6. Puddle of Hope

Bella dove into the water and was disappointed, again. This place seemed dead and abandoned already. A thick fog reduced her sight, helped by crumbs from the seabed and aggressive bubbles that didn’t tickle but hurt. Were they already too late? Was their tiny group of Movelings the only life left?

Eeris didn’t like to hear that. According to her, the Solidlings, her plants, were life too. Still Bella found it hard to hug a plant or talk to them.

A few Movelings crawled in her arms. Gulvi had made a new river, on command, to connect the two oceans. This took far too long, but Bella saw no other way. They needed water to survive, so they couldn’t just carry the Movelings over land. Half of them hadn’t even survived the journey through the ocean. Time was ticking.

Bella extended her paws and tried to find her siblings, but only felt more crumbs, bubbles, and … something else.

“Darus? Eeris? Gulvi?” Her voice caught before it even left her mouth. This entire area felt like a heavy blanket holding her down. What happened in this puddle? Why—

The Movelings in her arms stopped moving. At the same time, the fog thickened. She called it fog, but that wasn’t really true. It were particles, dust, crumbs, currents of liquid that floated through the water. They fell to the floor, yes, which should have made the water clear. But they fell so slowly that it would have taken days. Days they didn’t have.

She tried to return to the water surface, but lost any sense of what was up or down. She felt tickles and scratches everywhere, driving her insane, as if a thousand spiders walked over her body—until she saw it weren’t particles at all.

A gigantic group of Movelings swam past her, on all sides. They surrounded her like a new blanket. Their numbers were higher than in all the other places combined. And these seemed eager to move. They seemed to flee.

Her left ear pricked up at the sound of a low, dangerous growl. She recognized the sound, but didn’t know from what. It wasn’t a sibling—and weren’t they the only life here? The intruder entered her mind again. Her body shivered, which the thousand Movelings in her paws didn’t like.

The growling grew louder.

It had to come from shore. You couldn’t growl underwater. Or, well, until a few days ago she thought they were alone on this planet, but now—

The growl was loud enough to make Bella cower in fear. Fear. For the first time in a long, long while since their banishment, she felt fear. She was a goddess; she felt like a tiny fish that could be eaten at any moment.

She remembered Ardex’ saying: We are gods, we should go TO the danger!

She opened her eyes and whacked around herself. With effort, she could push away the thick fog, bend the water to her will, and swim somewhere. The growls were terrifying now—even though she still recognized them somehow—but also a guiding star. Now she knew what was up.

By the time she’d pushed all Movelings away from her, she burst through the water surface and happily sucked in the fresh air. She was only a stone’s throw from shore; in that misty sea it had felt like she was lost. She had come to the danger, but the danger itself had run away.

She scoured the horizon and found only two black dots chasing each other. Was that … Ardex? And that …

Feria’s Hespryhound! He was here! Oh, they must be receiving more and more objects from home! But then her Heavenmatter should be somewhere around here too: the Book of Meaning. If she could find that, everything would have an answer again. It contained all important knowledge in the universe, such as … how to sustain life.

Something grabbed her hind paws and pulled her back into the water. She dug her claws in the dirt to stay grounded.

“Say,” Darus said as he spit seaweed. “Where was the help? Pull me from that toxic water?”

“It’s not toxic,” Bella said. “It’s filled with Movelings. More than anywhere else. Maybe they need this? This … weird foggy ocean? Only then do they come alive?”

Darus followed a long silhouette below water, until he pulled Eeris to shore as well. Bella felt pride. Give it some time and Darus would be stronger and larger than Ardex. Would that cease their fighting? Or make it worse? And why didn’t Ardex remain the largest animal, being the eldest son? Father said no god could become bigger than those older than them—normally speaking.

Eeris spoke with a smile. “No, they don’t need this to survive. It’s the opposite.”

Her body was nearly unrecognizable, covered in so many plants and Movelings that gave her new brown spots. “They make that fog. It, erm, it’s their piss and poop.”

Darus spit everything out of his mouth. He rubbed his tongue with his paws, as if that could remove the taste. Bella wanted to lick her fur clean, but stopped herself just in time.

“Plants do it too. They take in carbondioxide from the air and convert it to oxygen. Something goes in, something else must come out. This must be a characteristic of life. Life changes.”

“Changing is vague,” Bella said.

“Then write down,” Eeris said. “The next characteristic is excretion. Whatever life eats, it converts into something else, and what it doesn’t need must then go OUT again.”

“And add this,” Darus said. “_The next time, Eeris explains this BEFORE I enter a pool of urine.”

“Not really urine,” Eeris said. Her eyes gleamed as she stuck her paw in the water to feel all the particles there. “They’re not that far. They just excrete random particles they feel they don’t need.”

“Then they don’t need a lot,” Darus said with a sour face. He still tried to remove every memory of this water from his body. Eeris laughed at him and just splashed more water at him.

Bella was in no mood for this and pushed the two away. “The time for games is over! It’s been over for a while!”

The Movelings were healthy here, for now. But slowly the water would just turn into piss, and nothing else, and nobody could survive that. Bella took Movelings in her arms and tried to take them to the next location: the second to last one they hadn’t visited yet.

“We continue!”

“Did you hear that roar too?” Darus said with a frown. “I’d swear it was Feria’s Hespryhound, but—”

“Yes! Me too!” Eeris hobbled over the beach, her neck stretching to see as far as possible. “Maybe my Heavenly Flowers are here too! And your—”

Bella almost exploded. She held up her mostly chipped arms. “We’re out of time, idiots! We continue! What’s your next characteristic?”

Her yelling froze Darus and Eeris. It took a while before the giraffe dared speak again.

“I thought it would be growth.”

“So we … so we have to give them room to grow? Encourage them?” Darus suggested. Then he looked away from Bella’s angry glare and grinned naughtily. “I have a plan, Eeris. I’m afraid you won’t like it.”