The Veiled Wave

High summer bathed the Croc Tooth Isles in shimmering light. Fishing skiffs bobbed on turquoise shallows, children combed the tidal flats for pearl-crabs, and traders haggled in the shade of palm-thatch stalls. Then, without warning, the horizon to the north darkened - not with storm cloud, but with the ocean itself.   At first it looked as though the sea were climbing the sky: a wall of steel-blue water rising higher and higher until it blotted out the sun. A deep, bowel-shaking rumble rolled across the lagoons; moments later a veil of white spray crowned the advancing mass like wind-torn banners. The islanders froze. Some pointed, mouths open; others whispered half-remembered prayers. Realisation struck only when the wind whipping off the crest stung their faces with salt: the sea was coming to devour them.   Panic shattered the hush. Drummers beat frantic signals, conches brayed evacuation calls, and every hand - young or old - scrambled for the nearest canoe, catamaran, or trading dhow. But Croc Tooth's dozens of tooth-shaped islets offered no refuge. Their highest ridges stood barely thirty feet above the spring-high tide. By the time keels kissed water, the wave was already casting its shadow over the fishing grounds.   What followed was not a single crashing blow but a roaring inundation that peeled away the skin of the archipelago like bark from driftwood. Coconut groves folded as though made of reeds, stilt-villages exploded into splinters, and coral temples - some older than the tribe's oldest songs - vanished beneath churning foam. Boats that had just slipped their moorings were flipped end over end; others were ground to driftwood against hidden shoals. Whole families were swallowed before they could shout farewell.   When the ocean finally settled, the Croc Tooth Isles were almost unrecognisable: a scatter of scraped sandbars studded with shattered coral and the ribs of wrecked dhows. Of the ten thousand Khajari who had greeted the morning, barely eight hundred survived - clinging to overturned hulls, bleached mangrove roots, or sheer luck. Over the next harrowing weeks, these refugees drifted or paddled back to the largest isle, now little more than a drying mud-tongue, and there they lit fires from storm-felled timber to signal the living.   Grief gave way to grim resolve. The surviving shamans gathered in a cracked shrine-circle, their skin still crusted with salt, and swore the Khajari would never again be caught beneath the sea's heel. For seven days and nights they chanted over fragments of obsidian idol and shards of storm-glass, weaving sky-spirits into cedar keels. They burned pearl-oil in bronze censers and hammered silver wind-runes into mastheads. At dawn on the eighth day the first of the new vessels - sleek, wave-carved outriggers - rose from its cradle, hovered a hand-span above the sand, and drifted forward on a hush of displaced air.   The witnesses gasped. Where oar-blades once parted water, the outriggers now sliced blue sky; where sails once bucked against salt-spray, they bellied with warm drafts of cloud-wind. The Khajari called the craft skyrunners, and each survivor laid a hand upon its hull, vowing to become people of both tide and tempest.   Today, the Croc Tooth survivors scour the upper currents for new fishing grounds and safe harbours, their skyrunners gleaming like gulls against the sun. They watch the sea - still beloved, forever feared - from far above its capricious reach, determined that no wave, however monstrous, will again erase their name from the song of the world.