Page 30

Chapter 30

Erik

I am no stranger to waking in the heart of the lake. Especially in the winter months, I spend every waking and sleeping hour burrowed in its depths, switching between forms and allowing Phorkys to hunt and prowl to His heart’s content. He craves the open water in the spring and summer, but I always reign Him in until the tourists have long fled the harsh winter conditions.

And yes, there is always the errant adventurer out for a winter surf. But those are few and far between. And the humans rarely bat an eye when one of them doesn’t return.

Although I rarely inhabit my fully human form whenever I am underwater, I feel my legs kick against the familiar resistance. Instinctively, I reach to check my gills, which are of course intact, before whipping my head around to take in my surroundings.

Something is wrong.

Why am I not in Phorkys’s body?

Why is the water so warm?

And then my eyes adjust to the darkness, and I remember.

Lillian!

Light swirls of hair float in a lazy nest about her hanging head, glowing an eerie blue in what little refracted light makes it down this far to the lake’s floor. This is not my usual cave. This is different, larger: with vertical tunnels swooping in and around us and letting in grayish beams that cast the space in chiaroscuro fields. My treasure is tied to a rocky outcropping with woven weeds. Her dress has been torn from her body: I can see the white stripes where the seams split across her shoulders and side. The fabric is bunched about her feet, translucent and inadequate, and a deep, all-consuming sadness overwhelms me.

I could not protect her.

Do not sorrow, Erik. You never could.

I cannot summon the energy to rage at Him. The creature who started this all.

This was your plan all along. You tricked me. I thought…

…

Now you are silent? Do not tell me you feel guilty. I do not believe it.

Even I am powerless to Her desires, Erik.

The conversation stops as I see Lillian stir: her sweet, soft hand twitches, then her body shifts. I count the seconds with bated breath until her head finally rises and her deep blue eyes meet mine.

My treasure.

Erik, she thinks, and her eyes swim with affection I do not deserve. Where’s Tiffany?

My body stills, and I struggle to remember who she means at first. But then her eyes focus on a spot beyond my shoulder, and I turn.

Another human female, with mousy brown hair and an unnaturally rounded belly filling out her thin frame, hangs from weedy ropes similar to the ones restraining Lillian. A man, thin and sinewy with close-shaved hair that appears almost spikey, is tied up and unconscious beside her. I look over my shoulder back to my sweet treasure, and know from their wavery appearance that if we were not surrounded by water, tears would be flowing down her round cheeks.

These are your friends?

Yes. She nods, and I curse myself once again for not being able to protect her from this pain. But I do not have time to comfort her, because at that moment the entire cave goes dark.

No, not the cave. The tunnels. Something is covering the tunnels.

Prostrate yourself, Erik! It is her!

Phorkys’s command rings to fill my brain completely, and my body complies without me telling it to. My face is forced into the sandy bed of the lake as I bow to the floor, covering my nose and mouth until I can taste its loamy grit on my tongue. My arms stretch out before me, and my body folds itself on my knees.

The stretch burns.

“Phorkys. You have returned to me. Let me see you.”

I am never ready for the feeling of being held captive in my own skin. But when my physical being surrenders completely to the whims of the monster living in my veins, Phorkys is in complete control. I can see, but cannot react. I can feel, but cannot move. Even my mind is trapped within; the Titan is at the wheel, and I am but the boards of the ship upon the tide.

My body, large and gelatinous and many-limbed, rises to meet Her. I take in all sides of the cave through eyes the size of tree stumps on either side of my massive head, feeling the top of it stretch up to the rocky ceiling of the now cramped cave.

But it isn’t me who fills the space.

It is Her.

The most beautiful woman in all of creation, as large as an ocean-crossing vessel, with the torso and face of a human queen and the lower half of a gargantuan octopus, larger than myself by a factor of ten. Her ten arms flare beneath her waist, their exterior skin coated in a flexible armor of glittering scales, protecting the rows and rows of squishy suckers within. The ends, instead of tapering to tips, flare out in translucent, webbed fins, giving her lower half the appearance of a party of dancing mermaids being swallowed by a scaley skirt.

But I only see her lower half in my periphery as my gaze is slowly drawn up her awesome body. The scales taper at her cinched waist, giving way to smooth, green skin that covers a powerful trunk and full, round breasts that shake with her subtle laughter. Laughter that lights in her hypnotic, silver eyes, that widen when she curls her wide, sensual lips into a sharp-toothed smile.

She towers over me, her massive grinning face surrounded by a quaff of eels and water snakes, who hiss at me in anticipation of what horror she’s about to unleash upon me. And atop the terrifying locks sits a sparkling crown.

As if there were any doubt of the majesty of the creature before me.

I have never been more aware in my thousand years on Earth that I am prey, and my pathetic fate rests in the hands of one being, and one alone.

Keto.