The sound of a pen scratching itself across an old pad. A hand lifted just barely off the paper to avoid smearing the fresh ink. Beads of sweat that percolated on a furrowed brow and were dried by the summer breeze. A page full of dwarven words pressed together as if in a crowd, confusing and burdensome to observe at a glance. A long shadow cast by a folding chair on the green grass. A bare steel sword as close at hand as the next blank sheet of parchment?

A man sat quite alone in a wood-and-canvas chair on the shore of a certain lake. The shore was not exceptionally grand, nor exceptionally beautiful compared with the rest of the lake. It was in fact much like nearly every other piece of shore on the lake, sparsely cast in shadow by the thinning forest behind it with an abrupt and beachless drop-off between the dark soil and the calm water. But that a man was there at all was enough to make this particular shore unique; the thick trees stretched a boundary miles deep between the water and any sort of hospitable dwelling, and the denizens therein were of a rather unhospitable nature to be sure. A sword he had, but of what benefit it would be to him when the time came to use it was another matter.

He sat quietly with his writings, seemingly unconcerned with these things. At a glance it was plain he was not a man of the field; he was thin and wiry, his skin lacking the tan of the sun, his hands slender and unscarred, his dark hair untangled and smooth. Simple clothes of tan and brown billowed out around him, clothes tailored for a man of his size but not of his weight. His brown-grey eyes looked away from the page as often as they looked at it, gazing out at the lake and shore and sky. He liked it there. It was calm there. Calm? and simple. There he did not have to fill his mind with the worries of his family or his house or his wallet. There were no wayward sounds of hammers or yapping dogs, no aeroplanes or motorcars, no intrusive neighbors or uninvited guests. Here he could remove himself from all the distractions of life, both the bad ones and the good. Here he could be at peace, alone with his thoughts and his words.

It was a risk, and he knew it well. Wander too far from civilization, and? things, began to happen. Things that belonged to a time barely forgotten, a land off the edge of the map? but only just. Things that kept children from disobeying their parents, and that kept parents from straying too far off the road in the night. The young man was no child, and no parent, but he was well aware of what it meant to stray off the path. To enter The Wild.

He knew, and yet? serenity. He was sitting on a shore untouched by man for years, perhaps generations. A place that even at its ugliest and most inhospitable created its own beauty, and in the midday sun it was surely neither of those. He had lived all his life with the subtle fear that The Wild would one day break into his world unexpectedly; he had grown to accept it, live with it. So why then, he thought, should he any more fear breaking into The Wild himself? He knew faintly the laws The Wild lived by; he was not there to hunt, or trap, or gather, or harm in any way. He was there to write.

One page gave way to another, and another, as the sun arced slowly behind the man's back and cast his shadow upon the waters. He seemed not to be making any more progress than he would have in his own home, but progress to him was not truly measured by how many words he put on a page. He could truly think there. He could dream there. Dream about any number of worlds and peoples that did not exist, and would not until he breathed life into them with his pen.

A ripple moved across the water, as if caused by the man's shadow itself. From the shallows a pair of crystalline eyes looked at him. Their owner sighed angrily, making the surface of the lake vibrate and splash like a fish had just jumped out of it. The noise broke the young man away from his pen and drew his attention to the shoreline, and to the eyes that stared back at him without a body. For a short while they said nothing, trapped in a strange twilight of awkwardness.

"You're on my shore," flowed a woman's voice from the lake, vibrant and rolling like several voices speaking in unison.

The man was at a loss for words, except for words that anyone might say normally. His reply was subdued and apologetic, as were most of the things he said in life. "I'm? sorry, I didn't know this was anyone's shore."

"Well it is," she snapped. "Get out."

He slowly set his pen and paper down, choosing his words carefully. "I'm not? hurting, anything here."

"You are in my lake, in my light, and in my WAY. Get, out."

The peculiarity of talking with water was for the man a small issue compared with the demand for his immediate eviction. He looked around himself, perhaps expecting to find a cadre of enforcers ready to drag him away should he refuse. Finding no one, he returned his eyes to the water and pled his case.

"I'm not looking for any trouble. I'm just here to write. That's all."

"OUT!"

A jet of water erupted from the lake like a hand swatting away a fly, drenching the man instantly and knocking his chair over with him in it in the process. He sputtered and gasped for breath, scrambling to his feet. As he looked back at the lake he saw the eyes in a small mound of rippling water raised off the surface, glaring at him hatefully like a woman scorned.

He picked up his pad, watching the ink bleed itself into an illegible mess, and sighed. Gathering the now-sopping-wet supplies he'd brought with him, he hoisted the flattened chair over his shoulder and looked back at the lake.

"Perhaps today is a bad day. Maybe I'll? come back tomorrow."

"Maybe you should think otherwise," replied the lake.

+ + + + +

A day passed on that certain shore, and the young man did not return, much to the delight of the water's own ego. Satisfied with her small triumph over humanity, she put it out of her mind and resumed her existence in whatever way she chose to go about it. But the day after, there he was, an hour or two before high noon, same chair, same sword, same traveling bag, new pad of paper. He did, however, sit noticeably further away from the shore than he previously had.

So confident was she in her victory that she didn't even notice the man had returned until once again, as the sun dipped lower in the heavenly hemisphere of the sky, it cast his long shadow upon her surface. She felt it first as an itch and paid it no mind, returning to a tenuous slumber. But as the itch persisted and her patience thinned, she raised her semblance of a head once more out of the lake. And there he was.

"I told you to leave," she emanated at him, grabbing his attention.

He looked back at her as he had before, calmly, curiously. The pride. The stubborn pride of humanity, stomping about sticking flags in the ground, battling nature time and time again and never learning their lesson to leave well enough alone.

"I didn't come back yesterday, as you suggested."

The insolence. "You won't come back at ALL. This is MY shore. You WILL leave it.?

Once again he set his writing pad down and folded his hands in his lap, in some mock gesture of peace. "Mi?lady, please? I'm not asking to take your shore away from you, I'm not asking to take a drink or go swimming or anything like that. I am of peace. I just want to sit here, and write, and appreciate the view."

Her head rippled slightly in frustration as it continued to poke out of the water like a gopher out of its hole. She had heard this before, and she had heard it from others like her. They come, cautiously, one at a time, two at a time, wanting no trouble. You concede for a while; you allow them to stay. And they grow, and they build and they push out and by the time they've overstayed their welcome they're already too entrenched to be removed.

Unacceptable.

She had kept her shore the way nature had intended it for centuries, perhaps longer. It was not beautiful, but it was hers, and she refused to let it be challenged and changed by a man with honey on his lips and selfishness in his heart. Humans? Humans were too fast. Too impatient. Too eager to change the world. Change was a journey, not an event; small inches here and there over long years, and even then only if nature would allow it to happen. So he wanted to fill the shore with his insignificant writings? Wanted to ?appreciate the view?" Then she would give him a view to ?appreciate?, and show him just how much he ?wanted? it.

Without either of the two saying another word, a figure began to rise out of the water, a figure made of the water, moving so smoothly and so fluidly that not a single ripple appeared on the surface itself. Like a bather exiting the bath stepped the form of a woman, the living water that flowed through her taking in the sunlight and scattering it outwards and inwards and purifying it in ways the most unique and brilliant diamond could never dream of doing. A river flowed out of her head and down her back like hair, like a cape, like a wedding train, pooling on the ground around her as a thin leg stretched out and touched the rich grassy earth. With each step she took away from the shore and towards the speechless man a stream of water followed her across the ground, flowing in and out of her feet and hair as if it were her very blood. As if she was nothing more than a puppet, and the shallow stream below her were the strings connecting her to her true master. But her eyes, those sparkling aquamarine eyes which alone had their own color in the miasma of translucent liquid? They were very much alive.

She stood before the young author, presenting her form before him like a silk merchant displaying his finest and most exotic wares. She could hear his heart beating even over the flowing sounds of her own body. He was nothing now. He was no longer his own. He was hers.

"Is this the view you were hoping to appreciate?" she asked him softly. Her lips moved, but her voice coursed out of every part of her.

He could do naught but stare, mouth open ever-so-slightly and hand curled near it in surprise. He felt almost that if he touched his face, if he moved in his chair, if a sunbeam shimmered through her body and into his eyes, it would all end, he would wake up, and realize that there had never been a cloistered shore in the forest to find in the first place. He forgot about his writings, forgot about this being's scorn for him but two days ago. He did not know what he felt as he looked at this nymph from the lake. Confusion? Fear? Love? Reverence? It might have been all of them, or none, or more. What he felt he knew he would never have been able to write down, not if he had all the peaceful shores and pages of a lifetime.

"Mi?lady?"

An eruption. A typhoon. Before the air from his lips had even died off she set upon him like a tsunami, all her serenity and silence gone in an instant. Her form seethed and churned and foamed like a maelstrom as she dashed the man against the ground, splintering his quaint little chair into meaninglessness. There was no woman there anymore, no graceful poise and pleasant bosoms, only a shapeless cauldron of white-capped fury as the man was thrust against the ground again, and again, the force of the torrent weighing him down like a millstone on his chest, crushing the air out of him. A lanky arm thin enough to be in danger of being broken grasped across the ground for its sword, acting out of sheer will for survival. The fingers found the hilt moments before the deluge did.

"THAT WOn't WORK," it bellowed, pulling the sword into its powerful currents and sending it singing out through the air and into the lake beyond. The man gasped for breath only to breathe in half as much in water, praying to God that this was not the end, and that if it was to forgive him for whatever disfavor it was he had caused.

The roar dulled, lessening from a waterfall to only a rapid as the aqueous wrath returned to some semblance of an anthropomorphic shape. The pitiful man managed one last hurried breath before a liquid hand closed over his face, preventing him from taking another. The head and shoulders of the woman stood out amidst the whirlpool of water, their surface rushing and spinning as the aquamarine eyes plunged into those of the man.

"You. WILL. Leave. You will take you life, and go. You will remember this day forever, or you will put it out of your mind in fear and RESPECT. You will know that we do not suffer fools, but WE do not kill them; their deaths are of their own design. This, is, OUR, world. You are not welcome in OUR world."

With one last mighty wave she heaved the man away towards the trees, her form splashing to the ground and flowing back into the lake. He coughed and choked and coughed again for minutes on end, shivering uncontrollably as the water bit into his skin and his clothes clung to him like a straightjacket. Taking only one last look at the once again peaceful shoreline, he crawled away until he was strong enough to walk, and then walked until he was strong enough to run, bolting back through the forest in a third of the time it took him to get there.

+ + + + +

She watched for him the next day, even went so far as to sit down upon his sodden traveling pack in defiance, just waiting to catch him sneaking back and trying to reclaim his possessions. He did not return. The second day she continued to watch, though more out of curiosity than disdain, to see if he really was that foolish to test her emotions a third time. Again, he did not return. The third day she did not wait for him; she flung the pack and broken bits of chair into the forest, and put the fledgling author out of her mind. She couldn't have cared less that he didn't come back the fourth day, or the fifth or the sixth. She didn't care what he did, or who he told his tale to, as long as he stayed in his world and left her to hers. She was content with what she was and where she dwelt, as was nearly every other being on the face of the Earth? except for man, and those few misguided races who sought to be more like them.

The battle, if battle it could have even been called, had left her weary, and so for a time she slept, at ease with herself. It had not been the first human she had evicted before they had taken root, and like a weed another would spring up in the future, but perhaps the story of her wrath would subdue the idealistic explorers for a generation or two, until the account faded and became merely a legend in their eyes. Humanity, like water, always traveled through cycles. Young becoming old and giving birth to the young, nations rising and falling and the ashes rising up again. Such an embarrassment that they could be so much like her and yet so different.

But as she slept? he came back. Slowly, reluctantly, and over a fortnight after he had been evicted, but he had come back. Hiding under the shelter of the trees, far away from her grasp, but not her sight, if she might have only cared to look. He did not return with a writer's pad, or a new chair, or even a new sword. For weeks he sat in the shade of the trees and did nothing but that. Two hours one day, four hours the next, or maybe six or maybe only one. Some days he would not come at all, sometimes two or three days in a row he would not come, and sometimes he would be there every day of the week. After a time he cautiously began to venture out of the tree line, a foot closer to the water every day, or every other day perhaps. The water seemed miles away, but his body had not forgotten the example it had been given, and as his progress away from the trees began to slow, he realized where the line was between acceptance and fear.

He was still unsure as to why he was coming back at all when it was made very plain that he was not wanted there. He didn't think that the shore was any more inspiring or unique than any number of other places he could easily find in the nearby countryside. He bore no desire for vengeance against the nymph, nor did he find himself infatuated with her. She was quite lovely?he would not deny that?but all the spirits of the earth sea and sky were as beautiful as they were deadly, and he was not at all a believer in the star-struck philosophy that danger made love more exotic. Quite the opposite, really; her previous display of ?passion? had cemented his opinion of that. Whatever the reason, he tried to put it out of his head, lest he start second-guessing himself and calling his own justifications weak.

When as last he brought his paper back with him, the doubt and the questions faded away behind the strokes of the pen and the imagery of the words. He began to remember once again why he had come there in the first place, and what the pages really meant to him. They were an endless sea of potential to be sailed upon by prose and verse, every story and poem an island on it; imagination given physical form. Magic.

"The earth always boasts that it's the strongest element, and yet no matter how firm it stands the water will always erode it into dust, inch by inch. Step, by step. We can do this because we know it takes YEARS. Not DAYS, young man. You cannot play a player; did you really think I wouldn't notice?"

He looked up with a jolt from his last sentence and saw the lady's aqueous torso glaring back at him from the lake, her chin resting against her folded arms on the grass. For a few seconds his heartbeat tripled, having spent so many days there in silence that he'd started to forget what it was like to have someone interrupt him mid-paragraph. Realizing just who and what it was that was talking to him, his heart calmed, but only slightly. A stone's throw separated them, but he had no way of knowing if she could still reach him from that distance.

He averted his eyes from her gaze; even from that distance he could see the twinkle of the aquamarines boring holes into him. "To tell you the truth I, uhh? I don't really know what to think."

"You THOUGHT that it was a good idea to come back here," she answered for him venomously.

"I thought that it was a good idea to write."

"There are OTHER places to write besides MINE!"

A wave crashed violently against the shore as she shouted, spraying the grass around her but coming nowhere even close to the young man. He tapped his pen against the paper nervously, at a loss for how to respond. It was easy enough to follow his heart without a good reason in the face of doubt. Quite another thing to try and justify what he could not explain to someone else.

"What? what do you want from me?" he finally settled on asking. "I? I just want to write, that's all. I think it's a good place to write? peaceful. That's all I want, miss. Peace."

"Peace?" she lashed back at him, leaning out of the water towards him with her hands firmly planted on the ground. "PEACE means seeking no quarrel. INTELLIGENCE means knowing when you're CAUSING one. I have told you before, and I will tell you again: You, are, not, welcome, HERE!"

Her form began to lose its beauty as the rage began to well up within her again, incensed with the stubbornness and the utter lack of good sense in this fool of a human. He [i]was in fact too far away from the lake for her to do much of anything to him; her arm was strong, very strong, but short. And the fact that he taunted her from beyond her reach made her despise him all the more. She gave him his due; he was brave enough to come back, and clever enough to do so without a repeat of their previous engagement. But that was all she would give him.

Shaking his head for whatever reason, the man got up off the ground, dusted the dirt of his pants, and started to turn away. "Perhaps today is a bad day," he said calmly. "Maybe I'll come back tomorrow."

She crossed her arms against her chest and hmmphed, a large ripple emanating out from her and splashing against the shore. Nothing she could have said would have done her true feelings justice.

He walked back into the forest, and she watched him go, altogether loathing the next day she would have to put up with him. She hoped that soon one of the residents of the forest proper would take care of him for her. They, like herself, were very territorial when it came to dealing with humans. But they were of blood, and blood was hot. It was water that ran through her veins, and water was cool. Calm some days, calamitous others, but always cool, always in control of itself.

+ + + + +

?How? How can a race so obstinate, so blind to the world around them possibly hope to conquer it and shape it to their own designs?"

The author shrugged as the nymph lay on the grass by the waters, tense and poised like a lioness waiting to pounce. She knew she couldn't touch him, and as the days rolled by and his nervousness seemed to wane she was beginning to suspect that he knew she couldn't, but she wanted him to see her, to remind him that she was there, defying him, rejecting him. It was not enough for his human mind to simply remember her presence and see the lake; he needed something more real, something he might see and hear.

"I've heard it said that the only ones who can change the world are those foolish enough to dream that they can in the first place," he replied, looking up from his pages.

"And the rest of you dash yourself against the rocks believing you can fly," she retorted in kind. "It truly is a wonder you haven't managed to wipe yourselves off the face of the earth."

He made no reply, quite depressed himself at how self-destructive his kind was. War and political posturing and the upheaval of the many for the benefit of the few? Nor did he really wish to remind her that they had wiped themselves off the face of the earth once, long ago, when their corruption had become so great that it had reached to Heaven, and Heaven would no longer tolerate it. And that it was her kin which had purged them; the flood to end all floods.

"You will tire," she said finally after a long silence between them. "You will grow weary of this place. You will find another more beautiful, or more inspiring, or more benign, or more convenient, or you will find no place at all and simply cease to care. It matters not even if you steel your will and attempt in childish defiance to do what I say cannot happen. It will happen, one day. I know your race; how staunchly they will profess their beliefs and yet how easily their convictions crumble away in the face of time. I can wait."

The man did not look up, but the motion of his pen trailed off and ceased. Though he could not see her face, she smiled smugly at him. Smug, but cool, always cool. She did not want to wait, but she could, and if she had to wait until he grew old and passed on, then she would, and when he was no more she would still be there, and the world would continue. A new cycle.

A sigh escaped from his lips. "There's always other places," he ruminated aloud, he response mixed with sighs and pauses as his mind worked ahead of his tongue and then pulled back. "Thousands, millions? a lifetime's worth, I suppose, and then more? And you find a place that's better than the one you started in and stay there instead, until you find a place better than that, and better than that, and better than that. And men will spend their whole lives looking for better places and die before they have found the perfect one? because it doesn't exist. There's always flaws. Always rocks where there should be grass, or grass where there should be flowers. And you spend so long looking ahead you never take the time to look at where you are."

He raised his eyes towards hers, wishing that though she would not accept him, perhaps at least she would understand him. "This shore isn't really that perfect, mi?lady. The edge is all clumpy and the ground is full of old roots, and when the sun hits the water from above you can see all the silt and grime and all the tangled seaweed below. And of course there's you, who wants less than nothing to do with me and interrupts me just as often as I'd be interrupted back at home. But? I looked for some place better, and this is what I found."

She listened to his sermon as a veteran general might listen to a philosopher discussing the mentality of war. Shaking her head back and forth over and over somberly, she told him once more, in a voice as full of conviction as his was, "You will never be welcome here, son of man. Never."

He shrugged acceptingly and twirled his pen in his hands. "Maybe one day I will. I can wait."

+ + + + +