There once was a little girl with nut-colored eyes and sand-colored skin who was tossed up by the sea. She was clasped in the arms of her mother with a coral flute, and they were cast up in the wreckage of a fishing boat painted all blue. And her mother, salt-covered and breathing her last had breath to speak, she said, "Now be good and mind your mother and don't be blowing my good pipe and calling up the waves for no reason."
When her new parents took her in to live with them by the sea, she had only a pair of ruined sandals and her pretty flute, which she took with her everywhere, tucked close to her skin. She ran wild over the rocks and the ruins of the island, and past the crops her new parents grew, and she danced along cliffs like winds dance through the sails of ships on the wide width of the ocean. Little Cala, for that was her name, was as wild as the seabirds, and the salt was in her veins and the water in the depths of her nut-dark eyes like it often is with the children of the wind and waves.
But one day, Cala danced too close along a cliff and she fell down the black stone all the way to the beach where her mother had washed up, and she lay dazed against the stone, her head swimming like a fever had gripped it, and her body chilled like she was wet in the ocean, though she was dry. And down there in the sands, she thought she heard the salt breeze through the holes in the cliff singing out like her dear mother in a lullaby, and she was afraid.
She remembered, though, what her dear mother in the boat all blue had said, and she pulled out the pipe, and she blew it once, weak and struggling like her breath was struggling, and then once more, stronger, singing up against the stone and water.
And it sang out into the waves, too, with a strange and weirdling song, and Cala saw twisting patterns in the soft ivory coral that she'd never seen on the flute before. But as her mother's lullaby sang to her from the soft salt and the swell of the tide, another voice rose above it, singing out of the wide blue of the sea and the stricken ships of the depths, and the painted sails out of Liidhaga the Beautiful, City of Scholars.
The waves, they curled, and like the song of the Ruby Princess of the depths, the coils of a great, swelling livathi serpent rose from the ocean, with crimson and ivory scales flashing against blue and green like the sea itself. And though it stretched longer than the great merchant ships of the sea, and almost the width of the little isle, the little girl called Cala heard only the song, swelling above the hurting in her head and the fading whisper of her mother's voice in the salt. And Cala found she had strength to sit up there on the sands, forgetting her hurts as the livathi sang on through the noon and into the evening.
Finally, when the moon was cresting the edge of the black of the ocean, the serpent sank below the waves, and Cala shook herself, and ran back up the bluff to her parents, flute tucked tight against her skin. And ther parents made much of her bruises and scrapes from the rocks and the egg on her head, and little of the tales of the livathi serpent, for why would one of the serpents of deep Sethzelorahn listen to a little girl?
And Cala, the little girl forgot too, for it must have been a dream with her head having struck the stone of the cliff, but she never stopped wandering the edges of the cliff, or running the length of the island and gazing out into the sea, dreaming of the furthest depths of the blue and black. But in the night, the serpent sang to her in dreaming, and she walked under the waves with the great serpent coiling wise and whispering around her, showing her triangles of alchemy, the polished metal of books, and singing out the songs of the seas and tides.
One day, many years from then, though a merchanter boy came to buy the crops of her parents and the sweet berries they raised on the heights of the isle, and he saw the eyes of young Cala, now a maiden, and was enamored of the blue glints in the nut-dark depths. And though she loved only the ocean, her mind dreaming of the depths, of the sails flying high above, with the salt on her lips and in her nose, he wished her for a wife, and offered a bride-price to her parents.
His coin was good and heavy and gold, and before Cala could say yea or nay, he took her with him on the deck of his merchant ship, back to Liidhaga. And before poor Cala could say yea or nay or place hand in hand over the marriage bed, he made advances on the maiden who dreamed of the waves, and his sailors made lewd suggestions as sailors often do.
The girl ran the length and edges of the ship as she'd run the length and edges of the island, and when they chased her out onto the sea-bleached prow, she took up the coral flute from under her sari and blew it long and loud over the ship, the sea, the waves. But as the serpent swelled beneath the waves, the men took up arms against it, took up spears and crossbows and fire to drive it from their ship.
As it danced about their ship, though, and as the merchanter boy tried to fetch her down from the prow, the maiden, Cala, sang out.
"For the seas are fair and the salt is bitter,
For the waves are wide and the land is narrow.
For the song and depths and the halls beneath,
For the waves that crash on the furthest lea."
As she sang, her words blurred together till she sang in the liquid song of the depths in the serpent's own tongue, and the men were struck as to statues. The serpent rose from the sea, curling about the maiden like a ribbon around a dancer's arm. And Cala, the fisherman's girl, stepped back onto the head of the serpent, and both livathi and maiden vanished beneath the swell of the waves.
They say the merchanter never got his dowry back, for what fool attacks a great serpent for his bride or forces a woman of the far isles? But as for her, they say sometimes a small blue boat rides across the oceans with a sail sewn of song and a serpent that curls beneath in the depths.
Originally written for Lament.