A Snake's Kiss

The funeral procession wound like a slithering black snake up the path of the Qixing mountain.

Helena walked in front with her mother, the casket of her little brother between them. It weighed almost nothing – a fact Helena was almost grateful for as they treaded, silent and slow, underneath the hot Taipei sun. They were blissfully far enough from the coastline that the sound of the frothing waves receded to nothing but a gentle hum; yet still, still – Helena felt the malice of the sea demon. Its ire was in the silt that stirred at their feet, its punishment the weary river that ran murky with sediment.

The demon's wrath, as the myth went, does not end at the shore.

Finally, they knelt. The shaman stood to complete the rites, and under the familiar lilt of his voice, Helena closed her eyes and thought of that distant summer day when her brother took her to catch garden snakes. They walked the very same path up Qixing; but in those days, the spring water ran cold and clear and they drank from it greedily, before darting into the sweet mountain grass. Her brother always had a knack for snakes. He’d cupped one in his palms that day, and Helena had stared, apprehensive, into its mud-brown eyes. It kissed her nose with a forked tongue. Helena shrieked, and her brother laughed – the sound spilling from him clear as a bell. Now, five years later, the silt had taken his lungs.

Helena opened her eyes.

The shaman had finished his rites. Helena's mother tightened the scarf around her face – the journey back to their village was long, and there was much to be done. The waves were constantly tearing at their soil, so their meagre crops were always in need of replanting, and they still had to rebuild the fence posts they'd lost to the dust storm the night before. Sometimes, Helena wondered if this would be the rest of her life: a patchwork of rebuilding and repairing and starting anew – an endless fight to claw back what the sea demon took and took and took.

“I’ll catch up,” she tells her mother, who nods.

But when she is gone, Helena walks to the cliffside and peers at the sea below. She curses at the raging waves, and they regard her with their own cold indifference.

She is not a warrior. She is not a seer. She is only a girl with grief still fresh in her chest and anger simmering beneath her skin; but it is the anger, in the end, that moves her hands. She picks up a stone. Finds a fallen branch. Sharpens the tip patiently until it is fashioned into a crude spear.

She dives into the sea. She has come to slay a sea demon.

~

The impact stings and the waves tear at her, but she is a strong swimmer – or so she thinks. Helena remembers an ocean that is vastly different from what it is now; before, there was reason to the currents and tides, and she’d learn to read them like the way a sailor reads the stars. But now, she gasps as the waves toss her senselessly. Patches of toxic algae blooms sting her eyes and dye the sea in ghostly red, and when she dives under the waves, she finds it is hauntingly empty. There is no fish, no kelp, no shadow of anything living.

She nearly misses it. A darkness in the rock face, half-submerged behind a curtain of dead coral. It is the colour that draws her eyes, makes her pause; in the midst of all that bleached and wasted white, there is a startling and impossible blue growing from the cave rock.

She swims toward it. The cave swallows her whole. The water grows shallow and her feet find ground. Before her eyes can adjust to the darkness, there is a voice.

So you have come to kill me.

She does not hear the voice so much as feel it through the earth beneath her feet, through the soles of her boots. It is an ancient thing, of salt and brine.

“Yes,” she says. There is no use denying it. Her fear is a palpable thing. She will not have much time to do this, she thinks. She will coax it into the light, and when it is close enough, she will have one chance to pierce its heart.

There is a rumble as the sea demon considers this. Then, the sound of claws skittering against sand and Helena sees a hulking form emerge from the shadows. She grits her teeth, quiets her mind. Her fingers tighten bone-white around the spear and–

She blinks. The sea demon stands before her, but it is not the ferocious, tentacled creature the myths spoke of.

It is a dragon.

Its scales gleam crystal blue under the sunlight, and horns curl from its head like the spiraling arms of a nautilus. She marvels at the scales; translucent at the edges, deepening toward the spine into a bruised indigo. With each movement, the scales shift and resettle like the surface of water.

It is enormous. It is terrible. And it is, in some way she has no word for yet, beautiful.

But it is also broken, she realizes. Its right wing hangs at a wrong angle, the delicate membrane between its fingers torn in long, ragged strips – a sail that has weathered a terrible storm. Scales on its left flank are torn off, the exposed flesh beneath dark and weeping, the color of a bruise pressed too deep to heal. One of the pale horns has been sheared away at the base, leaving behind a gaping wound not yet closed.

It does not move. It simply regards her, the way the sea regards the shore.

“They said you were a demon,” she breathes. “They said you’re destroying our shores, ravaging our coastlines. The droughts, the silt…”

At this the dragon laughed, a sound that reminded Helena of far-away thunder.

Look at me, it said. And then look at your people.

I have slept beneath these waters for a thousand years, it continued. I am as much a part of this sea as its salt. I have kept the currents warm and guided the schools of fish to your nets each spring. I have steered the storms away from your rooftops.

"Then what–”

What happened?

The dragon straightened, and even diminished, Helena could see in its movements the grace of a king.

The storms you blame on me. Those are the sea's fever. The water is too warm now. It has been warming for generations, since your fires began, since your ships began, since you learned to take and take and take. The dust storms that strip your coastlines bare? You cut down every tree that held the earth in place. You drained the wetlands that slowed the wind. You paved over the marshes that fed the birds that seeded the grasses that—

It stopped, considering Helena. Then, not unkindly:

I see you are young. There is time for you to flee. Go inland, if you must. There is nothing for you here.

But Helena thinks of her home — their plot of land nestled by the shore, shaded by cypresses, its provenance written in the hands of every generation that had turned its soil before her. She thinks of her mother, kneeling in that same earth, year after year. To love a place, Helena realizes, is in equal parts an act of defiance and an act of hope.

“It is my home,” she says simply, and the dragon regards her with something akin to surprise.

So it is.

She reaches out and touches its sea green scales. They are warm – surprisingly so – as if they’ve held onto the memories of the sun, of warmth, all this time.

I am sorry, she wants to say, but the words feel too small, and too late, and not entirely hers to offer. So she says nothing. Instead, two pairs of eyes meet – one still learning the shape of the world, one that has watched it change beyond recognition.

I have a favour to ask.

The dragon tilts his great head to the spear in Helena’s hand. He stretches his neck towards her, and his breath tickles her cheek – like the first fall of rain, like the sweet mountain breeze.

He does not need to speak. Helena understands.

She has come to kill a dragon, after all.

~

After it is done, Helena will walk the journey back to her home. She will wonder what to tell her mother and her people. Her people, with their empty nets, withered crops, and homes atop crumbling cliffs. She thinks of how quickly they had found something else to blame.

Can they bear to hear the truth?

She does not know. But she thinks of her mother’s calloused hands turning the soil, year after year, asking nothing of it other than that it remains. She thinks that the truth, like a seed, does not require belief to take root. Only ground. Only time.

What Helena will never tell anyone – what she holds in her heart for the reason of her life – is what happened after.

First there was the dragon. Then a spear. Then sea foam and scales and silence; and after, in the place where the dragon had once rested, a garden snake. Its scales were green-dark, and it blinked its mud-brown eyes at the sudden light.

She had cupped it in her palms, as gently as her brother had once done before.

“Hello again,” she said.

The snake kissed Helena’s cheek and she laughed, for it felt like the first fall of rain, like the sweet mountain breeze – a kiss of relief and renewal.

A secret greeting, she thinks. And a promise, kept.