"He just tells me 'Magick' when I ask."

Sumira leaned over the gunwale, looking into the water where the Thresher Daki called "the Doru" was hanging onto one of the pontoons.

"He's not wrong," the Doru answered. For a sea creature her voice was dry, raspy, lacking the deep resonance of the Leviathans in Grandmother's pod.

"It's still not much of an answer."

A single hoarse chuckle, the first laugh Sumira had heard from any of the Thresher's company. "Imagine what it is to *be* one of us and have little more than that. But then, what are you, exactly? And where did you come from? What is it for your people to be the first children of the earth and yet the shortest lived?"

When Sumira's look turned downcast the Thresher paused. "Forgive me, I got too sharp with my words. But there's too much irony in having to answer this from a shore-person."

"Why for?"

"It all began with your kind. Some strange rite in the drowned city that changed our world forever. The world as it was... gone now. A new world born from it in a matter of hours."

Sumira leaned even further over the gunwale, captivated.

"This new to you, shore-dancer?"

"Not entirely." There were musings from Enoch's Academy, strange allusions from the Thigg, and even stranger tales from Alal, but all of them had been insistent that no one knew the whole story, in truth.

"It was the opening of the Abyss. The world *convulsed*, they say. And in that moment she gave birth to Nephele, the maiden moon, and heaved her forth into the sky..." The Doru turned her limpid eyes upwards to the ethereal half-disc above them. "But the Abyss did not close. It bled forth tides of magic into the ocean, then into the rains, the rivers and glaciers, and the lifeblood of the world itself forever changed. *That* is why the Leviathan have so many strange and different forms, and yet we are of a single race. The sea is our mother, and magic is our father."

"So what are the Lurkers Beneath, then? Other Leviathan?"

The Doru shook her head sharply. "No. They are not like us. They are dangerous."

"I thought you were their allies."

"Not hardly," said the Thresher. "We keep a truce with them. Enforce a boundary, keep them within and the rest of the world without. For everyone's sake."

"But... how can we speak with them, if that's the case?"

"You embark on a quest to the drowned city to beg questions of its unfathomably ancient grim custodians who live below the reach of the sun, under the crushing weight of the deep ocean, but you balk when someone tells you they are unfriendly?"

Sumira frowned.

"We have emissaries. That place is too deep even for most of us to reach. We carry your entreaties to the Helios, and they go to the mouth of the Abyss for you to plead your case."

"Are the Helios friendly, at least?"

Another dry chuckle from the Doru. "Not the word I would use. But they can be trusted."