He’d put his affairs in order, given his power away to his many sons. Of course, if they were willing to pay the price they could visit him, but he doubted they would. His time above was a source of shame to them. The reason they had kept their children so distant from their own grandfather.
“Are you certain about this?” his servant Havla asked as he took the crown and the pearl plate armor from his king.
“You know that I am,” the old king replied. “I am finally free.”
“Giving up your life isn’t freedom,” Havla said, the words floating in iridescence around their heads.
“Is that any way to talk to your king?”
Havla’s irritation was replaced with sorrow. “You are no longer my king.”
The old man nodded and smiled putting his hand on his servant’s…his friend’s shoulder. “Goodbye Havla.”
The servant didn’t answer, turning away and disappearing in a flash of tears and tail. And so, in his last few minutes between the old life and the new, the king was alone. Alone to push his way through the western depths, to fight the unnatural brightness as he rose from the bottom of the blue toward the sunlight.
On the shore he used his last bits of royal privilege to disguise himself, to become a human man standing at the edge of the sea in rolled up trousers. It echoed the way he had appeared three decades before when he had bid his beloved second wife and his only daughter goodbye. His “land family” as his sons below had come to call it.
With one hand he held up a soft dark shirt, turned to salute the waves, and bid a final farewell to the deep. Then he shrugged the familiar cloth over shoulders that were only just now becoming skin from scales.
Jenel Alan 