It was whimsical, magical. Izuna was spellbound by the pearl.

I was spellbound by Izuna.

I handed the pearl to him. He held it as if it were a bomb as I put my beloved flute to my lips once more and played. Jenna sunk down on the command given by my flute, and Izuna looked at me in panic. I tried to smile calmingly at him, and when that didn't work, I took a step towards him, put my flute back into my pocket, Jenna now having understood what I wanted from her, and took him into my arms.

The magic of Jenna's pearl was more ancient than Jenna herself. It protected travellers using the lanternoid sperm whales, enabling them to stand or sit or lay on the whales as they travelled through water while being able to breathe and never falling off. I felt Izuna tense up as the water engulfed us, and when the eerie sensation of water surrounding you as you held the pearl hit us, he looked up at me.

When holding the pearl, you didn't become wet in contact with water. Your hair and clothes floated in the water but you didn't feel the wetness. You didn't feel the temperature, the texture or the suffocation of the water, either. A while after we had been engulfed by the water of the cave lake, Izuna dared to breathe, and looked up at me in glee when realising he could. Jenna sunk deeper and deeper into the lake, for minute after minute, until she could swim into a horizontal tunnel that was completely dark, lightened only by the soft glow of the biological lamps twirled around Jenna's body. Izuna tensed up again. 

"Are you afraid of the dark?" I whispered into his ear. With the pearl, sound travelled effortlessly in the ocean.

"A little", he whispered.

"Don't worry", I said, planting a kiss on his head. "The tunnel is very short. We'll be in open ocean soon, and then I'll ask Jenna to surface. It will be morning by then."

When out of the tunnel, I took my flute out and played a command. Jenna surfaced so we escaped the dark, but I kept my arms around Izuna anyway.

"Now, we just travel."

The entire day passed. We sat down on Jenna's back, looking at Anderion becoming smaller and smaller behind us until there was only a horizon of ocean surrounding us. We talked. We ate what food I had packed for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which was a feast; I'd had days to prepare, sneaking food out of the kitchen and storing it in bags inside Jenna's cool mouth.

"You can have one of everything", I'd told her sternly. She had closed her eyes, her way of smiling. Jena didn't understand a lot of the language, but she clearly understood this, as exactly one of everything was gone now; one apple, one piece of bread, one potato cake, one container of carrot soup and so on. I didn't know why, but this little detail filled me with such an immense giddiness, I felt like I was going to burst. I had never experienced anything like it before. It was happiness, I believed, something elves didn't usually partake in. Except Nicholas, perhaps, I thought sadly.

The sun set, and Izuna and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the spectacle as the great whale ploughed through the surface towards it. I looked over at Izuna and enjoyed his relaxed face in the orange glow. His eyes became larger when he was deep in thought, his eyebrows slightly furrowed, his lips full. I kept looking at him, and he must've felt it but didn't look back. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking about, but didn't dare. I just drank him in.

Night came, and soon, the moonlight and Jenna's lights were the only light sources providing vision for us.

"Jenna needs to sleep", I said.

Izuna turned to me with a worried look. "Whales sleep vertically in the water, don't they?" he asked.

I smiled. "Lanternoids only once in a while." I pointed ahead of us to where Jenna was headed. It was a group of whales of the same species as her. They were extremely rare, but they communicated with ultrared light that humans or elves couldn't see and easily found each other. The lights on the whales ahead of us provided a scene like an ocean carnival, the blues and reds and yellows and greens also reflecting in the water, causing thousands upon thousands of lights to brighten up the enclosed space in the ocean in between their bodies. "Usually, they sleep afloat on their bellies in groups, but they only needs a couple of hours of sleep. I thought we'd take a midnight swim while she rests."

As Jenna fell asleep among her new friends leaving only Izuna and me awake, Izuna looked at from where he stood on Jenna's back. He slowly untied the belt of his simple, grey robe. I was still wearing my turquoise and orange robe and all the jewellery, and as I reached my hand up to undress myself, Izuna put his small hand on my wrist. I jerked.

"No", he said softly.

I put my finger underneath his chin instead. "Giving the king orders?" I murmured, a smile in my voice.

"I told you already", he said, dropping his robe onto Jenna's back. Luckily, the lanternoid sperm whales were heavy sleepers and impossible to wake. He stood completely naked in front of me, wearing nothing underneath his robe. "You're no king of mine." 

Then, he took a step to me, stood on his toes and reached his hand out to remove my crown. Carefully, he took the soft chain with the crystals and pearls off, and instead of putting it down, he tied it around his own neck. It landed sensually on his collarbones, following the indentation between them. I swallowed.

He carefully undid my orange tulle belt and let it fall. My robe fell open, but as opposed to him, I wore trousers. He let the robe hang on my shoulders still, and instead went behind me, taking off my trousers. I was gritting my teeth. Then, he grabbed my robe from behind and pulled it off, let the expensive fabric fall at our feet. He started planting featherlight kisses on my lower back, reaching up for my shoulder blades but still not quite reaching. God... If the elven touch is to humans only half of what his touch is to me... I could hardly stand it. 

He took my hand, and we dove into the ocean. We'd left the pearl on Jenna's back, so for the first time, w e felt the sensation of the ocean around us; that first, shocking coldness engulfing our skins, the wetness like blood surrounding bone and also the surge in our stomachs when realising the water was probably thousands of metres deep. He held my hand as we surfaced, and for the first time, my ears were blessed with his laugh, but at the same time it was familiar, as if I had heard it before, and it took me a while to realise that I had, in that vision the amethyst planet had shown me. 

"But I'm not drowning..." I murmured.

Izuna turned to me, smiling, his entire face alive with all the colours of the biological lamps. 

"What?" he asked.

And I put my hands on his shoulder and pulled him in to kiss him.

There was desperation this time, hunger. My mind went to a blank space where it couldn't create crystal clear memories, but was still able to keep the essence of it all. I would remember his arms on my shoulders, his thighs around my waist, his wet hair floating around his body, his entire self against me. How he held my hand, swimming for ages, the timespan elongated by our desperation, to reach a cliff shooting up in the middle of the ocean, a way away from the whales where we were alone, where he pulled me up, and I gladly followed because I would follow him anywhere even if it meant I would die. And he would follow me everywhere because I took him to all sorts of places, laying him down on his back, kissing his skin, making our minds disconnect from us and meet again above our true selves among the stars, or maybe that was where our true selves were, and he never hesitated to follow me there. His mouth did all sorts of escapes as I let him feel the elven touch in hidden places, and he drunk all of my praises that I couldn't keep inside of me but had to pour out of my mouth into his, whispering them into him. The kaleidoscopic lights of the whale lanterns from far, far away were nothing compared to the colours of the fireworks exploding inside of me as I reached for parts of him much, much higher up than the stars above, and I plucked them down easily, put them in the basket that was my soul that was open to only him, him, him, and handed that basket over to him.

And all the while his pearly laugh echoed through the nothingness around us, a wall of mutualness providing the only pivot point the sound waves needed to bounce back, and then he would cry, and then he would smile, and then he would look at me with such a serious expression I thought I was hurting him, but which he assured me I never was. He asked me for more praise, and I gave it to him, as I couldn't deny him anything. We didn't lose track of time, but time lost track of us as we continued the act of no start and no end, never wanting to let go of the other, never wanting to know where one began, and the other ended, and even if we'd try to find out, we wouldn't find an answer because in that moment, we were one.

"What's wrong?" he asked me at one point.

"What do you mean?" I murmured back.

"You're worried about something."

"I'm fine."

But a slight sting of worry was etching itself in my heart.

The amethyst planet has showed me how I was drowning. 

When would that be happening?