Underwater Stars

“Have you not had your fill of the dark?” The question danced in his ears as he carved an upward path through the deep blue. 

“After all, only monsters choose to stay here.”

It was that final sentence that had woken him from slumber. 

The final sound of the gong, in the humdrum that was the question that had reverberated endlessly throughout the cavernous abyss of salted stones. 

His sightless eyes had cracked open when the being in the dark uttered it. Though his gaze could not penetrate into the thick darkness he sensed his surroundings. 

It was mostly empty stones and cold bones yet deeper still was a presence there that he had not felt in lifetimes. 

“The time has come for your awakening,” the presence narrated, a hint of humor tinting the sonorous inflections. He could not, for the life of him, see where it had come from though his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. 

All that stood before him was a wall of nothingness just like his memories; endless stretches of nothing with no discernible end in sight. 

“Have you not had your fill of the dark?” The question rebounded along the walls once more, as timeless and enduring as the oceanic crust yet harsher than ocean eddies. 

It is all I know, he replied wordlessly. Mother.

The familiarity of the words on his lips was as strange as the sensation of speaking with one tongue. His mouth opened but the words he wished to speak floundered out in airless breaths. 

Drowned thoughts translated into strangled sentences traveling on bubbles and sound.

But she understood what was not spoken. Knowing was in her nature after all.

“You remember me then, child,” she said, her voice comforting and soft. 

While her words were supposed to be calming the effect on his thoughts was anything but. They stirred violently, searching for what was missing, and the shadows, as if sensing his confusion, seemed to solidify and thicken into numerous tendrils around him. They motioned around him, wishing to wrap him in their ebony embrace.

If he had not remembered they would have dragged him down and engulfed his life. 

But they did not. Could not.

Why at that moment, the memories returned to him, he could not explain. But he saw the flashes of different lives. 

He hung in a sky that was an endless stretch of violet sea that was just as dark as this yet not as foreboding and empty. There were other creatures there with him: a man burning on an axle, a hound chasing a hind, a hunter stalking the paths between the constellations.  

And he remembered that he was made of thousands of flashes of light. 

Stars, he remembered. They were called that. 

In the life beyond that, he was coiled around a tree, in a garden far from prying eyes, that glowed with the ephemeral light of golden apples. When the mists of dawn would grace the slopes, seven daughters would sing to him, each melody seductive and haunting to his ears. “You were built for the stars, my child,” they would serenade in his mother’s voice as he unwound and let them take of the fruits. 

He died and lived again. 

It was falling and rising up. 

The cold pressure of the deep grasped at his clammy skin while he heard the world tremble around him: mounds of basaltic rock crackling as they moved in infinitesimal inches across the centuries. At odd intervals, the bristling noises of slumbering nightmares and sea monsters of antiquity slithered in. 

Slowly the noise disappeared like a word he could faintly remember or the taste of nectar as it dissipated on his tongue. 

When he focused, it was all silence and nothing more. 

I was a monster, he declared. 

The waters oscillated with the sounds of a cacophonous symphony of a rushing shoal of tentacles and teeth and claws. When the storm died down it was only then that he realized that it was laughter.

“You remember what you are and yet choose to deny it?” She challenged. “Let the shadows of my embrace swallow you whole, child. And remake you in my image, my fallen star. My Ladon. My Draco.” 

I do not know what I am now, only that I do not remember what it is to change. He said to the goddess who was his mother. 

“It is not in your name or your nature to do so,” she said. 

Death haunts this place where I slumbered. Where we now stand.

The darkness meandered, leaving a pregnant moment of silence for his thoughts to make noise. “For you know her kisses well,” was its only reply.  

He remembered falling, into a once golden city filled with merchants and magicians and inventors. Automatons walked on mother of pearl streets side by side with naiads, djinn, dreams, gods, and men. 

He had seen it from the skies where he had once lived. 

A city of the future, swallowed by the world and buried in myth under the shores of time. 

He had died that day and he had killed as well.

“You see the past that is better left buried in the darkness. Will you resist the pull of gravity that brought you back to me, my fallen star? Or do you still seek the pulsing beating heart of light that your darkness will destroy?”

I do not deserve the light, he declared as he gestured to the stones. But I wish for a glimpse.

For a moment the shadows faltered, in surprise or in pleasure he did not know, and for a second a shape took form. A gigantic woman with eyes like whirlpools and a smile that summoned Leviathan; with an amalgam of a thousand sea creatures bodies meshed together revealed itself to him. 

Her shale face regarded him with curiosity, absent of their usual judgment and ire, before opening the rocks above them revealing waters less black and more navy blue.   

The darkest blue morphed into cerulean and the pale sky as the corpse of his human body cut clean through the waves and back into the world. 

He did not believe he saw. 

The skies were different now, more smoke-filled and less cloudy, yet he could still see the heights where he had fallen. 

In the violet blanket of the night above pinpricks of light poured through.

There were stars.