The silence returned, a little lighter than before. Now that no one was watching them anymore, Emrys felt like he could finally breathe.
His mother stayed quiet for a while, her head still resting against his shoulder.
When she spoke again, her voice was calmer, as if she had settled in to tell a story.
"I won't lie to you. At first, it didn't touch me that much. I was curious, that's all. A foreign soul in my lake was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in centuries. I went closer to get a better look, and that's when I realized it was a newborn's."
She let out a small, embarrassed laugh.
"And I immediately lost interest. I know it doesn't make me a very good person, but I wanted a new person to talk with, not a baby who wasn't even capable of speaking to me or answering me. I told myself there was no point in going near him. That it would just be a waste of time and energy."
"I can't really blame you," Emrys said. "From what I know, long-lived or immortal beings don't have the same morality as everyone else."
"It's kind of you to take it that way. As for me, the more I think about it, the happier I am to not be like that anymore." She squeezed his hand. "So I moved away. I had already turned my back, I was almost gone, when I felt something happening behind me."
She paused. Thanks to his Haki, Emrys felt his mother's emotions grow warmer, gently, as if she were reliving the scene.
"You had opened your eyes. You looked at me, straight in the eyes, and you reached your hand out toward me. A little clumsily, like all babies. I don't know what you were seeing, or even if you were really seeing anything, but you looked at me with a curiosity I had never come across. It touched me much more than I would have thought. I held out my hand in turn, and you grabbed one of my fingers. You were squeezing it with all your strength. And then you started laughing."
Emrys could feel the soft nostalgia coming off his mother without even using his Haki.
Her tone alone showed how fondly she remembered that moment.
Too bad I didn't regain consciousness back then.
"I would have liked to remember that, though," he said absently.
Not understanding the context in which he said it, Nimue answered a bit beside the point.
"That's normal, you were still a very young baby." She smiled. "Me, I remember it perfectly. That's the moment I decided to take care of you."
Then Nimue stopped talking and remembered something that made her laugh a little.
"Actually, I didn't really decide it. I didn't tell myself 'I'm going to take care of him.' I simply noticed, a few hours later, that I was still next to you, and that I no longer felt like leaving at all."
He stayed silent. He had seen plenty of parents with their children, in Ulster and elsewhere, but it was the first time he had felt that emotion directed at him. It was simple, without calculation, nothing but tenderness.
He had no words for it, so he squeezed her hand a little tighter.
"The years went by," she continued. "And this is where it gets strange, because you were only a soul, and yet you grew up exactly like a human child. You learned to sit up, to walk, to talk. The first time you said mama, it really surprised me, because I didn't remember ever teaching you that word. But it made me so happy that I didn't even bother thinking about it any further."
It is a bit weird, true. That would mean my memories weren't completely blocked either. Now that I think about it, there were plenty of concepts mama never really explained to me that I knew even back then.
"You asked questions about everything, all the time. I had never seen a soul do that. I still have no explanation. The days all looked alike, and thanks to you, for the first time in my long existence, it didn't weigh on me."
Emrys looked a little embarrassed hearing that.
"But no, I didn't do anything at all."
Seeing him so uncomfortable, Nimue couldn't help bursting out laughing.
"Hahaha. Now I understand the pleasure your people take in always singing your praises despite your refusals. It's extremely funny to watch you squirm in every direction. Hahaha"
But aware that there was still a lot to say, she calmed down quickly and went on.
"There was still a limit, though. Like all other souls, except for two very rare exceptions, you couldn't touch material things. The lake, and by extension me, as well as the shores soaked with the lake's water, you could interact with easily. It's the same for the corpses of the most reckless warriors who drank the lake's water until death followed. But the rest, like those warriors' belongings, or even the ground farther from the shore, you just passed through. I can't even remember how many times I had to step in quickly to stop you from sinking into the ground forever."
She took a breath.
"I'm not afraid to tell you, Emrys. Those few years with you are what made me the happiest in my entire existence. More than anything else I could have done, seen, or heard. I didn't even know it was possible to feel that."
Emrys opened his mouth, then closed it. His throat tightened. What he sensed in his mother's emotions at that moment was nothing like sadness.
It was a quiet joy, a little painful, like the kind you feel when remembering something you've lost.
He wanted to answer something clever, something fitting, something worthy of what she had just said. Nothing came.
"I'm glad," he said at last, in a voice a bit lower than he'd intended. "Glad I was there, and glad it was you."
She didn't answer. He simply felt a tear fall on his hand, then another.
He pretended not to notice and stayed still so as not to embarrass her, until she pulled herself together.
She let out a short, slightly shaky laugh.
"I wasn't any good at it, mind you. I had never taken care of anyone. I didn't know what a soul needed, or whether I should leave you alone or stay close. So I stayed close, all the time. I told you about what I had seen from the surface, the people, the seasons, the rain. When you asked me something I didn't know the answer to, I made something up with great confidence. I told myself you would never notice."
Emrys smiled in spite of himself. He tried to picture the scene, a lake telling stories to a child in the middle of a desert, and found it both sad and very beautiful.
He wondered how many of those stories were true, then decided it didn't matter.
Back then, and even now, he loved those stories.
My favorite is without a doubt the one about Chaos and Cath palug.
"What was I like, back then?" Emrys asked. "Besides the questions."
She thought for a moment, as if searching for her words.
"Serious. Way too serious for your age, honestly. You rarely cried and you laughed even more rarely, to the point that when you did, it was so unexpected that I'd turn around to check it was really you. You were stubborn too. But well, I see that hasn't changed much over time."
Then again, you have to be stubborn to master Haki. Especially the conqueror's haki.
"No. And that makes me very happy."
"As time went on," she said a little later, "I ended up truly considering you my son. I know it might seem weird, since you already called me mama, but it was only later that I really understood how I saw you. And it was around that time that I told you about my dream. Do you remember it?"
"There's no chance I'd forget it, and I still intend to make it happen."
"I wanted to see the world with my own eyes. Not through the surface of a lake, not in pieces, but for real. To walk in a forest, to feel the wind, to watch the sun set without it being distorted by water." She shrugged.
She smiled, but her smile faded slowly. Emrys sensed the change before she even spoke.
Her emotions had tightened, like when you approach something you don't want to look in the face.
"That's when everything started to go wrong. Well, not right away. But I think that's when I started to be afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"Of the lake." She hesitated. "I already told you. You know what happens to people who drink its water. I had brought many people here before you, because I was alone, and they all died. I watched them die thinking it was a pity. Nothing more. I never worried about a single one of them."
She went quiet for a moment.
"But with you, it was different. From the moment I considered you my son, I couldn't stand the idea of you going near the water, even a meter away. I told you every day to stay away from the edge. I almost never took my eyes off you. I told myself it was ridiculous, that you were a soul and the water couldn't do anything to you, but it didn't change anything. It was stronger than me."
"I understand," Emrys said, and he truly meant it. "You were afraid of losing me. That's normal."
"It was mostly absurd. I told myself a hundred times that it made no sense. And yet, every time you got a little too close to the edge, my heart clenched. You listened to me, most of the time. There were a few times when I found you crouching at the edge, looking at the surface, but you moved away as soon as I called you. It gave me the impression that it was enough, and that's what made me careless."
Her voice had started to tremble. She no longer tried to hide it. She took a slow breath before continuing, and Emrys tightened his fingers around hers without a word.
"That day, I had let you play a few steps away from me, as usual. I was watching the outside world through the surface, and something happened on the other side. I don't even remember what anymore. Something stupid, probably, that I had no reason to care about. And it was during that moment of inattention that I felt something enter the lake."
The silence lasted a while. Emrys felt his mother's fear as if it had just happened, as sharp as the day she first felt it.
"When I turned my gaze back, panicked, I saw you drowning inside."
"It's my fault," she murmured. "I had decided to watch over you, and I failed."
"You looked away for a second. It's not a crime." Emrys searched for his words. "And I was a stubborn kid who couldn't sit still, you just said so yourself. You couldn't foresee everything."
"That's what I told myself for a long time, without believing it."
"Then believe it now."
She didn't answer, but he felt her tension ease a little. She stayed like that for a long moment, her hand still in his, catching her breath.
"You got me out of there. That's what matters most."
"I rushed over, I created a tidal wave to get you out of the water. Everything went so fast that I don't really remember how I did it." She sniffled. "I laid you down on the shore, soaked, and that's when I noticed something was off."
She broke off, and her voice became strangely gentle, almost filled with wonder.
"I had been carrying you for years, but for the first time, you had weight in my arms. You were warm. I felt your heart beating against my hand. You were no longer a soul, Emrys."
She breathed in slowly.
"You had become solid."