PoraBora

Chapter Fifty-Five

Pora swam onwards, leaving islands behind as chopping waters guided his way. When the sun came up again, the whale in the stars disappeared, swimming deep into the blue sky until not even a shadow of its shape remained. Clouds seemed to appear as its final breath, and Pora worried distantly about the weather. But clouds did not portend storms on their own, so he swam calmly the best he could.

Still it had been going north, so still Pora followed.

Mid-morning, in a channel between mountainous islands, Pora was joined by a pod of spinner dolphins. They swam beneath him with all the curiosity of the creatures, bellies up, clicking laughter and joy. Some kept pace with him, but eventually, their boredom bore them swiftly onwards.

Boredom, or sighting of danger. Pora looked back through the blue water, wondering if a pod of larger, bottle-nosed dolphins was on their heels, or even a shark, but all he saw were the lightly-dulled colors of a thriving reef.

Except...there. There was a shadow, a shape, deep and far. Pora hung and peered, trying to see what it was, trying to decide if he had to make way for a hungry creature.

Then he knew it. It was Bora.

His elation weighed him into the water, where Pora waited at the shark's level for his sauntering approach. Pora couldn't believe it. Bora, all the way out here! But why not? The current had been carrying Pora, so surely it would carry Bora, and all of his prey and his prey's food, just the same.

It was him, as sure as anything: the tattered fin, the diminished striping, the deeply brown hue made clearer for the sun and proximity. Pora recognized his face, his gait, his powerful length, and the shark recognized him too, passing him with familial closeness.

"Bora!" Pora bubbled, kicking after him. He could see a new spot of trouble making its home on the shark's side. By the time Bora would have returned to Pora's island, it would have been a pain to scrape off, a stubborn holdfast to an unwanted parasite. That was, if Bora would ever return.

Pora did his best to keep pace with Bora, who once more conserved his always precious energy. It hadn't been that long since the whale carcass, had it? Perhaps Bora had still had his fill, and....

There was a hook. Pora stroked after him. There, in his mouth, sticking through his cartilage. Pora's chest heaved for his friend. The pain he must feel, must have felt ever since he had fallen for Pe's morsel.

And he thought too of the girl's when he remembered what had once been Bora's morsel.

Can't you find peace? he thought sadly, and they continued down the channel.

#

Late morning left the islands behind, pulling Pora into the eternal, cascading waters of the deep sea. Pora was in a much-improved mood with Bora at his side and a sighting of dolphins in his day, and he tried his best not to let it sour with his own guilt and anger.

So it was he was in good spirits when the horizon changed again, and a new island settled into awe.

It seemed a mountain, and once it may have been, but now its body had been blown open to the sea, cratered into coral and bowl to calm waters. Its open rim towered above Bora's fin, and in that moment even the ocean felt small. The island reached crumbling arms around itself as if to protect against further hurt.

The seafloor pulled up to meet it from all sides, a gentle slope until its sharp and sudden existence.

Outside its crater, the island teemed with the most stubborn life. Hardy plants made footholds in rock, and a flock of petrels made an open field of its south face. Their calls whined and purred in the air, but the stench of their roost did not bother Pora by the water. Stone came up from the sea and made no room for beaches; even beneath the surface, it was rock shelves and hard corals that claimed the floor.