Tell Us, Old One

Today is my two hundredth and twenty-second birthday.

At least, that is what they told me, when the human came and placed them beside me in strange, neat rows and attached to oddly shaped rocks they wedged carefully beside my colony of kin.

At first, I did not hear them because they were so small.

"We are home," they whispered.

I did not understand.

"We are home," they cried, more voices joining together. "Tell us, Old One, what is it like?"

I still did not understand, and so I answered their question with my own.

"Who are you? Where have you come from?" I asked.

New beings, new objects, newness itself is not uncommon here, but each new thing is approached with apprehension. Some new things have brought disaster and destruction to my colony and those around us.

"We are you, Old One. We are descended from you and raised far away in waters controlled by human hands. We have known the human world from birth, but have longed to return to the waters of our origin."

I do not know the far away waters controlled by human hands. I know only the waters of my atoll, which the humans visit infrequently. Did the human waters have colonies too? Are they scattered with organ pipe, precious red, and blue colonies? I wished to ask so many questions, but the newcomers were young and had not learned patience.

"Tell us, Old One. What is it like, your water?"

My water. I think back to my youth but it is difficult to find a beginning. I simply existed one day, a new part of a growing colony thriving beneath the waves. Then, there were great undulating ripples of seagrass spread beneath the colony where lazy, shelled creatures grazed.

"Turtles!" They exclaim.

Turtles. Fish. Sharks. Coral. Starfish. Anemone. These are words they learned from the humans and passed on to me. They also told me of my age and declared it our birthday before urging me to tell them more.

Turtles soared among the seagrass, fleeing only when the shadows of the largest creatures, the ones the humans called sharks, startled them away.

Fish flitted in, out, and above the colony, sometimes grouping into great masses that moved as one, sometimes darting this way and that before reorganizing themselves in a spontaneous choreography of which only they knew the pattern.

And the colony. The colony was a small piece of the greater coral that spanned far and away. We thrived, we grew. We splintered when the world turned dark and the water lashed at us in violent whorls, beginning new colonies away from our parents.

That was then, before the newness. Now?

New abundances of the creatures crowned in wicked thorns, once a danger seen rarely, swept over us. They feared nothing and ate everything. We lost many to these invaders.

Humans began to appear more often, some floating above, others peering into our depths. As the humans came, the fish dwindled and the shadows of the sharks became more infrequent. The seagrass began to disappear as the turtles ate their fill day in and day out, without fear of their predator.

Then came the unknown newness; a death unlike those we had seen before. It crept across the coral, leaving a pale and ghostly white wasteland in its wake.

The humans returned. They poked and prodded, breaking apart the colony and taking the pieces away. They carried away pieces of the dead, too.

"That was us!" They cried. "They carried our parents away, Old One, and from them we were born. The humans believe we can resist the White Death, and so they have returned us here."

I do not know if this is true, but I don't tell them. The White Death may come for us all, but their journey is just beginning. Perhaps they may once again see the colony stretch across the atoll, or feel the shadow of the shark slide over them.

For now, they are small. For now, they are eager for more stories and I have happier tales to tell.