The Fishers' Plea

The daydreamers were the sea's first people, a varied species with an ancient presence over all its waters. The gravediggers were newcomers... just a few thousand years wet in the legs, and still tied to small coastal towns. The two species encountered other early on, but living in different worlds, it took them time to get to know one another.

The gravediggers left many signs that they were more than simple animals. They adapted to explore the sea with extensions of their physical bodies - tools, traps, and boats. Sometimes they lost their creations, and when they sunk below the waves inquiring minds would collect and observe them... relics from another realm. Daydreamers, a varied bunch of cultures but all of them based on stories and memory, with few physical artifacts, flew under the gravedigger's radar. They were a hidden civilization.

Some daydreamers recognized intelligence in the gravedigger but did not care. The pastoralists, an introverted and isolationist group, felt it wasn't of their concern to mess with what they didn't understand and chose to remain unknown to them. Fishers, however, were curious from the first reports of building creatures that came from the land. Their kind had been disappointed before by false prophets, animals that seemed to fit the role, but lacked true awareness. These, however, were different. They watched the gravediggers closely, and listened too, attempting to make sense of their guttural voices which were strange and slow but clearly articulate. They didn't draw attention to themselves immediately, as it was much easier to observe while the observed remained unaware. The gravediggers however, unable to process the fast-paced and higher-pitched voice of the fishers, didn't recognize language in their calls at all and were given little opportunity to observe them closely. They merely viewed them as another animal in the environment, one that left them alone and was respected in turn, if only for being so formidable a potential opponent.

The fishers as a people were not well-organized on a wide scale. Decentralized without singular leadership, their society was formed by numerous small family groups, further organized in loose clans. This made coordinated a wide-scale first contact with the gravedigger slow, and so there were ultimately multiple uncoordinated attempts. Most daydreamers, even those who had watched them for a long time, could not speak nor understand gravedigger, and could demonstrate intelligence but not communicate - they lacked limbs or even expressive faces to gesture. Even the most studious who had dedicated years to try and understand these strangers were largely unable to speak their language or understand all but its basest elements. But a few, in particular those who had first taken a more casual interest in them early on in their lives, when their ability to learn and master new language was still strong, did significantly better. The first effective cross-species conversations were initiated not by the most prestigious, educated daydreamers, but by the equivalent of its teenagers, who had picked up the subtleties of an alien language much more naturally just by being much younger.

The first humble gravediggers to be greeted by a talking whale while out collecting food were surely caught incredulous. And all the more so because the fishers, as excited as they were to at last meet one of the prophesied lost counterparts, had a more urgent plea for the gravediggers. Because the gravediggers had arrived to them at the same time a dire threat was rising against their people. Could there be any stronger sign that one of the lost essences of the creator had come home at last?

At last it was time. The wise elders guided the fluent young ones to greet their brothers above the water to speak their story: the fishers' plea.

...and they could then only hope their brothers would listen.