Talia slid soundlessly into the water. Her mother had taught her to swim, like all good mothers do. Though, truth be told, she thought, nymphs were probably born just naturally knowing how. She remembered her younger sister’s birth, the maidens closed in, forming a circle around her mother, who writhed in the water, and floated serenely between contractions. The sisters held her, comforted her, and protected her as much as their faceless, liquidy mother did, that one who brought forth life, and took it away. When her sister had emerged, she’d lain still for a breathtakingly long moment, a floating bluish-green worm to Talia’s young mind, then thrashed her tiny, thinly-webbed hands and feet, her lungs replacing amniotic fluid with oxygen from the air in a high pitched squeal. Her sister was gone now. Her body’d been returned. The wet place that had fostered her beginnings now ushered her transition into another kind of energy.
The channel among the mangrove roots was fairly shallow, the trees standing above both earth and water on their slender, arched legs, looking ready to walk away at a moment’s notice, yet anchored against the fiercest of hurricanes that blew through. They represented the perfect juxtaposition of ever-changing permanence that marked the Everglades. Alligators and crocodiles, creatures whose ancestors rubbed elbows with the dinosaurs, patrolled the murky depths. Turtles, silent keepers of the ecosystem’s secrets, were ever present at the edge of vision, watching, cataloging, recording, born old, it seemed, and capable of weathering the worst of storms. The birds who squawked and sang, chittering messages of melodic notes across airwaves thick with humidity and bits of decaying plant material, took to wing, leaving only the sounds of soft splashes in their wake, seeking shelter elsewhere until the tempests passed.
This place was alive, breathing with the ebb and flow of the tides. Everything was connected. Talia knew the men were getting closer. The creatures in her swamp gave them away. They’d heard the tales of the orb, and though their idea of treasure was far different from hers, she knew that their greed would compel them to hunt it down. She pulled a protective leather sheath over the bauble where it hung around her neck, glowing and swirling red in warning.
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