Topeagler

The sphere spoke. Not in words, but in vibration. She felt it in her bones:

Kaelira opened her good eyes. The third eye dimmed. She was exhausted. Her feathers were torn, her gills raw, her belly full of a single eel that would have to last her a week.

It was an engine. Not the old, clanking submersibles of the Port Glimmer scavengers. This was something new—a high-pitched, crystalline hum that made her teeth ache. She surfaced slowly, just her three eyes breaking the water like a cluster of wet amber stones. topeagler

Kaelira felt it. A sonar wave, but wrong. It didn't just listen. It probed . It scraped against her mind like a fingernail on slate. Images flashed unbidden: her mother, her mate, the harpoon, the stuffed chick in the guildhall. The sphere was not hunting her body. It was hunting her memories.

In the mist-choked wetlands of the Velorian Sink, where the water tasted of old thunderstorms and the trees grew their roots upward into the fog, there existed a creature that most scholars swore was a myth. They called it the Topeagler . The sphere spoke

Its name came from the old Velorian tongue: Topa (to pierce the surface) and Eagler (the one who watches from above). And for three thousand years, the Topeagler had done exactly that—gliding silently above the blackwater bayous, then plunging like a feathered spear to snatch the glowing eels that lived in the sunken ruins below.

LAST OF YOUR KIND. DO NOT FLEE. WE WISH TO PRESERVE YOU. The third eye dimmed

And remembering was the Topeagler’s deadliest weapon.