Jayne sloshed in the hot cavernous dark.  His breath came back slowly.  All around him came the pulse of life, the whale`s heart booming, booming, booming.

"Sweet provender," cursed Jayne softly, eyes wide into the black, reaching out for the length of the tongue on which he lay, crawling over to the teeth, the rising wall of gum, stretching up to the arcing roof of mouth but unable to reach.  "It`s a behemoth."

The child beside him began crooning whale-song.

"It`s alright," said Jayne, reaching out to pat the child`s arm.  "It`s alright now."

The child shrank from him, and the whale-song rose, twisted, then stopped.  Jayne felt the child padding across the giant Ptarmigan tongue in the dark.  Then there was a slow grinding thrum of bone on bone.

Then silence, for a moment.

"Damaris?" called Jayne.  His voice sounded weak and alone in the dark.  Then the tongue sank away from him, the jaws opened wide, and the ocean flumed in.

He was rolling in murky half-light, the whale hanging massive behind him.  The ocean was empty and cold, the conference of whales gone, the child gone.  The deeps were still and black.  He spun in the water, saw the giant Ptarmigan gliding away, snippets of whale-song fired off in its wake.

Then he began to swim.

      He breached the surface with his lungs bursting for air, and gasped in a spray of water.  The storm still fumed around him, the rain lashed down, and the waves stretched up higher than the city walls over his head.

He had no time to speak, or scream.  He had no time to see the whale-spouts circled around him.  He only had time to swim, and to breathe, and to swim and to breathe.

      *

When the storm ended it was night, and Jayne paddled exhausted on the calming sea skein.  His breaths came in salty ragged gasps.  His arms and legs burned heavy with every stroke of every weak movement he made.

A sickle moon overhead looked down on him, and a night sky filled with stars. 

He stared up at them, and through the grey haze that muffled everything, he smiled.

"Elspeth," he said, a whispered croak. 

Then he stopped moving.  He stopped raging for breath.  The sea-line, blank and straight in every direction, rose gently above his head, and the ocean soothed him in like a baby in its mother`s arms.  His last breath squeezed out, his first suck on water poured in, and he sank slowly into the black.

     *