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Kher floats beneath the surface of the sea, watching the sunrise from this angle as the water lightens slowly, rays of light slanting down from the surface to slowly illuminate the water with the dawn. Aequor never appears before the sun's lower curve has cleared the line of the distant horizon, but Kher likes to watch the dawn from this vantage point. His tail and feet move lazily in the water, keeping him from being carried in towards the beach.

He wonders sometimes what the merkyo god does during the hours of darkness. He had tried to follow the dragonlike aquatic around the point once as the sun set; he had made it only some two hundred yards before Aequor's silent voice snarled No inside his head, with enough force to set his mind reeling. When his vision and thoughts cleared, the other was gone, and had not returned to their meeting place for a full week. Kher did not try it again.

Lost in thought, he does not notice the dragon's approach. Aequor is quite stealthy for a creature nearly twice Kher's size, and only when the sunlight refracting through the waves is abruptly blotted out does Kher come back to himself with a start, looking up at the merkyo looming over him. Wake up, Aequor tells him gently. Today we will go and hunt in the deeps, and you will need to be alert. It is cold and dark, but there are many tasty fish.

Kher makes his thoughts clear and strong so that Aequor can hear them. I can't go down to the deeps, Aequor. It takes all my breath just to go down there. I will drown.

Is that all? The merkyo sounds surprised and amused. His motion is so quick that Kher barely even sees it before there are cool webbed hands on either side of his neck. Be still.

Sudden, burning pain stabs through Kher, and he lets out a startled yelp, bubbles twisting up through the water as some of the air held in his lungs escapes. The pain in his neck intensifies, and involuntarily, he tries to draw a breath.

The pain fades in that instant. Something lifts and moves and flutters as Aequor takes his hands away, and instead of water rushing into Kher's lungs, something else happens, something that feels like taking a breath but isn't, because his throat has closed itself off in an automatic reflexive action that he is sure he has never felt before. He lifts his hand to his neck, and finds infinitely sensitive not-skin there, protected by a layer of skin and his own thick short coarse fur, but open now to let the water slide past and over it.

Good, now come and hunt with me, Aequor demands, and is moving away towards the open ocean before Kher can respond.

Gills. I have gills? Kher follows, still stunned, a swelling joy rising in him. What wishing has never accomplished, Aequor has given him, offhandedly and imperiously. He still has lungs; he can feel that there is air in his chest, and though some muscle has closed his throat, he thinks he will be able to breathe on land again at the end of the day. But he no longer has to count the minutes carefully and return to the surface for air. Maybe he won't, he thinks, dizzily.