recovered via mnemonic crystal
corruption level: moderate
The water was the first thing I ever understood.
Not people. Not words. Not the careful politics of those who believed that power was something you negotiated for in quiet rooms. The water. The way it moved without asking permission. The way it carried things and drowned things and fed things and destroyed things and felt no particular way about any of it.
I was very young when I put my hand beneath the surface of the ocean for the first time and felt it push back.
Not against my hand. Against something inside me.
[gap]
— they told me it was impossible. Of course they did. That is what people say when they have decided that the boundaries of their own understanding are the boundaries of the world. I did not argue with them. I went back to the water.
The first spell I ever shaped was not a spell. It was a question. I held the water in my hands and I asked it what it wanted to become and it showed me and I simply followed. That is all aquamancy has ever been, at its core. Not commanding. Asking. The water already knows what it wants to do. We only learn to ask correctly.
[gap — distortion level: severe]
— I do not remember how long I was out there. On the ocean. Between one shore and another, or perhaps between one world and another. I was never entirely certain. The water does not measure time the way land does. It measures it in tides. In pressure. In the slow, grinding patience of currents that have been moving in the same direction since before anything alive existed to name them.
I learned things out there that I have never written down.
I will never write them down.
[gap]
— when I arrived, the shore was cold and the sun was low and a woman looked at me like I had fallen from somewhere rather than walked from somewhere, which was, I suppose, closer to the truth than she knew. She asked me if I was alright. I told her I needed to know the name of the nearest city.
She told me.
I walked there.
What I had left behind, I left behind. What I had crossed to get there, I crossed alone and I will die having crossed it alone. Some distances are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be respected.
The water taught me that.
[gap — terminal]
[end of fragment]