Servants and Followers (The Legends of Arria, Volume 2) by Courtney Bowen Page B

from
the sky, fire from the sun that he was a part of, and he belonged
in the sky , blazing alongside the sun, because they were
twins.
    Menthar knew that he
did not belong in the water. He hated being in the water. Being
quenched from burning more than he could if he had been in the sky,
and drowning in the water that robbed him of air he needed to
breathe , and stoke the fire deep inside . H e hated dying. He hated dying,
and he hated the water .
H e wanted to live and burn, to rage
against dying. Of course, that didn’t mean he could do anything
about dying; though he burned, there was too much water, and he
kept getting snuffed out every time he tried to burn so that only
smoke came out.
    While Menthar and Popo both sank at an
equal rate together at the same level, being useless about doing
anything other than struggling and fuming needlessly at their
drowning, their other two siblings were different. Loqwa sank
faster than the others because he was actually trying to sink down
faster, diving in a way that he was pointed straight down at the
bottom and tried to move towards it, not looking up at the sun.
    Loqwa did not want
the sun that had dropped them. He felt abandoned by his mother and
father, whoever they were, and he wanted to drown and die because
there was too much effort in struggling against the water and
death. There was too much going against him in trying to reach for
something higher like life and the sky when there was calmness and
serenity in the depths, if he surrendered. He was tired of his
older siblings’ bombast and their games to survive already when
they were only prolonging the inevitable, and he wanted to embrace
the nothingness that existed in death rather than wait. Besides,
Loqwa was half certain that there was something , down deep below the
surface of the water, he could feel it , that was beyond
explanation, and beyond life. That had to be
explored , and he wanted to go beyond death...
    Mila, however,
struggled towards the surface and the light. She saw it, perhaps
even more than her siblings did, her brothers, because she was
looking up while the others were interested in looking down
(Loqwa), or at each other (Popo), or at themselves (Menthar). She
was reaching out, and branching out, towards the sun. She felt the
warmth of the sun and of the surface, even through the water, and
thought that she wanted life from the sun. She wanted to be
comforted by the sun, who was her mother, and to be met with the
sky, who was her father. She wanted to breathe again, and to be
free of water, because she remembered, deep inside, that there was
more than water ; there was sky.
    Her hope sustained her, and she grew
toward that sky.
    Their struggles
disturbed the water as they were the only things moving in the
water with such strength, fury, and purpose , mainly to escape, or not,
as the case may be. They churned the ocean with their powers, and
the water was riled up all the way down to the ocean floor as the
ocean recognized them as outsiders , children of Day and Night. While
they struggled, rain and stars fell from the sky, and the sun and
the moon shone over the ocean , and at this point, the ocean
realized they were meant to live in the sky. The powerful forces
were commanding it to let them go. They could not die down here,
out of the sky, and the ocean had to get rid of them before the sky
got angry at the ocean for losing them.
    So the ocean floor
rose up to meet them at this point, and take them to the sky when
the water could not hold them. Loqwa, who was still diving when
this happened, did not want to surface when the ocean floor rose up
to greet him. He continued going downward , this time digging as he
created valleys, trenches, and canyons in the ocean floor in his
attempt to escape life. But as he did so, however, he opened
holes , holes to other dimensions, and other worlds, that he could
look through and see what was on the other side. And so he knew
that death was not the end of life,