You're out in the snow, walking under the comfortable winter sun. Walking, as in with legs, as opposed to a tail. It is a good sensation.

The wind feels pleasantly chilly on your skin, and not dull and cold as usual. Eigla, and Klimt, and all your friends are standing on a nearby hill, calling for you.

You pick up the pace, running through the white landscape to meet them, but you can't seem to go very fast. Your boots get stuck in the snow and mud, and become heavier with every step. After a few hundred yards, you can't lift your legs up at all!

Digging with your hands to try and free yourself, you realise you were actually standing on a thin sheet of ice, and it's cracked under your weight. Your feet are deeply stuck into the muddy, bloodstained water below, and you begin sinking like in quicksand. You pull one leg up with all your might, but it's already turned into a strange, mud-covered stalk, encrusted with a myriad of clams and barnacles.
Strange polyps arise from the depths, sticking their sucker-mouths deep into your flesh, sending tendrils through your body. Your hands melt into floppy tentacles, with a mouth in each palm. Your eyes are dull cartilage, and sea fans sprout from your back. You open your mouth to scream, but a coral colony immediately grows out of it, your neck permanently stuck in a painful, stretched out position.

You sink.


The tide brings you back to your senses. You are in the womb of the ocean, flying with more grace than any shark or dolphin. You cartwheel and pirouette in joy, flexing your powerful fins. Whales swim beside you, dwarfed by your gargantuan shadow, and large schools of fish pick at your blue-grey hide, hunting for parasites and dead skin.

You see the welcoming sunshine above, but you don't go towards it. It's not yours, anymore. Instead, you dive deeper and deeper, following the sprawling roots that cover the sea floor, deep into abysses never before beheld by humans, living or otherwise. And there, at the core, the source, beyond a thousand forgotten emperors, you see the cyclopean shape you were looking for. That life from beyond time, to which the surface world is as distant as the stars in the sky. It gazes at and through you, with a thousand-thousand faceless eyes, accustomed as they are to the sunless depths. You smile, and it somehow returns the gesture.

"Welcome home."