The thing about reaching for power older than oceans? Sometimes it reaches back.
Kira felt it the moment her fingers touched the water sphere – not just its physical form, but the weight of memory it contained. Every drop of rain that had ever fallen. Every tide that had ever turned. Every current that had ever carried secrets between shores.
“Oh,” she breathed, the word turning to bubbles in their liquid air. “That’s…”
“Vast,” Lira finished. Her earth-sense was going wild, reading patterns that existed before stone learned to be solid. Where her magic touched the sphere, ripples spread through reality itself. “Like trying to hold the first rain.”
The entity watched through its thousand eyes as they lifted the sphere together. Its crystal-current lattice shifted, showing new memories: the moment water first chose to flow, when oceans learned their songs, when depths discovered their own kind of light.
Their protective bubble shuddered as power older than elements pressed against it. Not trying to break in – trying to teach them something about its nature.
The sphere sang.
Not like Kira’s coral spheres, with their simple harmonies.
This was older music.
The first songs water ever learned.
“It’s not just about holding it,” Kira said, feeling memories flood through her water-mark. Her essence resonated with rhythms older than time. “It’s about understanding why it needs to be held at all.”
Lira nodded, her earth-magic stabilizing the flood of power. Through their combined working, she felt the truth of it: “Water chose to flow so earth could learn to be solid. Earth chose stability so water could discover movement.”
The entity’s voice pressed against their minds one final time:
REMEMBER THIS TRUTH
SEPARATION WAS CHOICE
FORGETTING WAS FORCED
NOW CHOOSE AGAIN
The sphere’s song reached crescendo, harmonizing with powers that existed before elements had names. Around them, the memory-theater blazed with scenes of first choice, of natural separation, of willing dance between distinct forces.
Power flooded through their marks, rewriting the patterns on their skin with scripts older than language. Not destroying their separate natures – completing them. Teaching them how to hold both truths at once:
Why water and earth chose their own paths.
Why they needed to remember dancing together.
Kira felt her connection to water deepen, reaching past Maralyd’s careful forms to touch tides that sang before oceans had shores. Beside her, Lira’s earth-sense expanded, touching stone that remembered being sea.
The entity’s thousand eyes gleamed approval as the sphere’s power transformed them. Not breaking their separate magics, but teaching them older songs. Deeper rhythms. First dances.
“Ready?” Kira asked, feeling the sphere’s power stabilize between them.
Lira’s answering smile held depths older than stone: “To remember everything? Always.”
Their magic rose together, water and earth moving like they’d never forgotten how to dance. The entity’s crystal-current form opened, showing them the way back to younger seas.
Behind them, memories older than time watched through countless spherical eyes.
Above them, void-hunters waited in unmade waters.
Within them, power older than oceans sang new songs in ancient tongues.
Time to show the world what water remembered.
Time to wake up what slept in younger seas.
Time to remind elements why they chose to dance.
The deep had kept its secrets well.
Now it was time to share them.
The first rain fell up as they began their ascent.