I was a weightless thing in a world that was always changing. Always shifting out of alignment. None of it made sense, but I was beginning to accept that that was just the state of things. It was all pieces strewn together in no particular order and our madness came from trying to make sense of it. I was just one piece. A small one at that.
I floated in an endless ocean staring up at a sky littered with stars but no moon. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been drifting. I found it calming. Even as a child, I enjoyed letting the current take me, but always, my mother warned me of the surface. They all did. Monsters sailed upon the water in giant structures made of wood, harpoons and blades ready to rend and destroy us. All they were good for was dying.
I began to hum again. I’d been doing it for hours, over and over singing words my mother had lulled me to sleep with.
Our scales are stained with crimson red,
The hunters track us 'cross the sea,
They'll slice us down and leave us dead,
No mercy in their savagery.
Heave ho, beware the siren's cry,
Where blood and waves together churn,
Our voices echo terror's sigh,
As pirate blades begin to burn.
Our voices break like shattered light,
Where sailors' bones forever sleep
Our rage against their brutal fight
Will crash like waves both dark and deep,
Heave ho, beware the siren's cry,
Where blood and waves together churn,
Our voices echo terror's sigh,
As pirate blades begin to burn.
Our waters where such horrors creep
With vengeance in our melody,
Their cannons primed to rend and reap
The singers of the cruel, cold sea.
I beat my tail gently in the water, letting it push me wherever I might go. I was so alone in that place. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been anything but alone. I could see faces when I closed my eyes, but they were blurred, distorted versions of themselves. Ghosts.
Perhaps that place was my afterlife and solitude was all I had. Silent, cold solitude.
I did not mind it. I kept searching for something to grip onto. A memory. A figure. A desire. There was nothing.
And there was a certain contentment in having nothing. Nothing to gain. Nothing to lose.
I began to hum the song over again, letting the gentle undulation of the waves steal away my worries, whatever they might have been before I was in that place. I could have stayed there forever, counting each little glowing flicker in the black sky. Perhaps when I was done counting them, I would name them.
But then the blackness began to stir, to twist and bloom like ink bleeding into milk. A sickly green seeped through the dark, staining my beautiful sky with its unholy glow. I blinked myself from the dream’s soft hold, rising to see what hand had marred the heavens. Turning slowly, I searched the horizon and there it was, the source of that dreadful light. It lingered, still and spectral, casting its pall over the sea. Through the shroud of green mist, I saw it take form. A vast and solemn silhouette, a jagged crown of stone and shadow rising from the ocean’s depths, clawing at the trembling sky.
Everything in me told me not to go toward it, but for some unfathomable reason, I did. I ducked under the water and I began to swim toward the strange mist. I thought I might have to resurface when I reached it, but as I approached, I found that what stretched beyond the water’s surface was but a fraction of the monolithic structures. Below the surface, a city lay in ruins against black, volcanic stone as sharp as knives. Gateways crumbled. Statues lay in pieces. Towers looked half-eaten by time and disaster.
