I tore a page out of the end of the book. I don’t think I will need that many. My tears destroy it, as it does my saliva and my urine, as long as they don’t disappear soon enough. In moments of doubt, I watch my shadow, solid as it has been as of late, and wonder why I had to be seduced by the call of the sea, by those invertebrate sirens. I don’t hate bryozoans, but I foster for them the respect one fosters for fire after he gets burnt for the very first time.

Enough rambling about my current situation, I have a story to finish telling. Even if I don’t want to. Even if I want to stop here and leave this unconcluded. I owe Zenvo a closure. I owe Terus a closure. I owe myself, if that could even be a thing, the pain of reliving those days.

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I reappeared in Ludlun, at the bar where the only person present was Remelias.

“Long time no see, Terus,” she said, sipping from her drink as she always did.

“Do you know, Remelias, the person you are shaped after? All the suffering she caused?”

She lowered her head once, and then moved it back up. It was not a nod, despite it intending to be. It was the sort of inhuman movements my kind routinely does. “Yet there is nothing to change about it. It’s a fact, Terus, nothing more, nothing less. Like the fact your actions are distressing the dreamer as of late. Will you go on?”

“Yes.” I sentenced, and willed myself away, quickly making my way back to the shore, one mountain span at a time.

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With the hands and feet aching and feeling tired for the first time in who knows how long, I finally reached a big, disc shaped coral where I was able to rest. I looked up from there, to the beams of sunlight that danced on the wavy veil above, and below, to the dark underwater plains from which I had come.

I lay on the rough disc and caressed its delicate polyps. The transparent animals retracted into its little holes as soon as my hand touched them, if they felt my hand at all. It shifted through some, passing over them like an illusion.

An octopus, disguised amongst the colorful cnidarians, slipped through, and when I noticed him, he approached, examining my slowly moving body out of curiosity. His arms, strong and covered in suckers, enveloped mine, and its beak bit my wrist, making me shift suddenly, scaring the creature, who left behind a cloud of ink thick and bitter.

Everything down there inspected me mouth first, it seemed. Of course, they were not used to men, and even less used to dragon dreams.

Dogs were easier. But I needed not to mind these almost random attacks: they could do no lasting damage to me. What I had to do, however, was to search. I could not swim around, I was too far from Cirruin, such that known paths were still as easy to traverse, but the unknown still pushed back.

I had to go on. I was so close to seeing bryozoans in person. There had to be some around here. Dead corals were a perfect substrate for them, after all, and the water was warm and welcoming. But it was an spectacle of colors: fish, corals, crabs, and some echinoderms inhabited this reef. Forget the needle on the haystack, this was like looking for a needle in a stack of short, grey, polished wire.

Descending from the disc, I began clambering into the domes and dendrites, careful not to break them. I may have the strength of a dragon, but I have the weight a man has to a dragon, too: Inconsequentially light most of the time, unable to even leave footprints unless the mud is mostly water already. Few beaches in the world would register my passage unless I explicitly wanted them to do so.

From morning to noon I searched under every rock, on every face of every coral, disturbing every creature that was unlucky enough to inspect me. The reef had probably not seen so much activity since a long time ago. And finally, when a ray of the sun was generous enough to reveal my quarry’s yellow hue, I crawled to it like a cat stalking its prey. Why, if what I was hunting couldn’t swim away. Why, if it was merely more than an amoeboid stain incrusted upon a long dead coral.

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Hypnotized with it, yearning and a certain vertigo overtook me, as if I were falling towards something divine. I reached slowly, a first contact between me and this object of my desire. I tried not to shift, not to move suddenly. The tip of my fingers touched the swaying tentacles of one of the zooid’s crowns, and it instantly retracted into the zoecioum, it’s little box, closing the operculum to protect itself.

This was the moment, not the conclusion of my journey, but the beginning of the payoff. I laughed, underwater as I was, I laughed out loud and the laughter impregnated the reef and made the fish, bony and cartilaginous alike, swim away in panic. It made the rest of the zooids on the bryozoan to imitate the first, giving up their feeding time to safeguard themselves.

Sea life could use a bit of fear if I could use a bit of elation. I, a dream, had found this object of my desire with no help more than what I had read. What could denote further mastery of the tongue of men, than following the cryptic clues in a book meant only for the eyes of naturalists to find this animal so real, so unlike me. I thought that if I were more of a dragon, I’d surely start to hoard bryozoans then and there, that yellow one being the cornerstone of my collection.

But as Terus, as this stain of a man upon a dragon’s heart, my hoard had to be burned into the memory, a mere gallery of recollections of the objects of desire. I was not the force of destruction my mother, the curse, constantly tried to turn me into.

After an hour or so of admiring my colony of little darlings, I decided it was time to search for another. This was the Auric Moss of the North Sea, but Lover’s Promise and Night’s Pieces had also been found in this reef, according to my source.

I crawled around a little more as evening passed by, and soon enough, down below, on the outer wall of the reef, I found a colony of Lover’s Promise. Unlike the Auric Moss, this wasn’t an incrusting colony, but one that grew like a small tree of purple and pink branches. On each branch the zooids did their thing, be it feeding or defending the colony, anchoring to the rock or aiding in reproduction. This one’s body wasn’t as hard, it was rather flexible, and the branches swayed with each little current that came by. I didn’t try to touch this one, and neither I felt as elated as for the first. I thought I could boil the water around it and gift these little animals a horrible death, and an instant later became disgusted with myself. I climbed away, descending a bit just to propel my body back up. I had to get away from it, from these precious animals. I had to focus my mind on finding a Night’s Piece before my presence grew too weak for me to cover new terrain.

I failed my task that day, but, two or three days later, as soon as I arrived back to the reef, I happened upon a cave I had overlooked. It was home to Polychaeta worms, fish that dug into the sand, bivalves and a couple octopuses, and every inhabitant that could move hid when I barged in. And there, on a corner of said cave, I found the characteristic form my book had described. It looked like a round blob of darkness. The exoskeletons of these bryozoans were pitch black, which would have been enough to warrant them this name, but that wasn’t all.: the zooids were bright white. It was like a clear night sky had granted its stars tentacles to reach out of the heavenly dome and into the space beyond. Marveled at it, I circled around the ball. it was the size of my head, and it didn’t mind my presence. This colony, it surpassed the other two in raw beauty. I felt I could live like that, forever admiring it at an arm’s distance, seeing the different patterns the movement of the zooids illustrated.

I decided it had to be mine in more ways than image alone. I had to dream it for myself, steal his image before memory had a chance to tarnish it.

The salt in the eyes, the wet environment, the animals and the pressure made it impossible to sleep, though. Every attempt to fall asleep was met with tossing about, rolling, and general uncomfortableness. The Night’s Piece was not mine to be dreamed of. Not then, not there.

I had to go. I bid it adieu with a soft touch, as if caressing the head of my firstborn. It was not as valuable as people, this colony of animals, even if it’s colors called to something primal within me. I had to recover the man, to not let the dragon win. But… I could be there until I faded, right? Nothing would happen if a waited a few more hours and watched the little tentacles sway and feed and retract and protract. Yes, I could have been there forever, and it would be there for me to visit tomorrow and possibly the next week too, right?

And it would have been like so, had it not been because that was the last instance of dreaming Cirruin had before the onset of the nightmare.