The salt came first—It coated his tongue, thick and briny, a taste so strong it felt as though it had settled in his bones.

The pain followed, spreading through his body like roots seeking soil, each breath a negotiation with muscles that had forgotten their purpose. He was not on ocean. That much was clear. The surface beneath him was rough and uneven, not sand, not wood, but something else entirely—something alive.

When Onwuka finally forced his eyes to part with darkness, the sky above him bloomed with stars. They scattered across the black expanse like cowrie shells cast by a diviner, each one holding a truth too precious to name. The waves whispered against the stillness, but they did not rock him; whatever thing he lay upon was too large, too stable, like a small island.

Slowly, he pushed himself upright, the skin of his palms rasping against what felt like thick, wet scales.

Then he saw her.

Moonlight draped across her form like a royal cloth, her locs writhing like sea serpents in the night air. Where human flesh should have ended, scales began—not with abrupt transformation, but in subtle gradients that whispered of worlds where such boundaries meant nothing. Water clung to her like a second skin. But it was her eyes that held him still—blue, endless.

And she had saved him.

His voice, when it came, scraped against his throat like sand against pearl. "You..." The word floated between them, incomplete as a half-remembered dream.

Her head tilted, a movement so fluid it felt more like water shifting than flesh bending. Then she laughed. A sound caught in the wind, high and soft, laced with amusement. He did not know if she understood him, but something in her expression told him she was aware of his confusion, his disbelief.

His stomach clenched painfully. Hunger. The realization came sharp and immediate. He touched his belly, the gesture instinctive, and looked at her with an urgency he hoped translated across whatever language divided them. She watched him, blinking slowly, then without a word, she turned and slipped into the water.

Before his heart could count its next beat, she surfaced, water cascading from her shoulders like liquid starlight. Her hands full of fish still glistening with the kiss of the sea. She held them out to him, her expression unreadable.

Onwuka hesitated, then took them. Their flesh was cold, slick, and somewhere deep within him, his mother's voice rose in protest. He should not eat like this—raw, fresh from the sea, like an animal. But hunger was a cruel thing, an unyielding master, and so he tore into the fish, his teeth sinking into the tender flesh, the taste of salt and blood coating his tongue.

She watched him all the while, unmoving, studying him as though he were the mystery, not her.

Then, his thirst came. Strong, relentless, pressing against the back of his throat like fire. He mimicked drinking, cupping his hands, bringing them to his lips. She did not move. A flicker of amusement crossed her face, but she made no effort to retrieve water for him. Instead, she sat, her webbed fingers tracing drawing patterns that might have been spells or memories or both, against the scales of the beast beneath them.

Why?

Why save him only to let him wither?

Onwuka swallowed against the dryness, against the discomfort, and instead, he spoke.

He told her his name, though he doubted she understood. He spoke of his home, of the village by the water's edge, of the mother who warned him of spirits like her, of the father who believed the ocean was nothing but a vast and hungry grave. He spoke of the storm, the wreckage, the fear, and the moment he thought he would die.

She listened.

Not the passive listening of politeness, but something deeper. She did not interrupt, did not look away. She absorbed his words like the tide absorbs footprints in the sand, as if she were collecting his voice, storing it somewhere beneath her ribs. Then, slowly, she raised her hands and began to move them.

At first, he thought she was casting a spell, weaving something unseen into the air between them. But no—this was language. A different one, foreign and fluid, shaped by fingers rather than lips. He did not understand, but he watched, trying to piece together meaning from movement alone.

Then, she sang.

The sound pierced the veil between worlds—ancient as the first rainfall, potent as crushed herbs in a healer's palm. It was like the whisper of ancestral waters against forgotten shores, the echo of depths that had never known human touch. It was a song that did not need words to be understood. It was a song that spoke to something ancient, something buried deep within him, deeper than fear, deeper than doubt.

She rose, moonlight catching on the droplets that clung to her skin like scattered pearls. She extended a hand. An invitation.

Come.

He hesitated, tasting salt on his tongue.

His mother's warning scratched at his consciousness, sharp as fish bones: Do not follow what you do not understand. The words carried the weight of generations who had learned such wisdom through loss.

But wisdom, he had learned, was sometimes the younger sister of regret.

Rising on legs that trembled like seagrass in the current, he took her hand. Her skin was cold and soft, slick like a fish, with a faint, sticky dampness that clung to his touch.

The water claimed him with the fierce tenderness of a long-lost lover. Cold seeped into his bones, not as an intruder but as a transformation. She moved through the water as though she had never known land. He followed as best as he could, kicking, pushing, but already, he felt the strain.

Beneath the surface, the ocean unveiled itself as empire. Schools of fish carved silver rivers through the blue-dark. Creatures with bodies like living light pulsed in the depths, each one a star in an inverted sky. Coral jutted from the ocean floor like towering spires, their edges softened by time. The sea here was not the enemy. It was a kingdom, breathing, living, endless.

But his body—that treacherous shrine of flesh and bone—began to fail him.

His limbs grew heavy, his breath short. He could feel the weight of exhaustion pressing against his skull. Dehydration. He had ignored it, too consumed by wonder to heed the warnings of his own body. He had nothing left to give.

The ocean blurred. The colors, the movement, the light—everything smeared together, a great and terrible whirl of existence. His chest ached. His vision darkened. His fingers reached out, grasping for anything solid in this liquid world, finding only the space between moments.

The last thing he saw was her turning, her eyes wide, her mouth forming something—his name, perhaps. A call. A plea.

Then, there was nothing.

Nothing but the sea, and the salt, and the silence.

☀︎

The sound came first—not as memory, but as revelation. The rustling of leaves shifting in the breeze, the distant calls of birds riding the wind. Then, the sensation—the press of something firm beneath him, something familiar yet impossible. 

Sand.

The word itself was a prayer, a thing he had thought lost to the hungry ocean.

Onwuka's body was a heavy thing, weighed down by pain, by exhaustion, by the remnants of the sea clinging to him like a second skin. He tried to move, but the effort was met with a deep, unrelenting ache, as if his bones had been rearranged by the water. Only his eyes bent to his will.

The sun blazed overhead, an unmerciful god, its light cutting through his eyelids even before he could pry them open. The world was blurred at first, shimmering like a mirage. But then, shapes emerged—leaves swaying, slender trunks stretching toward the sky, the familiar silhouettes of palm trees and coconut trees standing like sentinels over him. 

He turned his gaze, slow, deliberate, as though any sudden movement might shatter the fragile reality around him. And there it waited.

The ocean. 

Endless and restless, its waves crashed against the shore, one rolling into the next, devouring itself in a never-ending hunger. He should have feared it. Hated it. The very thing that had tried to claim him, that had swallowed him whole, now stretched before him in serene indifference. And yet, it felt like a miracle.

He had been marked by the impossible—survival itself had chosen him.

If this was illusion, let it be endless.

But consciousness was a fickle friend to those who had walked with death. Darkness reached for him with familiar hands, and he lacked the strength to resist its embrace. His eyes grew heavy as rain-soaked cloth.

The last thing he heard was the whisper of the waves, calling him back to where he had come from.

But not today. Today, he belonged to the earth, to the sand, to the air that filled his lungs with the sweet scent of life. Today, he would remain among the living, even if only barely so.

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