More long years passed.
Every day, he made the trip from his lair between the two reefs to look out on the leaden sea and the brown land. Aside from that he hunted and slept, and that was all. There was plenty of food, and his occasional battles with the larger cartilaginous fish were more a source of entertainment and stimulation than any real threat. He had never thought to want a companion, nor had he ever encountered another creature like himself.
Another day came that began as usual: he left his lair, passing through the kelp forest, and slid into the narrow channel between the reefs. At some point, the echinoderms had multiplied until they covered the walls of this passage, growing more like seaweed than animals. He noticed that the usual swarms of translucent fish were nowhere to be seen. Then he saw that the other schools of small fish had also vanished, leaving the channel eerily quiet. He thrust against the water, slowing his speed, and looked around. Something was different, of that he was sure. The little annelids that dug holes in the seafloor and waved their gills in the water were all hiding, their hard heads sealing the entrances to their tubes.
What were they afraid of?
He checked the reef, his nerves tingling, yet there was no sign of danger anywhere, so he returned to his regular route.
When he passed over the dark chasm, he looked down to see a school of large cartilaginous fish swimming furtively in the murky depths.
It occurred to him that they must be down there hiding from something. But what?
Fish rarely went down there. Yet something had driven them to seek the safety of deeper water, causing them to forget their usual fear in the face of a greater danger.
He felt the first pang of unease in his heart. An instinctual sense of warning filled him, a feeling of fear such as he had never known. For a moment, he wondered if he should return to his lair or perhaps seek the shelter of the depths like the lurking fish. In the end, he chose a third option.
He advanced, body tensed, acutely aware of the water around him.
By the time he had reached the rocky shelf beyond the reef, he was convinced that this day was unlike any other day out of all the days in the long years he had known. A fear he could not place gripped his whole being. Driven by a burning desire to know what it was that seemed so threatening, he clambered up onto the flat outcropping.
Around him spread the leaden sea and the brown expanse of the flats. The wind blew in from the open sea, strong as always. He shivered in the icy cold.
Far across the plains, a thick haze rose like smoke, swaying into the sky.
His body stiffened.
Farther, beyond the haze, something like a giant mountain range was moving. It stretched all the way up to the ashen sky, forming at least three peaks. He had never known such a thing to exist on the land, nor had he ever seen such a thing—even on the clearest of days, which this was not.
Then he saw more—another thing just like the first one, looming far behind it, and another one, so far away he could just make out a silhouette on the edge of the horizon, sliding from right to left.
There was something queer about the way those shadowy shapes moved, something that chilled his heart with terror.
What could they be?
If he had, at that point in his life, ever seen a mountain or even an undersea ridge, he would have realized how closely these things he was now watching resembled those massive rocky formations, and the fear would have driven him mad. Fortunately for him, he knew nothing about mountains or any such lofty things. That something as massive as a mountain might move struck him as no more odd than the shifting of the tides.
Then he noticed something else and stretched up to stand on the highest point of the rock that he might get a better view.
Far off to his left across the plains, the same spires he always saw deep in the mist were standing, almost floating over the ground like a mirage, and the giant peaks were heading right toward that phantasmal forest.
✦ ✦ ✦
For a long time he sat there, gazing out at that strangely solid illusion. The moments stretched into long, long hours, during which he asked the sky and the sea more than once what it was that he beheld.
And another question he asked of himself: What is this place?
He could feel something that had been locked up within his heart begin to unfurl, sending a tingling sensation through his body.
A storm loomed over the water. For several days and nights he sat in the driving rain. The sea roared in his ears relentlessly, and the waves that beat upon the rock broke over him like a drumming waterfall, wetting his body. Purple discharges of electricity lit the wave crests bluish white; the rumbling thunder sent its own trembling waves across the breadth of the sea.
He lay flat upon the rocky shelf, ceaselessly rocked by the waves.
The crustaceans that had once swarmed around the reef and the fish that had leapt over the waves, their scales flashing silver, were nowhere to be seen. Even the forest of kelp that covered the seafloor nearby had been drained of its color—he saw it flitting in pale strips or ripped from its roots to spin amongst the restless waves. For a long while he saw it drift in translucent sheets on the surface until gradually the currents pulled it out to sea.
A howling blast of wind brought him suddenly back into the moment. The ringing, discordant whine in his ears tickled his auditory nerves, stimulating him, awakening a large part of his brain that had until now been dead to the world. He lifted his body and stared with blank eyes across the vast ocean for a long time. Then, his entire body shivering, he tossed himself forward into the waves. It took some time before he was again aware of his surroundings and again wanted to see those strange, massive shapes upon the plains.
Time and time again, he rose up to the crest of a wave, stretching out his neck, only to find that he could no longer see anything on the land. The hazy, brown flats were once again as featureless as they always had been.
Far to the left, he saw the strange forest of tall spires, dim in the distance.
That was all.
Had it been a dream?
He shook his head.
Unease still smoldered in the recesses of his memory.
He swam straight through the channel between the reefs, flitting quickly over the dark chasm. He saw not a single fish, not a bit of kelp—only the reefs, lined thick with old shells, and the naked white sand. The clear water was as silent as death.
What had happened to all the kelp that once grew along the seafloor?
And what of the lively creatures that spread their gills like flowers from their muddy holes?
And all the crustaceans and the bold cartilaginous fish?
The only sounds drifting along the dark sea bottom were the low, distant crash of the waves upon the shore, and the high-pitched friction of the current against the reefs.
The roar of all those creatures of the sea was gone.
He wanted to find out why. And yet, he sensed, this was a dangerous question to investigate now. He beat with all his strength back toward his lair, plunging through the opening headfirst.
Fatigue such as he had never known assaulted him. The movement of his gills slowed abruptly and his head sank down as he fell into a deep sleep.
A minute later, the sphincter-entrance to his lair shrank, then quietly closed. The faint sound of a compressor grinding into motion drifted up from somewhere below. From the walls, manipulation arms of various shapes and sizes extended, sticking silvery needles deep into his dark blue skin. The tubes attached to those needles began to swell as liquid passed through them. More needle-tubes extended. A hemispherical cap was placed over his round head, and the bundled cables extending from it filled the inside of the pod like a spider’s web. Then, two pairs of thick tubes thrust out from the layer of shells outside the pod. One pair began sucking in seawater with a loud gurgling noise, while the other, a moment later, began blowing out thousands of tiny air bubbles. Like a chain of silver the bubbles rose toward the surface, their wavering shapes bringing motion to the lifeless, barren seafloor.
Unaware, he slept.