What From the Water Rises #24

In which Phaeon has an unexpected encounter.

Though he received no physical injury from his bout with Leontas, it still took Phaeon days to feel fully recovered.

It shamed and frustrated him to be so unsettled by a simple fight—a fight that he’d viewed with such open contempt, a fight that he’d won.

But the memory of it haunted him for days, affecting his mood and behavior more than he’d care to admit. He avoided Zuenos and a wide swath of the surrounding land, still thinking of the way the messenger had approached him on the adjacent beach.

No matter where he went, though—no matter how far he wandered away from the city to fish and forage—he could not shake the lingering fear that someone would find him again. He half-expected every distant rustle to be another messenger seeking him out to levy some horrible accusation and challenge him to defend his honor. To defend Azar’s honor.

Even if nobody challenged him again, the fear of being recognized still hung over him. His only hope was that leaving his sword at home would discourage others from realizing who he was; his appearance was rather nondescript, he’d always thought, except for the subtle reddish tint to his hair.

Isle Ezu’s culture was still so foreign to him, though—so unfathomable. He had no sense of how important Zuenos’s sword fights were to the city’s residents, how long after their conclusions the witnesses would share stories and gossip about them. The crowd on the day he bested Leontas had sprawled out impossibly far in every direction. How many people saw? How many people heard—?

The thought of Leontas’s comment after his victory always nauseated him with horror. Those words, delivered with such icy sarcasm—“Let it be known to all watching that Phaeon and his friend are not faggots”—echoed through his mind and made him shudder every time he thought about them.

How many had heard the insult? How many knew his name—knew he had someone he cared for, whose dignity he’d fight viciously to protect? How many had heard the man spit out his name and a reference to Azar and the word “faggots” in the same sentence?

In the end, it was Azar who snapped him out of his preoccupation.

Not intentionally—Phaeon still hadn’t told Azar about the fight, and he wasn’t sure he ever would. It didn’t strike him as necessary. Perhaps the observers had speculated about the identity of Phaeon’s “friend”—even in passing, thinking of the words made his stomach churn—but Azar was not present, and his name never came up. Besides, the original challenger was honor-bound to keep their rumors to themself. None of this was reliable enough to stop Phaeon from worrying, but it was enough to justify withholding it from Azar.

Still, Phaeon’s dark mood was clearly beginning to affect him. Phaeon first suspected this when he saw how restless Azar’s behavior had become, with aimless walks at random hours of the day punctuated by long periods of tense, private reading. Then, two days after the fight, he woke to find Azar up and writing—and realized that he’d either woken in the pre-dawn hours or not slept at all.

Though he greeted Phaeon with a light, “Good morning,” the sight of him struck Phaeon with a sharp slap of guilt. His agitation must have been radiating from him, filling the space, bleeding into Azar. What else would account for his insistence on time alone, his lengthy absences, his now-apparent sleeplessness? Phaeon was letting his anxieties rule him, letting them hurt Azar—and he needed to rein them in.

So he decided that day to give Azar space, though the amount of time they were spending apart was beginning to worry him, and resolved to conquer his nerves at once. Ignoring his fear of being asked to fight another duel, ignoring his lingering disgust and horror, ignoring the bitterness of Leontas’s words reverberating in his ears, he forced himself to return to Zuenos.

Near Zuenos, anyway. Once he arrived at the city’s coastal edge, he discovered that he was not quite ready to be in the presence of others. It proved too overwhelming to face the water alone when a few small groups of people dotted the coastline. The sounds of their laughing conversations set him on edge, and he felt their eyes every time he turned away from them.

He backtracked, but stayed close enough to see the corners of the white buildings at the beach’s edge through the trees. He settled into an unoccupied cove and sat to pull his shoes off, scanning the ocean for shellfish as he did.

He found a small bed of oysters not far from the coastline and quickly stood to step into the cool, calm water.

As soon as he was ankle-deep, though, something strange happened.

There was a shift in the air around him, unmistakable but unnamable—a sensation so abrupt and so unlike anything he’d ever felt that his first desperate reaction was to reach for his sword. But he’d left his sword at home, and he realized at once that this was not something physical, not something he could defeat.

A whispering, rushing sound echoed all around him, resonating strangely with his thoughts, and he clapped his hands to his ears.

The moment he recognized what was happening, the truth struck him with a clarity sharp enough to momentarily blind him. 

This was Ezu-anvashe.

Unsure of how to comport himself before a god, Phaeon threw himself to his knees—soaking his clothes through—and clasped his hands in supplication.

Anvashe spoke again, and it took Phaeon a long time to process the words, which echoed all around him—rising from the waves, from the sand, from the salty air—and through his mind.

“What has happened with Azar?”

“What?” Phaeon asked, then coughed out the water he’d sucked in. He wiped his mouth, feeling his face flush with horror at how disrespectful he must have sounded. “I’m—I apologize, your—Ezu-anvashe. I didn’t realize…”

“You have noticed how he’s been,” Anvashe observed. It was not a question; it was a statement of fact. Every one of Phaeon’s muscles tensed as he recalled that the god could read his mind. But why was he afraid? He had nothing to hide.

“He’s acting… a little different, but I thought it was my fault. I thought he was picking up on my mood.” He stared at his hands through the water, watching his nails dig into the sand. Being in the presence of a god so overwhelmed him that he was slow to process the meaning of the words. Once he did, he looked up—scanning the waves for anything to fix his gaze on—and began to speak with more urgency. “Did something happen? Is something wrong?”

For a moment, Ezu-anvashe was silent. Phaeon waited, frozen, unsure if his body trembled from the cool water soaking through to his skin or from terror or both. 

Then the god finally said, “I promised him safety.”

Phaeon’s first thought was that Anvashe must have misspoken. Had he meant to say “you?” Phaeon had promised Azar safety, after all. Perhaps—though the thought made him sick with dread—the lines between the two of them were blurred now that Ezu-anvashe was speaking directly into his mind.

He wasn’t sure how to ask—or whether it would be wise to ask. Frozen by fear and confusion, he hesitated for a long moment before cautiously requesting elaboration. “From… what have you promised him safety?”

“Everyone. No one else need know who he is. I have suitably addressed the two who have become aware of him, and word will go no further from them. Your secret is safe.”

Though the context was lost on Phaeon, he was in no state to ask clarifying questions. “I…” he started, but he shook his head and lied, “I understand.”

“Will you convey the same to Azar?”

“Yes, of course, and—thank you. I—”

But the presence withdrew all at once, with a sudden rush of waves, before Phaeon finished his sentence. He scrambled upright, spitting out saltwater.

He spent a moment sitting in the shallows in awe of what had just happened, soaked through and shaking, before he realized what he had to do. He leapt to his feet and clumsily splashed back to the beach, then ran to the house.

He wasn’t sure what spurred the sudden sense of urgency in him. According to Ezu-anvashe, they had nothing to fear. The implications of what had happened—two people had learned Azar’s identity, but who, and how?—were a lesser concern for now. First, he needed to convey Anvashe’s message. “Your secret is safe.”

It took him far too long to get back home, though he sprinted the entire distance. When he reached the door, he flung it open, panting and dripping in the doorway.

If Azar had been there, he would’ve chastised Phaeon for tracking wet sand and water inside; as much as Azar loved the beach, he was firm about wanting it to remain outdoors.

But Azar was not there.

His bag was gone, too. Phaeon found no further sign of his presence inside except for a torn strip of paper on the kitchen table.

Slowly, Phaeon approached and dropped to his knees, careful not to lean over and drip on the note. He recognized very few words, but two of the three written on the page were familiar to him. One was his own name, and the other was Azar’s.

The one in the middle, he did not know, and he could not discern whether it would be safe to ask someone else to read it for him. But some part of him understood, without comprehending its meaning, what it was.

He knew then, with a sinking certainty, that Azar would not be returning home.