Echo-Divers

Overview

On the stony shore of the Tidal Mirror, the pool that reflects not the present but another time, live the Echo-Divers. They have spent so long in its water that they live partly in the past and partly in the present. They call themselves keepers of the surface, and they warn everyone who comes not to look too long.

Appearance

An Echo-Diver is of ordinary height and slight, with skin pale and translucent as wet paper, so that the shapes of bones and veins show faintly through it, and at the edges it seems to blur into another time. Its eyes are wholly black, like the depth of the pool. Its hair hangs always damp. Its clothes are often a mix of ages, an old cloak over newer cloth, as if gathered from different years.

It moves quietly and carefully, and sometimes a hand or shoulder passes through a stone or a branch without touching it. Its voice is soft and comes a moment late, like the sound of the water. It smells of cold lake water and old stone.

Habitat and Range

They live on the stony shore that rings the pool, and in its water. A Mirror holds a handful, and they come and go with the transient zone.

Behaviour and Temperament

Echo-Divers are cautious and quiet. They value the present moment and hold the now to be sacred, perhaps because they have so little of it. They think of visitors as lost in the flow, and they speak in riddles about time. They are not hostile. They try to keep visitors from the water and from looking too long, and they warn them of the Surface-Walkers, who lure people onto the water to fall through.

Abilities

They exist half in the past, and can pass through solid objects as though those were not quite there in their time. They can go into the pool's reflected time and come back, which visitors cannot safely do. They are vulnerable to being thrown out of time, and some do not come back from a dive.

Life Cycle

Echo-Divers are said to have been visitors who spent too long in the water; whether any are born so is not known. They age, it is thought, partly at the pool's rate and partly at the world's.

Uses and Dangers

People who come to retrieve a lost heirloom or letter from the reflected time, or to see someone lost one more time, are often helped by an Echo-Diver who dives for them. They are harmless, and their warnings save lives.

Lore and Belief

Lakeshore folk believe the Echo-Divers are the drowned, which is not so, and they confuse them with the Surface-Walkers, who often are. Some say an Echo-Diver knows the hour of everyone's death because it has seen it in the water; it may have seen many things there, but it speaks only of time in riddles.

Where It Appears

• The Tidal Mirror
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Resonant Zones and its glossary