Earwig on a train!

The Alchemax heist

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When the song does come (it is hauntingly beautiful, unlike any of our own songs), the pod is still many days away, but there are many preparations to make. We can't say we fully understand, but the river clan loves a party and this is as good an opportunity as any.

The youth collect crabs and clams from the marshes. The pod must think it so quaint, our simple local fare, but they always partake in the feast with great zeal, bringing their own contribution of squid and the fast muscular fish that live so far away beyond our shores.

The crones tut over the bride-to-be as they weave her wedding veil from the finest strands of river grass (never mind that the bride has been wed to her maiden from the sea every spring for going on twelve years now).

We all collect shells and arrange them around her wedding bower. She chooses the finest of them for her bridal exchange (a point of pride for the winning collector who may brag about it long into the winter).

When the day finally comes, the pod gathers out in the sea, cavorting in the waves and singing their strange songs. Their songs and ways are still strage to us, and our songs must be equally strange to them, but we reply in kind. We sing our wedding songs with inflections borrowed from their dialects and they do the same.

We wait at the mouth of the river and send forth the bride, bedecked in her veil and strings of river pearls and snail shell, radiant and beautiful as the first time they were wed.

The sea clan sends their own bride into the brackish. They are larger than us, fat and muscular, built for life in the open water. The daughter of the sea is something fierce to behold, scarred and powerful, but she always looks upon our daughter with the tenderest gaze.

The two meet alone while we watch from the edges of our waters. They exchange necklaces. Ours a single shell, theirs hundreds of beads, one for each day apart: abalone and shark teeth and red coral and all manner of thing from every corner of the world.

We take turns calling the words, ours and theirs, two ceremonies syncretized into something new and beautiful and unique. And then, vows renewed, river clan and sea clan become one. We are one family until moon and tide signal them to move on in their migration until the next spring.

We meet in the estuary, neither side fully comfortable in the halfway salinity, but we love our daughters, and they love each other. We exchange food and stories and music, our two clans, and we celebrate long into the night.

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