Capture
Sheastra cracked her bounty on the shale at Mercï cliff in light of a full moon. The grace in her form, camouflaged in part by the lullabying current, enchanted the human eye to overlook the pale flesh of a Seaworn such as herself. It would see only the stabs of teeth, round and pink, sinking into her crabbery that she wore like a human shawl around her neck. The assortment of fleshy treats were impaled on the teeth of a Sitarta and sewn into a dried and procured star-fish.
The shore-crab crackled like wood in a fire as she broke it open. She balled the flesh with her hands and then mired it with a barnacle from the cliff until it took form on her crabbery, then she suckled the eyes and tossed the shell into the froth against the cliffs.
The enchantment of a salty wind had brought her a league from the deep reefs and from the undertow of Karshatra's harem. There, the consort of SeaWorn were adrift in Matres cojuling. The glub bore a frequency of drone into the ear canal for which the harem dreamt direction and plotted it upon waking. Sheastra was the youngest of the Harem and tasked with food storage amongst other things. She had committed herself to the moon and everything beneath in its darkness and wonder.
Sheastra had been given her name in the Leagues of Matres, waters that she could only recollect now in the flavors of salt as it drifted across isles. Her company had been away now for four hundred and twenty three-seasons and the Matreas had given their consort the name of Seaworn for the weary group of technes who could only be communicated to by whale song as they made their routes through the arctic.
Sheastra meant, in so many utterances, Voiceless. It was a common name for those who were not bestowed any powers from the waters. These members were often given over at birth to the technes who they served until death.
Sheastra laid her breast against a patch of coral, siphoning and discerning the flavors of salt the icy winds of the Atlantic had blown in. A mass of land had once existed six hundred Maetres south of where she now clammed to the shore. Humans knew it once as Atlantis, but they had long given their memory over to trivial currencies and no longer abided by nature.
Fifteen seasons prior, near the human city of Kashi, she'd felt a presence in the warmer waters. It hadn't been human necessarily but it had been consecrated by humans in the same way that the Seaworn conjured Matre. She didn't realize that humans had this spiritual technology. She'd been summoned by some foreign entity through polluted waters, and then met with a form that materialized from the sandy shore. He called himself Shiva. His form was very pure. There were no congestants in his system and he didn't speak. He didn't need to. Instead, he produced his entire lineage before her in a single thought form that entangled itself into her abdomen. Then his language appeared in her visual vortex and she understood it without having ever spoke it. Her first words formed her first question: What are legs?
Shiva held her up on her new humanity and at the same time all manner of communication flooded into her mind; a mind that now extended into the split of her legs. Sheastra danced with Shiva in ecstasy for an eternity, but then it ended and she was back in the deeper leagues away from the spark that summoned her. She was left with the utterances of the Shivuntrum and the ability to materialize into a human with its mantra. What she was not given by the waters was given by Shiva. Only she had never used it. She kept its manifestation deep within her so as not alarm the harem.
The humans here in the Carolinas were not of the same understanding. They went unacknowledged by themselves. They bore self-pity and could not feel the moon light anymore than the sunlight as they were often confused by both.
She continued to fill the rest of the crabbery with shore-crabs, delighting in the salts as she hammered their shells on the cliffs. When she felt it was sufficient, she treaded away, back into the moonlight. She was nearly a league down with a head weary for cojuling when a mysterious light shot down into the depths. She could feel the shocks from coral life permeate through the waters--a detriment to undulating species that relied on the undisturbed sanctity of the ocean floor. A shot of anger seized her and she rose almost in trance of the light, summoned once again but this time by some false distortion of benevolence--selfish and unrelenting.
Sheastra discerned a permutation in the influence of mental activity aboard the ship. The Shivuntrum recognized it as well. There was a misguided--no. It was intentional. Humans disguising trust and aid with malice. It's design couldn't be ignored by her biological makeup and she was too far into the trap to fall back. The synthetic tentacles wrapped around her and the light blinded her.
'It's a sea-bitch!' A cruel voice confirmed.
Sheastra felt her arms dangle out of the net where they were captured by two men reeling her into the boat. They both had coarse fur on their faces, something that startled Sheastra as her lungs expanded and contracted forcefully trying to maintain her equilibrium. She could of course breath out of water but the rate of oxygen being consumed by her sympathetic nervous system was quickly sending her body into shock. She clicked her teeth and shouted in Matre.
'This one's pretty small,' said the man holding her left arm. His cloth was the same color as his beard--eerie black and feathered. Sheastra thought he looked like a species of bird. The other man was larger, but his touch implied a receptivity the other man lacked. Sheastra wondered, in that moment of surrender, if the larger man was also a trap. She faded out of consciousness not knowing what that meant.
