Nedant entre les ombres,
d’un llac profund

His shuffling feet make no sound on the empty floors of the Antarctic Preservation, Exploration and Research International Station. He walks, plaintive, and quiet, through each room. Each hallway. Each cupboard is checked, opened with a warm, dry palm, and peered into with a strange, blurry eye.

He finds nobody, and nothing.

When he stands in the sooty wreckage of the lab, he looks down, and sees only one speckle of fresh blood.

He does not need to test it. It will mix. All of it will.

His stomach churns.

s’amaguen els teus monstres
mirant-te als ulls
Aviam si t'enfonses

He clambers into Sno-Cat 01. He meets the eyes of a young, concussed, half-drowned lamb, recently orphaned, who will be driving, and he does not look away, for he knows in the adjacent Sno-Cat, there are a pair of orange eyes he can never meet again.

He sits alongside the huddled, charred body of one Typhon Panagakos. He whispers, quietly, that he has checked thricely, and that not a soul remains on the base. He wraps one hand around theirs, the one clutching the detonator so closely, and he squeezes it. Just a moment more.

lentament apropant-me
seguint-te a tu
crec que estic ajundant-te

So many die. A cruel, cruel journey. So, so many.

Lambs to the slaughter.

He is only able to find recompense in that it was not all of them.

Only five.

(Russian roulette. One-in-six. Pull the trigger. The stun-gun fires.)

(The guilt he feels for his sick, suppressed relief gnaws. For none of those five were His flock. And perhaps the fact that he was not, therefore, responsible for saving them—perhaps that is worse.)

i t'enfonso endins
sense adonar-me'n

Perhaps it is mercy that he forgets.

Perhaps it is mercy that he does not know where his harpoon came from, six months from when he arrives back in that sunny Catalan port, and that he now uses it as a coat-hanger. Perhaps it is mercy that he does not know what once it stood for, in symbology, in agony.

Perhaps it is mercy that his eyes become the same shade of brown that they once were. Perhaps it is mercy that when wide-eyed youths with trembling voices and panicked hearts come to him in the dead of night, it is the kind and ever-trustworthy Dr. Aguirre-Vidal's gentility and bashfulness that disarms the investigators and hides their marks.

Tant temps fent-me por dir-t'ho
per no sentir

Perhaps it is mercy that, on warm brick floors, cupping old-burned skin with sun-kissed hands, he can embrace the man whom now leads Terra Indomita, and both need know no fear of retribution nor violence. Perhaps it is mercy that he knows how to slow-dance with one lame leg. Perhaps it is mercy that they do not remember how they met.

Perhaps it is mercy.

Absolom 41:10.

que estic fent el ridícul i tu tant temps
volent sentir-ho

You press 'stop' on the jukebox, with trembling fingers, and put down the knife.

You don't know why that song curls around your heart with such tremulous fear.

You don't know why you sieze up, panicking, knowing that you need to defend someone---knowing that one of your flock is unsafe---

You only know that the harvest of oranges this season has gone foul.

They must have. You loved oranges.

You just can't stand the way these ones taste.

Dr. Aguirre-Vidal doesn't eat oranges anymore.

Autumn can be a melancholy season in Catalonia. Oranges come to saccharine overripeness sag from branches, their sweetness pervading the winds that pool and well down these ancient hillsides, and lap at Emanuel’s shutters like a salt-tinged tide. Amidst the ocean of drought-deepened leaves, especially at the half-dark sanctity of dusk, they seem to glow. A shoal of bioluminescent plankton, or perhaps orange eyes, blinking. Like jellyfish, their juice stings.

But Emanuel expects it to. It’s nothing new, the sensation. He’ll slice the oranges for the children, because it’s not like the scarring of his hands can get any worse, and the juice will dig in like a harpoon-graze driven into lover’s flesh, and then the pieces will be palatable and all will be well. Somewhere across the world, a man whose name he does not recall is alive, and fruit stirs on the hillsides in those merciful months after summer’s grave. And Emanuel does not eat oranges anymore.

Instead, he teaches and nurtures. The shepherd and his flock, lambs raised to respect the earth, to love it, to care for the valleys of their birth and the Edens of their Lord. They say charity starts at home and Emanuel, in the aftermath of it all, stood in the snowy wreckage of what once constituted his life’s cathedrals, took this as gospel.

So there is a school. An environmental nonprofit, to impart stewardship and science, and skills for their changing world. The doors are always open, and indeed many outstay the conventional hours. Emanuel makes breakfast for those whose parents cannot afford it, and then dinner for those who do not wish to leave him. He is always a little surprised by the latter, but moreso honoured — a lone whale, travelling the tides with decades of research-ships and heartbreak, will always be appreciative when somebody sings back.

One day, there will be a baby on the doorstep, and his Typito will name it Alexis.

For now, it is autumn. An unseasonably warm day, and his flock spill languidly through the kitchen shutters to lounge in the grass. It took a long time for him to allow this, for him to stop seeing wolves lurking in the bushes, and lambs bleeding tar-black rather than scarlet. But Emanuel has always been a kind man, and something of a pushover, and so here they rest, picking at orange-slices that do not stain their hands red.

One or two linger inside, on the cool of the tiles, listening to the wave-lull of his speakers and the everlasting-loops of acoustic choruses within. Someone to sing them to sleep. A photograph of Sakiko’s graduation hangs on the wall there. He doesn’t recall how they met, but he knows that he is proud.

It is warm and calm, and the world is safe, or at least this little meadow-corner of it. Beyond the hills, the shoreline shimmers as he recalls from the Sunday afternoons of his youth, waves nectar-warm and welcoming. Aguirre. By the coast. And there it is, always calling.

It is on such a day that Emanuel decides the children must, at last, be taught to dive.

Not all of them, now. The last time he herded so many novices at once, a blood-swirl and a snapped flipper and, and—

It’s only ghosts now, unspeakable images. The water will soothe this weight on his tongue. Nevermind that he has been afraid of it for years, afraid to be immersed in the enormity of this most sacred world, to sink before an altar where leviathans might enfold him and deem him ever unworthy to serve. Dark tendrils wrapped around glass, cracking. The rood screen crumbles. The dead walk, rosaries snap. Dust is dust, is always dust.

Or so he thinks, when he bolts awake at night. Typito whispers otherwise, as if trying to convince them both. Iron is blood, sulfur starts fires. Renewal, genesis, regenesis. Iron-and-sulfur life. Vidal. Full of life. Eventually, with waves stroked into his hair, he sleeps.

And he wakes, and it will never be the perfect day to dive, but he has been blessed with many days in which to try.

Preparing the boat is a familiar rite, repetitive motions that soothe him much as the passage of scarred fingers over rosary beads. It floats at the end of the pier, his ferry to the underworld, and Emanuel the devoted ferryman who has agreed to look the other way. There are secret cabins and safes in here for Typhon’s use. Where his indomito wishes to go, Emanuel will carry them. Like many things, he does not remember how this came to be, but he knows that it is earned and hard-won. Emanuel will never be a man who spurns miracles.

His boat is christened Jonah, painted on the side in careful orange with a lilting left-hand. Named for a man swallowed by a sea monster, who emerged sure of what he needed to do.

Today, there is only one other passenger: a girl with sunbleach hair, curls as pale as wool. Best to start small. She is a sweet one. He trusts her.

This disciple is small enough that the ladder gives her some difficulty, and so Emanuel lifts her straight up over the side.

When he throws the mooring rope, she catches it well before it can tangle any rigging. Perfect team, he says. She is more grown up than he had given her credit for.

When they suit up together, she smiles in eagerness. Emanuel must try not to tremble as he kits them both, an old habit he has never subdued. Perhaps it is the hope in her eyes, like a well-behaved child in the line for confirmation. He musses her hair fondly as he lowers the goggles over those eyes, and his own flutter shut for a moment. He is as ready as he ever will be.

And when they dive overboard, it is as fast as he dreaded, and as beautiful as he feared. His own descent is clean, careful to leave not so much as a ripple on the sacrosanct. The girl leaves some splashes, with a propeller-whirl of the flippers. He learned. She will too.

Locus iste a deo factus est. The blue is everything, everywhere, and they are but dust in it, specks buoyed in the timeless void. Servants to the vast, marvellers of the divine.

He sees the widening of her eyes, and knows that she sees it too.

Later, he will have to stop her diving too deep. He will have to stop the maelstrom-panic in his pulse at what even dust can do to hurt, and be hurt.

But for now, they hang in the deep blue, and the holiness seeps into them both, and for a moment, he is allowed to bask in it. It is not easy, nor will it ever be, but for a moment, there is only that lull before a choir begins, before shadowy alcoves stir with music forever incomprehensible to them all.

For in the darkness, whales sing.

Written by Rose G.