Sea

"What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."

The depths of the ocean were quiet. Not silent, to be sure, but Sea was always quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of noise on the few occasions that he’d deigned to come to the surface. Down here, the only noise was the movement of water past his body, the darting and schooling of fish around him, the rush of his own heartbeat in his ears.

Down here, he was alone, and he liked it that way.

He’d never had a family. He remembered vague impressions of another like him when he was young that taught him to swim, to hunt, to speak. They were not his mother or father or sibling, and they left once they were sure that he had sufficient skills to survive, if not thrive, on his own.

Sometimes, a cold, weighted fist wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed, stealing the breath from his lungs and drawing water from his eyes that immediately melted into the surrounding currents. It was easy to deny their existence when he was deep under, where the evidence of his weakness was swept away as soon as it was created, but he could feel them all the same. He refused to acknowledge this sense of crushing loneliness for what it was.

One year, the fish were not as plentiful or as slow as they had been in the years before, neither lulled into a false sense of security by their abundant numbers or made careless by overfeeding as they usually were. Sea caught what he could, and subsisted on that for quite some time. But eventually, his stomach twisted painfully in ways that it had not since he was merely a hatchling, before the stranger. He was unable to deny the truth any longer: he would have to leave, one way or another.

He knew of no way to find others like him. Creatures of the deep were, he assumed, likely solitary by nature. After all, he’d never had someone come looking for him. He could move on into deeper or warmer waters and hope for more luck, but he had no way of knowing whether he would find food in other currents before he starved to death.

Or… he could go to the surface. He knew from the brief moments that he’d been curious enough to come ashore that there was food everywhere on land; more than enough to feed him. However, he wouldn’t know where to go, and he’d almost certainly encounter other creatures. It seemed his only option, but one that he was not particularly thrilled about.

Resigned to his fate, he propelled himself slowly towards shore with his teeth gritted. I can always go back into the ocean if I change my mind, he reminded himself grimly. A thrill of anticipation raced down his spine even as his stomach twisted with more than just hunger as the water became shallower and shallower. He paused at the very edge, where the water abruptly gave way to a sharp outcropping of rock.

He stretched up and hooked his claws on the edge of the rock, his now-exposed skin prickling cooly in the emptiness of air. He shivered distantly and took a deep breath. Whatever happened next, he would survive.