So far from the thin, waving surface that the light had been swallowed by the enormity of the seas, turning blue to black. Thrusting the golden sands beds into ink. Although, even in the uneasy dark we can see by the foggy and uneven illumination of the sea cucumbers and jellyfish lanterns that we have made.

Light is made, and constructed, and therefore, it is precious.

But, none of it is real light. The type that radiates a warmth that runs over the edges of my scales like pricking fingertips. That is why we stand in the middle of the city just as the sun cracks open its aureate eyes. Heavy eyes wander aimlessly around the crowd which has formed around the large and flat stone circle placed in the centre of our small village, Yetla.

Domed homes fashioned from porous colourful-ranges of coral sit just beyond the boundaries of the monument, just far enough away to allow every woman ample space to bow to the light. In the windowsills, cucumbers spit blurred and cloudy fizzles of luminescence.

After so many centuries and so many mornings of seeing our light press upon the dark stone one might think we might be accustomed to it all and yet, almost each and every woman mirrors me in large yawns as they breathe in the surrounding coral. Our sharp tails resting into the grainy sand.

Its thin body begins and cascades down further and further through the waters until it pricks the sandstone. The village bows. Each person vying and stretching their fingers to the edge of our monument, trying desperately to feel its warmth in the same way our ancestors did when they first found this small stretch of land. We bow together like the underwater tide bends us all forward in one sweeping motion. Fibres of grass knotted together in our movement.

"Kneel." My mother signs quickly with one hand, the other still firmly gripped around my wrist. I hadn’t moved fast enough, I surmise. She drags me down to the monument; I mirror her prayer.

The shells that have been weaved between my locks shift with the lowly current, I bow my head to the powder. Fingers reaching out to the cold stone of the monument. As I have done everyday since I felt the waters truly rush around me. I can see the monument even when my eyes are closed, I can remember the pinched pathways between our homes and shops. The waving sea plants who curl with the salt of these seas.

I can feel its faint breath run over my fingertips. The light murmurs, the heavens setting our pitch-black waters alight. A thin, bony body whispering incantations that embed itself between my scales. It coaxes out a sigh from between my lips, coupling itself with the gentle, hypnotic closing of my dulse-coloured eyes. The current is still, the ocean above is soothed into calm repose by its presence. Glory shines down upon us like a golden god.

Silence breathes heavy sighs between each woman, slithering between us like eels.

It will be gone again and we'll all stand here tomorrow. Waiting desperately to be bathed and cleansed once more.

ທທ

Murals made of shells dotted around our low-arched home. Colour from corals and starfish and sea anemone bursts against the stygian ink the water presses into all corners of the small bungalow.

Mother swims past me, treading towards the hanging seaweed-stitches bags of food. Next to it, in a small carved out shelf and seizing two water-bloated bark bowls. Lines of interlocking wood are pressed in together with such tension and force that when we had constructed them along with the rest of our village we were able to carve the edges to give it a rounded look. Shen swiftly reaches into the twisted bag-top and grabs two sheafs of vegetation.

I glance to the side, beyond our coral house to see a bundle of jellyfish. Their bioluminescence swimming past. They disappear into the dark from whence they came. In the corner of my eye I can see her continue working away silently, I move over to our small seating area. I sit and twist my fingers through the sandy bench beneath me. The details encased in sand have become a table, smoothed within its beads is a small truss of sea anemone. It provides a soft peachy glow across my dusky skin.

My mother continues with her lively preparation, her fin covered back rigid even as she prepares. A moment later her bowl drifts down in front of her seat. Keeping the other one in her grasp before coming around the circumference of the table. Ridged fingers drag over my braided hair as she places a minute kiss against the crown of my head.

"I thought I told you to destroy this." The cracked flute lays solemnly along the table. One long fissure burrowing itself into my instrument. I stifle a gasp. I press away those beginnings of a frown.

"Pity the dark Sarai. It holds nothing for you." She states so simply. Like she understands the dark. The woman has never gone further than the edges of our village and yet she believes to know everything about the monsters in the dark. These grey seas which surround us have blossomed despite her beliefs, I've seen it myself. "There is a reason we do not play this music, there is a reason we do not stray past the confines of Yetla."

I let any signs I might create die in my chest. How many times have we had this conversation? How many times had she broken my flute before? I couldn't stop, exploring the dark, playing my songs: I couldn't stop. I didn't want to stop, but there was no point in fighting with my mother.

She would understand, one day she would and finally I could play a song for her.

"The dark will devour you whole, for where there is no light, there is no life, no community, no safety."

We parted ways soon after and now I sat within the confines of my disk-shaped room. The tip of a lionfish spine dipped in squid ink scratches against the pressed pages of my notebook. Flipping through my own scribbles of pigment I have small drawings next to my own amateurish descriptions of each miniscule fish and creature that has swam through Yetla.

The ocean as my mother described it was vast and terrible and overwhelming and unknowable. It was where monsters who lurked in the dark and who preyed upon us lived. And despite it all, the fascination I had with the vegetation and creatures beyond us hadn't waned.

The moment I know my mother has fallen asleep I bundle the cord over my notebook and stash it back into my small seaweed weaved bag. It falls next to my flute where I have pressed muskgrass into the splintered crack on my flute where my mother broke it. The repair job isn't done well but at least it still works. That's the only thing that matters to me.

Yetla is colder now. The dark has seeped between our domed homes and framed our monument in sable. Anemone frames the edges of Yetla like a poisonous fence. The anemone are larger than usual, tubules reach further and further upwards, extending to a light that no longer exists.

I stray further and further past the gardens of corals and bobbing jellyfish and to the outskirts.

Three bluefish in a row. Momentarily I swim in line with them, my body larger than theirs and it moves the water between us like waves. Part of me wants to stop, to take down more notes about them; their pectoral fins, corked tails and smooth scales but I know I've already filled many pages with descriptions about them.

Stopping before a small winding piece of a type of seaweed I've never seen before, I take the sight in. A red to yellow ombre begins at the stipe and runs outwards. An oily residue is thickly pressed over the edges and into the crevices of the leaves. It left behind a heavy feeling against the pads of my fingers. They're so tiny in the palm of my webbed hand; a small barnacle crusted in the middle. It flips slightly up as I examine the flamboyant foliole, like the sea was waving to me in this half-lit world.

Delicately I begin to sketch each detail of the leaf, my eyes running back and forth over it before letting the beautiful foliage drift between the pages and imprint itself as a memento.

Twisting and turning I find myself diving deeper and deeper slipping past corals and over trenches. The dark swallows the edges of my vision. As I glance around, my usual path of exploration is entirely dissipated. Swallowed whole.

I stop and I realise I had never been in the dark before. Not like this.

As though it would go on for eternity.

With an extreme hesitance marking each of my tails flips I continue forwards, hoping to catch onto something familiar. A formation in the rock, some recognizable foliage, anything at all.

They take up an immeasurable amount of space. A thousand times larger than I. A sleeping giant.

My hand drops to my flute, letting the recognizable crack in it hold me in reality. I wish it was a dream. But I don't wake. I'm still. Silent and praying that if I don't move they won't perceive me under their ancient, predacious gaze.

Bones protruding and cracking, skin which had peeled from their ancient age only to be replaced by thick scars along their midnight-coloured existence. Tentacles swirl around its frame, ivory hooks larger than I jutting out from its skin. And a cracked Yetlan spear dug into it; I recognized easily the inscriptions along the splintered wood.

I had no knowledge of this thing…this beast, and for all the time I had spent filling pages upon pages, describing and watching and analysing these waters, they suddenly meant nothing.

It’s visceral. Overwhelming. Their eyes are wide just like mine.

Yellow eyes like coral.

The eyes never lie.

But I cannot pity a thing I am terrified of. I will not pity it.

I break into a swim, as far as I can as fast as I can until the world becomes recognizable again. Until I feel the warmth of my bed once more. The memories of the dark cling to me, the light from hanging sea cucumbers feels more damp than usual.

ທທ

I touch the light. Press my fingers into that stone for the thousandth time. It is beautiful. Eyes pressing together, I attempt to focus on the warm bask of sunlight. But, I can't, it's like it simply slips out of my grasp every time I strive to hold tighter.

I had been a child when I first left Yetla. It had been an accident and in my terrified youth of all that did not look like the women whose faces I had come to recognize as safe I came across a family of eels cornered in a small dugout. Curiosity led me to look into the worm-like hole and just as I did, all of the eels came out in a flurry. Their slimy bodies running over my scales. Shooting backwards I was desperate to get as far as I could from them and their sharp ivory teeth. This panic led me over the fences of sea anemone and into the expansive dark.

It was so cold.

I pressed into the rock behind me, back against sharp jutting stone and staring down these eels whose bodies crackled with blue electricity. The family, I knew not how many began to swarm around me leaving behind frozen pathways of gel across my scales.

And then they stopped and I saw them; truly and fully for the first time. Their hissing sparks of electricity all, the long yellow line running from the crowns of their heads to the ends of their fissuring tails. And I suddenly wanted nothing more than to understand everything that breathed life into these creatures. To understand every little detail of their stature.

I felt that call, that harmony that blended into the cartilage and marrow of me.

We do not comprehend the light, only rejoice instead in its presence. And I do, rejoice in it wholly, but to comprehend something or at least to attempt such a thing in my own way, that was unlike anything I've attempted to do before.

Perhaps it is a misplaced and useless dream to study the dark and all that lies within. And yet, my palms still burn with that far-off sunlight when I do not press that dark-squid ink to paper and let every note of the seas sing into my small notebook.

ທທ

They're here. In the same position as last time. Floating amongst the black seas,  microscopic bioluminescent fish skittering past their expansive frame. Sweeping and circling over the claws protruding from their calloused skin.

A silence between us lingers like a sweeping current.

I'm not sure what I expected coming back. I am not sure if I expected anything at all but I was here now, in the cold sea floating with balmy fingers.

"S-A-R-A-I." I sign slowly, sure to show the signs as clearly as possible. They make no sound, only a slow blink a few moments after I finish.

I take it as understanding.

Was understanding the only way I could rid myself of this overwhelming feeling? This overwhelming fear?

Slowly, hesitantly I bring out my notebook and lionfish quill. My tail gently swaying as I begin a rough sketch of the beast. Their frame running off the page.

The more they fill up my pages with ink with their hideous and curdling tentacles the more I begin to notice details I had missed earlier. The world around me closed, only them and I under the tons of these watery depths. Every detail disappeared except for the simplicity of this beast.

And I dawned upon one singular question*: What does it mean to be a beast?*

ທທ

I scribble furiously as each new untaken note from my trip earlier thrusts itself into the forefront of my mind. Each plant, tentacled-beast, sharp-finned fish and wondrous rock formation replays in my mind. And I was alive in this simple moment. So utterly alive as I scribbled indignantly, the waters wrapping around me softly.

The notebook snaps itself shut and slides itself between the sewn seaweed of my bed.

"Would you like to help me make dinner?" She leans through the doorway, the seas twisting her unshelled nyx hair around her head like a halo.