Beneath a brightening sky, Lirran awoke. Hunger tore his innards, thirst ground his throat. He wished not to feel this pain, he wished it to end, himself to end. But then there was this figure, Kaza. The words were still enticing, the allure of the dark drew him further, the thought of going beyond what is real and letting all that there is to feel stream into his heart, let it burst, relive all his joys and pain in a final culmination.

Just as he tried to imagine his self escalating into eruption, he saw something in the distance. The sun was not yet fully up, so it appeared as a bright sheet of cloth swimming on the surface. It had been a whole day since he saw the last drifting wreckage from the ship. The bedsheet seemed to move faster than a current would allow. It came directly towards him. He then saw that it had a pattern, something like black and grey waves. Then he realized that it was no bedsheet.

The creature swam ever closer to him and finally, when it was only a dozen feet away, it raised its head. Big black eyes taking up the entire width of a flat, pale face with no nose and only a flap for a lip. It was a tzappatt. It smiled at Lirran, showing two reddish-brown blades instead of rows of teeth and made odd clicking and rasping sounds.

It took Lirran a moment staring in awe at this person.

“Kaza?”

Eagerly, the tzappatt nodded and clicked. Lirran was aghast. He had not realized the person he had been dreaming with was a tzappatt, it had never crossed his mind. It made sense, who else was in this wasteland of an ocean? Another passing ship? But he had never hoped to find help this way, no, he would not have dreamed any ship would change their course because of a dream someone had. But a tzappatt? With no need for ships and boats, they would have no issues, it would be like him finding a fish in a puddle on a field.

“I am sorry, I cannot understand your speech.”

Kaza seemed unbothered by that and came closer. Its tentacle-like arms wrapped in the muscular layer of pale and translucent flesh he had mistaken for a bedsheet grabbed the rim of the boat. Instead of a hand with fingers it had a triangular flat end with three muscular protrusions that extended and the muscular sheet wrapped around whatever needed to be gripped.

“Please watch out that you don’t tip me over!”

But instead of performing a movement of sudden heaving and rocking, the tzappatt wrapped its muscular sheet around the rim and began to crawl upwards like a slug. Lirran now saw the rows of interlocking shell plates that formed the tzappatt’s spine, skull and limb skeleton, sitting on the outside of the sheet, which then wrapped around the rest of the tzappatt’s body, keeping the gill filaments inside wet. Only the head was laid free by peeling the sheet back like a single, huge petal of a ghostly flower.

Kaza sat up and looked at Lirran. It was wearing something like a satchel with a long strap that did not hinder it while swimming and affixed to it were a multitude of carved seashells, pieces of wood and bone, as well as lengths of string and sinew. Lirran had never seen a tzappatt, only drawings of them, but he heard they were able to go on land for a while only, and were slow and clumsy there. He understood why, for the muscular layer was much longer than it needed to wrap around the humanoid body, making Kaza look like it was wrapped in a wet blanket, hindered and weighed down.

From the satchel, Kaza pulled a canteen and rattled it, revealing at least some drinkable liquid inside.

Lirran’s eyes lit up in joy. “Where have you found that?”

Kaza pointed somewhere far off.

“I guess it was from the wreck.”

Kaza handed it to him and he hastily undid the cork and began drinking without a second thought. It was wine, a strong and tart one, but it was drinkable with no taste of salt. He emptied the canteen in one go.

“THANK YOU!” He leapt towards Kaza and hugged the tzappatt. The wet skin was slightly sticky through slime, but he cared little. He felt like Kaza slowly but powerfully tried to pry loose from his embrace and pushed him back onto his seat while making clicking and squelching sounds seemingly scolding him.

“Now what? You don’t happen to find some food as well, did you?”

Kaza nodded, reached into the satchel again and drew forth something much less cause for jubilation: a human hand, severed at the wrist.

“What?”

Kaza pushed it further to him, gesturing that he should take it.

“Wh- what? Why are you giving me a hand? What is it with you?” He looked at the hand and saw that it bore a ring, a peculiar ring Lirran recognized: it was the signet ring of the ship’s captain. “You found this among the wreckage, too, didn’t you?”

Kaza nodded and made a gesture moving the hand to its mouth.

“You want me to EAT THAT? That’s a person’s hand, I can’t eat that!”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Kaza seemed surprised, but shrugged and instead took a bite out of the hand itself, the blades it had for teeth cutting through skin and flesh with ease, followed by a rasping sound like running a file over wet wood. Bone and muscle were laid bare, long dead tendons hanging from the wound like fish guts in the buckets at the piers. The tzappatt then stuck entire fingers of the captain into its mouth and sucked them with more rasping and slurping sounds, leaving nothing but a ground-down nub afterwards.

Lirran looked on in horror. He tried to reconcile the glorious luminous figure he had seen in his dreams with the man-eating, slug-like creature before him. He felt like vomiting, but took all his mind to control the urge, as to not lose the precious water he had just been given. Despite the disgusting display, his stomach began to cry for food again. After Kaza had eaten three of the fingers and part of the palm, it put the hand back in the satchel and looked to the horizon. The sun slowly crept upwards and finally breached above. Kaza made a gesture, obviously telling him to wait, then got up and jumped back into the water. Lirran looked after her, watching as the translucent spot disappeared in the hazy dark of the ocean’s depths.

He sat on the blanked at stared to the cloudless horizon waiting for Kaza to return. Although his newfound chance at life made him want to row eastward in the hope the wind had not carried him too far west, he remained where he was. He was scared of the creature, but the figure in the bay of dreams had promised him he would not perish. Would it eat him or keep its dreamed promise?

He decided to wait.

Staying on the boat gave him time to think. He took the bucket and scooped some of the water that had gotten in out. Maybe one day, he simply would stop caring or he would be dead before it filled completely. He remembered the tales he had heard. Although he had grown up far inland on Ulsol, he had still heard about the icy people that came drifting in icebergs from the south, where their cities of pearl and splendour stood underwater. But they had been described as short, round and with colours of blue and green. This one was tall with slender limbs, all in either pale and black or entirely translucent. A different thought came to him, a story he had been told by the others on his first day as a deckhand, of what crawled on deck at night with black eyes and teeth like razorblades. He shut those stories out.

It must have been late forenoon when Kaza emerged again. Lirran saw that it held something in its mouth: a fully grown haddock. Without getting into the boat, Kaza spat the fish on board, then reached into the satchel to pull out a knife with a grip of bone and blade of black glass.

“Thank you!” Lirran made a bowing gesture over the railing of the boat in a show of gratitude. Kaza made no efforts to crawl on board this time and peculiarly stayed in its shadow instead, away from the sun. The normally huge eyes were reduced to almost pinholes by the iris and instead of peeling back like a petal, the muscular sheet hung over the face to give shade.

Lirran sat down and took the knife and started cutting strips of raw flesh from the haddock’s side. Raw they were bland in taste and texture, but his hunger and the mere sensation of eating something solid made him forget the taste. With full mouth he asked. “You are not a normal tzappatt, are you? Are you one of the darkwater children?”

Kaza nodded and Lirran knew why this tzappatt hated the sun. It had probably only seen it a few times in its entire life. While in the twilight, the body of the tzappatt had almost disappeared, the sunlight flooded through it revealing an opaque but colourless core roughly in the shape of a human with thin, spindly limbs and torso.

“I understand if the sun burns you. I wouldn’t want you to do this for me if it hurt you.”

But Kaza remained hovering in the shadow of the boat.

“But why? Why expose yourself like that? At least come aboard and cover yourself with this.” He showed the blanket.” it's already damp so why care?”

This time, the tzappatt seemed to think about it, then agreed and slithered back on board, immediately crawling under the blanket and balling up in the sheetlike bodypart to keep its gills wet.

Lirran observed the creature for a while, it observing him, pondering about each other until he decided to break the silence. “Why would you want to train me in anything? I can’t follow you into the depths and you can’t follow me for long on land and in the sun. Why would you want to teach me? How would you want to teach me?”

Kaza looked at him for a moment, then made a few half-hearted rasping and clicking sounds, followed by a sputter of foam.

“You’re probably right, until I dream again or learn your language, there’s no point in asking.”

They just stared at each other, Lirran sitting on the sternmost bench next to the rudder eating strips of raw fish and Kaza lying on the floor at the front, breathing through the mouth, pressing air in two expanding sacks underneath the eyes like a weird frog and then pressing it down towards the gills, kept safely under that sheet of muscle, only occasionally leaking slimy foam. Lirran thought about having to sleep in that blanket again that night. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to offer Kaza the blanket. He decided to care little. That creature... Person had helped him already too much to be this petty.

Lirran was done with the fish and decided it was time to start rowing. “Where to? Am I closer to Insasa in the east or Zirrol in the west?”

Kaza shook its head.

“What? Won’t you tell me? Am I just to sit here until I’m tired again so we can talk in dream?”

Kaza nodded, then reached for the empty canteen and disappeared back into the water.

Lirran let out an exasperated sound and slumped backwards. “I guess she’s off to find freshwater for me. She? He? I can’t tell, more questions that will have to wait till later.” He tried to see what direction Kaza was swimming, but saw now sign. Of course, the pale figure would dive into the depths away from the light.

His idle mind again reminded him of the stories he had heard about the darkwater children, but out of gratitude, he would not listen, instead seeking the company of his own voice and splashing the waters with the oars for no good reason. “If I had a sail and rope, I could rig the spare oars into a mast and crossbeam.... Boom? Gaff? Spar? I don’t know, I never even sailed properly. First placement on a ship and already shipwrecked.” He thought of the hand. “Poor captain. I wonder if the hand was already severed when Kaza found it. I wonder if he had been consoled knowing a thinking, speaking being got nourishment from it rather than a shark.” He looked around for something else to ponder. “I better spread out the blanket so it can dry.” He did so by spreading it across the rowing benches, then crawled under them for shade.

He knew not when he fell asleep, but unprepared, he could not grab the thin barrier of sand that was the beach on the bay of dreams, instead falling straight into nightmare.