Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(38) Taiki: The Ashianti Throne

There is no Singer. The original prophecy makes no mention of it, and the confirmation Ande received only reinforces that. Makeba was right all along.

I was already grappling with being named part Karu, but that struggle suddenly feels laughable next to the enormity of the wave of hopeless impossibility bearing down on me now. It fills the ocean and the darkness and the canyon and the sky, absorbing everything I hoped for. I feel like I've been tumbled in a Karu-shore wave curl that never ends. Dropped into the canyon with a rock on my tail and no way to stop myself from sinking.

The people are the power.

The Singer isn't coming. Help isn't coming. We're on our own to fight like the Sandsingers have been for fifteen years, and my people won't even believe it enough to join them.

How did we get to this place? Who invented an addition to the prophecy and lied so profoundly, pretending to make something sacred—to take the place of the Seers? Who convinced my people that they didn't have to fight back themselves because help was coming? I don't want to believe it, but there's a part of me, deep inside, that knows it all makes a devastating amount of sense.

My people are tired, and scared, and up against enemies that feel insurmountable. They learn defensive songs because they have never been able to beat the surface Kels with offensive ones, so they've given up trying and refocused their efforts where they can make it count. They've been picked off one by one; watched the ocean empty of fellow Shalda, and learned to fear the deep that should be a home for them. They've clung to the only scraps of hope they can find, and that's what's kept them going.

My people believe fiercely in Andalua. They open their arms to any Shalda tribe they meet, and embrace them like family because they never know if they'll see those people again. They go about their nights and days with a routine that comforts and distracts them, keeping their minds off the overwhelming odds challenging their very survival. It only makes sense to me that they would cling so fiercely to the Singer, too. The Singer represents hope that my people have had to make themselves as often as not. It represents help that has never come for them, except from one another.

It's no stretch to imagine a Shalda leader sometime in the past trying to bolster their people's hopelessness, and inventing the Singer. The belief that help was coming might have made the difference between life and death, as it could give that people a reason to keep living. But it was never going to work long-term, and now we're grappling with the consequences. The thought of breaking this news to my people is enough to carve a hole where my insides should be. The Singer has been giving hope for generations, and we're going to be the ones to tear that all away. And it's not even my people who will suffer the most. Nobody is coming to help the islanders, either. Nobody except the Sandsingers, who won't reach them all before the prophecy's end. I can only imagine how Ande must feel.

Do I join the Sandsingers now? The thought of it rouses the first fin-beats of panic in my chest. I'll be flinging myself into danger with them, risking my life over and over, all to sing down a few more lives than would have survived otherwise. Watching most of them die anyway, because there is war in the shallows and the Karu and Sami both defend the islands with their lives. Will war in the shallows even be enough to clear the way for the Sandsingers' songs to reach more people? Will it come fast enough, now that the Alliance has taken the Ashianti on their side?

My eyes fall on Sar. They're still on the ground, shoulders curled down and tail wrapped around them. They asked the Seers for help. I want to know how, or why. Sar doesn't look up as I sink down in front of them. I see my own hand touch their shoulder. They flinch at the contact, but lift their head. I find myself staring into their eyes, and the gutted look there carves me out from the inside.