His head bobs, both with the movement of the currents and with the indication that he is listening as she speaks while they submerge themselves even further. At the back of his mind, he notes that he is growing more uncomfortable, though it has little to do with Deiti herself. It seems that his suspicion is accurate.. that he is not built for the deep sea diving that he’d been wanting to do. But he does not let it bother him too much. Yet.
He notices the way she pauses and the look that crosses her face, seems to dim it slightly, even if it is only for a fleeting moment. Though she may not wish to linger at that point in her recollections, he cannot help but to interject his curiosity into the quiet that swells between them. “Dark, how?”
She seems to have changed in the few minutes she has spent telling him of Ischia, become just a fraction softer than when they’d met on the surface. The duality that she both speaks of and that he is already seeing in her intrigues him. He has realized that most souls have an opposite side that lies beneath their natural façade, but some exhibit far more dramatic differences than others. He wonders if hers is of the latter group.
As the coral begins to dominate the scenery and the species of fish seem to change, he contemplates his own dichotomy. For just a short period of his young life, he had been largely cheerful and carefree, as most children tend to be. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his own darkness, he knows that hopeful child still waits for the gloom to pass. But the sheer weight of his losses keeps him mired in solemn melancholy and volatile anger most of the time.
Just as the glow filters through the blue-blackness of the depths, an invisible grip locks itself tightly around his body and the chill of the water simultaneously begins to seep into his bones. Though he is not suffocating from lack of air or being crushed between the heavy hands of the ocean’s pressure, he knows that he has reached his limit.
She continues on without him, so he cannot see what lies below the cliff’s edge, but he believes that her assumption that the glowing light belongs to Baltia is correct. A twinge of… something… pulls at the strings of his heart. He is not sure what he expected to find within the former kingdom’s boundaries, but he is sorely disappointed that he cannot even reach a tentacle into its borders.
When she looks back, a single tentacle drifts near his face, waving her to continue on, while he also calls out, “This is as far down as I can go, but you go on! I might just check it out from above.” As he finishes speaking, his tentacles balloon outward then contract rapidly, pushing him to a less oppressive depth. When the pressure eases, he moves forward until he is drifting above her; he glances down and finds his disappointment growing as he realizes he cannot see much from his position. Well, she can always return with her findings, if she chooses.
@
Deiti