Of Crystalline Waters and Asking Why

Our last hope came in a wave. Not a metaphorical wave, I'm talking water and height and speed. They hid in the salt, tiny, fragile. Their bodies were crystalline, and they chimed when they touched. Communication through music, each too soft to hear on its own. They came in the trillions, and their coming was marked by a herald of sound.

We needed them. Our people were dying. Each one mutating, alone in a body they couldn't trust, shifting and cracking open with pus and blood and bile. Our people were dying, and we didn't know why.

We pleaded with our scientists, our politicians, our priests and our gods, and in the end we pleaded with the stars. We knew they were out there, somewhere. We had heard their music in the night, seen their shimmering forms in the light of the cosmos. We pleaded, and we cracked at the seams until the question was no longer if we would end, but how soon.

Our satellites still worked, our communication was sound, and for a long time we stayed in touch with each other--the diminishing dregs of our world. We swapped ideas, theories, asked ourselves why, por que, warum, keno, mbona.

The stars answered. They fell into our seas and oceans, like a rain of glitter. They waited in the night, waiting for the tide. Bonding with the water, they shaped it, gave it strength. Until they came at us in a wave.

Near the coasts the first of us were washed in water, carried on the surface as if all the saltwater in the world had become as dense as the Dead Sea. We tumbled, and feared, and some of us drowned. But when the waves subsided, those who could still speak spoke of their awe. The music had surrounded them, touched them in their core. They had bathed in the waters, and it had been cleansing, soothing, as no sea should be.

They came each day with the rising tide, again and again, washing the world clean. And those touched remained whole. Through the years, remained a person. Alive.

They stayed in our waters for a long time, becoming a part of our world so fully that our children scarce believed they had once been nothing more than music among the stars.