Chapter Text
18 years ago
Claudia carefully laid out the items she would need along the edge of the wellspring. She curled her tail under her to settle half out of the water on the rocks that formed a ring around the pool of mako and water, separating it from the sea. Scattered about were the remains of the offerings of countless others who had come to pray for a child. Everyone felt led to bring different things, and what you showed to the gods was a deeply personal thing.
The pool was in a small cove, amid dangerous waters filled with whirlpools and hidden rocks.
Reaching it was part of the test, they said, to show you wanted a child enough to swim far through treacherous seas.
Three oyster shells, to show she was strong enough to find food for little mouths.
A basket woven out of kelp, to show patience and cleverness.
A delicate corral she had nurtured from a tiny polyp, alive and still attached to its rock, to show she could tend to growing things.
And finally, the bone knife passed down through generations of merfolk like her, the one constant in all sacrifices. The stories of the elder’s said it was carved from ribs of the great ancient whale that the legendary sea-witch, Jenova, once rode across the ocean during her reign of terror. Grimoire, deep in his stronghold on the edge of the abyss, said the archives told of the wellsprings and knives and Jenova always together. That long ago merfolk had gotten babies in ways more alike to other living things, but the planet had blessed them for Jenova’s defeat.
Each clan had one.
They could all be from the same whale. Whales were big enough for a hundred knives.
Claudia placed her sacrifices in the pool, and took the knife to hand. A small slice let her blood drop into the mako filled water. After a moment she bound up her wound and began praying.
She prayed to the great Leviathan for a child.
The pool glowed brighter for a moment. Her friend Ifalna had said it glowed when she prayed for her child, and a week later she had returned to find the beautiful little Aerith in the pool.
But Lucrecia had prayed many years ago, and been given nothing. So had her friends Gillian and Vincent. Even David, who everyone knew was blessed by the gods with his healing, had prayed and been denied. Now only about half half those who went to the wellspring came home with a child.
They had begun to think the gods were angry with them, or something was wrong with their sacrifices. Some blamed the loss of Leviathan’s summon materia, which had disappeared from the sacred cave it was kept in some years ago. Some grumbled that the land people were corrupting the planet with their dirty power plants, and that the drop in babies was a sign they needed to fight harder against the construction at the harbor the land people called Junon. Barret thought they should blow up the reactor being built under the water there, but Barret reacted that way to a lot of things the land people did. The land people had erected a massive city inland of where the sacrifice pool lay, ringed by reactors powered from Mako.
Humans moved fast, living for such a short time. Merfolk lived centuries. They could wait.
Brian, however, had gotten a little girl himself just last year, and Reeve a few years before that had gotten his second. She knew others who had had their prayers answered.
So perhaps there was hope yet. She would wait and see.
A week later, the pool was still empty.
Heartbroken, Claudia returned home.