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Chapter Text

Long ago, in an ancient time lost to the memories of man, a creature came out of the deep. Its skin was bone and its eyes were yellow fire. It lived in the darkest coldest currents of the ocean, and though it knew little of its existence, it knew hunger. 

The creature came into a young world, an explosion of life as newly formed as itself. The creature quickly learned the laws of this lush kingdom, how to hunt, how to feed, how to give back, in turn, to the bottom feeders who flushed forgotten detritus into verdant nutrients. The creature became complex, powerful, a force to behold in the vulnerable ecosystem it preyed upon. As eons passed, it grew fins, by which to slice its hunter’s path through the currents. Its flesh calcified into armor. It grew hair like black tangled weeds, and sharpened its appendages into vicious claws, predatory tools for ravaging. 

All feared the creature and the creature lived with satisfaction in its deep dark kingdom at the bottom of the sea. 

Yet time continued on in its inevitable course, and the creature began to notice changes in its dominion. It smelled land-flesh in the currents, and through its thriving network, it heard whispers of warm blooded beings who walked boldly in the presence of the distant sun. The more the creature heard of this foreign hunting ground, ripe with progress and mammalian flesh, it hungered ever more. 

The creature had been birthed of the deep, and knew little of the gentle surface waters that kissed the heavens. As its craving grew to monstrous proportions, it grew bolder in its ventures. It sent spies up to the surface: venomous jellies that glowed opalescent in moonlight, fanged eels with unyielding jaws, clever crustaceans that buried their shells in the sand and listened to all that walked upon the surface. Those under the creature’s thrall reported back all they heard and even brought offerings down into the depths. The creature lived in the decomposing carcass of an abyssal beast and it lavished its skeletal palace with lost relics of the surface kingdoms. One day, one of its spies returned with a locket, within which bore the likeness of a human man. The creature gazed into the portrait and saw that the human was both beautiful and rich with life. It recognized a regality in the man’s features, not knowing that this was indeed the visage of a prince whose kingdom occupied a nearby coast. The creature’s longing and hunger magnified ever stronger, and it resolved to journey to the surface itself to taste mortal flesh. 

One night, the creature ascended from its domain for the first time in its long life. It felt its body reacting to the painful shifts in pressure, yet it pressed forward. That same night, a terrible storm roiled across the water’s surface. A passing ship from the nearby kingdom, tossed from swell to swell, cracked asunder under the ocean’s violence and spilt its lamentable crew into the waves. 

The creature howled delightedly at this sight. As it prepared to feast upon the doomed and drowning men, it happened to spot one whom it recognized. It had memorized every feature by heart, and knew instantly that this man was the very same one from its treasured locket. Hardly able to believe its fortune, the creature grasped the prince and prepared to devour him as it had longed to do since it had first laid eyes on his likeness. However, as it stared into the innocent face and felt the fading warmth of the body under its claws, an unfamiliar feeling welled up from within its chest and it found it could not bear to kill him. Instead, it took the prince into its arms and dragged him to the surface. Upon breaching, the creature registered the scent of a thousand unfamiliar wonders and felt the foreign touch of cold wind upon its fins, but it concentrated on cradling the prince above the waters as it swam for shore. It laid him upon the sand and caressed him under the starlight. The man was, indeed, more beautiful in person than his portrait, and the creature shuddered. It had only ever known desire as a thing of appetite, of death and teeth and stomach. It did not understand the shape of its want, but it knew it was desire that kept it from leaving the man’s side until its gills gasped for breath and its body could not bear the strain. It held its fearsome talons against the prince’s soft fingers and despaired before returning to the depths of the sea.

For many days and many months, the creature pined in its cadaverous den. It lost all will to hunt and grew weak with yearning. One of its minions, possessing an unparalleled intelligence within its exoskeleton, observed its master’s woe and offered a solution. It suggested that the creature seek out another entity that, like itself, had been birthed from the darkness, yet was said to exist from a time that predated the very world’s inception. This entity had divorced itself from the petty cycles of life and death, and occupied a fissure so black and soulless that no being dared seek its counsel except under the direst circumstances. 

‘It is enormously powerful,’ said the loyal servant. ‘But be warned, for its motives are mysterious and in its deceit, may take more from you than you can give.’

The creature, desperate to end its suffering any way it could, followed its minion’s directions and located the fissure. From within, it detected a primordial magic that struck fear through its core, but the creature steeled its resolve and pushed onward down, down, down, into the gloom for what felt like an eternity. Just when it thought it could not bear the endless shadow any longer, it heard a sinister voice echo, ‘I smell a broken heart.’

Its burning yellow eyes sought the speaker, but it could not make out anything from its dreary surroundings until a harsh white light illuminated the lair. It came face to face with a smiling creature, a horrifying sight to behold with a grin near-splitting its skull and a hypnotizing lantern bobbing from its head. The entity introduced itself as a sorcerer who could bend reality to its whims. 

‘But at a price,’ it specified. 

‘I seek an end to my torment,’ the creature pleaded. ‘Please lend me your power and restore me to what I once was.’

‘I know what you truly desire,’ the sorcerer cackled. ‘You wish to leave this rotting world under the waves entirely and live like a human alongside the man you spared. I can do this for you. But for my magic to work, you must eat of the one you adore. Retrieve his eyes for me, and I will make you a potion. Only upon consuming it will you trade your fins for limbs and walk free under the sun.’

The eager creature deliberated long and hard. To its own surprise, it found it did not wish to inflict pain upon the man that occupied its desire, but the temptation to walk alongside him overpowered its hesitation and it agreed. 

The creature sent its servants to retrieve the eyes of the man. Small and unobtrusive, they swarmed through the stones of the palace, into the bedchambers of the prince where he lay asleep, and plucked out his eyes with their claws. The man’s screams shook the foundations of the kingdom but the pests had already scuttled between the crevices of the castle walls and into the safety of the tide where they descended and presented their prize before their master.

The creature took the prince’s eyes and brought it before the sorcerer who concocted a foul substance which he bade the creature to consume. 

‘Heed my words,’ it said with a sly grin. ‘My magic shall bind your souls, but only conditionally. By the next moon, if the prince does not love you as you are, he will remain blind and you will return to the darkness from whence you came, cursed to live in a torturous limbo for all eternity. However, if he were to return your feelings, he will regain the sight you took from him and you will remain human to the end of your days. This is the bargain.’

‘How can the prince love me as I am,’ the creature asked, ‘if he cannot see me nor know my true form?’

But the wicked sorcerer merely smiled. ‘This is the bargain,’ it repeated.

Again, the creature ruminated on this treacherous deal, but it thought of the man’s noble face and pliant flesh in the starlight and it agreed. The moment it tasted the bitter potion, the creature convulsed and felt a fiery pain engulf its body. The sorcerer’s lair echoed with cruel laughter as the creature struggled out of the crevasse and swam with all its remaining might to the surface. It roared with the agony of its transformation as its bones ripped through its body and its insides melted and reconfigured into organs bursting with human blood. Its tail split into legs just as it breached the waters. Strength depleted, it let the tides carry it to shore with the driftwood where it fell upon the sand and sank into an exhausted sleep.