Through the Whirlpool Read Online Free

straight and fit despite a certain haggardness of features. His only clothing was a tight-fitting suit made of brown kelp. It even reached up into a hood that melded seamlessly into the skin of his face. He wore gloves and boots that extended into stiff, finlike appendages.
    “ Daakohn.” She smiled despite her weariness. “Daakohn-bhah-ehl-bhah-her, you are the only person who could make such a claim and have me believe it. I’m glad you are back.”
    “ I won’t stay. My mount misses me already, but it’s good to see you, Taashou.”
    “ So the rift? But how? If not through the mountain, for what purpose have we been camping on this barren lump of rock for so long? Kaa-meer-geh was the point of melding.”
    “ This time it has come through the sea.”
    “ It cannot be the same!”
    “ Taashou, no living person on this world knows it as I do. Every molecule in my body shrieks at the recognition. It is the same for my mount.”
    Taashou looked around at the bare cave that was their home, had been since Daakohn had come back to them all those years ago. Openings around the walls led to rudimentary sleeping chambers and storerooms, with torches and blubber oil lamps for lighting. For meetings and meals they stood or sat on mats in this wide space. But that was it. The red mountain offered little more.
    “ So how?”
    He shrugged.
    “I know only that the rift has reappeared. This time it has come as a sort of tunnel through the sea, or whirlpool.”
    “ A whirlpool? I wonder if that will be any more tolerable than through fire?”
    “ It is the worst experience any living creature could bear. Fire or water, nothing in this world prepares you.”
    “ Prepare… if we could. We cannot even know…”
    “ It explains the imbalance we have felt in the ocean all this spring.”
    The newest speaker was also one of the shahiroh, clad like Taashou in blue, yet twenty years or so her junior. “We have felt the pull, but it was just a strangeness. We could not define it…”
    “ That could not be,” Taashou answered the man. “There is a natural equilibrium that establishes when the rift opens. Your strangeness comes from another source.”
    “ I agree with Bel-geer,” said Daakohn, “I too have felt it… a lessening of life, or of the life force. It is pulling strongly at Shah. Taashou, I was seventeen when I experienced the rift and knew nothing of its nature. Yet I who then was the youngest am now the oldest, and I feel that this time it is different.”
    “ Have you located the region?”
    “ Somewhere about two to four days northwest of the Sacred Isle—with a good wind.”
    Taashou was silent for a moment. Then she spoke:
    “Seven of our young people have just been summoned to their initiation. We must protect them during their ordeal. Once sea-nomad-becoming has finished, we will turn our attention to this.”
    “ That may be too late,” Daakohn warned.
    “ I have made my decision.”
    “ We may not have such a luxury of time as you imagine.”
    “ It is the risk I take.”
    “ The risk all of us bear.”

100% Efficie nt! No Emissions!
 
    J ade was hurled and bumped upside down, head over heels, every which way, sand and salt in eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Finally, she was scraped, rolled, and washed into the frothing shallows, buckets of sand filling her shorts, a gallon of sea water down her throat. She could have, should have, handled that wave effortlessly. She got up warily, checking to see who might have seen her get dunked by such an easy wave. Rena was now down the other end of the beach with the older surfers. This time at least she had been spared.
    It was that vision of a watery abyss that had overcome her, spiraling down into the horrific dark... a sort of waking nightmare. She knew it had something to do with her dream on the beach, and with that colored algae that had slopped into the water around her from Rena’s launch. A kind of whirlpool, only faster, darker... and that