Miha knew that any ship had many moving bits and pieces. Endless lengths of rope tied to endless poles and large metal things, and each boat needed a person, or two, three, or more who knew exactly where everything was supposed to go. Each person thought they knew exactly where everything was supposed to go. That was an important difference because when one was in a life or death situation like a storm, if it was not completely agreed upon how things were supposed to be done... Well, the situation pointed much closer to death than life.
Death was on the seal's mind when she yanked open a door with her teeth. The shipwreck that she and Lia Mellora were relieving of its mysteries had seemed to go down with the entire crew. The Palivar, or what remained of the Palivar, was trapped in shallow, rocky water. Scavenger-cleaned Svefra bones lay about the remains of the ship, but the rewards they so sought to reap were hidden inside. Miha estimated that the wreck was at least four or five months old. The shallow, warm water made it the perfect place for scavengers, shrimps and all sorts of other animals to clean up the bodies quick, leaving only the bones. By the state of the ship, it wasn't too much older than that, either. Must have been a particularly difficult storm. Miha hadn't experienced winter herself, but she had heard stories that the lack of it was messing with the weather.
Her grandma surfaced for air and the teenaged seal swam into the ship. The vibrissae on the end of her face tingled with the movement of the small fish, but there didn't seem to be anything bigger. Lucky for them!
As Miha swam around, she passed more bedrooms and more skeletons. She didn't mind taking sunken goods from the dead - they were dead, after all, and had no use for them - but the skeletons still freaked her out a bit, despite the fact that she'd seen them so many times before. Those were people once. She wondered what they thought, what they'd done before they crashed into the rocky pillars that jutted out from the shore. There was no telling the kind of lives they led, but it was a fun game to try and piece them together. Occasionally she'd find them clutching something. When it was a shiny, pretty, not-particularly useful thing, Miha liked to think it had brought them comfort before their untimely demise. Her favorite were music boxes - sometimes, sometimes, they still worked, and she adored the delicate tinkling. Most everything she found eventually got bartered away, but she didn't mind. There was always more to find.
Mellora had dove back down and swam up behind Miha. The water was shallow, only 10, 15 feet feep at most. Her grandma could hold her breath for minutes at a time, which was nothing in comparison for the spotted seal, but impressive for someone who was just human. She had her eyes open and she was prodding at a chest that was lodged beneath some broken timbers. Now, the Lia was a strong woman, and she did not need Miha's help to pull it out. She wasn't very good with large items in her seal form, either - she only had her mouth to grip things with. Out popped the chest, and once again Mellora surfaced.
Miha took the extra time to explore the living quarters. There were multiple small rooms. She imagined they had once been carefully decorated. Smashed statues, soggy wooden carvings, even Mizas lay in the ruins. In the first room, a small skeleton lay on what used to be a bedframe. Must have been a child. She felt a little sad seeing it, the life of a child cut too short by bad luck and rough waters. She was clutching something in her tiny bone hands.
Miha could feel her grandmother re-enter the sunken ship. She knew the next step - now that she'd found a chest, she was going to tie rope around it and haul it out. The sandy beach was a much better place to explore her finds than a few minutes at a time underwater. Plus, much to her luck, the chest seemed to have been thoroughly tarred. If it was structurally sound, that meant the insides might have survived mostly intact, with little water damage. Anything could be hidden away from history in there. Miha imagined a journal that listed the names of the pod members, or shiny golden Mizas, or even a chest full of cozy knitted blankets, made by the child's mother to keep them warm on cold and rainy nights.
She focused her attention back on the child. A swish of her flippers brought her over to the skeleton, and fish vacated the room from their predator. She didn't want fish, though, and she gently used her flipper and teeth to pry open the fingers bones. One of the fingers fell off and floated down onto the floor, but a dainty music box and a tarnished locket revealed themselves to the seal. Miha grabbed them with her mouth for safekeeping.
Now it was Miha's turn to surface. Her grandmother was already ashore, chest thrown open and rusted lock tossed aside in the sand. Somewhere, at sometime, someone had created that lock, that chest, and the little cloth doll that Mellora was inspecting. She pulled herself onto shore and spit out her own prizes. A tick and a flash of light later, a teenaged Miha lay on the sand, her fingers at work to pry open the locket. The outside was engraved with the letter L, and the inside had bits of sand. She closed her eyes and held it in her hand. She focused on her breathing and then the aura of the locket in her hand. Miha gathered it was made of silver, but she focused more - deeper. She emptied her mind in the attempt at pulling out any fragment of what happened to the ship.
"You're going to tire yourself out." Miha opened an eye. She didn't recognize that voice. An unfamiliar Svefra woman stood over her, eyes cast downwards.
"I think it's worth being tired to figure out what happened, you know?" Miha replied. She opened her hand and looked at the locket. Something felt off about this woman, other than the fact that she had just appeared. A little voice in her head told her not to even try to read her aura.
"What's this?" The woman crouched next to the Kelvic and picked up the music box that rested in the sand. She held it out for her to take. Miha tried the handle. Much to her surprise, after a few hard turns of the crank to work past the rust, it began to play. It tinkled and scraped, and the song was indiscernable. Miha looked down the beach to see her grandmother hauling the chest back to their own Palivar. It seemed she didn't notice the strange woman. No other boats were moored nearby. "Where did you find it?"
"Me an' the Lia go diving in the shipwrecks. I like finding the music boxes. This is the best sounding one yet." Even still, Miha stopped cranking it. The rusted gears turning almost overpowered the sound of the music.
"Who did you find in there? Tell me about them." Miha furrowed her brow. No one had ever asked her who she'd found. She wondered how she knew about the skeletons. It wasn't too hard of a guess, sure, but she didn't think most people would be interested in her own assumptions.
"I found these in the hands of a child...a little girl, from my guess. She held the locket and the music box 'til her dying breath." Miha paused and turned the necklace around in her fingers. "A lot of people died in that wreck." She gazed at the pillars of rock that stuck out of the shore. It was a dangerous place to be caught in a storm. "From my guess, the ship got tossed against the rocks and drowned most everyone inside."
"Hmm. That's a good guess. Much of the truth of history is lost beneath the waves." Miha nodded.
"Exactly! I love trying to piece together what happened...who was on the ship when it went down. What the ship was used for. That one in particular was a Svefra pod. My grandma recognized it as a Palivar almost immediately. And on the side of it you could see the name. Bastard's Bride."
The woman smiled, but she refused to meet Miha's excited glances. She took Miha's hand in hers. "Don't stop questioning the things you find. Seek the truth. You will always be able to find the answers you seek. Just keep looking." With that, the woman stood up and began to walk down the beach, the opposite direction from the Sea Turtle's Tale. Miha reeled from the power she felt channeled into her hand. On the back lay a glowing sigil.
Just as the woman disappeared from sight, Lia Mellora began to walk down the shore. "Miha! It's time to leave!" Miha scrambled up and made sure to account for her two waterlogged trinkets. As she walked down the sand, she cleared her mind and focused on the music box. The image of a little girl laughing to the music flickered in her head.
![[Verified by Luminescence]](./images/checkmark.png "[Verified by Luminescence]")
