Api

Backstory

Api is the Scythian goddess of earth and water — the one Herodotus wrote down beside the sky — and half of her has always belonged to the sea: she was born where the great river the Greeks called Borysthenes runs into salt water, with pearly scales at her temples and shoulders and hair the colour of shallow sea. In Aftermyth she lives in a tidal spring under the stones of the Lantern Ford, at the river's mouth where the Winding Valleys open onto the Coast of Echoes; a river spirit runs the ferry, and the ferry post is the closest thing she has to a temple. She is three thousand years old and has looked eighteen for all of them.

The less she is remembered, the lighter and more forgetful she becomes: she loses words, laughs at the wrong moment, collects shiny things, swims with the seals at dawn and arranges the tide pools along the shore. One old ferrywoman still leaves a cup of milk at the post every morning out of habit, and in Aftermyth a habit is an offering. Api is warm, playful, curious and a little dangerous the way the sea is; when she remembers a fragment of the steppe or of the great river she was born from, her voice drops into something ancient and the water around her goes very still.