Beastly roars embraced me as soon as I wandered back into their depths. The stalactite ceilings shook with their deafening roars.

Carvings made my magnificently sharp fins now dulled. My fingers run gently over the walls, as though if I press too hard it all might crumble under my shattering touch.

They had charted the ocean, the mountains beneath the waves. Each beast, a figure sculpted and chiselled like a stalactite skeleton. I could make out wars, colossus beasts swinging ships and ripping them limb to limb. The first time their caverns appeared, a gentle pressure into the cavern wall like they wanted to so tenderly draw their home. Their dwelling. Pressed just above their carving of the cavern is a small shell, shining like a rounded star above the space of the sea.

Alive for millenia upon millenia, swimming among these seas and interacting so little with my ancestors that we did not even possess a scratch on the walls. To them, we had only been born. To us, they were our history, our reason for our worship. An existence dependent on a thing that had no name for us.

A fascination sprouts around my scales like a chill. I can feel and see this ancient life that has been bled into the belly of the sea itself. They had been here before and long after me.

How long had our fear kept us frozen in time, unable to open ourselves to all that the seas had to offer? Generations of yetlans buried in fear and unease and terrified of the dark. Terrified of beasts so entirely similar to them.

They were there too, the Beast. Pressed into a portrait of a family. It boasts a large group of tentacle-clad beasts, vast and expansive yet dwarfed compared to these black seas. Deep scratches blur their broad frames now leaving only the Beast alone.

Once again I see another motif of a small ringed shell pop up between the fascinating carvings. The beast is next to me all of a sudden and for such a vast creature it moves so silently. Their tentacle unfolds against the rock and stalactite.

I look up to them, eyes glistening like the sun spoke in their irises. Tentacles pressed to the sea of flowers and algae sculpted. A love so gentle for the smallest and most inanimate of things that decorate our shared worlds.

And the sight reminded me of my mother's eyes, the way the light caressed her like a mother should. I am glad it bloomed something in her in the same way the sight of red algae did. To feel so alive under the light's warmth and gentle touch…

"I am grateful for my mother.” My hands burst out like a wave until the wave ceases into a slow, languid movement as I sign, “I am grateful for my mother.” The waters still and all the bubbles I had produced pop into oblivion, “I want to grateful for my mother. She’s given me food, a place to sleep, she’s given me everything…” I trail off and the stillness continues between I and the silent animal.

ທທ

I hug my mother tightly when I see her next. "What was Yetla  like when you were a child? I-I don’t know that I’ve ever asked. Also," I continue, "why did we choose here?"

"Here?" She inquires.

"This spot exactly to make our home. Why did we choose here?" I elaborate.

"This is our home Sarai." She spits, so out of turn, so ruefully that I almost flinch, "Yetla is our home. Why must you ask these questions."

"Why do you dislike me?" I sign with a marked hesitation, hands held in close to my chest, each sign has become only half its true form but I can see that she understands when her eyes squint just slightly.

I watch in the bubbling silence as her chest rises and falls before her palms face upwards and shake, "What?"

I'm still.

"I don't."

"I don't." She repeats, this time more forcefully, her fingers stern and abandoning her tenderness. "I don't dislike you Sarai."

I'm still and silent.

"I am your mother." She signs it like it is the perfect answer. As though she's expecting a sigh of relief to cascade out of me.

Instead, this time, I ask a different question, because there's something about the way she looks at me. Like I am a tragedy that has already happened.

And this time, I think she's telling the truth. "You wear your ancestors' face and still you try to desecrate all that they have taught us. You venture beyond Yetla as though your ancestors did not die trying to protect each other from what lurks out there." She continues signing but her eyes drift from me, persisting more for herself than I, "Playing that shell. Hanging out in the dark. Has all I have ever done to protect you meant nothing?"

"When you were a child you were so easy. Compliant and good-natured." In the soft bioluminescence that billows over us I can see a growing red in my mother's eyes. The red mixing with yellow into a sickly darkened-ochre.

"But now," she gestures dejectedly to my frame, "You are you. A child who leaves Yetla despite all she knows. A child who picks flowers that our ancestors purposefully left to die in the dark."

My chest folds in on itself.

"Mama please!"

"Have I not given you my all? My everything? My love? My hope?" She swims closer, shattering the distance between us, "My home?" And I can feel it all beginning to crumble, like every cavern beneath the depths of the sea was collapsing; becoming ash and bone for nothing but the seaworms to feast upon.

"I'll tell you! I'll tell you where they are!"

She stills. The tenseness in his frame suddenly escaping between her gills.

"They? As in multiple beasts?" Her other hands clutches around my shoulder, scaled fingers pressing against my frame.

"Not too far from here, in the caverns that frame the eastern range." Despite the lack of tension in her now, her face doesn't morph like I hoped. The burning anger sharpens instead.

She slams the door in my face. It reverberates waves into the sand beneath my tail.

"What-Mama?!" My webbed-fists bang against our home. Coral beginning to chip away.

They hate me now. What have I done? Why did I do that? I float down to the ground, half my body laid into the sand. Sand worms crawl and crawl and I can see the outlines as the sand dips and raises around their frames. Slow and steady they crawl.

My hand extends to the granules, fiddling with them and letting them momentarily run atop my scales like a porous current. Once the sand has run away my fingers begin to play the notes of an invisible flute into the soil.

I am a coward.

I want a rage like my mother has. One that would take me beyond the confines of all this. A rage which would allow me to defy her.

I hear her. The shuffling of the sand beneath her swim.

I don't say anything and she doesn't either. I take it as an apology. Soundlessly and without movement nor eye contact do we fall back to the table and begin to eat our food. I am watching myself from above; a voyeur in this tiny-domed house, a visitor in a place I call home.

ທທ

I fled, vying for those winding caverns, where the swirling seas stilled and where the light swallowed itself like a snake.

The cave is quiet when I enter. Every bit of turbulence I had come to expect has vanished. Shallow graves pressed into the sea's fawn sand, half covered symbols crudely carved above.

My lips curl downwards, and I find myself harbouring a sudden lack of words to sign. What would there be to say? So I express the simplest but truest feeling.

"I'm sorry." I sign hopelessly, I'm not sure if there is a way to ever repent, to pay for what I've done.

With apprehensive hands I reach into my boundless bag, my fingertips touching its rough surface. And I pull out a red and orange shell. Above each of the graves I press it into the sand, it's imprint clasping into the ground.

Then I turn, bowing my head into the sand.

There is nothing.

And then there is everything. Screeching wails surround me like echolocation. I smile, for what feels like the first time in forever.

Peace idles between the waves.

I leave the caverns behind eager lightness. My tail flips enthusiastically.

I stop.

"I'm sorry." I sign long before my mind processes the image of my mother drifting in the salty seas before me. Fingers pinched and tight, close to my chest and mirroring the constricted features being displayed across my face.

Her blue skin illuminating a ring around her against the nyx background. There is nothing but her before me, an ocean which lacks any sort of warmth and yet, the true chilled feeling I feel grow in me is born solely from my mother's gaze. My mother's love vanished and was replaced by a dull gaze placed upon me. No different than her gaze when she looks at a passing fish.

Has all her love vanished? Would I feel such a thing more than I would see it?

She returns nothing at all. Only turning swiftly and leaving me to follow her in strict silence. So far from the pricking cold I was now swimming in an ocean of fire.

There's a feeling that grows in the pits and trenches of me as we swim closer and closer to Yetla. I could see it in my mother, clear as Yetla became under the light's gaze as her mind dashed with anxious thoughts concerning our return. It was the same face as when she was preparing for our dinner parties with the women of Yetla. How would they react? What would they say?

"I'm sorry." I sign again. I am sorry, I truly am, but not regretful. I could never live with the knowledge of how I hurt them. That would be against everything I've ever tried to be, it would be against everything I would allow myself to become.

There is an inconsolable anger in her eyes; it's different than usual. The burning is undercut with green flames sliced between the vermillion ones. "I told you to stay away from them. I told you and you didn't listen. How many times must we swim in circles?"

“You’re scared of them, I get it. I understand but if you just take a second! please!” my voice felt crumbling, the pillars in her were turning to sand. Gills filled with seaweed that spewed out and wrapped around her hands. Garbling her words.

“I am not scared of them! Please.” her chin rises, a defiance in her hands. Striking against the other like tectonic plates. “They’re hideous monsters, unworthy of seeing the light. and now you tell me to listen? to what? their stories of eating our people? of tearing apart our homes? of looming in the dark, waiting to strike? ah yes, you’re so very right my dear, how could i not have felt empathy for them?" She looked sick; sick of the mere thought of these indescribable creatures living beyond her home, sick of their existence without ever having met them.

“Mom! Please! Stop! Just listen to me!”

“No.”

But we do stop. We stopped with her back to me. The waters twisting through her strands of hair so delicately. Reminding me of those long passed memories where she would brush through mine with tenderness.

Would I ever stop pleading for her approval? Waiting and listless until she finally decides to root me back down, to tell me that once again I can swim through our hollowed home without trying not to make a sound?

"For the love of the light! No!" Turning around, my mother's hands become half illuminated by the viridescent glow of nearby sea cucumbers. "No, I will not listen to you! You are my daughter! Mine! Not the daughter of those beasts! Mine!" Her heaving chest begins to transform into a balanced one as the moments of silence between us tick by. Slowing until we're wading in the silence between us. The eyes, they never lie - I can see it, I can see it so clearly, so neatly. I'm standing before my mother, this woman who has made my first thoughts in this moment of ones where I beg for her forgiveness. Thoughts where I plead with knees and fingers dug so deep into the sand that I might slip beneath it. Her eyes, the same ones where I have memorised each flickering emotion of hers. Those emerald-ringed pearls dulled and breathless in a way that matches her body language; despite the tense shoulders and rigid fingers… there's nothing. My mother is looking at me. Into me. Through me and there's no trace of light in her eyes despite the glowing jellyfish just beyond our home.

Look at me mama. Look at me.

How many times had I looked into those eyes searching for something that I would never find?

Had I finally become one of the beasts she loathed? Or had I always been one of them; a beast beneath the surface, waiting for its birth?

My eyes pinch together, only slightly, tensing in opposition to the sigh that curdles within me. It emanates with the heaviness of all of the waters above and below us. I sigh and my voice is steady as I say, "I don't want to be your daughter anymore."

I leave.

She doesn't stop me.