“Where is the city?” my mother asked, as our cloud descended.

“I heard it lies beneath, upon the seabed itself,” Shuxiao told us.

I stared at the waters, shifting in a ceaseless rhythm. “Can you swim?”

Shuxiao shook her head. Celestials did not take naturally to the water; their lakes and ponds were purely ornamental, brimming with lotuses, adorned with waterfalls and fountains. What need was there to swim when one could fly?

“I will go. My father was a fisherman. I could swim almost as soon as I could walk.” It was my mother who spoke.

Her father; my grandfather. It was the first time she had mentioned him. She spoke so rarely of her mortal family, the one she had left behind.

“Be careful, Mother.” My stomach knotted at the sight of waves, deceptively mild one moment, cresting violently in the next.

Without hesitation, she strode into the waters until they lapped around her thighs. Diving in, she cut a path through the waves with smooth, sure strokes. I shaded my eyes, staring after her until she was a speck in the distance. As a wave swelled, lifting her high, she vanished abruptly from sight. Dread coursed through me as Shuxiao and I urged our cloud onward, soaring to where she had disappeared. My nerves were frayed thin; I had lost too much already.

Waves churned beneath us, their tops aglitter with the gold of the sun. The opaque waters masked their secrets well; there was not a trace of my mother or the fabled city of the Southern Sea. My heart thudded in a frantic rhythm as I grasped my magic, twisting the air into a translucent spear that burrowed through the waters, plunging to its depths.

An arm flailed up, my mother emerging as she floundered amid the turbulence. The wind dispersed at my command, the waves calming as I grasped her hand to pull her up onto the cloud.

She coughed, scattering droplets of water as I slapped her back. “Xingyin, what did you do?”

“I couldn’t see you. I thought you were in trouble.”

“I am capable of looking after myself.”

She wiped a dripping sleeve across her face, then wrung her hair out, coiling it into a simple knot. Her face was drawn and pale, yet she looked younger somehow, as though the seawater had washed away a carefully cultivated veneer, that of the immaculate goddess. I caught a glimpse of the girl she had once been, echoes of her carefree youth in the quiet seaside village. My mother had ascended to the skies, becoming a goddess—and given up her parents, her husband, her future. And now she had lost her steadfast companion throughout the long years of solitude and despair. Some might think this was a small price to pay for immortality, and yet for us, grief was eternal.

A breeze fluttered from my fingers, drying her clothes and hair. “What did you find, Mother?”