"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Skin splitting, their innards burst through the breaks in their flesh. Bones splinter and crunch under the constant pressure of the fist—but the worst was yet to come. Sloughing off from the crushed bones, the flesh of the demonic wolves shivered and then slithered like maggots over the contestants; as unpleasantly warm as the blood on the horses’ hides, they covered their bodies and then fused together like gelatinous corpse-scented cocoons.
There was only darkness.
And then there was light.
⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆
It filtered through the clear water above, casting strange lines of curling shadows below; a school of curious, colorful fish prod at you—and then they skitter away, afraid. Moving is awkward. You discover you no longer have four legs. No, you have the usual two in the front. But your hind legs are gone, replaced with a fish-like tail. Gills flutter along your sides when you breathe. Your mane was gone, replaced by fins; there are more fins and frills than you are even aware of. Fish-like scales have replaced your coat, though they are the same color your coat always was.
While you were busy trying to regain your bearings, a group crept close; they watched you from behind the reefs, from behind the rocks. Their movement was fluid, careful to not draw your attention—smooth enough that the fish don’t even spook when they glide past.
Some of them have tusks, others have an underbite with jagged fangs—some have both or neither.
That didn’t matter.
What mattered was that they had deemed you an intruder.
The largest of the group moved in first, circling you like a pack of sharks—and then the others came drifting forward. It didn’t take you long to figure out that they commanded the sea. Especially as the currents wrapped themselves around you like invisible ropes to hold you in place.
A small mare swam forward, black and red; her massive tail fanned out behind her, she fixed you with a cold, black-eyed stare. “Who are you, outsider?” She half-hissed, half-growled—a feral, guttural sound unlike anything you have ever heard.
A blue stallion floated beside her, looking bored. “Rajah, we should take them back to your mother. Your brother is still missi—”
“Silence, Nereus,” she sneered.
Before the blue stallion could respond, a great shadow spread over the sand; looking up, you see the impossibly colossal shark. Brown, with a soft, white underbelly and thick bands of darker brown stripes. It surged downward, swallowing half of the gathered creatures in one swoop—whole.
Everyone started to scatter, screaming.
You zip between rock, between reef, between every crook in the coral as you try to desperately avoid the Megalodon.
“Outsider!” Rajah barked, motioning for you to follow her into a nearby cave cut into the coral with other survivors of her party.
“If you go with her, you will die!” Nereus shouted, beckoning you to follow him through a narrow passage between the reefs.
The blood was now thick in the water, making everything murky—and the Megalodon was coming back for its second pass.
—
WELCOME TO PREHISTORIC BALTIA!
You have three choices:
Go with Rajah.
Go with Nereus.
Face down the Megalodon.
Responses must be at least 500 words.
The last three to respond will be eliminated.
The last three only need at least 300 words.
If you are eliminated from this round, your character will return to the dead and you will receive a genetic 3-space trait to be passed on to their descendant or another character they deem worthy. Whoever receives the trait will be plagued by the contestant’s memories of the quest via nightmares for exactly two starter posts. It’s up to the player to determine if they keep having the nightmares.
If your character joined the quest while alive, they may choose to keep the trait for themselves.
The deadline to respond is October 12th, 11:59PM Eastern.
Failure to respond will result in forfeiture of the trait.
—
RESULTS FROM ROUND ONE: Rapture - Please post an update to claim your genetic 2-space trait after you decide which character you would like to grant it to.
Oceanus - Since you didn’t respond within the allotted time, but you did respond, please post an update to claim your genetic 1-space trait after you decide which character you would like to grant it to.
Tithe - Eliminated/forfeiture of trait, since you didn’t respond. I’m sorry!
He doesn’t understand why it suddenly feels so hard to die, why this ache in his chest feels like a heart that won’t stop beating even though he knows he left his behind lifetimes ago. Yet he can feel the thrum of it in his chest, feel the bruises it pounds against ribs no longer strong enough to keep it caged. Just die. But he cannot, and it hasn’t been this hard to stay numb in so long. He aches with it, burns with it, and he wonders if maybe that is the answer. If he allows it to, will the fire not consume him and burn away these parts of himself trying so hard to exist?
Doubt is warm lips pressed to his cheek, a slender shoulder pressed to his chest. It is the memories of what he left behind and the very reason why it is so vital that he cease this feeling, this wanting, this senseless existing.
He does not exist anymore.
He is Sundered.
Swathed in the goo of the pulverized creatures, entombed in the stink of death and too much viscous material to even breathe, he submits himself to the dark. He expects it to take him, to hold and keep him, to let him rest in a way he has never been allowed to before. But all too soon it is leaving him in that way that everything does, and the burn of day alights across the dark of his red brindled skin. There is an instant that he misses it, a heartbeat where he craves the familiarity of the dark and the pain and the bone-deep grief that keeps its teeth buried in his chest, when he feels suddenly and wholly too exhausted to open his eyes, to bare himself to the bright beyond his lids.
When he does, he wishes he had not.
His eyes alight on the space around him–all currents and coral and fronds that bend and sway, endless ocean and pale sound–and there is a reflex bone-deep that has him dragging in a ragged breath of air. Except it isn’t air, and he does not drown, and when he twists his body to take another assessing look, the motion sends his tail thrashing awkwardly behind him.
His tail.
His tail?
He realizes belatedly that this is not the only thing that is changed, and when he tries to peer down at his forelegs, he can only settle on one single explanation for the scales that glitter and spark in the whorls of sunlight filtering down from the surface far above. He must be dreaming. But even this cannot be true, and the stallion can feel the weight in his brow as it furrows, because he is not allowed to dream. There is escape in dreams, freedom even if it only lasts until you wake. There are memories and faces and the ghost of touch, and none of this has been allowed to him in longer than he cares to consider.
The stallion frowns more deeply, twisting again as though there might be some hint for him to uncover, but all he finds is a dozen faces staring back at him. The musculature along his body ripples as he tenses, jaw clenching with frustration that he allowed himself to be crept up upon like this. But then there are tangible bands wrapped tight around him, currents that feel like hands, like being buried alive. Every atom of his being aches to lash out against it, but showing so much dread feels like showing weakness so he swallows it back with a growl. Someone carves through the group–a mare, black and red and reminding him of volcanic fury even despite the water flowing between them–and he can feel his gaze harden to match hers. “I am no one.” He tells her, and the snarl on his mouth is flint and brimstone. His eyes shift from the mare to the stallion who has come to float beside her, committing each of their names to memory. Rajah and Nereus. He finds he dislikes the bored way the stallion watches him.
Cold sweeps over him, sudden and without warning, and he has only the sliver of a second to understand that something very large has torn the sunlight from the water and cast them all into shadow beneath its colossal body. He doesn’t think, doesn’t need to because the moment he feels the bands disappear from around his body he is launching into motion with everyone else. Well, he realizes, jaw clenched as blood turns the water red, not everyone. He darts away to the formations of coral, feeling awkward in this new body, clumsy in the weightlessness of the water. He means to disappear but there is nowhere to disappear to, and the filtering daylight so briefly returned is once more being blotted out by the behemoth shark above him.
Outsider! Rajah barks.
“If you go with her, you will die!” Nereus shouts.
But Sundered thinks he recognizes the command of someone who is used to leading, and leading well, in the bark of the mare with the other survivors behind her. He thinks it has to mean something that when Rajah and Nereus split, the rest of the group remained with Rajah. She may be sharp as a blade, but he cannot help but feel as though that means she was forged by something more. Besides, and he is already moving in her direction, he still has not forgotten the look of boredom on Nereus’ face just moments before. I’m already dead, he thinks at the blue stallion as he swims through the currents of swirling red into the coral cavern with Rajah and her companions.
sundered
i'd give anything to hear you say it one more time
Great hands ensnare him like quarry, they drag him into cavernous darkness, swallow him down this gullet of damnation—a morsel meant for sport.
The sensation of dying was not unfamiliar to him.
It had been a peculiar thing, the world falling away from him while his body stilled, eyes heavy with sleep and had it been only that? Falling asleep? He remembered the ache in his bones, the weight in his chest, the flickering of light that was left behind his eyes becoming the very thing that pained him with goodbyes. Things that had been, things that could have been, but either way everything became quiet.
But this was different.
Killdare could feel them dying.
One after the other, after the other, the demons extinguished around him, passing in remnants of blood, in cracks and splinters of bones. This was an uncomfortable sensation, more than that, it was as if invisible threads snapped around him, and each severed fiber left behind an even more disturbing realization. They sloughed against him in discomforting warmth, seeping between the crook of his ear, the bend of a muscle, the crevice of his eyes and all too soon the endless dark became light once more.
And there too was breath—
Killdare’s attention turned inward, where an unfamiliar arrangement of flesh and sinew found him. Light cast down upon him from above in wandering rays, while his disoriented mind made every attempt to make sense of where this was.
No, what this was.
This body, it could not be his own; the weight sat differently, and altogether it did not sit at all. Where once there had been fur, brilliant and pecan and brown, were scales, shining like tarnished copper beneath the flickering rays of ocean-swept sunlight. There was too a drastic change in his heaviness; the drafted build that had kept him company, had made it his home, had made him, him—was sculpted anew.
Water replaced air, yet he did not drown; his instinctual habit of adjusting his hindquarters sent him drifting. There was no ground for them to brace against, no familiar resistance beneath his hooves.
Seaglass eyes glide over the testimony of his form, a tail elongating where once his hind legs had stood their ground. Ripples of fins flutter as ochre veils with the sway of the current and to be sure, he’d never considered how many fins or frills were needed for swimming. Now he knows that it’s a lot more than one might think. Every strand of his midnight hair furled away, exchanged for veiny, gossamer frills that undulated with the current, drifting and expanding in strange rhythmic patterns. His thoughts tangle, curling around an attempt to regain his bearings. To make sense of, and peace with, this vessel now forged, to harness what control he might gain over it and learn just how he might survive this next scheme—all the while the ocean had been contriving a game all its own.
The others reached him shortly after.
They came from the current, the waves surely ushering them in, prowling forward with the same agile cunning of wolves. A figurehead announced itself first, pressing towards him without reservation, the others—and there were many—following close behind. Some bore curious conceptions of tusks, great teeth urgently protruding from a jaw quite unusual. Some had neither, but all were impressively radiating their mistrust of him. Even the sea announces its displeasure, ensnaring him with invisible ropes, and there is no hesitation on their behalf—these creatures command the sea.
Who are you? a small mare questions, her eyes as lightless as the pitch of her fins, the red details anointing her with the same feral fire that spurred her voice.
Outsider.
Judgement settled in the word, making its home in the curvature of syllables that christened him alien and outcast. He lets them, stealing his gaze but acknowledging their misgivings about him with a single turn of a dark ear. Killdare was prepared to answer, but their disputes left him no room for declarations.
They bicker like children; perhaps they are. A blue stallion permeating the collection with his air of boredom, drawling his words out to preface the potential urgency with tedium. A missing brother, outsider, back to your mother, outsider. Killdare lifts a brow, watching, waiting, garnering what little information he can because if he is to answer, then he will be ready.
Silence, the word snaps the confrontation into attention, and he’s almost certain that the male had an answer, but the water was too dark to tell. Shadowed into submission from above, and with it, screams goaded his movement.
In one great bite, a creature beyond his recognition swallowed half of their assembly whole, devouring the critics and forcing the taunts to transform into shrieks that held no leverage. Everything is a calculated reaction, his movements pressing his body between rocks, speeding between crooks of coral, weaving between reefs with a familiarity that he had not known himself capable of. Anything to gain distance between himself and what he could only name as—Titan. Creature. Beast.
’Outsider!’ her words tug him away from the urgency of escape, motioning for him to follow, and with her a clutch of survivors skirting away into a cave cut precariously amidst the coral.
’If you go with her, you will die!’ the blue shouts from afar, beckoning him to seek a narrow passage.
There are many things that Killdare had been, many things that he still was, down in the deepest recesses of his being. The places where the soul meets the body.
Once he was only a brother, a man seeking asylum with his sister from a world that had grown colder for her than he was willing to accept and though they went their separate ways, he took comfort in her safety. The certainty that her path was not chosen for her, but rather she made her own way, as did he.
Once he was a lord among a forest, pale eyes looking upward to a canopy of ravens, practicing the pace of his steps with the rhythm of a heart beneath the pine-strewn earth. There were scales here too, great dragon wings against his back; bronze in their bearing had been his armor. Just as he was charged to be.
Once he had been a king, crowned not in gold but in the heat of the earth, molten and reactive. The Chamber had laid its burdens upon his shoulders beneath the watchful eyes of ravens and the restless murmuring of pines. He had learned that sometimes the measure of a ruler was not what he could subdue, but what he was willing to endure for those who called his kingdom home.
Killdare let his gaze travel beyond the creature, searching the terrain for an advantage. Distance, elevation, obstruction—the others needed to move. There had been a time when he might have answered such a threat with magma, pulling it from the wellspring of the earth's core until it bent to his intention with undeniable triumph. He turned towards the group secluding itself within the cave not far off, his expression betraying little of his calculations.
"Go on, then," he said, the words carrying a familiar measure of impatience. "I'll catch up."
He didn't wait for them to bid their farewells; he didn’t wait to hear their arguments, or what’s more—their orders. He moved, and he moved quickly.
Not because he thought himself invincible, but because he didn’t like their odds. Killdare knows what it means to stand between danger and those who need to escape. His hooves struck against the seabed with force; each movement he made had to be used to garner attention and lead this monstrosity away. There was no warmth, no magma to summon; all he had was his voice, his movement and the thread of hope he held for his tail.
The beast answered his efforts with a violence that shook the world beneath him. Water surged, great teeth flashed, and the distance between himself and the terrible mouth diminished with alarming speed. He moved again, narrowly avoiding the destruction that followed, his heart beating an unfamiliar rhythm against the confines of his chest.
This was a suicide business, to have once commanded a kingdom only to be reduced to bait for an overgrown fish.
How much time he had bought with each dauntless movement, he could not say, but the margin between his survival and oblivion grew increasingly thin.
He stumbled.
Then he understood with a distinct unpleasantness.
There would be no victory here, not for him, and there was even less honor in dying for nothing.
10-09-2026, 07:33 PM (This post was last modified: 10-10-2026, 06:27 PM by gail.
Edit Reason: closing tags
)
you'll bury me again, you'll say it's all pretend;
The hand begins to fold in, and the first of the creatures burst.
She squeezes her eyes closed against the splatter. She feels the viscera drip over her face and disgust churns in her stomach. She was well used to being punished – she’d known a staggering amount of pain, in her centuries here – but rarely was it so filthy. Her dark god preferred a more refined sort of pain, a different set of tools wielded.
More of the things burst, the hellish rain of them soaking her dark hide. The hand keeps closing, and the creatures are pressed inward, squirming like eels against her flesh, between her legs.
She has the sense to take a violent gasp of fetid air before the tide of them rises and she is completely surrounded, and she feels the first of her ribs break, the rest following in quick succession. She swims to death, to the darkness, like an old friend.
But for Gail, the darkness never lasts long enough.
There is light, again, but it is fractured and strange. It is nothing like the sickly light she is used to in the Afterlife. She is so stricken at the beauty of it that it takes her a moment to realize there are fish flittering about – live ones, not like the wretched, flopping things she had encountered on her trek into this strange place.
It is when she gasps in childish delight that she realizes she has been transformed. She does not inhale anything, instead she feels a strange sensation at her side, feels herself sustained for a breath – but not a breath. Something else, something vaguely cool, sliding into her, satisfying some biological urge.
Her focus shifts from the hazy sunrays now to her own form, which has been transformed, her own hindquarters changed into a fishtail. She moves it experimentally, and cuts through the water like she was bred for it.
It is a new sensation, to feel so at ease in the water. She had long viewed water as a boundary, something impassable. Her powers had not extended to changing her own body, and she did not spend much time in the Afterlife’s ocean.
But now!
Now, she cuts through the water, her body changed and slick and fast.
She moves as quickly as the sunbeams through the water. Though the movements have none of the fish’s grace, but she feels as if she is flying.
Her joy is short-lived, however, as she feels something in the water turn. The water had cut through so easily a moment before suddenly resists her, shifts like a rope around her ankles.
And then the beings, moving in, shouting a question at her. Who are you, outsider? Gail, I’m Gail, she tries to say, but though her body has been crafted for the water, the mind commanding it is still learning. Nothing comes out and she sputters for a moment, her body torn between memories of breathing and the gills that had replaced her lungs. Her body wants so desperately to drown, but the new anatomy forbids it.
She is readying herself to talk again when the shadow comes, the heft of it blocking the sunbeams.
The currents slacken as the other creature’s focus is diverted, and Gail moves, darting from the shadow. She watches as the others scatter, and she is aware she is so terribly slow compared to them.
Such easy prey.
The water begins to turn murky with blood, and she is reminded of that hand, the creatures’ viscera raining down on her. At least this death might be less messy.
Though she had welcomed blackness not long ago, this time, she swims from it.
She pushes herself, stupidly churns her forelegs. She can see a shadow still, but the swirling eddies of blood confuse her vision.
And then, the shadow is upon her, the grinning teeth of the beast reminding her of the dark god’s smile. Perhaps it’s him, she thinks. He would hate that she was having any sort of fun.
The beast closes in on her, and once again, she looks for darkness.
For the briefest flicker, there is peace, absolute quiet. She has closed those useless eyes and all the world has gone dark and, for a singular instant, she does not feel the crushing grip of that great hand or the vicious jaws that had dragged her down, down, down.
But this is not a place of peace. She had resigned herself to another death, this one perhaps the most brutal of them all, but she blinks open those useless eyes a second time. And to see, she thinks, must mean that she is not dead at all. To still be tethered to this useless body must mean that this is not death but something else altogether. And it is something else altogether, this vast blue. Water, she understands, and yet she breathes freely. She moves freely.
(Ironic, then, that the second death had begun with her dragging in a lungful of water and drowned. Drowned, drowned, drowned. The water had not been this blue, though, it had not been this deep.)
This is not death, she thinks, but a rebirth. Her useless body has been made anew. Gone are the feathers, the hindlegs, replaced by scales and fins. She almost confuses the relief of it for a gift, the fear that she had felt as she’d been dragged, bleeding, into the fissure begins to dissipate. Silly to think that the creature who’d sent his hounds after them might treat them with such kindness as to provide them with some new, better life. Hounds do not drag you to heaven, she knows, they drag you to hell.
She looks up when the water begins to stir, a cold rush of new fear surging through her at the sight of these strange creatures. They do not look as inherently violent as the hounds, but they do not appear natural either. She’d known of the magic that allowed others to breathe underwater, to live there, to blend seamlessly into that great, blue world, but she had never seen them up close. She had certainly never been one of them.
They watch, beady-eyed, and she is powerless to do anything but stare back at them. Until one moves forward, separating herself from the rest, hissing her question. “Anaemone,” she answers, automatic, ironic that there behind her a whole colony of anemones sway in the current. She shrinks, as if she might join their ranks, invisible to the rest of these creatures. Shrinks when the blue stallion glides forward, shrinks when the shadow looms overhead. There it is, she thinks, proof that this is hell, this creature unlike anything she’s ever seen before, even moreso than the rest of them.
It happens faster than she can register it, the great creature swooping, snapping its tremendous jaw, all that blood. The screaming, the scattering. She flounders in the melee. For a moment all she can hear is her heartbeat until all those sounds come swimming back to her, absolute chaos. And she does not know where to go, but she knows that she cannot stay here, sharkbait. So she swims in no direction in particular, looking up sharply at the sound of the mare’s voice, beckoning. There, into the cave. She thinks to go, but before she can move, the blue stallion calls out.
(There is no way out of the cave, she understands, should the beast make its way in, there would be no escaping. Through the coral there is open water, cursed vulnerability. And yet, there is the possibility of escape.)
So she follows the stallion’s voice. Through the narrow reef and into the unknown.
Lillith screams her distaste as the crushed bodies of the demons slither over her body, warm and wriggling and revolting. Her sound is abruptly muffled when some gets into her mouth and she snaps it shut. Muffled but still straining in her throat against teeth closed tight together. The taste wiggles onto her tongue and she thinks she'd rather exist in the grey nothing forever instead of this.
Everything is dark and horrid until it isn't. The watery light alarms Lillith until she realizes she is breathing, not drowning. She's something else entirely. Never could she have imagined something part-horse, part-monster (fish), and she moves in a slow circle, trying to get a good look at what her body had become. The filtered light catches on the purple tint she knows as her own, changing the shadowy ink-black into something a little more.
It had been so long since she had seen her own colour. It had been drowned out in the grey nothing as well, muted to unrecognizable shades. Dull and uninteresting. Now it is understated and undeniably beautiful.
She is still cataloguing what she likes and does not like about this new self when there is suddenly a group of strangers there. They look like she does now, built for the water.
There's nothing offensive about the way the mare speaks to them in her impressive growl — a reasonable enough response to strangers arriving. If it wasn't for being bound by the currents, Lillith might have just waited out the little scenario. As it was she struggled as much as she could, trying to use the bulk of her large, flowing fin to throw herself against the current but there was no way to move enough to get the momentum. "Lillith." Her name is a harsh hiss through the water as she meets Rajah's cold glare with fiery loathing, frustrated to the ends of the earth over not having command of her own body more so than the threatening group or this entire endeavour all together.
She opens her mouth to snap at them over top of their bickering when the massive shadow passes overhead. It would seem impossibly big except for what they had seen on the beach — only this one had pointed fins and sharp teeth. Fascinated and frightened all at once, Lillith watches with wide eyes as it descends nearby, swallowing them as if they were nothing but flies. Close enough that she is rocked by the way the water is pushed around its collossal body.
The instant the invisible ropes break, Lillith moves. This precious half-life means too much to her and she swims as best as she can, dodging the obstacles of the ocean floor and looking for a safe spot. Only when the creature has circled away and the conflicting voices from Rajah and Nereus call out does Lillith hesitate. Not because of what they have said but because she wonders if she can take on the shark in this new body. But the creatures that live below, with their fangs and command of the currents, are hiding from it despite their numbers and if they don't stand a chance then she (bitterly) accepts that she won't either.
She didn't like the look of the narrow passageway or the cave, but the passageway had the benefit of being too small for the shark to fit through. Lillith scowls, unsatisfied with all choices presented, but follows Nereus.
Horrible, horrible, horrible. The squirming and sounds, the scents, and the feeling of suffocation all crawl along the edges of Undergrad’s belly, threatening to reach a fever pitch. He feels the edges of his vision darken as a surge of swimmy headiness accompanies a fainting spell. He is nauseous, horrified, and clinging to the very shreds of sanity as he is engulfed way down below. A thousand ways to die, and he wonders if this will be his. Not by war, bloodletting, or mercy kill, but in a writhing, stinking ball of tangled limbs and filth.
…the darkness consumes them all.
Before his eyes can open, he feels a lightness in his limbs. He feels weightless, yet something surrounds him. Undergrad’s dark eyes squeeze shut momentarily, as though he wants to remain in a womb-like hold, yet he feels a surge of need to see if he is dead or even in a purgatory. Painfully, he groans as he wrestles with wanting to face reality, then cracks one black eye open. The world is out of focus and upside down. Gone is the orange glow of the fissure; gone are the ugly biting demons; they're all gone! Undergrad feels himself blow out a sigh of relief, bubbles rising around him…BUBBLES! Both eyes tear open as he feels his breath move not from his nose, but as it vents along his neck. He doesn't register the tickling sensation yet; for all he knows now, he is in water.
His panic is palpable as he whips around, fearing his brain is on the fringe of drowning, but as he moves, he sees his front legs, shining impossibly black in the water. He cranes his neck to look around and sees he is floating in the water, the fan of his black tail spreading to blot out the light above like an eclipse. Is he dead? Is this a dream? He has a fin?? Undergrad has seen a hippocampus before, so he isn't totally lost, but he struggles to accept what is happening.
How? Why? What is-
” Who are you, outsider?” The words sting him, cutting through his spiraling thoughts. Undergrad realizes a black-and-red mare is now facing him down. ’ Poisonous colors’. He thinks for a moment before a blue stallion glides up close, looking bored. The once-wendigo-turned-hippocampus can only look between them before the stallion mutters something about taking him to her mother…a brother is still missing. ’ Rajah and Nereus’, he thinks to himself before the mare commands the blue stallion to hush.
So much has already happened. Undergrad wants to explain; he wants to ask where he is and how this all happened, but none of that is possible; the megalodon's looming shadow blots out the sun, and the others scramble. Undergrad feels himself doing the same, flailing and swimming in a body that knows how to move, despite never having been a water horse before. Still, he lets this body move and glide, trying to outmaneuver this massive shark…but his chances of survival dim as he becomes the only one without cover.
” Outsider!”, Rajah calls from the cave. ” If you go with her, you will die!” Nereus beckons from the reef. Undergrad is torn between the two. The reef is narrow and suitable for the blue stallion’s camouflage. The cave has the poison colored mare and others. Still, it could be a dead end…but if it isn't, Undergrad’s inky black skin is perfect camouflage…plus there are others…a better chance of survival with many (Undergrad isn't above sacrificing someone for his own survival either; let’s just be honest with ourselves). And he remembers the blue stallion’s bored look moments ago. Perhaps Nereus hoped to sacrifice him to the shark because he was an “outsider,” after all.
Undergrad sprints through the water to the cave with Rajah and the others, melting into the darkness easily, praying he has made the right choice.
He inhales once, sharply and loudly, and closes his eyes as the creatures disintegrate, as their putrid flesh squirms and slides slickly over his own and wraps him in darkness once more. A rough exhalation attempts to push the odor from his nose, but like everything else thus far, it is to no avail. Still, he refuses to suck another breath in, nauseated as he is by the rotten casing he wears. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing to suffocate here and return to his boring, bodiless being.
Then, light touches his eyelids, gently at first, then more insistently as he silently protests, not really wanting to see what fresh horror awaits. But this is another battle he cannot win; curiosity blooms, not just as he feels the hesitant prodding near his head and shoulders, but also as he notices an odd weightlessness in the way he… stands?
A fish is alarmingly close to one of his eyes as it tentatively opens, which sends him backpedaling just as quickly as it and its friends dart away from him. He gasps and is surprised by the sensation and taste of saltwater flooding his tongue and mouth. His initial instinct is to devolve into sheer panic, but as he involuntarily goes to seek replacement air, the distinct lack of choking surprises him and temporarily pauses his struggling.
Wonders never cease.
He spends too long wondering and marveling at this latest transformation, at the gills giving him breath in the strangest manner, at the scales laid so perfectly where his hide had been, at the fins that flow sinuously along his neck, at the powerful tail that helps move him through the water. He immerses himself so fully in self-inspection that he does not see the throng forming. He only looks up and around when the unseen tethers of current bring him to a complete stop.
He scans the faces that surround him, a mixture of intrigue and hostility mirrored back at him. They are an interesting bunch, without question, but at least they're less the stuff of nightmares than the last pack that'd been set on him. Still, they are quite formidable, especially the smaller one that pushes to the forefront. A stray thought leaves a fleeting impression that she reminds him of someone, though he does not recall ever meeting anyone with even the barest resemblance to the aquatic mare. Her voice sends a grating chill down the length of his spine; no doubt she has earned whatever title gives her the authority to make her demands of him.
In the moment he takes to study her, before he really tries to form a reply, another figure moves forward, mentioning a lost brother. He looks back to the mare, who, aside from a flash of possible anger, shows no emotion at the mention of her family. True indifference or crafted apathy in the presence of others?
But he does not have time to think much else of the pair or where things might be headed, as a massive shadow casts itself across their little gathering. In synchronization with the others, he tilts his head to search for the source, and yet again, dread begins to fill his pathetic little heart.
The almost comically oversized shark begins to dive at them, nothing funny about the gaping, sharp-toothed grin it flashes just as it falls upon its prey. Several strangers are swallowed whole, and Andrew is lucky enough to escape being part of this first course, though not without a few tears in the scaled flesh of his dark-finned tail. Blood wells from the wounds and dissipates in the surrounding water, but he barely notices as he joins the fleeing creatures.
His heart drums out a loud, terrifying soundtrack to every cinematic aspect of his personal horror movie as he winds his way through the unfamiliar landscape, dodging bodies and detritus as they're strewn in his path. As eternity seems to pass, the taste of blood fills his mouth and eventually begins to obscure his vision as well.
Her harsh voice cuts through the noise, demanding that he follow. Against his better instincts, he stops to locate her. Just as he does, the stallion makes himself known and issues the warning that he'd die for following the mare. Andrew glances between the two several times, as torn in decision as his tail was just moments ago. The shadow returns as he hovers there, guaranteeing that he will die if he stays.
With a huff of indignation at having no time to think this out, he spurs himself after Rajah and her survivors, hoping that her dauntless demeanor translates into his best chance for survival.
Claws curl into his flesh like hooks, teeth puncturing skin and muscle, slavering tongues lapping at his blood as it oozes sluggishly between flesh and dagger. His own teeth bury themselves deeper into the struggling arm of one less - but not significantly less - fortunate beast than the rest. Its blood tastes of sulfur and rot and then the creature suddenly shivers in his jaws and melts like warm fat, oily and coating his tongue, gumming up his teeth, blinding him, filling his nostrils in a way that makes lungs, only recently reintroduced to breathing, spasm violently. Arik chokes and struggles uselessly. His hooves meet with a strange resistance, neither flowing like water, nor firm like earth, he cannot swim within nor stand upon it, but he tries anyway. Life clings wretchedly to him but the darkness swallows him again at last.
Then, light.
Flickering light overhead, a pattern he knows in his bones. His ears are full of the rushing susurration of the tide washing past and the stallion finds himself softening, muscles slackening, letting himself be pulled along by its strength. He's missed the feeling of the sea beneath him and the familiarity masks too long something else, the pulse of it on his skin, the brush of it in his throat, his eyes jerk open in terror and he kicks out, shouting, desperately searching for the surface and, finding it plunging up towards it. But it is so far away and already there is no air in his lungs, no bubbles thunder from his lips when he moans softly. He drifts, the fight swiftly leaving him. It was a mistake that he was brought back and the universe is only righting itself. That makes more sense than not and he accepts it readily, never noticing any change to his short-cropped mane or the transformation of his hindquarters. He knows the sea and he knows how to drown, it does not occur to him that he is not even when his gaze, now listless, fall on the shadows in the water.
The sharks have come for him. It will be harder to come back when his body sits bloody and ragged in the bellies of a dozen sharks, he thinks, closing his eyes tight.
Who are you, Outsider?
A dream. A neuron firing in his brain, starved of oxygen, hallucinating. He does not speak, he remembers this part.
Rajah, Nereus, names float past him with a strange timbre he does not recognize. Who are they? It was his sisters, last time, it was his parents, it was Kostas, the drowned captain, murmuring sea-salt reassurance in his ear. Now it is only these unknown voices, blocking out any other he might think more comforting in his final moments. The stallion reopens his eyes feeling strangely annoyed.
"And who are you, I'd like to know, coming to bother a drowning man. I call it unkind!"
Even as he speaks, he begins to realize something is wrong about his words, that he is not, in fact, drowning. His body yet draws breath and his vision is sharp enough to pick out the strangeness of those around him, but even with this dawning recognition he does not release them from his glowering. He can see from their faces that they have not come to save him. He opens his mouth to say more but finds his voice quenched by shock at the crushing attack of an enormous shark. How can anything so large move without being seen sooner? Enough to surprise half the gathered army that surrounds him and swallow it away? How can anything still be hungry after such a meal? He watches them only long enough to notice that they scatter and do not school like a shoal of fish which must surely be the best option against such a beast - it is impossibly big and yet, it is still a shark. But he is too new in this shape to wonder at it long - and the danger is too great, he leaps away with a flick of his muscular tail, crashing graceless through the coral and rock, sharp edges slicing his skin so he bleeds black into the greenish water.
The mare calls again and then the stallion, Nereus. The great shark circles, its nostrils filling with the smell of blood. Arik stares long at the blue hippocampus hovering near the shadowed alley and he grins at him. The choice demands too much trust, it is impossibly stupid.
He is dead either way and the cave is oh so much closer.
The darkness had been a relief. The shrieks, snarls, and pain all wiped away with the world around him. Returning to nothing was what he had wanted.
And then there was a sudden light. He blinked slowly against the visual assault. His surroundings slowly cleared from a dreamlike blur to reveal he was not anywhere he had ever been before. A laugh rippled from him as he realized the light was shimmering through water. He was under water. Not only was he under water, but he felt very wrong. After spending a moment taking in his surroundings he looked down to find scales had replaced the scarred hide on his legs. Not only that, but a turn of his head made him aware his mane was gone, something odd in its place, and his hind legs were gone, a strange fishlike tail was now a part of him.
He swished the tail, trying to adapt to the way this new body moved, when he caught movement not far off. The strange creatures didn’t wait long before circling Kars, the water holding him still, though he wasn’t sure he could have swam off anyways. Certainly this tail would take some getting used to.
Two came forwards from the circling group, a mare and a stallion? They were horses, but also not. The mare reminded him of someone as she stared coldly, her words causing a chill down his spine. “Kars.” he muttered, unsure what else he could possibly say. The stallion then was insisting they go to the mare’s mother, and she abruptly cut him off.
Kars was about to ask where he was and what they were when a sudden shadow once again blocked out the light he had just adjusted to. He looked up in time to see a massive fish-like creature swoop down, mouth wide, and many of the strange creatures disappeared into its maw. His eyes widened a bit as the remaining creatures shrieked and scattered, he maneuvered best he could to a hiding spot as the mare and stallion each called out for him, each in differing directions.
The bloody water swirled and grew darker, the giant creature turned to face them again, hunger not satisfied. Kars glanced in the direction of the mare and stallion one last time before rushing from his hiding spot and towards the opening jaws of the shark in hopes he would once again return to nothing.
