Ocean Master

The court of Atlantis was very old and very beautiful and, on this particular afternoon, very tense.

Orm stood at one end of the great hall — tall and proud in his purple and silver suit, his cape moving in the slow currents that flowed through the palace corridors, his own trident across his shoulders. His posture was the posture of someone who had been told since childhood that he belonged in this room and believed it completely.

Arthur stood at the other end, and his posture was the posture of someone who had grown up in a lighthouse in Maine and was still, some days, surprised to be in this room at all.

They were brothers. This was sometimes the most important fact about them and sometimes the least relevant one.

Orm's vision for Atlantis was pure and absolute and genuinely believed: the kingdom should be the greatest power in the world, and it should be separate from the surface entirely, and its people should not have to navigate the complications of surface politics or surface pollution or surface anything. He had looked at the world above the waves and found it wanting. He had looked at Atlantis and found it sufficient. He could not understand why Arthur, who had seen both, kept insisting on a bridge.

"They dump their waste into our oceans," Orm said, and his voice was even, which was somehow more alarming than anger. "They run their ships through our migrations. They trawl the floor with their nets. And you want to cooperate with them."

"I want to change what they do," Arthur said. "That's different."

"Cooperation validates the people doing the harm."

"Isolation doesn't stop the harm. It just removes us from the conversation about ending it."

They had this argument in many forms, in many locations. It was the argument of their relationship, the knot they kept untying and retying, each time slightly differently but always around the same central tension.

Orm had taken the name Ocean Master — a declaration, a title, a statement of what he believed Atlantis should be in the world. He had his own trident, its powers focused on the ocean's power: he could control currents, generate whirlpools, summon walls of water with the particular authority of someone who had been born to Atlantean royalty and trained to the specific exercises that unlocked those capabilities.

Their disagreements had settled, over the years, into something almost like a tradition. When the tension became acute, they met in a trial. A challenge of strength and wisdom, conducted according to Atlantean custom, in which they tested each other in the old ways — racing through the bioluminescent jellyfish fields that lit the kelp forests north of Atlantis, the electric blue of the jellyfish casting strange, shifting light on both of them as they moved; navigating the labyrinthine trenches of the Mid-Atlantic ridge; returning first to the pod of stranded sperm whales near the surface, because that one Arthur had suggested and Orm, who cared about Atlantis and therefore cared about its sea, had agreed.

They raced the trench passage neck and neck — Orm's technical precision matched against Arthur's intuitive read of the current. The jellyfish field was eerie and beautiful and neither of them won it clearly. The whale helped first was Arthur, because he heard it first, because he had grown up listening to the sea.

After the challenge, they sat on a rock formation at the edge of the kelp forest, which was something they did — would not have admitted to doing, but did — when the formal proceedings were over and nobody needed to hold a position. The kelp moved around them in the slow current. The jellyfish drifted nearby, still glowing.

"I know you care about the ocean," Arthur said.

"Of course I care about the ocean," Orm said, as if this were the simplest possible statement. "It's everything."

"It's what I'm trying to protect."

"From your new friends." The word came out flat.

"With my new allies," Arthur said. "There's a difference."

The jellyfish pulsed their quiet blue-and-green light. Somewhere above them, miles up, the surface moved in its own patterns.

Orm said nothing for a while. Then: "The whale pod moved north."

"I know. There's a current shift this time of year."

"I know," Orm said. "I was noting it." A pause. "You lead them well."

This was, from Orm, something close to a compliment. Arthur accepted it as such.

They swam back to Atlantis in a silence that was not uncomfortable — two princes of the deep sea, one who believed in openness and one who believed in protection, both of them, underneath everything, believing in the same blue kingdom.

The argument was not resolved. It never was, exactly. But they kept having it.

Family argues. Family argues and swims home and sits in the same current and keeps going.

That, Arthur thought, was probably enough.