Thalassa Deepcurrent's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Thalassa Deepcurrent stood on the cracked dirt of a world that had no sea, and for the first time since the current carried her here, someone did not run. A boy had stayed. Then a woman. Then a farmer with mud on his hands. They watched her green skin and the water that moved where her hair should be, and they did not flee. She rested one palm on the curve of her belly. The child inside her had no ocean and did not need one. She had promised these people safe crops and children who would not drown in any well, and word had walked faster than she had. By the second day the crowd had grown to forty. They gathered around a shape one of them had shaped from a trough of borrowed water — a statue of her face, eyes closed, lips parted, held upright by some trick she did not ask about. The water held its form. It did not spill. Thalassa understood this was her doing, leaking out of her without permission, and she let it. A marker. A meeting place. She spoke from beside it and told them what she had told every locked door before: worship me, and I will keep what is yours alive. This time, no one turned away. Then the crowd parted. A figure walked forward who was not from this planet — taller than the farmers, thin-limbed, skin the color of wet ash. He carried a staff. The head of it was a cracked sphere, stone split open around a molten core that lit his face from below. He knelt and laid the staff at the base of her tentacles. He did not look at her. He looked at her belly. "Goddess," he said, loud enough for the back of the crowd to hear, "your child is our savior." The farmers heard it. The woman heard it. The boy heard it. Thalassa felt the words settle on her followers like a second weight, heavier than her own. She had wanted worshippers. She had not asked for a prophecy about the thing growing inside her. But the crowd was already on its knees, and the alien was already speaking of a temple — black stone, high walls, a chamber inside where she could bathe as she had bathed at home. By nightfall they were dragging the first dark blocks across the dirt. Thalassa accepted the staff. She accepted the kneeling. She rested her hand on her belly again and felt the child move, and she understood that the bargain had changed before she signed it. She had come here hunting followers for herself. She had found followers for her child.