Chapter Ten
Lilith
My apartment door clicks shut, and the silence is deafening.I don’t turn on the lights because I don’t want to see the familiar, boring reality of my living room.I don’t want to see the stacks of bills, the laundry, my candles, and magazines.Anything that’s part of the life of who I was hours ago.
Seventy-two hours.
The number sounds like a threatening thrum in my skull.I head straight for the kitchen and turn on the tap, filling a glass with cold water.I drink it in three long gulps, but it does nothing.It even tastes flat.I pour a second glass and splash it over my face, but the moisture barely lingers, leaving my skin feeling tight and itchy.What the fuck?Am I drying out like a… sea creature?
Cold blood rushes through my veins, and I put my head between my knees to keep a panic attack at bay.Breathe.Just breathe.In through the nose, out through the mouth.I count to ten, then twenty, then keep going until the spinning stops and my heartbeat feels normal again.
I refuse to spiral right now.What I’m going to do is what I always do when I don’t understand something: I’m going to research the hell out of it until I do.
I grab my laptop from the coffee table and curl up on the couch.I start typing: ‘The Undertow Tidecross Falls.’
Nothing except a local news article about a fishing boat that went missing in the seventies, a Yelp page for a different bar two towns over, and a community forum post about tidal flooding.I close all of it.
Then I Google Theron’s name.All it says is that the name originated in Greek mythology, but nothing about a kraken, a bar between worlds, or a bond that puts a countdown on a person’s life.
Pushing my hair back, I try again, typing “Man with tentacles” into the search bar.I get a lot of hits from DeviantArt.I would usually appreciate the art, honestly, but right now it makes my chest ache in a way I don’t have time for.
I try “Human-kraken hybrid” next, but all I find is fan fiction and Reddit threads debating the logistics of tentacle anatomy.As a last resort, I type in “Abyssal biology.”I’m hit with scientific papers so dense and dry that my eyes glaze over within two sentences.I slog through them anyway because I’m thorough, but it’s all wrong.The creatures in those papers are just animals.
I snap the laptop shut harder than necessary.
Think, Lilith.Think like the designer you are.When you’re building a new prototype modeled after a mysterious monster, you don’t look for it in the obvious places.You go to the weird corners of the internet where you find people who are too obsessed to be embarrassed about it.
I open the laptop again.The forums I’m thinking of aren’t hard to find if you know where to look.I’ve been lurking in them for years, long beforeMonstrous Designswas anything more than a sketchbook and a dream.They’re the places where people post blurry photographs of things that move in the dark or where someone from coastal Norway describes a pressure in the water that feels like being watched.Where threads run to three hundred pages because nobody can agree on what something was, but nobody can quite dismiss it either.The mainstream internet calls these people crazy.I’ve always called them kindred spirits.
I navigate to one of the oldest ones and type “The Veil” into the search bar.I get mythology threads and pagan forums.I’m treated to a long, heated debate about whether certain spots on the Irish coastline qualify as thin places.It’s interesting, but it’s not what I need.
I try “Tethers” and “Bonds with mate.”Then, after staring at the ceiling for a moment, “kraken mate human.”
That last one pulls up mostly erotica, which is cool, but not what I need right now.Buried in the results is a link to a sub-forum I’ve never visited.Deep Sightings: Encounters with the Abyssal.The thread count is low.The last post is from 2021.I click through while my heart skips a beat from anticipation.
Most of it is noise.Grainy sonar images, vague accounts of swimming and feeling something vast move beneath them.One genuinely unhinged post about a woman in the 1800s who apparently walked into the ocean and didn’t come back but left a letter describing something that loved her.I bookmark that one for later.
Then, just when I’m considering closing my laptop again, I find it.A thread from 2018.The username isAbyssal_Watcher,and the post is titled:The Physics of the Unseen.
Everyone talks about the Kraken as a beast that sinks ships, but they’re wrong.In old texts, like the ones museums won’t translate for some reason, these beings are described as the “Lords of the Weight.”They aren’t just flesh and bone; they are manifestations of the ocean’s pressure.This is why they can’t simply walk among us.Our world is too light.To them, our air is a vacuum.If they try to manifest here, they simply dissipate.Unless they have a reason to stay.It’s said that they can bridge two worlds if they find a reason to stay here.
I sit up straighter.Dozens of replies call the guy crazy, which to me is the usual noise of people who need the world to stay the shape they were handed.I skip past all of them and click the link at the bottom of the original post.It takes me to a scan of a page from a manuscript, yellowed and water-stained at the edges, the handwriting replaced with a typed transcription beneath it.The English is clunky and archaic, like it was translated badly from something even older.I zoom in until the words fill my screen.
To bridge the worlds, the Great Predator must find a Vessel.Not a slave, but an Anchor.A mate.By sharing the essence, the kraken marks the heart of a Sun-Dweller.This mark begins a change in the blood.For three days, the Anchor stands between the Sun and the Deep.Not every human can bear this weight.The Anchor must resonate with the Deep, must be able to hold pressure without breaking, must desire the dark rather than recoiling from it.If the bond is accepted, the Anchor’s soul becomes a weight, a gravity that allows the kraken to walk upon the shore without fading.The Anchor becomes the bridge.The two are no longer separate; they are a single circuit of life.They are bonded as mates.
I read it once.Then I read it again, slower, making myself absorb every word.I close my eyes and read it a third time from memory because I already know it.Not because I’ve seen it before, but because something deep and wordless in my body recognizes it the way you recognize a song you haven’t heard since childhood.The melody was always there.You just needed someone to play it.
An anchor.A single circuit of life.Bonded as mates.
I set the laptop aside and look at my hands.The faint blue light tracing the veins on my wrists is still there.It’s subtle enough that you’d miss it, though.I’ve been trying not to look at it since I got home, treating it like something shameful, like a symptom of a horrible, inevitable infection.But now I tilt my hands under the glow of my screen and actually look at them.It’s beautiful.The light looks alive, moving like bioluminescence in deep water.
I think about the first fantasy toy I ever designed.Not the polished version I eventually sold, but the rough sketch I drew at two in the morning at my kitchen table.I drew tentacles.I drew the curve of suckers along their length and the way they’d taper to a delicate point.I drew them from instinct, from some ache in my chest that I didn’t know how to explain except to put it on paper.
I think about every design after that.The bioluminescent patterns I kept coming back to, the specific blue-black coloring I chose for the kraken line, the way I obsessed over the texture of deep-sea skin.I wasn’t designing toys.I was drawinghim.Theron.Over and over and over again, in every iteration I could imagine, getting a little closer each time, like a cartographer mapping a coastline they’ve never seen but somehow know is there.I was preparing my hands and my eyes and my understanding for the reality of what he is.I was reaching out into the dark, and the dark was reaching back, and we’ve been moving toward each other for years.Just like he told me.
He didn’t choose a victim.He didn’t stumble across a convenient human and decide to claim her so he could bridge the world from the ocean to the land.He felt me, specifically me, and he waited until I was ready.
I was already his anchor before I ever walked into that bar.The fear that’s been sitting in my gut since I fled his room hasn’t disappeared, but it’s smaller now, and the thing growing around it is bigger.It feels like recognizing yourself in a mirror you’ve never seen before.It feels likeoh.There I am.
