A storm loomed on the horizon.

Not that the cheerfully, insultingly blue sky betrayed any of it, though, but it would take more than a veneer of quiescence to fool Jason’s senses. Even since before he’d taken his first breath, he had found himself to have a certain fascination for meteorology. Now, with the refined, studied knowledge of two centuries and the sharpened senses of a Philosopher on the eighth step, neither sky nor sea could conceal much from him. Jason did not like what he was seeing.

In the eye of his mind, currents spun and wove, wind and wave alike. Above, the firmament was clear and bright, sunlight descending unobstructed to warm Jason’s skin. Below, fish and crustaceans went along their lives, simple minds unbothered by the quelling weight of virtuous beasts further in the depths. He envied them sometimes. Advancement, refinement, mystery, deviation - those were concerns of humankind. Anchovies only needed to care about food and mating.

And yet. Jason’s weather acumen showed him that soon enough the sky’s blue would be devoured by a roiling blackness, churning and thundering, crying tribulation onto those who would be caught under the storm clouds. His sophist’s knowledge warned him of the encroaching treachery of the tide - with the winds roused to wrath, the waves would follow suit. His eyes followed the curve of yet-to-exist rogue waves, great watery axes splitting apart the boats of hapless fishermen who made their living around the Coast, only to then unfurl on their way to the shore and lay down more destruction upon the seaside districts.

Near-absentmindedly, he’d pulled out a wax tablet from his robes, his hands urgently but methodically scribbling down his thoughts in thin tiny lines. Conscientiousness was in order, obviously always, but in such times moreso. Keeping motionless as to not smudge his tablet, his gaze embraced all that was before him, the exhalations of his vital breath rising into the pale strands woven high above, sinking into the unseen titanic currents beneath the surface that shaped the sea.

For an instant, Jason was more than a man.

For a breath, he was one with the cold firmament winds.

For a heartbeat, he was one with the primal silence of the abyss.

For a moment, ever fleeting, he beheld all the cosmic machinery of the world, and understood it.

Instantly, the burden of comprehension bore down on him, crashing on his shoulders, boring into his mind. Jason barely had the time to stow his tablet away in the folds of his robes before the painful part came. After all those years, he’d gotten it down to half of a second. The sand of the shore rose up around him, frittering and crackling, and then- 

Searing, indescribable pain. Lightning shot down from a clear cerulean sky, only once but with countless shudders in the pulse. Jason’s foundation did not tremble nor break, his advancement remained steady, but his mind rent and sundered. Tribulation beat like a heart, like a raging tide, gnarled lines of white-hot retribution shearing through his consciousness, tearing away at his thoughts, at his reason-

Jason’s fists struck together, a sound that resonated in his psyche like iron on iron, the hammer against the anvil. The fires of tribulation lit the forge. His mind was the ore. His willpower would be the crucible. Lightning was still on him, unrelenting. But so was he. Jason held, with his fists clenched together, his muscles screaming under the strain of catching- of restraining- of appropriating divine lightning, and the thunderbolt did not defeat him. The heat welled up inside him as his volition pressed down on the burning spark of judgement, and when it was all too much to hold together, everything flashed to white.

Identity. Personhood. Grief. Elation. Meaning.

The geode of consciousness cracked, charred-black thoughts breaking apart to reveal in the center of splintered crystals of memory, a gleaming copper gear.

With the last of his higher thought, Jason tucked the glistening piece of understanding into his robes; then he jumped into the sea.

After two hundred years, it wasn’t painful anymore. When there was nothing but willpower and natural instincts, when the mind overshadowed the body for as much as it did for the Wave-Hunter, the flesh obeyed the spirit.

Now a magnificent specimen of blacktip shark, the Wave-Hunter let the arc of its leaping parabola carry it into the saltwater. A shrill whistle rippled across the surface as the Wave-Hunter pierced it, torn rags of bleeding pneuma coming undone on the tide’s foam. The shark dove deep, letting the pressure blanket it in soothing coldness.

The currents roiled around it, a gentle rhythm that cradled life within the ocean. Schools of fish parted around the Wave-Hunter, swaying like a thousand droplets of mercury. Strands of algae covered the rocky seafloor, fluttering ponderously in the water-winds. It was all so serene. Quiet, natural, unblemished. The Wave-Hunter set out to hunt, a growing hunger in its stomach; it did not know why it had to feed. Only that it had to.

Phantasmal impressions of yawning ravenous maws wafted off the Wave-Hunter, hunger calling to hunger as the blacktip descended further, into waters where the depths cast a shroud that blocked off sunlight and where, instead of merely cool, the world was truly cold. It was the cold of death and silence, the primal fear of wasting away in weakness, suffusing the very fabric of the ocean abyss; the Wave-Hunter felt soothed by the embalming chill.

Few things lived here, in the open gaping void between the crags of the oceanic shelf and the teeming sands of the true deep, and those few were hunters and killers all. It was the Sea of Monsters, but for the Wave-Hunter it had another name. Home.

Piercing the darkness, other sharks reached out to the Wave-Hunter, wanderers whose attention was seized by the call to hunger. Six of them, all blacktips too but of lesser stature, had joined the Wave-Hunter on its ravenous quest for satiation. Seven animal minds touched each other, communicating in a way that would give no confusion nor mistake. With kin, there was nothing easier than to bare one’s heart and send out meaning.

Lesser the six may have been beside the Wave-Hunter, they all were nonetheless partaking of the ocean’s breath. The souls of beasts like them were simple, primal things. They did not have steps, or even understood such concepts. They simply grew, until there was no one left to match, nothing left to overcome. Pneuma sighed off the six sharks as they arrayed themselves around the Wave-Hunter, streaks of bright turquoise flashing briefly across all seven’s skins as their souls attuned to each other.

Around them all, the ocean water flowed, heaving and exhaling, currents like a heartbeat and thrumming arteries; from the tip of one’s fin to the soft underbelly skin of another, all seven were as one now, feeling the fluctuations of the deep. More than as one, even. There was strength, there was power in seven united souls, of course. In the strands of breath and will that held them together, there was resolve, hunger, and kinship. Seven swam as one; seven swam as eight.

The Wave-Hunter shuddered with an instinctive impulse, and pneuma welled up from within. It slithered between each and every scale that covered it, seeping into skin and bone, cloaking fin and flesh in a mantle of night and silence. Six similar shrouds were exudated in turn around the Wave-Hunter, and the One vanished from perception. Now they could only rely on their bond, on their kinship, to keep them safe.

With the barest tremor, the sevenfold shiver went forth on the prowl.

Deep in the black lightless sea lived beasts and monsters of all kinds, always fighting - for food, for dominance, for bloodletting - always tearing into each other. It made for a jarring symphony, vast stretches of cold emptiness punctuated by surges of cruel, brutal violence. The Wave-Hunter’s shiver had come out of a lull, the waters rippling with the noise of struggle ahead.

Hidden under clinging shrouds of pneuma, the One-in-Seven approached the fight without leaving so much as a single disturbed droplet behind itself. Upon beholding the belligerents, though, the sharks’ instincts made them stay away for now. Before them, a great orca was brawling with an enormous lobster; the killer whale’s black-and-white skin shimmered with a crimson haze, the bubble of its pneuma raking against the other beast’s deformed carapace, each swipe of its unnaturally sharp tail rending great gouges in the lobster’s chitin.

They seemed to be evenly matched, for all that the orca’s strikes could break its enemy’s shell, the lobster’s pincer strikes sent snarling ripples of pneuma flowing in erratic patterns, forcing the whale to constantly dodge around invisible currents. Even in wounds did they appear stalemated; the orca ducked under the lobster’s claw, attempting to rip out the limb, when the lobster violently bobbed its head, impaling the orca’s eye with its proboscis.

All around the great beasts and for an unfathomable distance, the sea bent and twisted, grasped by the rippling wail of the orca’s pain. Pneuma tore the currents into impossible shapes, even as a constant radiation of screaming set the saltwater to a roiling churn from horizon to horizon; even then, it diminished, heartbeat after heartbeat. The lobster’s hungry maw had stung its opponent, and the great crustacean was draining the orca’s lifeforce, at once weakening its foe and strengthening itself, until the killer whale wrenched itself away, staring at the lobster with a now one-eyed hateful glare.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The One-in-Seven barely weathered the crushing pressure of the orca’s roar, fanning out around the duelling beasts in a wide circle. None of its bodies were dead, but all had had to expend a lot of power to avoid getting mulched by the crushing spasms. Slowly, quietly, carefully, they began weaving an unseen snare around the brawling monsters, stealthy strands of pneuma twisting into the shape of barbed algae, each pricking thorn hollowed and thirsting. Between each shark, a vine of coiled breath made for a sturdy framework; then, with the utmost discretion, a thin film of pale algae blossomed from this boundary and towards the center.

There was an instant of tension as the ghostly pellicle made itself whole with a twang, the Wave-Hunter surreptitiously glaring at the great beasts and feeling relieved as they appeared not to have noticed. In the next moment, the One-in-Seven moved. The snare spun on itself, the film of hungry algae reshaped into a bubble, then given another layer, and another - until there were seven, and the binding strands of pneuma faded, leaving the interwoven bubbles to collapse inwards.

Faint but sharp ripples ran through the deep waters as the snare shot inwards with a muted boom, flowing faster than sound; both the orca and the lobster reeled as it struck them, being suddenly entangled in a mess of interwoven sheets of phantasmal algae that rasped and tore at them with every shift of their body. The battle turned into a raging debacle in a heartbeat - the great killer whale urgently bristling with violent scarlet edges that pulsed with the scent of wrath and viscera, stoking murderous instincts and spilling in a roil pneuma that tasted of blood and torn flesh - the crag-shelled lobster’s carapace frothing with distorted currents that threatened to shred all that came close, seething out a boiling, acidic vital breath that clawed and sizzled against even saltwater.

And yet.

For every layer they tore away, another pressed down on them, prolonging the struggle, lengthening the helplessness, deepening the weakness. Already others had smelled the struggling prey. From a side, a shoal of cuttlefish came in shooting through the water, pale grey and green lights blinking under their viscous skins; from beneath, a thing of jaws and tentacles swam upwards; from elsewhere still, a great white shark, pale and brilliant as diamond, with a blazing glare on its fin.

All had come for the bloodbath - all had come for the feast.

A first heartbeat passed, in which nothing happened. The predators were closing in - the prey struggled to flee - the hidden hunters renewed their shrouds and slipped further away to avoid the notice of the newly-come killers. Another heartbeat went, and five great beasts unleashed their most potent instincts. A crimson phantom of teeth and blood flickered into existence into the shape of a killer whale; sizzling ropes of boiling pneuma scattered in fractal patterns around the lobster, wrenching between places; great lashes laden with mindless decay struck out in an attempt to cling to whatever foe they could, grey carrion tentacles seeking to unmake flesh and soul; senses warped and constructs of pneuma shook as the abyss rose, its faint eerie music soothingly strangling those it sought to swallow; and from the great white shark - and the human on its back - shot a thousand piercing, cutting lances of hardened gleaming water.

In the third heartbeat came indescribable chaos as every murderous instinct met every other, flesh and tooth and shell colliding with fearsome intensity, and throughout it all, the keening, insidious whistle of the abyss’ rasping lullaby. Domains flickered, dominions blinked, pneuma spat out in heedless bursts thrashed around, and a growing cloud of blood and mulched viscera bloomed from the center of it all. Before the fifth heartbeat had come, the orca’s lifeless body spun out of the raging melee, the great whale’s spine sundered in three spots and its flesh punctured with countless tiny holes. Three of the Wave-Hunter’s shiver-mates had been clipped by errant instincts and killed, but as much as each death had felt like the tearing of a limb and more, the three that remained and the Wave-Hunter itself rushed onto the orca’s corpse, pressed forward by the urge to feed.

Moments later, another explosion of pneuma rocked the waters around the brawl, three screeching sounds ripping through the cuttlefish shoal and dispersing its rotting miasma. Again, the balance of the battle shifted, and a dozen different bubbles of pneuma swelled up and burst in quick successions. The great white shark’s crystalline body sundered at the edges, scattering into a thousand shards; in this moment, the glare of the blaze faded to reveal that its light came from the human’s pneuma being refracted through the crystal. In the following breath, the countless tiny fragments of diamond softened, hard edges fading into glitters on the surface of gleaming bubbles - before every orb of brilliance gathered anew in the form of a glowing phantasmal jellyfish surrounding the human.

It was not a moment too late. The beast from the abyss had wrapped itself around the lobster, and was bearing down on it with unmatched strength. The crustacean’s carapace was giving way, and soon it shattered with utmost violence, exploding outwards in a rain of stone shards and currents of rending pneuma that severed through the abyssal thing, but bounced off the jellyfish or merely caused its surface to ripple. One of the lashing currents struck the flank of the orca’s corpse, twisting it asunder and killing another of the Wave-Hunter’s shiver, sending all the others whirling and reeling in pain and confusion.

Unity was no more; the consciousness of the One-in-Seven, disjointed and carved out, faded entirely, leaving the Wave-Hunter and the two other survivors twitching and searching for a bond that was no more. All the monsters were dead, save for one. Overcome by mindless hate, the two blacktips surged forward to tear away at the human and its jellyfish. For the barest moment of a moment, thought flashed across the Wave-Hunter’s mind. Lines, angles, forces. Then it was gone, and the Wave-Hunter could only stare hopelessly as what it had envisioned unfolded, its shivermates rent across by a sharpened turquoise edge of hardened water.

Blood dispersed slowly, following the slow descent of shredded viscera towards the bottom of the sea. For a rare moment after the brutal battle, silence held. The human and the Wave-Hunter met intentless stares, the jellyfish floating listlessly to the side.

Then there were words.

“I see you, Unraveler of Secrets.”

A sound like horror embodied writhed out from the Wave-Hunter’s very being as understanding and higher thought returned to it. The shark’s- no, Jason’s mind screamed in agony as it reeled back from the pain of the metamorphosis. Stuck in this body was an unbelievably painful experience, and Jason lurched and bent every way and then more and never finding a posture that was not staking him through with lances of white-hot pain. His thoughts were jagged, sideways things, barely managing to hold him together while he kept screaming.

It was the kick to the head that shook him enough to make the pieces of his mind click together. Jason did not even notice it happening; one moment he was thrashing in pain, then a flash of pure impact was delivered to his skull, and the next moment he was flailing around with his hands, trying to escape the crushing pressure of the empty sea.

Not for long, however. The other man swam towards him out of the jellyfish’ embrace, and around him was a bubble of clear luminous water pulsing with pneuma; when it washed over Jason, the philosopher found out that the pressure was relieved, and that he could breathe this aquamarine flow. More interesting, he could hear the other man speak.

“Thank you for everything, Arethusa.”

Behind him, a crystalline laughter echoed, the shape of the jellyfish shrinking into that of a luminous woman who came to float next to the other man. Arethusa - or so was her name, Jason supposed - had a voice entirely unlike a human. It bubbled and glistened like a mountain creek, and it carried power that Jason was not even close to understanding.

It was, however, a power that he knew the nature of, and he was overcome by awe and dread both at the question of how this strange man - in tattered orange robes, no less - had managed to attract the grace of a nereid, knowing that divine spirits of the natural world were incredibly hard even to meet, and even more so to find amenable. Yet here he was, shoulder to shoulder with a nymph, who’d fought with him, protected him.

Jason tensed in anxious expectation when the man spoke to him again and reached out with a muscular arm.

“So. Jason, was it ? I reckon you have questions, but for now best hang on tight, we’re going to go up fast.”

He did have a lot of questions, but the warning spurred him forward more intently. He clasped the other man’s arm. Beneath them, the nymph - Arethusa - laid one finger on the bubble of clearwater, and pushed up.

“Do come see me again if you can, dear. It is always a pleasure to meet a son of the sea.”

Her last words were barely audible over the roar of the titanic currents yanking them towards the surface.