Chapter Text
The current shifts.
It is not the jagged rush that heralds predators, nor the distant tremor of storms. This current is softer, deliberate and familiar in the way it moves. He presses himself deeper into the cold stone of the trench, listening to the drum of water above, and waits.
A shape approaches through the dark: long, steady and heavy with weight.
“Still alive down here, I see.”
The words reach him not as sound but as vibration, fine pulses along the current, shaped by tone and memory. Its resonance ripples through the water, threaded with warmth that doesn’t belong in the deep.
Enon drifts into view, silver scars catching faint light, pale green tail with golden shimmers cutting through the gloom with weary elegance. His grey hair drifts like silk, golden eyes sharp as ever, and the pressure of his presence bends the current itself—an old tide that refuses to fade.
Yuder stirs, turning his face toward the shimmer. His answer ripples outward, quiet and unbothered. “You sound disappointed.”
Enon scoffs, his clicks sharp in the water. “If I were disappointed, I wouldn’t keep swimming down here.” His gaze flicks over Yuder, assessing, sharp. “You’re thinner. Don’t tell me you’ve been feeding on currents again.”
Yuder doesn’t reply, but the corner of his mouth twitches. Enon visits occasionally and he’s always the same—arriving to scold, to talk, to heal, but most importantly; to make sure Yuder hasn’t been swallowed entirely into the deep.
Enon exhales, air that disturbs the silence more than he means it to. “Tch. Burying yourself in the dark and calling it living.” His trills holds a chiding rhythm, but underneath is always something warmer.
Yuder of course, doesn’t answer. He doesn’t really bother to. Enon already knows.
The deep holds him in ways the bright reefs never could. He does not need to explain that the ocean is in him. He feels it. It is not control over the ocean so much as it is the feeling of a living map: currents like veins, whalesong like weather on his bones, the faint upset of a predator’s interest passing leagues away. The sea presses stories into him and he learns to read them by the way the water settles. “Melach used to say you’d inherit the borders, that it would bring you pride—it would sustain you he insisted,” Enon waves he hand, “but he failed to realize how that confines you in return.” He adds, eyes softening.
That name pulls something in Yuder’s chest. Melach.
His grandfather.
He doesn’t reply, only lets the water fill the silence where an answer should be.
Melach’s voice still lives in his memory, always threaded with that patient tide-tone.
Listen better, boy. The sea hums the truth long before we do.
He hadn’t understood then. Now he listens because he cannot stop. The hum of the trench, the whales miles above and below, he hears them all. The songs rise and fade like ghosts through his bones.
Yuder had been young when his grandfather passed; old enough to remember the slow stilling of his heart, the way the sea went quiet for days afterward. Melach had been the trench’s keeper, its guide.
Even after the passing of many tides, he still sometimes feels the old mer nearby, trailing behind Enon’s visits: a shadow in the rock, a vibration shaped like a voice he will never hear again.
He remembers that old mer’s steady eyes, the callused hands that taught him to read the sea’s rhythm—the hum in the stone, the pulse in the water. His grandfather had been called the Listener of the Deep. He spoke to the divine whales, knew their songs by heart. And on his last breath, he told Yuder one truth he always holds deep in his heart:
When the sea grows too bright, seek the dark. The deep keeps what matters.
Enon stays long enough to press a presence into the usual silence, then he moves away with the same impatient tenderness he always showed. “I’ll be back. Don’t let the dark swallow you whole.”
Yuder closes his eyes and waits until his familiar hum fades.
---
Yuder rises.
He moves upward, long hair streaming down his face as black as squid ink, his black tail flashing violet where the light catches as he ascends. The ocean wraps around him—not weight, but belonging.
He swims, listens and the sea answers.
A slow roll of whale-song ripples through the deep, a sound that only Melach could translate. Yuder closes his eyes, feeling it vibrate through his chest. He doesn’t know the words, not really, but he understands enough: shifts beyond the trenches. A change in tide.
The sea always speaks before it moves.
When the water stills, Yuder moves upwards, rising from the trench. This sea always presses close, heavy but not suffocating. He knows its weight, its breath, its pulse. He belongs to it as much as it belongs to him.
His patrol calls.
He glides through forests of coral bone, past eels knotted in their dens, over ridges where forgotten shells lie half-buried in dark silt.
And finally—light.
Emerging into the border of the outer reefs, the sounds start striking along its heat.
Though the water here is bright and restless, it’s not as bright as the shallows up north. Coral towers rise in colors: red, gold and fractured blue. Schools dart like shards of glass and laughing currents brush his skin. The world hums too loudly here, too fast.
Yuder stills at the edge, squinting his eyes. The noise and the light grates against his eyes. He always needed a minute to adjust.
While moving along the border, Melach’s clicks drift through him again.
The surface reefs glitter for show Yuder, their songs are hollow. The truth of the sea always lies where the light ends.
Now after many tides and many patrols. He understands what his grandfather really meant. These shallow reefs are beautiful, yes—but they’re also fragile, desperate to prove their life.
He moves along the canyon’s lip, the water thick with light his eyes would never get used to. The patrol is quiet work; he does not expect company.
In the distance, into the surface reef’s borders—a colony of mers’ live, life hums louder there, brighter. He can taste their noise even from here; mer chatter, color, the constant collision of movement. Too much. Those waters have always unsettled him.
Yuder dislikes the surface reefs because it shapes the world into unpleasant taste, noise and danger. It churns the water until it leaves wounds in his scales. These outer reefs are the thin skin between that madness and the deep he stays in.
Twice a day he moves along the outer reefs border: through caverns where light dies early, along ridges where anemones anchor like small flags, scanning the channels for anything that does not belong.
He does not bend the sea but rather listens to it, feeling the current’s mood like the pulses he feels inside his veins. When the water sours or when fish scatter too soon, he knows something’s off. If the sea goes quiet in the wrong way, he follows the silence to its origin, spearing or clawing when predators press too close.
For those fights Enon brings him herbs; binds him up with kelp poultices. Enon’s care is practical: a salve here, a grounding herb there, and an ungrudging hand that knows how to stitch flesh when scales are torn. Enon is the sort who will scold and then press a tray of remedy into his hands without waiting for thanks.
And so, he patrols, as he always does.
The surface mers like to call him the trench’s shadow or occasionally the outers keeper, though few have seen him close enough to know his truth. Some fear him. Others trust the quiet wake he leaves behind. After all, he’s not the only deep-end mer that exists, his grandfather told him that, but he’s never met another like him. Only faint vibrations sometimes answer from far, far below, distant as memory.
Yuder moves through the reef with effortless ease and a familiar rhythm.
His webbed fingers brush against familiar stones, reading the echoes of currents, the subtle signatures of life. Schools of fish scatter at the edge of his awareness, sensing him as both their predator and their protector. Even plankton has its rhythm, pulses that add layers to the deep’s song. Every creature, from the tiniest shrimp to the far-off whales whose songs press faintly against his bones that in turn shudders in reverence, belongs to this ocean that hums like a living organ.
The sea carries everything, and Yuder always listens.
---
A faint tremor rolls along the current as a shark moves along the canyon, its eyes glinting in the haze. It doesn’t attack or flee. It acknowledges him, slow and deliberate. This shark knows Yuder is a predator unlike any other, but there is no fear, only recognition.
He allows it to glide past, a silent partnership of two apex presences navigating these waters.
Ahead, farther along the border, something lighter stirs. Dolphins.
Clever, cunning and elusive. Yuder senses them before they reach him, their clicks flickering like sparks in the water. They twist around the coral like they are testing him, small challenges in their play, with glinting eyes alert to every shift of current. They dart, circle back, laugh with clicks that ricochet through the water, daring him—but always just beyond reach, clever enough to know the limits of his patience.
Yuder doesn’t chase. He studies, noting patterns and rhythm, feeling their cunning beneath the playful veneer.
He decides to pass them, their clicks and squeals drifting behind him. If they’re here to play, Yuder’s going to ignore them for the time being.
As he drifts the borders, he senses something above, in the faint distance, heavy with a dull rhythm, the scrape of its long body cutting water. He can feel it even through the weight of the sea, an alien sound that doesn’t belong to these tides.
Yuder doesn’t only patrol the outer waters to defend against invading predators, but also to warn the surface mers about the bodies that float above.
Surface dwellers.
Creatures above who seem infected with the fear of silence.
Their aggravating noise reaches Yuder even here, a low, grinding pulse that makes the currents taste of iron. They drag their hollow shells across the upper waters, leaving long scars of sound behind them. He feels them occasionally during his patrol, the way the sea flinches when they pass.
They never come towards these coral reefs, only circle the open shallows beyond. Still, the sea remembers their shape, the same way wounds remember pain.
He has never seen one with his own eyes. He cannot. The sunlight above the sea would blind him. But he remembers what his grandfather showed him long ago, when he was still small enough and quite clingy to the old mer.
He had been a very curious child.
Once, Melach had taken him upward to show him, beyond the reefs, to where the water thinned and light cut sharp as bone. They had risen higher than Yuder had ever allowed himself to go. The light there was unbearable, burning and wrong. And through squinted eyelids, Yuder saw the dwellers.
They were shaped almost like mers, but unfinished. Their tiny bodies were wrapped in thin skin and they moved like wounded fish, jerking and slow. Some carried strange tools and others a net. Each movement was heavy and wrong, as if the sea rejected them.
He had been fascinated: their fragility, their way of floating like debris. His grandfather had watched them in silence before turning towards Yuder. “They belong to the air,” he clicked. “They take and never hear what the water says back.”
And as one drifted close enough to them, for Yuder to sense its pulse—there was none. It was just a dull, mechanical thrum.
Ba-dum…Ba-dum.
Dead rhythm, filled with emptiness.
“Look”, his grandfather pointed.
He’d watched, as the surface dwellers didn’t glide, but flailed. They stumbled in the water, yet their intent was clear. One turned its tool and loosed a thunderous crack into a school of fish. The flash split the water. Silver bodies fluttered apart like torn kelp and bubbles rose. They didn’t listen to the currents, did not sense the paths of their prey. They took blindly, carelessly, leaving ripples that will echo long after they leave.
Yuder had thought them predators then. Cruel, but beautiful in their own way.
Melach’s clicks had been low beside him, “Not predators, they do not hunt for hunger. Watch closely, Yuder. Those tools aren’t something you make to hunt food. This is for pleasure.”
Yuder had watched them from below, hidden behind coral walls, feeling vibrations of the panic and chaos of fish scattered in tight spirals.
His grandfather’s warning clicks were soft but sharp, “Never trust what does not feel the sea. These surface dwellers do not understand the dark. Listen Yuder, if you ever happen upon them, always—and I mean always, run.”
That night, when they descended again into the dark, unease grew in Yuder’s heart. Those surface dwellers do not belong in the sea; they are noise and intrusion, predators in the wrong place.
A thought lingered his mind then, hot and bright as that sunlight in the water: the mer reefs are fragile to those tools, we can’t leave them unprotected.
Yuder, after his grandfathers passing, clung to that thought with everything he had, body trembling with something he didn’t yet understand.
And now, when the distant vibrations of the dwellers craft reach him, that old unease stirs again. Curiosity has long since soured into dread.
Yuder watches from below as one passes overhead, near the outer reefs’ borders, a long shadow against the sunlit ceiling. He feels the churn of its body, the rhythmic pounding that masks the sea’s natural hum.
They’re closer than they have ever been.
Yuder turns away. He needs to inform Enon.
---
Yuder swims deeper into the reef where he knows the other patrol mers are usually stationed, sea meets sunlight here more than the outer reefs and it strains his eyes. He feels more than he sees his path. It felt clean—until another shift catches. A ripple of presence, soft but sure.
Copper light flickers ahead—Ever.
She emerges from the coral bloom, eyes sharp as reef glass, long brown hair drifting along her back. She is a patrol mer who works near the outer reefs—the mer reefs second borders, and she holds the habit of command in the set of her shoulders. Her pulse in the water is measured, careful.
“You’re far from your borders.” she clicks, a ripple of thought pressed into the current.
“So are you.” He clicks back.
Her tail flashes orange as she glides closer, her eyes hard. The current carries her worry even before she shapes it.
Yuder’s answering wave is steady. “Patrol. The reefs have been restless recently and it seems like the surface dwellers are closer than usual today. I came to warn.”
“So I’ve felt. Thank you, I'll inform Enon for you.” Her current hesitates, curls once. “I’m looking for someone, Nipollen. Wandered too far again.”
The name hums familiar against his ribs. “Your mate’s kin.”
She nods once, her fin trembling with contained impatience. “Elle’s worried. He won’t admit it, but—” she exhales, a short, choked trill—“he hasn’t slept.”
Elle. Purelle.
The name stirs memory like sand disturbed from stone. A flash—long ago, of a bright young mer crossing through the border currents alongside Ever. Hair bright like coral, eyes like sunlight caught in shallow water. He’d been too curious for his own good, too bold to be a patrol guard. He had smiled at Yuder once, even when the dark pressed in around them, and called him Deep One, with something like awe instead of fear.
Yuder remembers the strange warmth that word carried, the soft rhythm of Pruelle’s trill blending with the pulse of the sea.
“You know how Nippy is. He listens to things that aren’t there. At least, not for the rest of us. You’d think the deep had stolen his heart.”
Yuder almost smiles. His golden eye catches a slow flare of light. “Maybe he hears what’s meant for him.”
Ever’s water shivers faintly—approval, “If you find him, bring him back. The sea is not kind to wanderers.”
Yuder’s return is calm. “He circles near the trench,” he clicks. “He is drawn to the dark. I will bring him back at dawn.”
Her pulse softens; gratitude carried like warmth through the current. “Melach would’ve been proud of you, you know. You keep his borders clean. The reefs still breathe because of you.”
Yuder doesn’t answer. He only dips his head once. She turns, fading into the coral shimmer, her light swallowed by distance.
When the sea falls quiet again, Yuder moves back to descend. The surface colors fade behind him, replaced by the slow pulse of the deep. The trench greets him; familiar, dark and alive.
And there, at the edge of the rocks, something waits.
A soft hum.
He feels a disturbance, soft but irregular, coming from the lower ridges. Not a predator. Too small. The vibrations circle hesitantly.
He knows it before he sees it.
A small shape drifts near his nest, golden-red hair spreading like seaweed in the current.
Nipollen.
The child’s pulse quivers, faint but bright. The kid doesn’t click, but Yuder feels the greeting trill resonate in the water, like a soft chord against his chest.
The child pauses, tiny form half-lit by the glow of drifting plankton. Tail trembling, flicking twice, and curling in on itself. The gesture is familiar now.
Yuder exhales through his nose, watching quietly. Of course the kid found their way to his nest. The deep seems to draw them in, the same way it draws Yuder.
The child inches closer until their head brushes against Yuder’s arm, a tentative greeting that sends a faint pulse of vibration through the water.
“You wander far,” Yuder clicks, tone soft enough to blend with the current. “Too far again. Your family worries.”
The child tilts their head. Their eyes are strange, translucent red, shimmering with all the light the deep never sees. The child doesn’t click back; never does. Instead, they hum—a low resonance that vibrates faintly against Yuder’s ribs, curious and soft.
Yuder answers a hum without words, a subtle shift in his own current, steady and reassuring. The child understands, drifts closer, curling at his side as if the gesture were ancient instinct.
They both enter his nest, the trench breathing around them.
His nest is small, carved deep into the trench wall where no broad-jawed thing can wedge a nose. Shelves of hard stone have been smoothed by his own hands and the current keeps their contents washed and honest: bundles of dried herbs Melach taught him to forage, a broken spear hafted with shark bone, shells scratched with the old man’s records—the rise and fall of whale songs, the way a certain low keening meant migration for a shoal, how some pattern warned of approaching surface dwellers that made the water taste acrid, and another script unfinished; completely unknown, now that he’s gone.
Yuder’s hair floats across the stone, around them he has necklaces hung with threaded off-beat things: a sliver of glass from the reefs that caught light in a strange way, unusual shells and scales gifted by Enon, pearls Nipollen presses into his hand whenever Enon visits with them. They are his anchors. He fingers them in the dark the way others finger rosaries, tracing small, private rituals.
Nipollen’s eyes follow them, tracing the old markings carved into the walls.
They reach out, touching one of the shells. A soft chime passes through it, the same tone that echoes faintly through the whales’ distant songs. Yuder’s chest tightens.
“That one,” he clicks, more to himself than to the child, “ my grandfather said it was the sound the sea makes when it dreams.”
Nipollen tilts their head again, curious. Tail flicking against Yuder’s wrist—small, wordless wonder.
Yuder watches for a long while, the child’s presence soft and steady. It’s strange, he feels the same quiet around them that he used to feel with Melach. The same sharp awareness of currents, the same ability to listen to things most ignore. Nipollen feels the sea the same way Yuder does.
Perhaps that’s why Enon brought this child to him.
This same quiet grace had marked their first meeting. Enon had brought the child to him long ago, shaking his head with reluctant fondness. “This is Nipollen, the youngest of the Tains,” he clicked. “Strange little thing. Hears things. Too much, sometimes. Reminds me of you.”
Yuder had not wanted an intrusion, yet when the child—small and restless—nuzzled the side of his arm, the action was a small, unspoken claim and Yuder found himself answering in the only way that ever mattered: touch, the smoothing of hair, the steadying of a palm across a fin. Nipollen’s jittery tail calmed under that contact as if tuned by it.
Nipollen did not chatter; their attention moved like a creature tracking scent. They liked to be petted. Liked the quiet. Liked the trench. Yuder observed and felt rather than named the things that made the kid odd—ways of blinking and curling, of rubbing their cheek along Yuder’s forearm when comfort was needed.
From the moment Nipollen’s pulse brushed his own, Yuder had recognized the resonance; the same attunement to the sea’s hum that lived in him. The silence between them had never been empty; it vibrated with meaning.
That day, when they both left, Yuder had found a small pearl lying among the stones near his nest. Dull, but warm. Nipollen’s first gift. He had strung it into the necklace that never left his throat—an old strand of whale bone and worn shells. His grandfather’s before him.
When the sea grows too quiet, listen through these my boy. They’ll remind you of where you belong.
Now, as Nipollen drifts closer, that same necklace hums faintly, the pearl pulsing warm against his skin.
Yuder lifts a webbed hand, brushing the child’s hair, the fine ridges of their small fins. Nipollen stills, the restless flicks of their tail softening into calm. Their pulses align.
“You’ll stay in the trench tonight,” Yuder informs. “The reefs above are noisy today, I’ll bring you back to your kin tomorrow.”
Nipollen tilts their head, unreadable, but their tail curls once in quiet assent. They settle beside Yuder, pressing their small frame against him. The child puts a small warm pearl in his palm and nudges against the necklace at Yuder’s throat. The pearl is small and honest; Yuder takes it off and threads it between. The child likes to give things; it’s how they speak.
He touches his necklace and remembers Melach’s trills again, from when he was small: Each bone marks the turning of the sea. There is no end, only the deep breathing in and out. You’ll understand when you’re alone long enough to hear it.
He understands now. The sea speaks in circles. Every vibration, every song, every encounter returns.
It’s eternal.
When Nipollen sleeps, curled faint and fragile in the nest, Yuder lets his thoughts wander. His grandfathers’ teachings a memory.
Whales carry the sea’s memory Yuder. That’s why they’re divine.Their songs remember storms and peace, losses and passages. Once you learn the tones and the seams between them, you will never be lost.
Yuder had been a poor pupil once—impatient, wanting to move faster than any lesson allowed—but the lines remain on shell and bone, and in the long empty hours they ache into meaning.
Nipollen’s small hums as he dreams sometimes mimic the low keening of whales, a fragment that pricks Yuder like a distant bell.
Alone, the nest is loud with long gone ghosts: the scrape of Melach’s tool marks along a slab, the faint dust of coral where he stored herbs, kelp that smells like someone’s laugh. Yuder presses a palm to the carved shell Nipollen touched, feels the grooves like a heartbeat.
For now, the trench holds him. For now, the necklace rests heavy and sweet, threaded with the small kindness of another—Nipollen’s pearls—and it grows. Each pearl is a quiet promise: that he can keep something, that the dark is not all taking.
The reefs need someone to hear them, to be the sentinel who knows the mood of currents and the language of whales. He will be that sentinel for as long as he can.
At the edge of sleep, with Nipollen’s warm, small form pressed into his forearm, Yuder lets the old lessons fold over his mind.
And somewhere, far beyond the reefs, the whales make a long, low note that threads the night. It is only a fragment, a mood and not a sentence, the sound rolling through the stone and into Yuder’s bones.
He closes his eyes as the necklace thrums faintly against his chest, answering.
---
A slow tilt of current.
Faint, but Yuder wakes to it.
Dawn, to the deep, is not sunrise but temperature. The water warms by a whisper, the currents draw outward, and the sea’s breath change direction.
He feels it on his skin first, a subtle loosening of pressure. Morning.
Nipollen still sleeps curled against his side, their tail flicking in small, unformed dreams. He rises, careful not to stir them at first, and stretches, each fin unfurling with a slow ripple. The trench hums softly beneath him, as if aware he is about to leave.
He clicks low—a vibration that brushes against Nipollen’s pulse.
The child stirs, eyes brightening in the dim water.
“It’s time,” Yuder murmurs through the current. “Wake up.”
Nipollen stretches, a small flutter of fins and pulse, then curls close to Yuder as they swim outside the nest.
They rise together.
The path upward coils through cold and quiet. Yuder leads with slow precision, brushing his fingers against the trench walls to read the sea’s mood.
It is… unsettled.
The current shivers against his palm, restless. The rhythm isn’t right. He feels it before he can name it: a disturbance near the border.
When they breach the upper lip of the trench, the water changes. Brighter, lighter—but wrong.
Currents pulse in broken patterns, as if something foreign has sliced through them.
Nipollen tilts their head, uneasy. Their hum trembles through the water, soft with question.
“Stay close,” Yuder clicks. His tone carries a weight Nipollen understands.
They move together through the coral forests, weaving between towers of red and bone-white. The reef should be alive with darting fish and the distant laughter of currents—but everything is hushed.
This silence is abnormal.
And then Yuder feels it.
A slow, grinding rhythm above, too steady to belong to the sea. Heavy, deliberate. It scrapes through the water, dragging bubbles in its wake.
He knows that sound.
Surface dwellers.
But this time, their pulse is closer than yesterday—too close.
His tail stiffens. The taste of iron edges the water.
He turns sharply, reaching for Nipollen, urging them closer as they press through narrow coral spires. The trench’s calm song is far behind them now. Here, the water trembles.
Then—shadows.
Not the shape of sharks or the dart of dolphins. Slower. Wrong.
Figures move above them, wrapped in ink skin. Their limbs are thick, their motions clumsy and mechanical, strange fins on their feet. Something coils from their backs, bubbling with each motion, sound too loud. Their faces are hidden behind dark, round shells.
They swim like drowned things forced to move.
Yuder freezes. His first thought is of Melach, the way his grandfather’s voice had carried through the current all those tides ago.
Never trust what does not feel the sea.
One of the dwellers releases a trail of bubbles as it turns. Another holds a strange shaped tool, long and black, ending in something sharp. Nets drift behind them, they seem to be searching for something to hunt.
As one points with an unwebbed finger at a fish swimming near their hiding place—a kind Yuder doesn’t see often, the other one seems to shrug its shoulders, a stream of bubbles leaving the place where its mouth should be.
That must be how they communicate, Yuder thinks.
Yuder’s pulse pounds in the water. He flicks his tail once, signaling Nipollen.
Get down. Hide.
But the child’s hum trembles loud—fear spilling through the current like blood and the nearest dweller jerks towards their direction, its tool flashing.
The water shatters.
Yuder surges forward, grabbing Nipollen, spinning them into the shadow of the coral. Their bodies cut fast through the reef—zigzagging between columns, stone, and shell, the only paths he’s ever known better than his own veins. The dwellers follow, slow but relentless, bubbles booming around them.
Nipollen’s pulse stutters, panicked. Yuder presses his tail against theirs, firm, guiding. Move with me.
They twist through narrow arches where the dwellers cannot follow, ducking under coral ridges, scraping fins against stone. The sea is their ally—but even it trembles. The currents are too fractured, too loud.
He feels the shift a heartbeat before it happens.
The water pulls unnaturally to the left, a small vacuum—a trap.
Something sharp, thin, iron-like catches his awareness.
“Down!” he clicks, shoving Nipollen hard. The child tumbles away just as a net erupts through the water, unfurling like a silver storm.
It wraps around him—tight, biting through scales. The world flashes white with the force of impact, the net immediately dragging him upward with impossible strength. He twists, claws raking at the threads. They’re too strong to cut with his claws.
Nipollen’s distant pulse trembles through the chaos, small and desperate.
“Go!” Yuder sends through the current, his trill burning with command. Go to Enon. Please.
The dwellers’ strange tools glint as they pull the ropes tighter. The surface’s noise floods the water; crackling, churning, smothering all song.
Yuder thrashes once, twice—his tail striking hard enough to break coral. But the net holds, metallic and unyielding, dragging him upward into the bright, poisonous light he has feared all his life.
His last thought before they tear him from the deep is not of himself, but of the child’s pulse disappearing into the dark—small and fast and alive.
---
The sea screams.
Not sound—movement. The water convulses as he’s torn from it, currents fracturing in violent spirals. The net yanks upward, slicing through layers of pressure his body was never meant to breach so fast. Every part of him aches with the wrongness of ascent. The deep pulls at him, trying to hold on; it does not want to let him go.
Yuders gills flare open, gasping, straining for the weight that is no longer there. The higher he rises, the thinner pressure becomes. Water thins and light burns his irises.
He fights. His tail lashes, black scales flashing violet in the streaking light, but the threads only seem to tighten around him.
The water continues to grow hotter, brighter. He can feel the sun now—fire pressing against his tightly closed eyes.
His chest convulses. His gills fold, choking from light.
He breaks the surface.
And air hits his body like knives.
The world is too big—open, blinding, screaming with noise. The pressure that always cradled him vanishes, and his body panics.
His skin burns, the water sliding off him feels wrong, empty.
He gasps, but there is nothing to breathe. His gills open, ache, close. Panic claws at his chest as the world becomes blinding, loud, wrong.
Unwebbed hands close around the net. The dwellers haul him from the water with grunts and short, sharp throat noises that don’t belong anywhere in the sea. He feels the net bite against his chest, scales tearing loose on his tail—his own weight pulling him apart.
Then—impact. Hard, flat, dry.
Air burns into every wound. His body convulses, instinct driving him to twist, to find water. But there is none. Only the foreign heat of the light and the cold bite of iron beneath him. His fins slap uselessly, slick and heavy with air. He’s choking, dry-mouthed, each sound he makes scraping out of his throat instead of through current.
—Got it—!
—Hold tight, damn it—it's big!
—Careful—don’t let it cut loose—!
The syllables are meaningless but their tone—it is like iron striking coral, jagged and cold.
He opens his eyes for a heartbeat and regrets it instantly.
The light is unbearable, a flood of white and sky that sears through his vision. The figures around him are shadows framed in flame. Their skins glisten as they grip the ropes that bind him.
He thrashes once more and their throat sounds increase. More of them reach to bind him.
The net drags him over the side of their floating shell, its belly groaning like a dying whale. The moment his body left the sea, everything in him began to die.
His skin dried almost instantly, scales cracking along the seams. His gills close and pulse weakly. His tail slaps against the deck with a hollow thud, and the surface dwellers recoil at the sound.
Water drained away, leaves him gasping. Every movement hurts.
He tries to find the sea again, any trace of pulse—but it’s distant now, a faint whisper below the chaos. His necklace clinks faintly, the pearls trembling, as if trying to answer a call too far away.
Those unwebbed hands reach close and he feels the air tremble with their voices.
—Look at the tail—Jesus—
—What type of breed is this?—
—Get it in the tank, before—
He thrashes again, desperate. His claws tear through something, and a cry cuts the air.
Someone’s hand strikes the side of his neck—pain, something sharp and searing entering through his neck. His body locks. The world wavers. Yuder gasps once, body shaking. His tail curls in on itself, reflexive. His gills open and close, searching for a world that’s already fallen away.
Above him, the sky stretches endlessly pale and empty. It looks like water but it doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe.
For a moment, he thinks he’s dead.
Then the air shudders. Water rushes over him again—thin, too clear, wrong—but it’s water. He falls into it, body limp.
Walls surround him now, clear, smooth and solid. He tries pushing against them with whatever strength he has left—they do not give.
He’s trapped.
The water tastes wrong. Flat. It doesn’t hum. There’s no current in it, no pulse of life threading through—only stillness. The pressure is wrong, too shallow.
Shapes move beyond the barrier. Throat sounds in broken rhythm. One shape leans close to the glass, eyes wide open, curious.
Yuder bares his fangs in intimidation as he presses his palm to the barrier. It’s smooth and cold beneath his skin. He pushes harder, claws scraping, but it doesn’t yield.
His strength is fading. He can feel himself faint.
He needs to wake up.
Gathering enough strength through the haze, he slams his tail against the wall once—twice—until the whole container trembles, echoing sharp inside his skull. The throat sounds outside increase in volume.
One of the shapes beyond it gestures wildly and another reaches for something above.
Yuder freezes as a thin cord dips into the tank. It latches around his neck with efficiency and yanks his head upward towards the waters surface.
He thrashes again, rage overriding reason. He claws at his neck as the prison rocks; water sloshing over the edges. The cord isn’t budging, too hard and tight.
A sharp tool—like a puffer fish's thistle—pierces his neck again and cold fire floods his veins.
His raging claws manage to tear into something as he’s let go into the water once again.
The dwellers' shout as drowsiness consumes him.
The world folds inward.
Water dulls. Light fades. His tail goes still.
For the first time in his life, Yuder sleeps without feeling the sea.
---
Yuder jerks himself awake.
Hard walls close around him, slick and still. The light is everywhere and it sears through the thin skin around his eyes until his instincts force them shut again. The world feels inverted: water that doesn’t move, weight that doesn’t hold, light that doesn’t fade.
He moves before he can think—tail lashing, claws scraping—and the motion slams him into flat and unyielding walls. The echo bounces back so sharply it hurts. His body recoils, the vibration striking through his skull and ribs until he grits his teeth and hisses.
It seems that his body hasn’t recovered from sleep—still numb with senses going haywire.
The water around him continues to feel wrong—thin, stale, breathing in a way that isn’t the sea. It clings to him with every breath as his gills seem to burn.
Just then, through the blur of brightness, shapes beyond it move.
They crowd around him—shadows framed in pale light. Their throat sounds leak through the barrier, muffled and uneven.
—Lots...f mon-y for somethin..this prett...—
—Car-ful...it’s...gitated..—
—Look-t those..fins—
The figures lean closer. Their faces are unmasked now, bare and strange, pale as fish bellies—they resemble the northern mers. Though their mouths seem to move too much.
No pulse hums from them—no current, no resonance—only air spilling out of their lungs.
One raises its unwebbed hand and touches the glass. A dull, rhythmic tapping follows, rippling through the water like a blow. Yuder’s head immediately throbs from the vibration.
He instinctively bares his teeth and the sound that escapes him is deep and raw, a low-frequency warning that shakes the tank.
The dwellers flinch.
One of them says something, sharp and commanding, and another seems to laugh at it—quick and short, like a pleased predator.
Yuder’s fury spikes at that.
He surges forward, driving the full force of his tail into the wall. The water convulses, sloshing against the edges; the whole prison groans under the impact. The pain lances through his tail, but it’s worth it—to see the shadows stumble, to see fear finally flicker in their movements.
—Dose..t befor-it cracks!—
One reaches above the tank, grasping for something unseen.
Yuder thrashes harder, the movement raw and desperate. His scales scrape bloody against the barrier, his gills flare open in panic, and every move sends more pain lancing through his muscles.
Then—contact.
A cord dips into the tank, swift and sure, this time wrapping tight around his arm. He jerks back, claws slicing through the water, catching flesh. A cry cuts the air, pained, followed by more noise
—Hol-it—!
and then the sting.
The burn floods his veins.
He thrashes once more, violently, trying to shake it off and water spills over the rim, but his strength dies too quickly. His body begins to stiffen and his tail curls tight.
The shapes blur as the light behind his eyes dims. Slowly sinking to the bottom.
The last thing he sees before everything folds in on itself is the reflection of his own face—distorted in the curve of the walls, eyes half open, one dark violet another shimmering gold, staring back at him like a stranger.
---
Yuder wakes drifting in false water, its currents absent, the soul of that deep entirely gone.
Counting how many days have passed didn’t occur to him. Yuder no longer knows when the lights dim, or if they ever do. He keeps his eyes closed most of the time, willing himself not to react. Sometimes, he wakes to a harsh overhead glare. Other times, he wakes to silence and filth clinging to his gills.
The surface dwellers come and go. Sometimes there are many. Sometimes none.
Their noises bleed into each other until they become meaningless background sound, like the dull hiss of water through a broken shell.
They feed him occasionally. Dead fish, plopped into his tank.
He eats it not out of hunger, but because instinct won’t let him waste what’s thrown at him.
Yuder will wait until their throat sounds fade, and their steps vanish. Only then does he allow himself to tear into the carcasses with sloppy but angry movements. Flesh splitting under his claws; blood clouding the water, a poor imitation of a hunt.
Everything felt wrong.
The food, the stillness, the sounds that don’t echo properly.
He felt humiliated. Degraded.
Before, when pure rage used to flicker through the numbness, he would lash out with his tail, muscles spasming as he slams against the walls, again and again, until the water shuddered and his own blood started to float around him. The pain grounded him, and for a moment—provided proof that he was still alive.
Now, even that fury feels heavy. Pointless.
Bruises deepened along his tail. His scales split where the glass caught them. Every beat of his heart sends fresh pain spiralling through him.
It aches—the muscles of his tail, the ridges of his fins, the soft, gill-lined folds of his throat, scales cracked along seams that will never fully heal in this shallow, stagnant prison.
The filth in his tank settles heavier each day.
Fish scraps, his own excrement, droplets of blood from the tears in his scales—drifting against the pressureless current. The water sticks to his skin, coats him, and fills his gills with decay.
When he breathes, each pull of water scrapes like shark teeth.
Once, the stench made him retch so violently that his gills seized. Slamming his claws against the barrier in blind panic earned him a strike from the dwellers—someone’s hand slapping the wall so hard the sound shattered throughout the water, sending his sensitive senses reeling.
After that, he stopped reacting. Mostly.
He’s begun to lose scales along the edges of his fins. They flutter down and settle around him like dead black leaves.
He can feel himself thinning.
Not just his body—his mind. The edges blur. His thoughts bleeding into the water, slow and formless.
At least they touch him less than before.
The poison they use seems to drag him under more thoroughly now. He doesn’t fight as hard. His thrashes are slower, weaker. Claws scrape ineffectively at the smooth walls of his cage. Gills open and close, struggling to remember how to pull water in, how to make it breathe for him. His muscles always feel limp now and his tail drifts uselessly, barely stirring the water.
He floats, the water a slow poison.
The dwellers’ sounds overlap outside it, their tones shifting.
—Shipmen...here—
—he....auction—
He curls himself tight against the floor of the prison that’s barely bigger than him, fins folding close—every part of him aches.
Yuder waits for sleep to drag him under. Waits for the poison to dull the pain. Waits for the currents to come back, though deep down, he knows that they won’t.
He wishes the poison would put him to sleep forever. That the next prick would drag him deep enough that he could sink, just once more, beneath a pressure that holds instead of suffocates.
He wonders then, if death would feel like sinking. If he’d finally hear the sea again.
When Yuder sleeps, he dreams of that pressure. That weight. The way it used to hold him, every inch surrounded and safe.
He dreams of the whale songs—distant voices layered through current, calling, answering and living in that deep.
---
Something is wrong.
The air beyond the walls hums too fast, full of sharp sounds, steps, metal. His body barely responds anymore—muscles became sluggish and tail heavy. Even his heartbeat feels uncertain, stuttering against his ribs.
The light above him flickers.
He squints, his eyes still terribly unused to the light, and looks sluggishly, as movement disturbs the stillness beyond the foggy wall.
The usual dwellers were gone. New ones seem to have come—different shadows, sounds, more cautious. Their tones are clipped, controlled.
The difference is enough to stir the fog in his head.
—…clea..tank—
He doesn’t understand the words, but he recognizes intent.
They’re not here to feed him.
Yuder doesn’t need that prick in his skin anymore to feel dizzy. The water itself has turned against him—thick, wrong and settling in his lungs like poison.
One of the new surface dwellers gestures, and the cover above his prison splits open. The noise that follows it tears through his skull like thunder. His body convulses, instincts screaming to dive, but there’s nowhere left to go.
He barely shifts before that scraping sound comes—the one that always means a cord will follow, reaching down to put him to sleep.
For a heartbeat, he almost welcomes it. The thought of never waking again, of sinking quietly into stillness, feels like mercy. To stop breathing, stop fighting, to lie among the coral where the ocean keeps dead—
His muscles go slack. Almost.
Then the shadow moves closer. The cord reaches down.
Yuder lashes out, pure reflex, but his strength betrays him halfway through the motion.
His arm gets caught and the sting follows—a sharp puncture, then the rush of fire.
It floods his veins like deep molten stone.
The cord retreats.
Yuder presses his palms against the wall, the thin webbing between his fingers translucent enough that light filters through.
The world softens around the edges.
He feels hollow, weak—the simple act of keeping his eyes open feels unbearable. More surface dwellers flood the space, a whole shoal of them, pointing with bare, unwebbed hands, their sharp throat sounds cutting through the water.
Then the drain begins.
The pull is sudden, ruthless.
Yuder gasps, gills flaring open and closing against empty air. His throat tightens; each breath he takes comes out with a broken, rasping sound. The pressure collapses around him as he’s lifted then lowered into another prison—smaller, cleaner, and blindingly bright.
The new water stings when it touches him, burning through the cracks in his scales. The sounds continue to blur together, meaningless, clipped.
He curls his tail close, shuts his eyes, and lets the poison take him.
---
When Yuder wakes, he’s being transported somewhere else.
He can feel the sway of motion, the faint drag of water clinging to his body as everything around him vibrates with noise making his fin ears twitch. The world sways around him and distant sounds grows louder until it breaks apart into a deafening roar.
His senses splinter.
Shadows stretch before him—rows upon rows of surface dwellers, their mouths moving in endless noise. Their voices rise and fall in a strange rhythm, sharp throat sounds that stab through his head like broken shells.
—Lo-k at...hat tail..—
—Never s-en..one..ith that color..—
—How muc-did...e last one go for?—
—Rar....this one’s..rare—
His lips peel back and he bares his fangs, summoning what little strength remaining through the fog of the poison in his veins. Some of the dwellers flinch back. Others laugh.
He hates them.
Every single one.
A flash of light strikes and pain slices through his eyes, too bright, too sharp. He jerks from it, disoriented. The world narrows to burning light in his iris and ache pulses through every scale. He can’t hear them anymore. Only the dull thudding of his heartbeat and the rush of blood filling his skull.
He sinks lower, vision fading, colors bleeding into white, and resignation feeds on his bones.
Then—something changes.
Noise, a different kind. Louder. Chaotic.
The surface dwellers around him shout, this time their tones rising with panic.
The floor vibrates beneath him, strong enough to rattle his teeth.
A burst of heat, a flash of light. A scream that pierces his ears and skull.
He tries to move, but his limbs are numb, his tail unresponsive; the poison is still heavy in his veins.
The water stirs violently around him, shadows flashing past him, fast and frantic. Another deafening splinter splits his skull as the walls around him shatter.
The rush of cold air slams instantly slams his weakened body, and for a moment, he thinks the world itself has cracked open.
Then—unwebbed hands reach. Different ones.
He’s dragged into motion as the air continues to burn against his gills. His body convulses, choking, twisting on instinct. Sounds echo all around—too many, too loud, unfamiliar.
A surface dweller shouts close to his fin-ear, sharp and urgent.
Smooth cloth brushes against his tail as another prick stings his arm.
And then, everything tilts.
The light folds in on itself and the water fades to black.
---
When Yuder comes to, it’s in a different cage, trembling from something deep beneath that shudders with rhythm. The air beyond these walls roar and whine like a wounded creature.
Light greets him with burns through the fog of his eyes, slicing, and violent in brightness. His eyelids clamp down shut until the pain throbs behind them. Even the faint shimmer on the water’s surface feels like knives.
He blinks sluggishly, trying to make sense of the motion around him. His tail barely drifts, each movement delayed, heavy. He’s floating inside a prison larger than the last, but still small enough that every ripple he makes touches the walls.
The water’s different though. Its color seem to have changed and it tasted somewhat strange. Bitter, metallic, like someone put something in it. He can feel it in his gills, clinging and sliding against his skin.
Shapes stir beyond the barrier. Blurry at first—then sharp enough to break the pale light into shards.
Surface dwellers. Three of them, maybe four.
They move with restless energy, pointing their unwebbed hands toward him, mouths opening and closing with their usual throaty sounds. He can’t understand, but their tones slice through him—sharp, agitated, like the chatter of reefbirds before a storm.
Yuder flinches as they come closer. His gills flare wide, tail coiling tight. A low vibration escapes his chest—instinctive, weak, but enough to make the water tremble.
The dwellers hesitate, but a brave one steps forward.
Smaller than the others. The light catches on their hair; short, brown and uneven. They move slowly, like approaching an injured creature.
The others speak to the small one, their voices rising, sharp and clipped. The small one answers back softly, words coming out like muted bubbles.
Then they reach out and press their hand to the transparent wall.
Yuder jerks back immediately, striking the far end of the prison. The water vibrates around him, echoing the panic in his chest. He expects a slam on the wall, but none of that comes.
The hand stays there, still and silent.
Through the wall, he can see their mouth move. He doesn’t know the words, but the way they shape them slowly, carefully, almost like an apology—makes his throat ache.
His foggy vision recognizes something in their eyes, though it shouldn’t exist in a dweller’s face.
Grief.
He’s seen it before, in Enon’s eyes, when the sea took his grandfather’s body. And again, later, when he saw Yuder floating alone in his nest of coral and silence.
It doesn’t make sense that a surface dweller would carry that same look.
He wants to snarl. To lunge. To drive them away. But his body won’t move according to his will. The poison still lingers, heavy and dull in his body.
The others call the small one—sharp, commanding sounds that make them flinch before pulling their hand back. They answer without looking away from him, something firm in their voice.
Then they turn and disappear beyond the light where he cannot make out the shapes.
Yuder stays still for a long time. The hum beneath him continues. The walls rattle and the water stirs with each bump of motion.
He drifts lower, pressing his palms against the smooth floor. It vibrates with each pulse of whatever beast carries this prison forward. He wonders if it has a name. If it feels the weight of him inside its belly.
Exhaustion drags at his body and his eyelids grow heavy. The water laps weakly at his gills. He breathes steadily as sleep comes like a tide pulling him under.
---
The vibration stills. The water stops sloshing. Yuder blinks blearily, disoriented and fogged.
Then sharp light flares, searing his eyes. Yuder squints, forcing them slightly open to catch the change shift around him.
Shapes move. Many of them. Sounds overlapping, sharp pitches with a rhythm of alarm.
He’s being moved again.
The water rocks, sloshing against the walls with each uneven motion. His tail drifts with it, every muscle sore, leaden.
Light keeps changing—from bright to burning, noise rising and falling. He clamps his eyes tight shut and presses his palms to his fin-ears as he waits for everything to stop.
---
When he blinks open his eyes again, it’s when everything stopped hurting.
There's movement beyond his prison walls.
That surface dweller. The small one from before.
They stand apart from the others, head tilted, watching him through the distorted blue of the water.
He stares back at them for a moment, then turns away, sinking to the bottom and curling into himself, long hair hiding his face. His gills flutter weakly.
The prison is still too small, too shallow for his length. His tail brushes one wall when his head touches the other and each turn scrapes his fins against the smooth wall.
His body aches all over and hunger gnaws hollowly at his stomach, never been fed to feel full.
The throb behind his eyes and inside his skull seem to never fade. He closes them and tries to remember the dark quiet of the real sea.
After a while, the water stirred again, current familiar.
When he opened his eyes, tiny silver shapes flickered through the light—fish.
Instinct wakes before thought.
He moves to catch, lunging his claw through the water. His muscles protest but hunger wins. The first strike a miss; the second landing straight through two. Warm blood blooms, curling through the water in slow, red ribbons.
He bites down before the twitching stops. It has been many tides since he last had fresh food.
The taste used to remind him of the sea, but now that past prison is what haunts his mind—the decay and rot. He watches the red cloud drift and settle instead of fading away.
In the ocean, the currents would’ve carried it off, feeding the deep. Here, it just lingers, staining everything it touches.
He swallows and the food turns to guilt in his throat.
When hunger has somewhat worn off, he drifts near the far corner, the wall pressing cool against his cheek, floating hair covering his face, away from prying eyes that seem to never leave.
Though this prison is bigger than the other one, it’s still small.
He remembers the open blue—the divine hum of whale songs rippling through the current, the feel of coral beneath his claws. The sea had no walls. No limits. No eyes always watching.
Now every movement echoes. Every sound he makes bounces back at him, trapped, hurting his skull and mind.
Anger still simmers inside, but it’s quiet now, tired, dulled into something that feels like surrender. He can feel the weight of knowing that this is how he’ll die.
He realizes what he’s become.
A trapped creature. A prey caught.
Once, he guarded the reef’s borders. Once, his song could calm storms.
Shame coils hot in his chest until it burns behind his ribs.
He looks down at his webbed hands and finds them trembling.
To distract himself, he gathers the tiny bones left from his meal, lining them along the floor of his prison. The motion soothes him. It reminds him of his grandfather’s patient hands carving whale bones into song pendants.
His thumb touches his necklace absently, tracing it like a prayer.
---
Tides continue to flow past and Yuder wakes to the chatter of surface dwellers.
He can sense them beyond the walls, clustered together, not near but also not far.
The same small one hovers around his prison often, always holding something in their hands—a thin white slab and a stick that moves across it, always writing something. They also occasionally come close enough to touch the water, but nothing more than that.
Once, one dweller got close with something silver clutched between their unwebbed fingers. He saw that glint and felt memory strike, of that poison in his skin, and before the hand even reached the water’s surface, he lashed out—claws striking with a low, guttural snarl, the sound rippling through the water, wild and sharp.
The dweller screamed, stumbled back and others rushed in, their tones full of alarm.
After that, no one tried to touch him again. And he never saw that dweller again.
Different ones watch over now.
Two occasionally linger for a few minutes around the small one—a tall one with bright scarlet hair, another dark-skinned with darker hair like the mers farther south the outer reefs. Their voices are noticeably lower, unlike the small one. The three seem to always converse with each other when they meet.
He catches fragments through the barrier, disjointed throat syllables:
—He’s eating?—
—…health look-ng stabl—
—…nerlan waters..—
Yuder watches as their hair ripples in air currents, fascinated and disgusted that such creatures breathe that poisonous space so easily.
He drifts to hide in his corner, where less light gathers, gills fluttering as he waits for their sounds to fade.
The ache in his tail dulled slowly with the passage of tides, though Yuder never counts them. The bruises along his ribs faded from purple to grey but the prick marks remained like marks on his arms—small, raised ridges he touches absently, one by one, as if counting prayers.
Sleep fills most of his time, broken by flashes of white light or by noise.
But the poison that lived in his veins is gone now and the fog in his mind lifted enough for him to think again, though exhaustion still clings at his skin like a leech.
---
Tides blur without shape as Yuder swims in circles with restless energy until the motion loses meaning.
Sometimes he clutches his necklace between his teeth and tries to listen to the shells and bones, pretending he can hear the sea through them.
He can’t.
But sometimes, if he listens long enough, the silent ripples his tail makes in the water almost sound like waves.
When he sleeps, he continuously dreams of the cold currents, but always wakes to still water.
One cycle, when Yuder was more restless and stayed awake longer than usual, the light dimmed more than it ever used to instead of flaring white. And for once, his eyes stopped burning.
Yuder opened them wide for the first time in ages, expecting emptiness beyond, but found them again.
That small dweller.
They stood a distance away, eyes wide as they gazed upon his fully exposed pupils for the first time, dim light reflecting off their face. Their movements were quiet and careful, as they slowly got closer with each step.
They wrote something on their slab, looked up at him, then back down as they wrote again, eyes full of wonder.
He watched them for a long time, memorized the slope of their face, the way they breathed without strain and the uncruel way they moved, completely different from the others.
It was almost peaceful. Almost enough to make him forget what they are.
When they left, the water felt emptier.
And Yuder, more than anything, hated the way that emptiness ached.
---
The light dims again, and Yuder learns its rhythm.
It flares, then fades, over and over—an artificial tide he can almost predict. He begins to time his sleep by it, waking when the glow weakens, drifting under when it blazes too bright. The hum of the place, once harsh and foreign, grows familiar now—low, steady, almost lulling.
He notices that the surface dwellers move differently with the light. When it dims, they vanish. Perhaps they are diurnal creatures, bound to their false suns. Yuder never needed to track time before. The ocean never changed its face for him—it was always dark, always alive.
Now, he doesn’t startle when the distant sounds come. Only the small one lingers when the light dims. Their presence is quiet, almost gentle.
They make little sounds, sometimes kneeling near his prison, eyes following the shimmer of the water on his scales but not disturbing it.
He starts seeing more of the place beyond his walls now that his eyes no longer ache from the light. The blur resolves into shapes—wide pools ringed with transparent walls, each tinted blue with the same false water Yuder breathes. Bright fish move in them, their scales catching light in colors he remembers from coral reefs. He even catches sight of a small shark gliding, its motion rigged—perhaps injured, unaware it’s just as trapped as he is.
The small one seems to watch those creatures too. Sometimes they crouch near the other pools, the glow of their strange tools they sometimes bring reflecting in the water. They always watch with that same look—part curiosity, part sorrow. He wonders if they are supposed to tend to him as well, like a keeper to a wounded beast.
His water changes often now. Each time he wakes to the dim light, it feels cleaner, the taste sharper and strange. The filth that clouded the surface after his meals always disappears, replaced by the faint bitterness of the new liquid. He doesn’t understand how they do it—only that the scent of the water no longer belongs to him.
It should bring him comfort, but it doesn’t.
Every change reminds him that he has no control here.
He curls his tail tighter around himself, watching as scales continue to fall despite his healing wounds.
---
The light is flaring.
Too bright. Too early.
Yuder blinks up through the distortion and sees movement—many shapes. Dozens.
He startles, anxiety rising like a tide through his throat.
Their throat sounds hit the walls and press against it, thick and heavy, crowding his skull.
It feels like before—like the roaring hall of surface dwellers and their blinding lights.
Something’s wrong.
He blinks rapidly, his vision struggling to focus through the glare. The shapes beyond the fogged vision move with purpose, too many of them, their gestures sharp and deliberate.
The water trembles as something descends upon him. A shadow. It slopes through the water. Not alive, but flexible—soft edges brushing his tail.
Like a trap.
Instinct flares. He recoils, body slamming against the wall. The thing follows, wrapping closer, slick and suffocating. He thrashes, water frothing around him, heart pounding too fast.
The throat sounds spike, and he hears the small one’s high tone among them:
—easy… sl-wly!… he’s scar-d—
—tighten..! —
Their voices create nothing but vibration through his skull and his pulse hammers against his ribs.
He feels it tighten around him, then the pull begins.
A sudden, merciless lift—the sensation of being torn upward, the pull against his weight as the water falls away. The light above him floods brighter, unbearable. His tail thrashes, panic taking over as the water drops out from beneath him.
The air hits him like fire.
It scorches his gills; he gasps, instinct clawing for breath, but the air cuts his throat raw. He flails, twisting violently in the thing that holds him. Rough unwebbed hands grab at his tail and shoulders, the heat of their touch searing through his skin.
He can’t breathe.
The world blurs around him, collapsing into flashes of light and movement. The roar in his fin-ears swells until it drowns everything else. He thrashes harder, desperate, blind, until his strength gives out. The last thing he feels is his chest locking, gills fluttering uselessly against nothing.
He’s dying.
The thought comes clean, almost peaceful. He stops fighting. He lets the air eat him alive.
Then—impact.
Cold.
Water.
He convulses violently as it floods through his gills, choking on the first desperate inhale. His body jerks, then sags, trembling from the shock. The water is clean, stinging against his raw scales, but it’s water. He drags it into his chest again and again, even though it burns.
The water hums around him, faint but steady, like a distant heartbeat, familiar. He realizes dimly that it moves beneath him—the vibration of motion. Another journey. Another cage.
He floats, too weak and exhausted to move, letting the water carry him. His body feels heavy, his still vision dim.
The small one stays near. He sees their shadow through the water, hears their noise cutting through the rest:
—Car-ful...he’s too weak!—
He sinks lower, folding himself into the dimmest part of the cage. The hum beneath him and the soft rush of water blur together until they sound almost like the ocean’s pulse.
He drifts like that for a while, half-awake, half-dreaming.
Then the world tilts again.
The light shifts again as the water ripples with movement above him. He feels himself being lifted again. He knows enough to brace himself now, he closes his gills and holds the last breath inside his chest as claws pierce through his palms.
Air sears his skin the moment he breaks through the surface, hands steadying him and sounds blurring:
—W-tch...fins—
—Almos...th-re—
Yuder’s mind dims. The roar in his ears dulls. He catches that voice again—the small one—close to him now.
—...ou’re safe now. I promise—
He’s lowered again. The water embraces him coldly, deeper this time, with faint currents curling around his tail. He descends without resistance, eyes half-lidded, chest aching.
He drifts down to the dark, curls tight around himself and finally lets go of everything but the sound of his heartbeat—slow, fragile, alive.
---
Kishiar hears the commotion before he sees it.
The humans are gathering again—voices raised, steps quick and purposeful on the upper platforms that line the holding pools. He watches them from below, their silhouettes bending and moving through the water’s shimmering ceiling.
At first, he ignores it. New arrivals are not rare here and the humans move fish often, sometimes for display, sometimes for what they call “treatment.” It never matters. The cages only change shape here.
But Kishiar, as always, has nothing else to do. It’s early enough that no visitors are pressing their faces against the thick glass, and boredom gnaws at him that clinging on a scrap of anything would keep him alive.
He pushes himself upward through the filtered water, resting his arms on the ridge of the barrier near the gate that separates the holding pool from the main exhibit. He tilts his head toward the noise, long hair clinging to his face—so blonde it shines gold under the surface lights, like sunlight trapped underwater.
His tail flicks lazily beneath him—a massive slick white arc, gleaming faintly of gold when the light catches, like a polished pearl. It moves with practiced ease, keeping him afloat as he peers at the humans.
He spots Nathan almost immediately. The human turned his head the moment Kishiar rose, fixing him with that disapproving look he always wears when Kishiar does something he shouldn’t be doing. Kishiar innocently blinks back, unbothered, and settles his chin on his arms. Nathan looks away without a word, returning to his work.
Kishiar takes the opportunity to exhale through his mouth, practicing the strange rhythm of lung-breathing through his nose, while tracing idle shapes on the surface floor with his free hand. He peers in at the deck by the holding pool, where the new resident will be staying until adjustment.
Then the machines hum to life.
The stretcher emerges from the transport tank. He notes the details automatically—metal, fabric, the slick pull of wet straps, the urgency of movements. Light glances off the stretcher’s surface, and beneath that distortion—something moves.
Kishiar stills.
For a heartbeat, he assumes it’s another large fish. Then the shape shifts in a way that no fish could—limbs, a tail that bends with control.
He presses closer, feels the indent of the deck’s lip digging into his stomach. The light catches, and for a moment he sees it clearly: A black tail, enormous, glimmering with violet hues. Fins that pulse once, weakly, under the harsh lamps. The form is heavy, too heavy for the humans to lift easily, and Kishiar’s breath stops. The hum of machinery fades to nothing under the soft, electric buzz building in his skull.
His chest tightens.
It’s not a fish. Not anything simple.
He notices Kanna beside the stretcher, as it dips lower, mechanical groan echoing, until the thing cradled in it touches the surface. Water splashes up in bright arcs. Voices blur and then a faint splash as the body slides free, sinks, and vanishes into the holding pool.
The engine cuts out. Kishiar blinks, drops back below the surface, and drifts toward the gate that separates the tank from the pool. He nudges past fish fluttering near the bars of the gate and squeezes himself as close as he can to see.
Kishiar watches, unmoving, as the figure drifts downward like a fragment of moonlight. The water clouds faintly where he passes—healing wounds and scale dust. Then comes a tremor, the sluggish beat of a tail too heavy with exhaustion. The new arrival curls in on himself near the bottom, beautiful black hair haloing around his face, eyes half-open and unfocused.
A mer.
Kishiar’s pulse falters. His hands clutch the metal mesh until it bites into his skin. He only realizes he’s been holding his breath when his lungs begin to ache. He exhales through his mouth softly, bubbles slipping past his face.
He hasn’t seen one of his kind in years.
He drifts closer, slow enough not to disturb the current. Red eyes trace the new mer’s gills as they flare unevenly shallow, trembling pulls of breath. Alive, but barely.
The humans are talking above, voices muffled, breaking apart in the water.
“He..stabl..for now..”
“Ke-p monitorin...is respons-”
Then most of them leave, their shadows retreating. Except for two, Kanna and Nathan remain, speaking to each other. At some point, Kanna crouched at the pool’s edge, her tone gentler, though the words are lost to Kishiar’s ears.
It’s strange, having someone alike so nearby. Someone that breathes like he does. Someone that might understand what it means to belong to the sea.
The thought settles heavy in his chest. His gaze not leaving the faint shimmer of movement in the holding pool.
He stays there until the urge to breathe forces him upward, breaking the surface to draw air through his blowhole before sinking again.
Afterward, he swims his endless laps restlessly, the same slow circles he’s traced since the day he was rescued. This tank isn’t nearly the size of a sea, but he moves in it as if it could be.
And this time, between each turn, his thoughts echo against the glass:
When he’s ready. I’ll reach out.
He swims as cameras start to flash and ignores the muffled sounds of human chatter as they press their face on glass for a glimpse of his tail, and wonders—for the first time in years—what his voice might sound like if he tried to sing again after being separated from his pod.