Pectinarid worms

“What’re these little cones?” Baby Precious wondered as he lay basking in the afternoon sun, combing his hoof idly through the silt. It was sticking to every crease in fins and scales and he looked forward to sliding back into the river to wash it off, but there was more to the grey-brown expanse than you could see from a distance.

The shark-tailed land fawn from the troupe of performers that had arrived at the camp a couple nights ago was watching him from the edge of the bank. She hadn’t said much, and she wasn’t in the initial show they had put on for all the campers, so he knew nothing about her. Baby had met hybrids at the Antler Islands, but they were people of the ocean shore, raised with customs of their Antler Islands parents as much as their come-from-away parents. She, from one of the inland cities he could barely imagine and living the nomadic life of an artist, was as mysterious and exotic to him as any land faun. That made no sense for someone who looked like her, like someone that could almost be just another fawn in his school, if she weren’t walking on four legs, completely confident in the strange and beautiful gaits of a land faun.

She responded, and her voice was nothing special either, a vexing lack of answer to who this faun was - to how she was. “A pectinarid worm builds the sandy cones you can find along the riverbank in sandy and silty areas. If you find one that’s still inhabited, you’ll see its frills, named paleae poking from the larger end and its tail from the smaller. It’s a strangely beautiful creature, but it spends its time hidden, most of it burrowed in the sandy ocean floor - except this species, remarkably adapted to freshwater and the smaller, silty particle size of this river. The burrowed mouth swallows grains to digest any organic debris attached to them and spit them out the tail. The paleae let it burrow deeper, like a rake digging through the sand.”

“How do they make the cones?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do they eat on the sand? And what eats them?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know so much about them but not know that?”

“I do not know anything about them except what the counsellor told us yesterday when we were beach combing.”

“You talk like you do.”

“I am just repeating what he said.”

“All of it?”

“Yes. I thought you may have forgotten. Other people often do.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Never.”

“… So you’ll remember this?”

“Forever, as far as I know. I do not want to think I might lose memories when I age. I am not familiar with having to lose them.”

That made Baby Precious feel some things. “… I don’t think I’ll forget you either.” She was something stranger and more beautiful than anything else he had found on the beach.