Fiction by Liam Davidson

Your kind was once a wholly aquatic species. You can’t imagine what it must have been like to never know the touch of the breeze. Not that the ocean is particularly unpleasant; your time as a fry was initially fun—being tossed between your mother’s tentacles in the reef’s shallows, watching golden rays refract across her eye. The ocean was comfortable. The ocean was safe. That is to say, the ocean was boring.

You’d always wondered where those golden rays actually came from. For much of your juvenile life, the answer was simply “above.” That was enough because you were still coming to terms with concepts like up and down. Oh, how easy it was to be fascinated back then. You could conjure intrigue from the most mundane of sights, from fields of glimmering aurorus algae, to the bubble columns belched up by cracks in the seafloor. You were an adventurous fry, even by terrapus standards. By the end of your first year of life, you’d done all there was to do around the reef. You’d witnessed every species of fish and snail and plant, seen and felt every rock and shell and piece of coral. The only mystery left in your life lay above, and so that was where your eye seemed always to wander.

You’d been hatched in a clutch of twelve, but by the end of that first year, you were one of only five survivors tucked safely beneath your mother’s eight arms as she drifted about the reef. She’d occasionally let you wander, but never beyond her reach. Sometimes you would try to sneak away. You’d pump your little legs, propelling yourself higher, watching the gilded patterns of the surface draw near. But your absence never went unnoticed. Your mother would pinch you gently between her claws and pull you back into her embrace. One day you would grow claws like her, you told yourself. One day you’d have your own horn like her and be big enough and fast enough to escape.

You grew to resent your mother as you matured. Why had she brought you into this world only to act as the warden keeping you from experiencing its wonders? Slowly, so infuriatingly slowly, you did develop claws like her on two of your tentacles. From your back grew a protuberant, spongy gland you were unsure what to do with. An osseous spike sprouted above your eye like the boneroot plants that grew next to the reef, and you sharpened your new horn on stones whenever you could. Eventually, your jailor could no longer keep you tucked beneath her lest that pointy tip find her underside. You grew. You learned.

Now, you and your siblings have finally found the courage to escape.

There are only three of you now. Together, you abandon your mother and make for the above. When she tries to stop you, you lash out, clenching her arm between your claw until it’s sliced from her body. She recoils. No other tentacles reach to pull you back. You’re free.

You ascend toward the surface, the precipice of a new world, but you hesitate. You’ve dreamed of this moment since you first felt those auric rays from beyond; why now do your nerves falter? You drop your gaze. The reef—the only home you’ve ever known—stares back at you from the darkness, daring you to return. Your mother is a deeper shadow across its face. She watches you, deflated, all traces of strength having left alongside her children. This is the first time you’ve seen her from such a distance, and the first time you realise that she is old. Very old. Deep lines and jagged scars trace her aged, leathery hide. The flick of her remaining tentacles lack resolve. A red cloud spreads through the water from the grievous wound you’ve inflicted upon her. She doesn’t seek shelter, even though the reefjaws will soon smell that blood and be upon her. She merely watches you and waits to die.

You taste disgust on the tip of your beak. Anger. How dare she draw pity from you now, after two years of keeping you captive! You chitter a final curse, turn, and launch upward. Fear, pity, and momentary regret follow you to the height of the ocean, and all of it washes instantly away when you propel past that final barrier.

Heat. Pure radiance, more holy than the mild warmth of the shallows you once knew. High above—higher than you think is possible—a white orb drips honeyed light over your skin. The blue that surrounds you steals your breath. Streaks of white are painted across a soaring invisible surface, whorling shapes you could stare at forever.

Something akin to a current slips across your face, only it is lighter and carries with it a delicious warmth. A scent of foreign salt. There is an unheard voice in that breeze. It calls out to a primal part of your being. You and your siblings follow it, pushing against the waves on a quest to discover its source.

Without your mother, you must hunt your own food, but you’ve seen her do it enough times to understand the process. While you are bigger, your siblings are faster, and by the time they snatch their fill from passing schools of venusfish, there is little left for you. You decide to leave your siblings, to hunt and seek the breeze without them.

Now you are truly alone. At least you’re eating well.

On the fifth day of following the winds, you are pursued by a colony of stinger snails. You’ve seen their kind before, in the reef, but had no idea they could swim so fast once they’d singled out a target. You didn’t know they could swim at all. Only a few manage to pierce your skin before you crush enough to send the rest fleeing. Still, their toxins are able to steal sensation from three of your tentacles for hours. You shudder to think what might have happened were you smaller or they had caught you unaware.

On the eighth day of travel, you spot a strange creature coasting along on the surface of the waves. Or perhaps it isn’t a creature at all. It coughs plumes of smoke into the air and propels its metal body forward with a series of spinning blades. It's even larger than the trenchdigger leviathans of the reef. Curiosity pulls you close, but once the upright creatures that ride the metal beast spot you, they begin shouting and pointing and hurling chains and nets. You slink below the surface and don’t taste the open air again until you’ve left the rumble of the beast far behind.

On the eleventh day of travel, the world changes. The horizon—what had always been a flat line defined only by the two blues that formed it—darkens. Pointed shapes stretch up from the approaching mass. You swim closer and notice thousands of spires tipped with bright green foliage just beyond a stretch of sand. Dry sand. The winds you chase cascade from inland. If you wish to discover their source, it seems you’ll have to truly leave the ocean behind you. Cautiously, you pull yourself onto the beach.

The first thing you notice is the weight. Everything becomes a thousand times heavier, from your bony claws to the sac atop your head. Water continues to drip from the sac, its spongy material refusing to part with the fluid it's always known. You’re thankful for this, despite the incredible heft you are forced to support with three or four arms at all times, for sand of the beach leeches hungrily at your moist skin.

The breeze calls, and you push on.

The beach gives way to forest. You pull yourself past the strange, sun-obscuring spires and listen intently to the high-pitched cries of the feathered forms that leap between them. The forest gives way to fields. You relish the soft brush of grass and the shining touch of the sky as you watch a herd of horned creatures chew at the greenery. One brazen bovine approaches you, head lowered in a threat. You and the creature are roughly the same size; however, you possess the bigger horn. Foolishly, it attacks.

When the fight is over, you make the discovery that the flesh of land animals tastes nothing like fish. Not bad, merely different.

The fields eventually give way to rocky hills. The bright orb in the sky is replaced by its softer cousin as darkness blankets the landscape. Your first day on land was an exciting one, but you find yourself yearning suddenly for the comforts of the deep. It's been growing ever more difficult to draw enough breath from the air to keep your lungs satisfied, and you feel your hide cracking in places, crying out for moisture. You spot a shallow depression in the earth and have an idea.

Once you’ve squeezed all the water from your spongy back, the pit becomes a pond that you gratefully lower yourself into. There you spend the night, breathing the way you are used to, scrubbing dirt from your underside, nursing what minor wounds you sustained in your fight, and looking up from the water at millions of clear constellations. The breeze calms. In the morning, its call will echo once more. For now, you spare a thought for where your siblings might be and drift into a blissful slumber.

When you wake, you are surrounded by feathered creatures like the ones you spied in the forest. They sip from your pond and squawk at one another, seemingly unaware of your presence. You decide to snatch one for an early meal, which sends the rest spiralling away into the sky. When you finish eating, you absorb back into your sponge sac as much water as you can and hoist yourself out of the hole. The breeze is calling. You follow.

Your journey across the land takes nearly a full season, seventy-three days and seventy-three nights, if you counted correctly. Some days were less eventful than your first. Others, you were forced to fight claw and horn for your very life against savage predators. You pulled yourself through forests and around mountains, over rivers and across wetlands. If at night you found no suitable pit to form a pond, you dug one. If no land-dwellers presented themselves as food, you picked a fight. You felt yourself change in subtle ways. Your skin grew thicker, your legs more powerful. The air became more bearable to breathe. At times, your resolve faltered. You were devastatingly lonely. You considered more than once the prospect of turning around. You’d never faced danger like this in the ocean. You could return to that safety, to your home, to your kind.

But with each day, the call of the breeze grew stronger until at last you found yourself here, at the peak of a cliff, staring out over its source.

A sea.

A beautiful, infinite sea.

A sea of such vibrant blue as to put the sky to shame. And below you, in a sheltered cove, you see them. Hundreds of your kind. A swarm of terrapi celebrating the end of their own journeys. Their scent mixes with the salt of the cliff face as it’s grabbed by the wind and pulled to you.

You descend. You rejoice. You dive into the waves and swim amongst the throng. You spot one of your siblings and mourn together the loss of your third kin. You find a mate and produce a clutch of twenty-eight eggs. Then, when the first hints of the coming cold season are felt on the breeze, you depart. The journey home is easier this time, for you have adapted to the perils of the land. It is also harder, for you carry your unborn offspring in the pores of your sac.

The reef is as you remember it. Boring, comfortable, and so thankfully safe. The fourteen eggs that survived your return hatch into the most beautiful fries. You hold them close, tossing them between your tentacles and gazing into their eyes with love. When they attempt to wander beyond your reach, pumping their little legs to find the surface, you gently pull them back. You’ve been to the above. You’ve faced its dangers and know its unforgiving side. Someday your precious babies will experience it. When they are ready. When they are bigger and faster and have horns and claws of their own. Someday, the breeze will call for them. Someday. Just not yet.

Liam Davidson is a digital artist, author, and game developer dedicated to sharing his fantasy stories through a variety of differing media. Currently working to publish both his first illustrated novel and first full game, Liam hopes that his work will further the abolition of those notions which keep fiction from being experienced visually, textually, imaginatively, and interactively all at once.