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I kicked my legs and held my arms out to steady myself. My body moved slowly, as if I swam through mud instead of the water I saw all around me, as if I swam in a dream. Light filtered down from above and fell upon the gate of bone and upon the fins of a mighty whale that swam in the depths below. 

A human hand, the same gray-blue as the whale’s fins and as long from wrist to fingertips as I was tall, emerged from the darkness. An arm, encrusted in barnacles and dappled in white and gray, followed. The figure unfurled its great length, and I found myself face to face with a giantess, her upper body bare and mottled with coral, and her waist tapering down to the tail of a mighty whale. Her hair was long sea-grass, and colorful fish darted between the fronds. Her face, angular and sharp-toothed, held a whale’s huge dark eyes. She studied me with one, and I saw myself reflected in it, tiny and distorted. Unhurried, she turned her head to fix me with the other. 

I could not move. Distantly, I was aware of my body breathing, though I remained submerged in the otherworldly sea. A terrible deep note sounded through the water, shaking the bones of the gate and stilling my heart for a terrifying moment. There was a question in that note, and in the wide-set eyes of the giant. At last, I understood: I swam before Nashurru, goddess of the deep and the places between, and she wanted to know why I had come to her. 

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Here is the tale that the grandmothers told me, as well as I can recall it. 

The island was called Mau, and the fairest maiden upon it was named Noa. When she was a girl, and her three small siblings were but infants, their parents were both lost at sea in a terrible storm. From this storm came Soroena, an eel as large as the mountain of Ewandar. In the springtime, a single bright blue star rises above the horizon at sunset, and a serpentine trail of white stars follows it; this is the eel approaching the island, demanding a sacrifice as it did every third year at the end of the rainy season. 

“Is this eel like the great lind-worm of the North,” I asked, “scaled and finned, with teeth like sabers?”

“Hush,” Luana said. 

The next constellation to clear the horizon was a human figure, arms spread wide. This was Noa, chained to a volcanic rock a short distance from the shore of her island. She had grown to womanhood caring for her siblings, while others fed the slow but inexorable appetite of the eel, but this time she was not so fortunate. At sunset, her fellow islanders secured her to the sacrificial stone, and there she would wait. Soroena would arrive at midnight, and devour her whole, leaving only her hands and feet in the iron shackles—and, more importantly, leaving the waters surrounding the island safe for another three years.