Findil and the Sapphire of Vrandakan

In the time before the ages were named, before kings or calendars when the sky and sea were strangers, and the world was still choosing its shapes, before Fey, human or Blood Iris Sister, the Old Gods made their home here on the world they called Trinity Moon.   It is said that Mald, goddess of the spring rains, wept herself into being: born from mist and memory, with hands like river foam and moods that turned with every breeze.   She wandered the high air alone, singing rain-songs no creature yet could understand.   And far below, in the slow-turning dark of the deeps, Findil watched her.   Findil, god of the fishes, of patience, silence, and the small nets that catch what the world forgets. He did not rise often. His kingdom was deep and dreaming, a court of coral palaces and eyeless things. Around him stirred the Deep Sleepers, older even than he, bound by old songs. They would not wake unless called. They must not wake.   But Findil was lonely. And he had heard Mald’s song.   So he rose, slow as a tide, and sent her gifts : a fin like gold spun in sea salt, a pearl filled with the sound of whales. But Mald, ever changeful, turned her winds and fled.   He followed, rising further from the deeps than a sea-god should. And the Sleepers stirred.   Mald descended at last to a high cliff where the rain meets the tide. Findil met her there, and they spoke in the old tongue of waves and weeping. It is said that for seven days, the rains fell sweet and the tides lay still, and that the first lovers were born from those meetings.   But Findil was of the sea, and Mald of the air, and they could not touch without stirring chaos.   So Findil did the unthinkable. He forged a gift, a jewel drawn from the memory of stillness of a blue so deep it could calm even the dreaming Sleepers. A sapphire cut from the first lullaby the ocean ever sang.   "This I give you," he said. "To call me when you wish it. To keep the sleepers hushed, and the sea quiet for your coming."   She wept again, but this time for joy.  

---

  But the world does not allow such balance for long. Mald, true to her name, grew moody and forgetful. She tossed the jewel into a stormcloud in play, and it fell, not back into Findil’s hands, but into the sea.   The Deep Sleepers heard it fall.   And they stirred.   Their dreams soured. For a thousand years, the oceans boiled with their murmurs. The land quaked to hear them and it was then that it was cut by the angry waves into the endless involutions we now call the Ragged Coast. Whirlpools laughed. Mald fled to the mountains. And Findil, shamed and grieving, descended into the trench of never-light, to sing them still again, but his voice was hoarse and tremulous and he struggled to calm them.   The rains fled, and the sea grew strange. No storms came for many years, but the silence of the water was a heavy thing. It did not rock or foam or dance. Fish vanished from the shallows. Nets came up bare or bloody. The priests of the Tidal Archive declared that Findil had withdrawn to his trench of sorrow, for the sapphire he had given was lost, and Mald no longer answered his tides.   The people whispered that something below stirred again.   One day, a fisherman named Kerrin, sailing off the coast of Klokken Isle cast his net in defiance of fear. He sang to the water not in worship, but in sorrow, for his nets were empty, his family starving.   "Please do not stray far from shore!" his wife had pleaded with him. "You know it is dangerous in the deeps. I need you to come back to me!"   The skies darkened and the winds rose. Kerrin forgot his wife's words. He sailed between the twin domes of sky and sea, out further than he had ever ventured before, his heart heavy with only a desperate hope to drive him on. He had a family to feed and no faith left to break.   He thought he had followed a school of elusive fish. Perhaps they had lured him. He cast his net farther than he had ever dared, far beyond the reefs, into the still waters that never laughed.   The sky blackened. The wind curled back on itself. From below, something vast and lidless rose. The sea bulged upward in a perfect dome.   Kerrin saw nothing at first, only the absence of sea, a chasm of trembling water. Then came the eye. Then came the mouth. Then came the whisper.   "I dreamed of hunger."   The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. It cracked his thoughts like eggshells. Kerrin fell to his knees, choking on air. The Sleeper, one of the oldest, whose name cannot be spoken by anything with lungs, had found the songless world unbearable. And now it woke.   The boat began to crack.   But as the storm burst and the waves broke open the surface of the sea, something gleamed beneath the creature—something lodged in the jagged ribs of a coral encrustation. The Sapphire!   The storm’s fury had torn open the bed of bone, kelp shells and where it had been dreaming since Mald dropped it, and the Sleeper had been drawn to its forgotten echo.   Kerrin, broken in voice and bleeding from his ears, crawled forward and seized it.   The moment he touched it, the sea stilled.   The Sleeper did not vanish. It watched him. But it did not devour him. It sank back, spiralling in thought, once more confused, once more hushed.   As Kerrin drifted, half-conscious in a ruined boat, a second presence came. Something different, ancient but kind.   Findil, lord of patience, stepped onto the waves as if they were stone. His beard was kelp and his hands smelled of brine and forgotten caves. His eyes saw the gem in Kerrin’s lap and he sighed—not in anger, but with the weight of centuries.   “You found what I gave to the sky,” said Findil. “And you used it better than she ever did.”   Kerrin tried to return it. But Findil shook his head.   “I thought it would win her heart. But she was never meant for keeping.”   He looked into the distance, where the stormclouds had fled.   “Perhaps a lullaby cannot hold love. Only sleep.”   Then he reached out, and pressed the sapphire into Kerrin’s palm, curling the fisherman’s fingers around it.   “Keep it. It will serve you now better than me.”   “Give it to your daughters. Let it pass from hand to hand not as a weapon or a charm, but as a reminder that the sea was once sung to sleep. For though I will not willingly let the Deep Sleepers rise again, yet I cannot be everywhere at all times and in all places, and mayhap it may save someone again someday. At least I hope so."   And with that, Findil stepped backward into the water and was gone, leaving behind only a ripple shaped like a fishhook.   Mald’s name now gives us the third month, when rains fall soft and uncertain. Findil’s name, the fourth, marks the calm after, the time when fishermen dare the waves again.   As for the sapphire, it was at first placed in the lonely Temple of the Sea Song in the south of Klokken Isle.     Many centuries later, it was claimed by the first rulers of Vrandakan in the age of the Old Pale Empire and moved to the city. There it was kept in a chamber filled with sea-mist and conch-shell wind chimes. When tides are wrong or storms approach, the gem begins to hum softly, like a lullaby from the deep. Sailors swear it grants calm seas to those who offer a strand of hair and a whisper of longing.   And some say that when the sapphire shines brightest, Mald and Findil walk again at the tide’s edge, where sea meets rain, lovers from different worlds who can never be united but can never be divided.