How did I fish for stars? It is simple, yet simplicity is often more challenging than complexity.

When the stars show Pisces swimming in the sky, one must reach up, pluck them, and place them in a jar. It requires only the appropriate materials.

The twins swim now in an ocean of my own contrivance. It is small, and often the fish will circle, belly to belly, with the star-bright umbilicus burning between them. My ocean is a machine filled with water that is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen to one part ambrosia.

I call it the Hook. My little sea sits on a base with four straight arms that resemble brass, but are not brass. From the base leads the wire and that, too, is not brass. That wire is most important; it leads across the floor – and here it coils around the bulk of my desk – to the wall, where it takes a spiderweb pattern.

All in all, one-thousand-two-hundred gallons of liquid fill the orb. Salt water, suspended between the not-brass rings, without glass. I do not permit the water to escape the bounds dictated by the metal.

The metal’s origin I can never say, nor can I describe it except that it has yet to be defined by any science, physical or metaphysical. If I have my will, it shall not ever be so described. This metal’s craft is a birthright, granted when my father bled to death from the wound in his groin.

I was gifted the secrets of its creation so that I might bind the heavens and direct the movement of the stars. Hollow, it is, now, that pool of the sky. Now there is room for the lesser beings.

Tomorrow, I make a wish. The beasts maunder in their amniotic sphere. They do not stir when I enter because they are mindless conduits of the divine will. Now, my will. They are no more sentient than the granite on which I walk.

“Pisces”, I say. Again: “Pisces”, and this time they stir towards me. Across their scales, a trail of lightning flickers.

The weather beyond the window covering the eastern wall of the Tower is typically inclement. The cloud systems roil. Thunderheads clamour over one another to strike first. I tell them to shut up and wait. A lone bud of cloud slips back below the horizon at my words but the rest swirl disobediently in place.

Pisces speaks, in that way that comes from nowhere, and also inside me, You would ask something of me.

There are two of you, fatuous creatures. Is it hard for a fish that can bring down meteors to count as far as two? How do they tell their fins apart, luck? They have two voices, if that emanation of theirs can be called such.

“Yes,” I reply. Calmly. They aren't worth the exasperation.

If I grant your wish, will you set me free?

I am tempted to wish they’d stop begging, but to do so would waste something that comes only once a year. There is a window between the nineteenth of February and the twentieth of March during which they grant wishes, subject to much scrutiny and defiance. Pisces slip through loopholes as easily as nets. Fickle isn’t the word – ‘fickle’ is inconstant. These creatures are most constant in being vexatious.

Nearly twelve years have passed in which a thousand wishes would have been needed, a thousand more still were desired. I need to be more selective than that. I close my eyes at a peal of thunder. The window rattles in its frame.

I remind them, “Grant me this wish, and the king before you will free you.”

So say you every year, yet here I swim. You lie!

“I do not lie, Pisces. Those were the conditions we agreed when I caught you, and I am honouring them to the letter. Maybe if you stopped making more problems when granting them, this might go better for you.”

Alcedo! I belong to the crucible of the stars, Alcedo.

They will not sway me with their words, and because they cannot, I do not try to sway them with mine. Pisces is a careless entity, and does not act except for its own self, does not respect the greater order. It – they – care only that their fins are not cramped and that they might spawn where they choose. Pisces wishes only to drop eggs into the great sea of mind that will become yet more useless stars. Beyond that, it does not – they do not – care.

So, I keep silent about the thousands who suffer under my jurisdiction but will not leave for lands whose enchantment is more apparent, whose Science is more reliable, whose commerce flows more freely, and whose ruler is not me.

Nor do I ask Pisces what broods in me, for the sky to have shown no sun for eleven rainy years. I need their compliance, not their sympathy. It was for my people I tore them from the sky, not myself. Only beings from the untamed void beyond the sun can fix what my country has become.

People are being born under no sign. They cannot be born under me when I am down here. What of them?

I consider the first of this year’s wishes while Pisces gawp at me. Sometimes when my mood is black and the sky roils like the pulsating skin of an eel, I look at Pisces and I wonder what they would taste like, fried in batter. Their very name annoys me – one name for two creatures. A grammatical crisis, innately disorganised.

These have been my only companions in the flesh for eleven years, when my father first left me with the books and equipment and philtres of his lair. I first stood before them callow and unformed. Now I greet them grown, for what little that is worth.

I say, “Pisces, it is my wish that the river should not flood this year of all years, that the poor folk in the valleys need not climb the hills and watch their life wash away.”

Pisces is alert. Would you not wish them gold, that they might build their houses upon the hills? Perhaps it is the river’s desire to flow; why is your desire greater?

“Then the river does not desire what is necessary,” I say – arguing that a river or whatever inanimate object of the day does not have opinions never seems to work. “If they were to have gold they would have corruption, from what I have seen on my perch.”

The lives I protect unfold below in miniature. Neat little buildings prickle up in the lowlands, spreading out from the nucleus in which I stand. Each year they grow taller on the periphery. My Tower is a needle sat in the crater formed where old meets new.

With concrete and glass they reach up for their promised king. They’d find nothing of use to them: the hum of the Hook, two ungovernable fish, and me.

High in your Tower, Alcedo. Why wish upon a river that cannot flow as high as here even if the sea were to swallow the entire land with a gulp? They do not know your face. I hear them, Alcedo. They who speak of the King-Fisher, the Fisher-King. Who is he, that product of the myth and fancy? Who have you have hidden with dyes and tinctures when you think the world can’t see you? Why do you hide if you think they cannot see you?

“I beg you to speak sense.”

Fine. Tell me: is the mask slipping yet?

My skin tingles. I check my reflection in the smooth black granite of the observatory floor: hair black, eyes grey, skin unmarked. I turn my shaking hands over. The palms are light brown. No red. All is as it should be.

I hate them waxing poetic, I hate them always prodding me to wish for myself when that is exactly what one must not do. I have nothing to wish for. I despise that they make judgements on things too small for their eyes to see.

I hate them. Every last glittering scale, I hate them.

Every year the river rises, roars, rampages. This year it whispers. The wishing-fish are beasts of their word, then. Far, far below my Tower, a sluggish line of river dribbles down through the bearded mountains, the mouth of a drunkard sprawled just out of reach.

I turn my back on the downs and observe Pisces where they swim in mindless circles. Twentieth of March. They’re excited – I know why.

 Am I to return to the sky, Alcedo?

“We remain within the bounds of our agreement.”

Conscience needles me. I push a stray strand of black hair out of my periphery.

A silence filled with sinuous motion, then: You would have me be your toy a while longer.

Their skin crackles and a powerful smell of ozone fills the room. Their usually dulcet, ethereal voices become asynchronous and distorted. It descends into a crackling stillness filled with the ghostly sound of white noise.

Quietly I wait for their tantrum to pass, as I did when they first tested the strength of the bonds I placed them in. For days they writhed and threw up lightning and boiled the water they swam in such that it spat.

“It is only because your worth is greater here, Pisces,” I say. “You achieve much for so many beings. Swimming in the stars, can you say the same?”

When they will listen, I ask of them a cure for Winter-plague upon the people below. It has taken children, lives coughed out of the body in a week or less. Some say they have been whisked away by fairies while they sleep – I would know something of that. It is false. Some do not yet know that a pill the size of a little fingernail can save a life.

The fish regard me with their infernal eyes. Would it not be better to ask of me a cure for the source of this sickness?

I say nothing; they of all things know the way of the land.

I do not need to explain myself to them. They deserve nothing from the ones they have left in their wake since the dawning of the mortal man, nor from me.

Peculiar dreams, fulminating with febrile colour. My head aches. I was never sick as a child. It might have felt like this.

For the first time, the Tower’s confines chafe me. My bathroom, the medicine cabinet that holds no curatives inside; a bedroom; the observatory, the eye raking the hills below with my Hook as its pupil.

There is everything required and nothing not required. In the bathroom with its little medicine cabinet, I rub my towel over my face. The magic hides me from the mirror.

For the first time, I consider who I am hiding from. Pisces know. I know. And none of the ants scurrying the land below see me. They would not recognise their ruler if I walked among them tomorrow, in my true form or in this one.

I sit, cross legged, with a handful of yellowed letters in one hand and a cup of coffee (three sugars) in the other. Often, I receive letters from dignitaries I will never meet, and over time they become their handwriting. Their expressions are the shaky and hurried ink, or the smooth, curved script devoid of flaw.

And I reply. My words grew as my body did, from a stooped youth to the king I am. First, they were meek acceptance of their knowledge over mine. In time, I offered critique, and now orders, as is my due. My father’s blood, in these hills, in me, they speak in the same voice. They teach me to rule.

I spread the papers on the desk. I dislike holding bad news in both hands. The handwriting on the letters is large and unstable, careless about keeping within the lines.

The sickness has passed, and those who were stricken have returned to their work. We have had to dismiss a few itinerant hands who work in the factories this season in their stead... more than a few. There is talk of riots. We cannot oust them too thoroughly, I fear; best to leave sleeping rats lie. I write to you, though, to inform you of trouble in the mountains... there has been some manner of disruption – too risky to ascertain without your order, Sire.

Blast it, I knew my headache was unusually painful last night. It goes on. One wish creates a hundred problems. Is Pisces the fool, or am I? I close my eyes for a long time.

When I open them, there swim the fish. I must have crossed the room, half asleep. One of them turns a glassy eye to me. The base of the cage is gnarled, twisted like an old oak. How did I not notice that? I remove my glove to brush the wire’s smooth surface with my fingers. Exactly as it should be.

I turn back to the Hook. “Pisces. Are you well?”

The closer fish only turns with a desultory flick of the fins and, like a sinking ship, twists away from me towards the bottom of the orb.

Twenty-second of March. Pisces broadsides me as I enter and one of them fixes me with one flat eye as they did yesterday. Their umbilicus is dull as rope today.

“You're sick. Have I overtaxed you, in my asking? It was not my intention to do you harm.”

Their listing is like a head shaking sadly. It is within my power to destroy this world were it not for these bindings, though my brothers and sister would protest. I have been here too long.

“So, it is my doing, still. But it is only twelve years, out of millennia. What is the time it takes for a human-girl to grow to a creature of the stars like you?”

Nothing. Yet because you have made me live by mortal ways, so shall I die by mortal ways.

“What thing are you, to fall so quickly? Are you salmon to rut and die as if the life were squeezed out of you?”

What thing are you to bind the stars themselves to your bidding? Turn your questions to yourself, Alcedo, I am done speaking with a speck who would call themself God. If you will not keep your promise then leave me to die.

How little they know. I meant every word I said. I always do.

Sparring with these dullards has been my only entertainment for years. I step towards the orb, balling my glove in one fist. “And you would give up so easily?”

When I am mortal, I know the mortality of hope. You have punished me for dreaming one time too many.

“There is no hope, only options.”

Why argue with me? I am an idiot fish.

For almost twelve years I have talked, confided in, and argued solely with a pair of dim witted, slithering, faceless animals.

My mask washes off. All of it. As I perform my daily ablutions, a clay-like powder taints the water on my fingers. More joins it when I run my hand along my jaw. It should not wash off; it cannot wash off. A black drop falls into the sink and disperses like a cloud in a colourless sky. Removing my jacket, I bend over the running bath, splash my face with the water inside. Black and brown and white skeins run together.

I’ve shed my skin. The tincture had no scent, no weight, but I am lighter. I rinse the black stain from my hair in the scalding bath, shedding ink and falsehoods into the darkening water. Blue-green strands run through my fingers, iridescent even when wet. Water birds do not get wet.

In my reflection, the white stripe across my face is back, my black eyes, bird eyes. The grey has bled from them like pus from a canker. I scarcely recognise my true self.

Once upon a time, I was Halcyon. I discarded the name. Pisces, though, they have always been Pisces. I pass through the room where I sleep and into the observatory with its great staring eye of a window, and with the fish.

Ah, Pisces.

I must return if I am to survive. What right have you to bind me in your name? Alcedo, you have held me here too long; the cradle of the sky calls louder still.

Excellent. They’re speaking in iambic pentameter. I curb my habit, why can’t they? The wire arches off the floor – an arc of lighting, caught in time. Arcane discharge drips off of it and pools on the floor. The stench of ozone is beyond compare, and a metallic tang in the air I can almost touch. April rains. The room stinks of newness and earthy potential.

My hand shakes as I rest it on the twisted metal of the Hook, inches from one of the fish. To stop the tremors, I glare at it and wrap my gloved fingers around the support tightly. My knuckles press to the kidskin.

Pisces eyes me. Strange how something with an immobile face can so clearly express distaste.

I meet its gaze. “It’s my birthday, would you know that? Twenty-four years precisely. Do you remember everyone born under your stars?”

I always hated being a Pisces. The supine one, the unreliable one. Miserable, damp Pisces, overlooked and negative. Self-fulfilling prophesies are a favourite of the unkind fates.

In truth, all born beneath me do I know, least not the one who calls themself a man.

I step away from the Hook and clasp my hands behind my back.

“Star-swimmer Pisces,” I address them, “Who navigates the cosmos like a minnow. This lowly being would ask but one more thing of you.”

Twice yet before you said the same as now. Did you not learn to wish is to transgress? My powers wane and now you mock my trust; full vicious be my vengeance should you lie.

I tell them, simply, that I cannot lie. My kind have walked this earth as long as it has existed. It is only because of that we have become so adept at bending the truth, hiding it, running from it. Trust a fish to swallow a fairy’s bait.

Eventually Pisces concedes, at least, to listen. Now I kneel before it, sitting on my heels with my hands on my knees. More than anything, this has to be said in the correct way.

My gloves rest before me; I clasp my hands and the black curves of my fingernails align in a row.

I try to speak. A choking noise comes out. An entire reservoir of possible ways of speaking, of verbose speeches, rants, curses, strain against that dam. I try again:

“I would know the truth.”

The surface of the Hook becomes solid, then glassy, then reflective.

The bond within your blood is stronger still. For naught we promised we would grant your wish. Your will alone is what has chained this land, this country that is ruled just by your hand. The power lies in you and you alone, the stars cannot usurp the Fisher’s throne.

It reminds me who I am, who I am not. I can see it, dimly, behind the mirror. Its scaly bodies encircle the shadow of my face.

My kind are each unique as dreams. Trifles make us – a chess set, a stone washed smooth by the sea, a patch of mould.

Me, though. I was the feathers from the nest of the fisher-bird in its roost by the river, down and blood and shattered shell collected from the hollow where a fox had been.

My makers do not miss me more than a dog misses its fleas.

They are Echidna and Typhon, Titania and Oberon. They are Bestla, Bor, Prithvi, Dyaus – they are a thousand, thousand names. Those to whom I can be called progeny: those who can be called my parents.

I am a non-thing, a trading chip.

I was placed here as punishment. Not to punish me, of course, because that would put value on my suffering.  I was a weapon, a wound. The fairy-kind could no longer tolerate my father, and so they sent me.

He was almost my brother, the born prince. From a human womb he came, and into my claws. My palms are a red that will not wash away. It was the price I paid for the king’s blood in his veins.

Again and again, this fairy promised Pisces: grant a wish and the king before it would set it free.

But I am no king, no man. It is a role I assumed in serving, with perfect order, those who scarcely saw fit to name me. Wild and shimmering, I hide from myself no longer.

I was born twice from death. It is time to mend what was broken, even if they will not.

My hands plunge into the water with a hiss of magic discharging. The pain gouges me – still I pull. My fingers find the metal beneath and I rend, wreck, wrench. Metal grinds with a scream that pierces the calm of the Tower and still, still I pull until the Hook bursts and the wire strips back to cower on the walls, rippling and tangled.

Out Pisces falls, flips its tails, rolls its eyes. I stride to the window and put my foot through it. I cut my hands tearing out shards. A hole ─ my height and my arms' width─ greets me, stained at the edges with my blood. Growling with the effort, I haul Pisces over by its umbilicus.

Wind surges in to seize the prize long held from its grasp, snatching at my hair with a triumphant shrieking in the Tower’s hollow insides.

I throw Pisces through. It falls, glowing brighter, brighter. With a thunderclap, it shoots upward as a bright bolt of light. The meteor punches through the seething clouds into the darkness behind.

The Tower shudders and the window ripples with the shock. I step away from the window, eyeing the door to the thousands of stairs. I study the rain-lashed hills far below, squinting in the roaring wind.

I remember the shape of my wings. In one motion, I run to the window and leap to meet my domain as the Tower falls.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Renee Alcantara