Aseka
doesn't want to play with the other children. She likes the library.
The little island has a large library housed in a castle, endless
corridors and mysterious towers and walls covered in books and warm
stones in the sun where she can sit and read all day, and eat nuts
when she gets hungry. She carries nuts and grains in her pockets
wherever she goes, for staying out until late at night. The small
island, so tiny it doesn't even have a name, gives little room for
exploration, and Aseka has already seen all its forests and fields
and mountains and valleys up close. But she can swim for hours and
look for forgotten treasures on the ocean floor. There are old houses
from the time when their people lived as comfortably under the water
as on land, ruins overgrown with seaweed. Just a few structures
remain standing, but almost anywhere she digs down there are
square-cut rocks waiting.
Everything
of value to the grown-ups has of course been reclaimed long ago, but
she can still find pretty baubles carved of seashells, toys of
treated wood, tiny sculptures of animals she doesn't recognize. And
the discoveries she values at least as highly as these things, the
sights. She finds an old hothouse with some shards of glass panes
remaining just below the surface, and through the glass she looks up
to see the sunlight turn a shimmering blue-green gold and she watches
these dancing lights for far longer than she can easily hold her
breath, until the world starts spinning and she has a hard time
finding the way back up to the air.
And
further out, where people don't often go, she makes friends among
crabs and eels and sharks and plays with them more easily than the
village children.
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