Fish Out of Water

Fish Out of Water - By Ros Baxter

Prologue

In the beginning, before The Awakening, the earth was a place of rage and heat.

Greed fanned murderous embers among the children of the land.

Aegir, God of the Boundless Seas, looked on in fear and perplexity from his island paradise, Hlsey. He called for his nine daughters, the billow maidens, and commanded them to sing nine land-men to their sides. Nine seeds from whom a new world would grow.

Then Aegir summoned a blood-song and rent a jagged scar upon the earth. The waters gushed in like tears and sent Hlsey, and all who dwelt upon it, to rest seven miles under the sea. There, in the deepest place on earth, he bestowed upon them the gift of water-breathing.

And at last Aegir knew peace.

For a millenium he and his goddess wife, Ran, stoked the tiny flame of their family into a nation. Aegira — a land of peace, hope and refuge for all who breathed water.

But history knows that darkness is jealous of the light.

A sorcerer born of the earth, Manos, looked on Aegira with avarice. When each of Aegir’s daughters refused him in contempt, he conjured an illness to call them to Reaper’s side.

Mad with grief, Aegir declared war. In the bloody battle that followed, Manos butchered Aegir and Ran and made the seas run red with blood. With the last of his life force, Aegir spun a veil of secrecy so Aegira could never again be found by Manos or any who wished it harm.

But even Manos had not been able to bring himself extinguish the billow maidens light. He spared Aegir’s eldest daughter, Angeyja, and imprisoned her. Then he cast a spell so that each of her eight murdered sisters would be reborn consecutively, living a millennium before giving birth to the next. But Angeyja escaped and returned to Aegira to become its Queen.

As Manos raged and Aegira wept, the High Council of Dolphins brought forth a prophesy:

At the end of Ran’s line

only one world can be,

and the bloodtide will only be stopped

by the swellsong of the three.