Chapter Text
Everything is a smear on her senses. There’s ringing in her ears, shrill and punishing, like someone dropped a coin purse and the sound of clattering metal resonates within her skull. Everything aches terribly. She doesn’t care, though. Her inner monologue is frozen, with nothing but white noise in its place.
The night sky hangs overhead; it’s peaceful, undisturbed, beautiful, and preserved as if a disaster of apocalyptic proportion hadn’t occurred just below the waves. It feels like a mockery.
The last thing she recalls is crumbling towers of quartz and gold. Terror surrounding her before the water is tainted red. She doesn’t know what she thought, felt or did between then and now, her body only pushing her further and further away from her home, begging escape, escape, escape…
Before she knew it, she was dragging herself up the shore of a tranquil, white sand beach. Her body collapsed with exhaustion. Silence drags on so contrary to the chaos she barely escaped, that the lack of noise is deafening.
Formless thoughts fog her mind like heavy stratus.
She sighs. The unceremonious exhale sends lightning down her spine and she whimpers. Her ribs feel like brittle drywall. She continues to breathe, slow, and each huff is an anvil on her chest. Her gills twitch, attempting to adjust to a new mode of oxygen intake.
She lays there on the sand, cold and scared with adrenaline racing through her veins. Tears, which had been fighting her ducts for hours, finally slip free. Salty streams mix with cuts and bruises to litter the pale canvas of her skin. She reaches out, clutching for something — someone, anything — and finds only sand to hold onto.
Remembrances of people and places she holds dear taunt her.
There’s a taste of iron in her mouth. It’s been there for who-knows-how-long. It’s exacerbated as she punches down on her bottom lip with razor sharp teeth. Her tail begins to writhe in the sand. Her fins have been mangled and she’s only just noticing. She cries harder. Each time her tail coils around itself in agony, dark red pigment stains the pure white sand surrounding her. Inevitably, there’d be some passerby who’d wonder what poor animal was scooped up and eaten, judging by the amount of blood left behind.
She turns over on her stomach. Panic is bubbling, everything feels so loud and so quiet, her brain is unable to comprehend anything. Her heartbeat thunders in her chest like the clap of a cyclone. Her tears are tropical rain. She hugs her arms around her body and shudders, searching for purchase where there was none. She finds the sting of injured gills — her injuries making themselves known one by one, as overstimulation fails to shield her from pain.
In the back of her mind, there’s a realization about the gravity of her situation. She knows, deep down, what she’s up against — what’s befallen her home and her people… Her world…
She retches. Her throat is tight. Reality crushes her under its weight and pushes the contents of her stomach up and out. She regurgitates into the sand. The taste is rancid and the burn of acid in her mouth is the final straw. She lets loose a terrible, broken shout.
Time screeches to a stop. She can’t do anything but ride the wave of emotion. Every ugly, terrible emotion… For the duration of her agonized throes, nothing exists but her and her grief.
Nothing, that is… But an owl…?
Somehow, she notices a small bird perched in a nearby tree. It stares at her like it’s studying her. Like she’s an insect to be dissected. She’s unnerved, but that’s the extent of her feelings toward the bird. That’s all she can feel about the bird. The owl fades into the background, alongside everything else.
Time goes by. Maybe minutes, maybe hours… Eventually, her eyes are too heavy and her energy is gone. She closes her eyes.
That night, she dreams of Atlantis.