Air Eels
Air Eels are the air-breathing fish of the Drowning Garden. The Garden turns breathing around, so that air-breathers breathe its water; the eels breathe air, and live in it, swimming above the surface of the sunken forest as other eels swim below. They hunt by dropping into the water to strike and rising again.
Appearance
An Air Eel is as long as a man is tall and as thick as a wrist, its body silver-green above and pale gold beneath, its skin slick and shining. Its fins run in a frill along its back and belly and ripple as it swims through the air. Its head is narrow, its eyes large and gold, its jaw long and lined with fine, back-curved teeth. It swims a body’s length above the water in slow, rippling curves and strikes in a sudden, straight dive. The splash of a strike and the snap of its jaws are the only sounds it makes. It smells of salt and the green of the kelp.
Habitat and Range
They live in the air above the Garden’s water, wherever the kelp and the coral trees reach close to the surface, singly or in loose groups, and never go deep, since the water does not let them breathe.
Behaviour and Temperament
An Air Eel hunts from above. It watches the surface for the fish that rise to feed among the floating plants, and drops on them, holding its breath for the moment of the strike before rising again with its catch. It bites at anything that breaks the surface. Visitors who panic in the water and struggle up into the air, as many do, meet the eels there.
Abilities
The Garden’s reduced weight lets an Air Eel swim in air as a fish swims in water, and its own inversion lets it breathe that air, which for the Garden’s other life is the wrong element. It can hold its breath underwater for only a short dive.
Life Cycle
They lay their eggs in the floating mats of weed at the surface, where the young hatch half in and half out of the water and soon rise into the air. Like everything in the Garden, they grow and age fast.
Uses and Dangers
The Gill-Folk spear them from below as they strike and eat them, and use their skins for cords. To visitors they are a reason to trust the water: those who surface in panic are bitten, and some of the Air-Drowned, floating at the surface, bear their marks.
Lore and Belief
Herbalists who come home from the Garden tell of eels that fly, and are not believed. People who live near Depth-Gates say an eel seen swimming in the mist over a lake at dawn is a sign that the Garden is near the surface there; ordinary eels do cross wet grass at night, and that may be what is seen.
Herb-gatherers who surface too fast in the Garden come up into a writhing cloud of them, and the lakeshores boast of the diver who climbed out with three eels hanging from her arms and the herb still in her teeth.