The next morning, my brothers helped me up. LoPa was saying, “We need to keep moving. We’re at least a day behind the rest of the clan, but I think we can catch them by tonight or tomorrow. There’s so many of them, they have to be hard to miss!” He laughed without joy and turned back to us with a smile that unsettled me.

  His shoulder slumped as he walked. When he caught himself walking slow, dragging his feet, slumping over, he’d straighten up and begin singing. He sang so many songs over the five days we walked from home. Those five days he gave up the loves of his life to save us. Five days and a thousand more he spent walking from his heart.

  I think I came to understand him best then.

  Akmuo and Medis clung to each other whenever possible, but they also made space for me.

  It almost made me happy, walking between them. Their hands gripping mine. Giving me strength. It was all we had to give one another, since we had no words for those days.

  When we stopped for the night, Akmuo and Medis gathered wood and made a fire. LoPa laughed and rubbed the back of his neck, “HoPa taught you well. I never learned this stuff. I always meant to learn, but you keep getting older and it seems to not matter. I never thought I’d be—well.” He turned away, grimacing. Putting a hand over his face, his body shuddered.

  We watched his back quake. Akmuo and Medis’ hands were gripped tight and they turned to me. Akmuo quickly looked down, but Medis nodded to me, his gaze steady and his mouth flat. I walked to LoPa and wrapped my arms round his waist. A sob cracked in his throat and he steadied himself. His hands fell to mine, and he pulled my hands from him, then turned and crouched before me. His eyes were red and wet, his cheeks sunken in.

  He just looked at me. I put my hands to his cheeks. Blinking, a few tears ran down his nose and he began nodding. I put my forehead to his and he wrapped his arms round me, folded his body round mine. Then Medis and Akmuo were holding us too.

  Medis said, “Be strong, LoPa. We’ll protect you.”

  LoPa cried then. He cried so hard I thought he’d fall apart.

  We didn’t though. It’s funny, how when someone you care about falls apart, you find strength within you didn’t know you had. LoPa could barely live with his grief, with the choice he made, and so we held him up.

  After dinner, LoPa fell fitfully into sleep. The night was cold. The forest was quiet. Akmuo, Medis, and I were all curled together beneath the skins we wore against the late autumn chill. Winter was coming, and if we didn’t find the clan, we might die out there.

  Their hearts beat together. Not in sync, like how mother’s heart taught mine to beat. But like music. Their hearts were timed to one another as if even the pulse of their blood was in communication. It was a kind of rhythm. Like two hands clapping at different speeds and slightly out of step, which creates the percussive backbone to a song or dance. One heart, then the other, back to the first, twice from the other, back to the first. Their hearts beat like that and I listened. My heart fell into their percussive loop, making a third tempo.

  I think that moment brought me closer to them than any other time I can remember. All the words and moments we shared were so separate from that. They had invited me into their most intimate of communications. Their bodysongs. The way they really communicated, maybe since the days they were in the womb. Because as much as I think of Akmuo as a trickster and Medis as a loud scrapper, they were both so quiet most of the time. So few words would cross their lips over the course of a day, and they almost never spoke to each other with words.

  “What will we do?” My voice warbled in the cool night air.

  Medis said, “LoPa needs us.”

  “Mother needs us.”

  Akmuo put a hand on my leg and the other round my shoulder till it found Medis’ shoulder. Medis said, “Mother has HoPa.”

  “I need mother.”

  Medis only nodded.

  The fire burned and Akmuo put more moss on it to keep it blazing through the night. We lay down with LoPa, all our bodies together. To keep warm. To keep us strong.

  I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to leave, go back to mother, even if I didn’t know the way. Even if it took me all day. But when I got up to sneak away, LoPa woke.

  “What’s wrong, little Lu?”

  I swallowed, “I need to make water.”

  He nodded and shook himself awake. Standing, he stretched a hand for me to take and we walked away from the still burning fire, into the blackness of night. No moons shined but the stars did. So many stars. That forever ocean of stars staring down at us. When I stared into it, into that immense vastness, it felt like the gods were staring back.

  It was oppressive, despite the enormous beauty of it.

  When I came back after forcing a slight stream, LoPa sat with me beside the fire. His skins draped over both our bodies, he said, “Can’t sleep?”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m worried, too. About your mother. About HoPa.”

  I swallowed and blinked back the tears, “What stars are those?” I pointed to a cluster above us.

  His sigh brushed against my hair, “The Bear and the Whale. Have you ever heard the story?”

  I shook my head again and settled into his embrace. The rapid beat of his heart that he tried to slow by controlling his breath. His skin was hot, and his bony arms secured me. Made me feel safe, even without my mother.

  “There was a whale, long ago. Far away. So far away. Past the edges of the forest. Out there, the world opens up and you can see forever in all directions. That’s where the ocean is. The ocean that is the world. It stretches on and on and on. That’s where the whale lived.”

  “What’s a whale?”

  LoPa paused for a moment, then laughed, “It’s like a giant fish.

  “The whale loved to swim through the depths of the ocean. The ocean as deep as the sky. As full of wonders too. Look up. You see how the sky opens up to you. The stars grow and more and more become visible. The same is true of the ocean. The whale swam down and down and down. So far down that it could no longer see the suns, and even then it didn’t find the bottom. Only more ocean. Only more water. Only different songs. Songs of other whales and other fish. Songs of the gods of the deep.

  “The whale loved the surface most. Where it could swim on top of the water, stare at the stars, the way we are now. It would watch the stars and wonder how they got up there. If the stars were like him but in reverse. That perhaps the stars looked down and wondered how the whale got there, to the ocean. If the whale was like them, but in reverse.

  “The whale swam finding always new stars. New stars that formed new constellations. New shapes. Hundreds and thousands of shapes. A thousand thousand shapes and still more. It followed the stars so long that it found the shore. The edge of the land and ocean. Where ground meets water and separates them.

  “The whale never knew there was an end to the ocean. It never knew there was land at all. It swam into the shallows until much of its great body was out of the water. There, it saw a bear. A bear so large. But next to the whale, the bear looked small.

  “The bear approached and said, I’ve never seen a bear like you. The whale said, I’m not a bear! I’m a whale! The bear only laughed and called the whale ridiculous. The whale, angry, decided to swim back out to the ocean but found that it was stuck in the shallows.

  “Watching the whale, the bear saw it struggle. The bear said, Do you need help? The whale, embarrassed now, said that it did. So the bear pushed the whale but nothing happened. So the bear pushed and pushed but still the whale was stuck. So the bear got a running starts and jumped into the whale. The push was strong enough this time and the whale was sent out into the ocean. But the bear, having pushed so hard, found itself off the ground and riding the whale.

  “Thank you, said the whale. I can bring you back to the edge of the water now. But the bear was excited at being in the water. It said, I’ve never been out here so far before! The whale asked if it would like to see more of the ocean, and the bear did. So the whale swam and the bear stood on its back.

  “For days and days they journeyed. Hundreds of days. Thousands! The whale showed the bear how far the ocean went. It showed the bear new lands and all the gods of the ocean. They fell in love, the bear and the whale. But the bear became lonely for land and trees. It became lonely for bears.

  “Do you want to leave? the whale asked. The bear said, I want to stay with you but I miss my home. The whale understood. They loved one another, but it was sorrowful. For the whale couldn’t go to the deeps of the ocean with the bear, because the bear would drown in the water. The whale couldn’t come to the forest where the bear lived because the whale would drown in the air, and so neither was getting what they wanted, but neither would leave. Due to love.”

  LoPa fell quiet so I listened to his racing heart. The fire danced before us and the night crowded tight round us. After a time, he said, “Are you still awake?”

  I nodded, and he sighed. “Do you want to hear the rest?”

  “Does it hurt?”

  I felt him nod, his chin bouncing into my hair. Then he lowered his face into my black puff of curls and said, “I’ll say the rest.”

  Without lifting his head, he spoke like a whisper, “The bear and the whale decided to leave this world. They couldn’t leave one another because of their love, but they couldn’t stay together because they belonged to different worlds. So they stared up into the endlessness of the sky and found an empty space. A place where they could build a new world. A new life. They took to the sky. Right there, where you see their constellation.”

  This became the shape of our days with LoPa in the forest. But the next day, after not finding the clan, we came to understand that LoPa was lost. The day after that, we found ourselves in the same spot we camped when LoPa told me the story of the whale and the bear. We were wandering in circles through the forest and LoPa didn’t even realize it.

  We moved slowly during the days. My brothers and I in no hurry to make more distance between us and mother, and LoPa so weary and sad that he couldn’t keep pushing us forward. Even had he had the strength, we were all still children.

  Our nights repeated the same pattern. My brothers made the fire and began gathering the food we’d eat. LoPa tried to keep our energy up with songs and stories, and at night I would try to run away, but he’d wake and tell me more about the stars.

  He was so broken. It broke our hearts. I heard it in Akmuo and Medis’ bodies as we lay together under the heavy stars. On the fifth night, LoPa was so tired from carrying me during the days and telling me stories all night, that he slept like the dead. Our bodies wrapped together, I knew Akmuo and Medis shared a silent conversation. Their bodies reacting to one another in ways I’d never really understand. But since being invited in, I could follow the shape of their conversations.

  They were afraid. Pensive. Not for me or even so much for mother. But for LoPa.

  After LoPa began his second cycle of snoring, I whispered to my brothers, “I’m going to find mother.”

  My whispered words hung in the air. I felt their bodies change. The pulse shifting, as if running through the possibilities. Finally, Medis said, “He won’t wake up. Not tonight.”

  I don’t know how he knew it with such surety, but it was enough. It gave me the strength to run.

  “Come with me?”

  Akmuo wrapped his arms round me and pulled me close. He nuzzled his face into my chest and neck and Medis said, “LoPa needs us.”

  I began crying then. I cried so much as a girl. It’s hard to remember when I always felt so much. Like my body couldn’t take the weight of the world. But Akmuo and Medis wiped my tears away. They held me close. Held me tight. And when I got up, they gave me food.

  Akmuo and I cried but Medis wiped away my tears. He said, “Mother needs you. Go home, Lulu. Save our mother.”

  That was the last time I saw them. I wish I knew what happened to them. But they never found the clan. They may have died in the vastness of the forest, or they may have found the otherside. Found a place and way to live. To be happy.

  I don’t know. All I can do is hope.