Triakis

It is a dream in the depths.  Everything moves with the slow deliberateness of sleep, from the giant kelp forests looming shadowy in the distances, to the lazy winding eel in the underwater caves.  From far, far overhead comes the suggestion of light, but it is lost within a hundred feet of the surface.  The world above is enshrouded in night.  The world below is as it always is: salt water and invisible currents, cold water and lethargy.

And then there is movement.

Fast, sleek, agile, a streamlined shape cuts up from the depths of the dark, vast ocean.  Hunter hunting, it is too quick for the eye to fully realize.  There is a suggestion of fins, of a lean body shaped by and shaped for a watery life, and then a lash of the—tail?  Legs?—sends it darting in another direction, negotiating waving stalks of kelp easily.  Too late, the eel sees it coming.  A lash of its ribbon-thin body loops it about, and already the undulations that would carry it to safety are working down its body, but then its pursuer whips its tail-fin as what had once been pectoral fins unfold from its body.  Thus does it resolve into a man-shape, at least from the waist up, the arms once folded across the chest, such that the backswept razor-edged fins that lined its forearms had served to steer its path.  Even as the eel makes this realization somewhere deep in its dull mind, something—jaws, a harpoon, a taloned…hand?—sears out and closes about the tail.

The prey thrashes.  The predator holds firm.

Almost silently, gracefully, the pair dance the death-dance, their movements as muffled and cushioned as sound.  But there is one movement that is not buffered in the slightest bit.  A flick of what must be the wrist; a slash from the opposite arm-fin up, up, viciously up, and the eel is bleeding.  A reverse-blow, a slice of the arm back down, and the eel is dead, floating gently on the currents that eddy about the pair.

There is stillness.  Gently, the streamlined fish’s body bends, and what had been a tail-fin separates into a pair of legs, each bearing a backsloping fin on the outer calf, and another on the outer thigh.  Still gripping its prey, the water-creature begins its ascent to the dim starlight.

It breaks the surface, water-slicked, shining, and a toss of its—his—head scatters crystalline droplets of water in all directions.  Along his neck, the gill slits seal firmly shut.  His nostrils flare and he takes his first breath in seven turns of the skies, expanding the little-used lungs.  His cephalic fin folds down for a moment, wringing water away, before it snaps erect to display a crest splashed with reds and oranges.  A slow stroke, arms flashing and glittering, takes him to the not-so-distant shore.  As his feet touch bottom, the fins along his legs fold back, laying so flat against his body that they were almost indistinguishable.

There is a wind rising, and it smells the way it always does: like salt.  Like the ocean.  It is a cold wind, but he does not shiver.  His is a cold world, and his blood, cold as well.

He wades out of the sea that stretches behind him as far as the eye can see, black and breathing.  He leaves a trail of water, the tail of the eel dragging over the sand.  In the starlight, his body is revealed to be entirely hairless, entirely covered in shining scales, the iridescent hues ranging from green-tinged yellow to blue-tinged green to purple-tinged blue, and back.

Starlight?  No.  Galaxy-light.  His planet circles far, far from its powerful star, so powerful that though it hangs no larger than Earth’s Evening Star in the sky, it gives the light of Sol.  His planetary system is alone, apart, distanced from any other.  In the night, there are no stars to see.  There are galaxies instead, hundreds, thousands, scattered across the black sky.  Some are so distant that they are naught more than indistinct patches of light; others, great elliptical glitters, or spiraling pinwheels cast across half the heavens.

He lifts his many-hued eyes to that magnificent, austere sight now, the great dorsal fin folding flat upon his spine.  The skies of his world have a bleakness, a solitary and austere beauty, much like the small, scattered patches of desert that are the only alternative to the vast, vast sea.  Much like him.

Here, all life arises in the ocean.  All life thrives in the ocean.  And all life ends in the ocean.

All life is the ocean.