The Elusive Ralekatis
A River Myth of the Emaris
(This song was created with my words and style curation with Suno -Chaiga T. Cheska)
(I painted this in Procreate using the HB Pencil, the Eaglehawk brush and the Smudge tool - Chaiga T. Cheska)
Leylines run through everything in MirMarnia. They thread beneath mountains and along ancient ridgelines, through the cold high passes and the cloud temples where the air itself hums with old energy. They run through the deep salt of the sea, through the black soil of the valley floors, through the breath of storms. Where two or more converge, the ground remembers it for centuries.
And they run through rivers.
Within the Emaris river, whose waters are already alive and watchful, a second current moves below the first. Not the water the boats ride upon, nor the quick pull of the shallows over stone, but something older and quieter, a water leyline running through the river’s depths like a vein of light through dark glass. No scholar has mapped it. No sailor has seen it. The Emaris keeps her own counsel about what flows beneath her surface, and she is not in the habit of explaining herself to those who ask.
The Ralekatis is a small, round fish, blue as deep water and barely wider than your palm, with ribbon fins and a trailing tail pale as river foam. Its eyes are bright and dark-pupiled, quick with a watchfulness that suggests it is always considering whether you are worth paying attention to. Its mouth is small, and it gives nothing away. From its body trail long, fine tendrils, drifting down into the dark water beneath it, feeling for what no other creature in the Emaris can feel, the pulse of the water leyline below. When the need arises, those same tendrils rise and float above the fish, reading the shallower currents overhead with the same patient attention.
When a water leyline runs close, the Ralekatis begins to waltz. That is the only word for it. Its whole round body turns in slow, looping spirals, tracing the unseen path with the grace of a creature dancing to music only it can hear. To catch a glimpse of it from the bank, turning and turning in its blue spirals beneath the surface, is to have the strange and lasting feeling that you have just watched the river think.
Its scales carry pale opalescent markings, one for every leyline already swum, a living chart pressed into its body over years of patient travel. Whether the Ralekatis understands what it carries is not known. It seems content enough.
It does not eat as other fish do. It feeds instead on voices. A murmured worry at the water’s edge, a half-formed plan spoken into the cold air above the current, a lullaby, a quarrel, a confession made quietly to no one in particular. The Ralekatis tastes them all, drawing them down through its tendrils as it passes beneath. But laughter is what it loves best. Laughter, it seems, is the sweetest nourishment the river’s surface offers, and the Ralekatis rises for it the way other fish rise for flies.
The river folk have known this for generations. They speak gently near the Emaris. And they laugh freely.
Somewhere below them, in the river’s blue dreaming, a small round face with bright eyes tilts upward and listens.
A waltz song of the Emaris riverbank,
sung at village dances
Oh, have you seen the Ralekatis?
swimming round and round?
Its tendrils trail to depths below
where leylines can’t be found!
Spin and turn and turn again,
follow where it goes,
round the floor
and back once more
as only the Emaris knows!
It feeds on laughter,
feeds on words
left hanging in the air,
So sing out loud and stamp your feet
and show the fish you’re there!
Spin and turn and turn again,
follow where it goes,
round the floor
and back once more
as only the Emaris knows!
Its eyes are bright,
Its mouth is small,
Its scales are maps of blue,
It waltzes all the leylines down
and never tells a soul what’s true!
Spin and turn and turn again,
follow where it goes,
round the floor
and back once more
as only the Emaris knows!
So laugh and shout and clap your hands
beside the river’s edge,
The Ralekatis is listening
beneath the mossy ledge!
Spin and turn and turn again,
follow where it goes,
round the floor
and back once more
as only the Emaris knows!
Field Report No. 27
Department of Riverine Mysteries,
MirMarnian Institute of Subtle Phenomena
Researcher: Dr Artreaus Thistledown (Acting; mostly upright)
Subject: The Elusive Ralekatis
Status: Ongoing, though the river appears to be winning
I have now spent four seasons attempting to observe the Ralekatis in a manner the Institute might charitably call scientific. I have not managed this. What I have managed is three unintended immersions, one destroyed listening apparatus, and the growing conviction that the fish is following me personally.
The Ralekatis is small, translucent blue, and spherical in the manner of something that has made a considered aesthetic decision about its shape. Its eyes are bright and quick and carry the expression of a creature that has already decided what it thinks of you before you have finished introducing yourself. Its tendrils trail downward into the deeper water, reaching towards the water leylines that run beneath the Emaris, those hidden currents of aligned energy whose aquatic cousins thread through mountains, moors, air columns, and every other terrain in MirMarnia with equal indifference to my research career. When provoked by proximity to such a leyline, or so I believe, the tendrils rise above the fish and hover with an alertness I found personally unsettling. The scales carry pale opalescent markings I attempted to sketch on four separate occasions. The Ralekatis vanished each time I raised my notebook. On the fourth occasion, it waited until I had the quill dipped.
My most significant observation concerns diet. During my second fall into the Emaris, the one involving the heron, several onlookers laughed. The Ralekatis appeared at once, circling my submerged person with frank enthusiasm, its tendrils rising in what I can only describe as delight. Repeat testing confirmed the fish feeds on overheard speech, laughter in particular, which it treats somewhere between a delicacy and a public spectacle.
I am now reasonably certain it has been engineering my mishaps.
The water leylines themselves remain unobserved, which the Institute’s Review Board continues to raise at every opportunity. I remain hopeful that a drier research season, conducted from a stable and non-slippery platform, will produce the quantifiable data they require. The Board remains sceptical. The river remains sentient and, I suspect, amused.
I recommend that future researchers wear boots with grip, carry a towel, and under no circumstances deploy the listening cone apparatus. The Emaris will simply take it.
Dr A. Thistledown
MirMarnian Institute of Subtle Phenomena
Dictated at the field desk; fair-copied at home after discovering the original notes had been used as a nest by something small and, apparently, indoors without my knowledge