One night, a summer sun didn’t set over the lake, but fell right into its waters. Or, at least, that’s how the Sentinel saw it. The Sentinel, before they were called that name, had caught a riveting breeze in their wings as they had skated the glassy ripples flexing against the lake’s shore. They had attempted to coax one more lap from around its circumference before the day was up, their brown spotted wings spread across a buttery sky. That’s when the sunset drew their regard like water is drawn from a well. In those days, time hadn’t yet harrowed into their young, hatchling eyes, but the sun tugged something deep from their pooled pupils as it fell from the sky, gently. The Sentinel landed at the shore, head tilted. The orange limbs of the sun’s feathered rays caressed the surface of the lake. The Sentinel opened their beak silently, watching. The sun fell into the water, but it didn’t disappear into the horizon as it was supposed to. Beneath the lake’s waves, a flickering, staccato splotch of brightness that had to have once been the sun sank.

The Sentinel wondered if this sun would ever rise again. It did. It wasn’t the same; it was smaller, denser, the limbs of its light shorter. It hurtled from the point where the sun had set to where the Sentinel perched at the shore, silent and songless. They ogled the drop of sun, because now it had fins. It had dark, papery eyes. It caught the hesitant, fading light of sunset in numerous refracting facets along its undulating body. The sun had, inexplicably, become a fish. They both blinked at each other. The fish's eyes glowed as he stared, as if they were painted glass with the sun behind them. The Sentinel had never seen anything more beautiful than this little sun. The fish appeared quite dazed himself. His long, creasing tail flicked with wonder and something settled within his eyes that the Sentinel couldn’t name.

“Who are you?” the Sentinel asked the Sunfish.

The fish blinked. He then parted his mouth around a bubble that proceeded to rise toward the Sentinel, and the Sentinel bent down towards the Sunfish. But before the bubble between them could reach the mantle of the lake’s surface, a song pierced the evening air.

It was a whistling song that the Sentinel had never heard before, but they recognized it intuitively. They lunged upwards with a beat of their wings and caught the lance in their chest that had aimed for the drop of amber sun. The Sunfish’s bubble opened the skin of the water: a gentle wound. The lance nested between the Sentinel’s feathers.

Words, still dripping, rose from the lake in the Sunfish’s voice. A finger of the Sentinel’s blood extended down their chest. It gestured down towards the Sunfish as the Sentinel fell into the lake’s shallows like a sigh. The blood tickled the Sunfish’s mouth as he twitched toward the fallen bird and listened to his own voice, muffled by the convergence of lake and air. He laid his head against the Sentinel, and opened his mouth, repeating the secret he’d given.

The Sentinel’s blood processed past the Sunfish’s open lips.

The Sunfish’s secret stilled the air and water above them both one more time, but it wasn’t true enough yet to bind the two.

“I'm yours.”