumping or tapping the interior of the trough, he lifted his wrists, twisted his hands, and bent his fingers to cast.
__________In non-verbal spellscript, he signed: The sunlight glosses over the sea.
__________No stars governed Zaliradai. No lanterns brightened the barracks. No candles burned in the inescapable darkness. Since no other light shined in the room; when Kimio turned and shaped his hands, when he channeled the magical essence flowing through his veins, it interpreted his bioluminescence as sunlight. Since his trough was the largest body of water in the room, the sentient essence also interpreted his bathwater as the sea.
__________Kimio squeezed his eyelids shut even tighter than before, until the veins in his forehead puffed. The luminous streaks in his sopping locks brightened to blinding gleams. These stretched out and glossed over the surface of his frigid bathwater.
__________When the dazzling light reached Glaiven’s bare arm, it stung like the slap of an eel’s tail and burned atrociously. With a grip tighter than the jaws of a bear trap, Glaiven clutched Kimio’s tunic, as he yanked his submerged hand from the hexed bathwater. He slammed the boy’s back against the rim of the trough.
__________The trough burst. Bathwater gushed from the cracks. The spill pooled beneath the boots of those left standing. Glaiven cupped his hand over the reddish-pink burn, which ringed his bluish forearm like a gaudy bangle. The stranger laughed hysterically.
__________“Two for one!” he touted. “The Little Selkie carved a djinn’s manacle into your flesh.”
__________Glaiven’s gaze dipped to the Sea-elf boy sprawled out on the floor.
__________“Grant wishes and be discarded, eh?” he related. “His notion of me for sure.”
__________Disgracefully, Kimio lay on his back in the puddle. Since his spell rescinded when his back burst through the trough and sundered his concentration, he peeled his eyelids open. His vision returned blurrily, as if he peered through the migrating mists that stole his twin from him some time ago. Despite his sore back and deplorable circumstances, Kimio smirked.
__________Silently, he gloated, I weaponized my hair like Mom.
__________Once Kimio’s pupils adjusted to the room, the blurriness receded hazily. His vision slowly cleared, and he spied the stranger in the room. Chewing his fingernails almost incessantly, the lanky he-elf paced the aisle between the busted trough and an empty bed. He stopped only to twirl strands of his snow-white bangs, while he chatted with Glaiven.
__________ “I’ve never kept a tailless protégé, you know?” the stranger cautioned.
__________“Trapper, you owe me for her,” Glaiven hissed.
__________Though the stranger neither bled nor winced from his fingernail chewing, his milky-white skin frayed, and his fingertips blackened, as if he dipped them into charcoal. His icy presence pegged him as a stereotypical Thayquakatheer (an Ice elf). Since most Thayquakatheermor (Ice elves) were precocious craftsmen, the stranger’s fingertips were as likely to be tarnished from blending charcoal as to be necrotic from his habitual chewing or some nasty miasmic residue.
__________There’s more to him than meets the eye, Kimio noted, but he remained catatonic while the men argued. The longer they disassociated his juvenile presence from their adult conversation—while he eavesdropped on them—the more he learned. They locked eyes whenever they spoke, and their expressions shifted with their tonalities: from platonic to agitated to grave.
__________“Enchanter,” the stranger addressed, “her tail doesn’t wag anymore.”
__________“We buried her together!” Glaiven compounded.
__________The stranger scrunched his shoulders and inspected his fingernails.
__________“Not even the Eternal Rain can rinse off the accursed stains,” he grumbled.
__________“Because,” Glaiven reinforced, “her blood cries out from the ground.”
__________The stranger’s snow-white, samurai ponytail bounced behind his head, as he hoisted Kimio off the floor and onto his feet. “Come pet,” he growled. “I’ll train you, while your master forges your dog tags.”
__________Kimio shuddered; the man’s grip was as icy as his demeanor. “Don’t touch me!” he snarled, as he wrestled away. “I’m no one’s pet!”
__________“I’m done arguing,” the stranger denounced. “Let it snow!”
__________The Ice-elf man glowered and grabbed the Sea-elf boy by the shoulders. He squeezed the boy, until his gnarly fingernails drew fresh blood. A flash of white light emitted from the stranger’s palms, and the miasma coursing through Kimio’s veins crystalized in dewdrops spurted from the wellspring within. His blood chilled. His chest tightened, and his pulse slackened. Only Kimio’s mystic bond to the Element of Quera (Water) prevented the stranger’s sinister snowflakes from stopping his bewitched heart.
__________Kimio attempted to clap his hands to his aching chest, but his limbs would not budge. He attempted to duck out from under the stranger’s grip, but his back would not bend. No matter how his thoughts commanded his body to move, the message was lost in translation. Were his nerves as frozen as the elemental magic in his bloodstream?
__________Why can’t I move? Kimio panicked, but his lips would not part to shriek.
__________While Kimio was unable to protest, the stranger dipped the frozen elf-child, like a ballroom dance partner. Then, keeping an arm wrapped around Kimio’s back, he supported the boy’s knees with his other arm and swept the boy’s feet off the wet floor. The stranger, whom Glaiven dubbed Trapper, carried the boy like a wounded animal.
__________Glaiven snickered. “Don’t let your Water-bound blood curdle by the warming fire!”
__________Trapper’s glacial-blue eyes animated. “Awe, you do care!”
__________Trapper did not stay long enough for the Dark-elf commander to discredit his canard. Tossing his snow-white ponytail like a whip, he whirled around and kicked the grubby barracks’ door open. He marched through the door and carried Kimio elsewhere in the Dark elves’ shoddy—largely outdoor—fort for preteen trainees.
__________When they entered a nearby stable, Kimio expected to be tossed over the haunches of a warhorse. Since horses and their riders were alleged to have as much in common as dogs and their masters, he predicted a giddy, white-haired horse impatiently waited for Trapper. He could not have been anymore mistaken.
__________Even though a horse’s saddle was strapped to its sturdy back, an enormous, poised, dark-furred wolf sat calmly in a horse’s stall. After it stretched and yawned, it sauntered over to jittery Trapper and immobile Kimio. Sloppily wagging its extra-long tail, it greeted Trapper with enthusiastic licks and nuzzles.
__________“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Delilah,” Trapper encouraged. “This Selkie ‘sicle needs licked.”
__________The Ice-elf man lowered the Sea-elf boy onto the giant wolf’s haunches. Once his hands were free, he scratched the affectionate creature behind the ears and climbed onto her saddle. A head harness gently looped around Delilah’s muzzle and clipped to the leather collar that tightened around her neck. Without stuffing a bit between the carnivore’s fangs, the head harness supplied Trapper with reliable reins for steering his mount.
__________Trapper gripped the reins and nudged the giant wolf’s elbows with his knees.
__________“Rush home, Delilah,” he urged. “We have an elf-child’s heart to thaw.”
Endlesslore 