Umi, Child Of The Sea

• Heather Wasson, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2018

By the grace of a dying star, with the last breath of the root of all evil, the chuckle of the relinquished souls, sorrow of yet another brother lost to the tides of war. Sun filtered, as if even the life of the sky will be unable to disturb the anguish whispering it’s winsome across the landscape.

Birds flitting through the trees, landscape, a dappled light of greens and browns, presenting silence, all understand the loss of such an occurrence. Animals foraging through the autumnal colours of red, orange and brown. A contrast to the non-deciduous trees flourishing under the cold wintery wind.

A beautiful crystalline sea lapping greedily at the edge of a tropical island, inhabited by only those allowed by the goddess residing on the island. All animals inherent to the land are as divine as the goddess herself.

She is old, as old as those renounced by even the sea itself. Yet, you would be unable to tell such a curse by the look of her unblemished skin, the glossy hair, long, powerful limbs. With the eyes windows to the soul, those gifted with sight shall see down into the depths of her old age.

With a whisper of the sea breeze and the humming of a name, those wronged shall be deciduously hand-picked from few. To right their wrongs is what it would mean to be a goddess of her stature. To give them the powers some dream of, to allow them to enact vengeance… it is her right.

Humming to fill the leaves and flowers with life again, she twists her fingers intricately, producing the essence left by one of very few mortals. A click of the fingers changes the course of the future forever.

For a future ruled by simply men with a desire to cause harm and sorrow will not be a future at all.

The boy born to the babe is the cause of so much grief and anguish, to be brought up as a criminal… it would not befit her son and with a gentle kiss, he is passed onto her father-in-law. She will not live to see another day, but she knows her son will be greatly protected, she can feel it in her bones. As surely as she knew that she was bearing a child.

“Umi is his name,” And with a final exhale, her soul is plucked by the god who surely places her in the garden of souls, to be harvested in the final war, “and you will become one with the wrath blemishing this curs’d land of ours, you shalt be granted powers beyond the most divine of creatures and it shall behove me to keep your stay upon this planet. Your sacred duty is to harvest that of the discrimination, the pollution tarnished upon my livelihood. Go Umi! Unto the sea! Child of water and all things beauty!”