Beneath the Waves

Sea Monster

After reading more from the book of sea monsters, Ria had a better understanding of what was happening to her. Or rather, what had always been a part of her, just hidden below the surface. According to what she read, not only were her ancestors the very first creations of God, but they were also the envy of humankind. The creatures first created by God all had special powers. Some were amphibious like her kind, some had special abilities like flying, or strength. According to scripture (as she had now come to think of it) the humans were still God's favorite. Flawed, weak creatures built to make mistakes. They had no special powers, but God believed that they were the purest creations, unblemished by the powers that sat within his other creations, weak and dependent on Him. When the great wars broke out, the humans were losing. They convinced God that the creatures that he had made first were the ones that had to die, the ones that originally betrayed his rules. That they were the ones who convinced Eve to eat the fruit in the center of the garden. Upon a mountain, a man called Moses received tablets dictating 11 commandments. Right she also thought it was 10, but apparently there was one lost commandment that had been stripped from the bible at some point.

She also learned why that knife was special. It had been carved out of a special metal only found in the ocean. It had been blessed by a priest of her people, given to each family and handed down through generations. What she was supposed to do with it was much scarier. Turns out, for her full transformation into a 'sea monster' she would need gills. Not just any gills. Not a cute Harry Potter moment where she ate a kind of weed and gently transformed into a human with webbed extremities and gills. Nope. She had to cut her own gills into her neck while touching a body of water. If she does not touch water during her transformation, she will die. After transforming, she could move between land and water as she pleased, but during the transformation she needed to be in contact with water in some way. It took her a while to let this all sink in. Cutting gills into your own neck seemed reckless, terrifying, dangerous... all the adjectives. It seemed like something out of a horror movie or some kind of fanfiction. The only thing sort of keeping her sane about the whole thing is the way her body reacted the first time she cut her hand with the knife. It hurt, but only for a second, and the water healed it. Wait if the water healed it, wouldn't her gills just heal as soon as she was submerged? How would she turn back into a human? She hadn't finished reading the book yet, she got distracted by the pictures found on later pages detailing the different kinds of sea monsters. Ones with onyx black skin, yellow eyes in stark contrast to their bodies, more with skin resembling lava flowing down a volcano, the colours beautiful and striking. She could understand how humans would be jealous. She was jealous. They were able to move freely between the world of the humans and that of mythical creatures. Well, not so mythical it seemed. She was jealous, but had to remind herself that she was one of them.

She went to her bookcase to have a look at the remaining 7 books. Dragon. Unicorn. Minotaur. Phoenix. Centaur. Chimera. Sphinx. The only one that really still existed in the modern world that she knew of was the Sphinx. However it definitely was not the same kind of humanoid creature she saw in the books. The great sphinx in Egypt had the head of a woman, haunches of a lion and the wings of a bird. Depicted as a creature that walks on four legs, the anthropomorphic being she saw in her books was a little different. Head and upper body resembled that of a human. All illustrated images were shown with straight black hair, draping elegantly over their shoulders. The lower body was that of a lion, tail included. Finally great birds' wings sprouted from their shoulder blades, smaller than those of the dragons, but still great. She paged through the Sphinx book, reading similar stories as in her book. She wanted to know what each of these creatures had to do to transform. In all of them, in her quick glance, she had noticed the transformations being quite painful, a sort of rite that they had to live through pain to become something so different, so special. They were once able to transform at will, but after the great wars they were forced into hiding. As she read before, they spread out all over the world, speaking different languages, creating different cultures and religions worshipping what they once were. Or at least this was the case in Egypt. The great sphinx. The worship of cats. She had so much left to learn about where everyone really came from. What really happened in the past and how the world came to be the way that it was. First, however, she had something more important to do. Something possibly dangerous and life-threatening. But who doesn't love a little bit of adventure on a Tuesday night...

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Ria pulled up to the lake about a 30 minute drive from her house. The sun was setting and the parking area was abandoned, all the day visitors seemingly fleeing the darkness and chill that would soon set in. She knew this was not the ideal time of year to go swimming in a lake at night. I mean was any time of year ideal for that? But she came prepared. Wetsuit (from the two surfing lessons she took), first aid kid (cause, you know, the whole cutting thing) and goggles? It seemed like a good idea at the time. She didn't know what exactly was about to happen, but she knew that she no longer lived in boring Ria land, she now lived in exciting fantasy land where anything seemed possible, because what she was about to do would only work if that fantasy land was real and she wasn't in fact going batshit banana bonkers.

She got all her stuff and really really reluctantly climbed out of the car, walking much slower than her usual gay pace towards the edge of the water. She put her stuff down a few meters away from the lake, somewhere she knew it wouldn't get wet, but close enough for her to get to if she needed. She took off her shoes, slowly undoing the knots in her laces as the knots in her stomach seemed to be doing the opposite. She wanted to run, screaming crying throwing up, into the woods surrounding the lake and not have to deal with this. She didn't want to do this. But also she REALLY wanted to do this. Because until now, she had been so obsessed with how crazy and weird all of this was, but the fact that it was also really fucking cool had escaped her until the exact moment that she was standing, toes in the water, knife in hand ready to do the craziest shit she had ever done in her life. She took a deep breath. Hoped that this didn't require surgical precision, and raised the knife to her own neck (much like a scene from one of Chris' favourite possession movies). She pressed the tip to her neck until she could feel a bead of blood trickling down her skin, then parallel to her jawbone, she traced a line, not too deep, but deep enough to draw blood. She repeated it twice more before moving on to the other side. Her hand was shaking, her breathing shallow and the pain was, well, really not as bad as she expected. She could feel that her neck and shoulders were drenched, she knew she didn't cut deep enough to cause life-threatening damage and she really fucking hoped this would work. She finished the last cut, tossed the knife where her stuff was piled, and dove into the water.