Owl City Short Stories

Explorers

There was a kind of charm that came with an as-of-now indefinite life, of having been for so long but at the same time having been for no time at all. The sensation was difficult to explain and was only best represented in and of itself. Much like how time existed in sections of seconds and milliseconds but was still collectively, time, his life existed in a progression of fantastical and wondrously new moments that yet still coupled together to be one Existence, as though every breath was his first breath and every thought and movement and beat of his cold heart was just as amazing and new and bright as the first. It was a sensation that was completely innate and as confounding as it was spectacular. It wasn't so much memory as it was a feeling that there was once a time that the expanse of the ocean and the boundless blue was not his, not that he occasioned long enough on this sensation to allow memory to come. There was a vague awareness of sinking, of darkness flitting at the corners of his vision and the water catching defiantly against his lungs and being forced through his veins. He remembered the uncomfortable coldness and the final welcomed numbing that spread from his fingers and toes to beat in time with his slowing heart and unblinking eyes. From his view, the surface of his new sky tossed and turned in its ephemeral state, as dark as it was crystal clear, diffusing and refracting the light into swirls and curls across his colourless skin, tracing the salty water that crept into his arteries which with his now silent heart, still roared in the way the ocean always did wherever it happened to be. There was a vague sensation as he stopped falling and allowed the darkness to close his still opened eyes. He slept with the rushing water in this blood and the memory of the fractured light in his silent mind.

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The next time consciousness came for him there was a slice of light cutting through the same unchanging and ever changing atmosphere. He took a desperate, deep breath and found the water filling him with a rush of comfort he didn't understand why he needed. He blinked widely, stunned into temporary inaction, whether by panic or surprise, at the movement of the cold in and out of his chest until the sensation became familiar and as soon as it did, he lost the notion of it ever being otherwise. The raven haired boy waited and then flicked his raven tail slightly, rising a foot towards the surface and revelling at the way the light cut and drew patterns over his thin, blue and green tinged arms. Past his chest with its smooth scale like skin stretched over the outlines of his sharp ribs and lightening his pale blue eyes. Lilting through his webbed hands with its elongated fingers and the rows of sharp fins that lined his arms and tail and back where it looked as though the bone hand grew through the mesh of his skin. He fancied for a moment feeling the warmth that came with the flickering and snaking light. The creature now no longer man blinked again, making another flicking motion which brought him closer to the surface and as he neared the light, he unconsciously grinned. If it was panic or uncertainty he felt it was gone as quickly as the bubbles he exhaled. The grin became a breathy laugh only the darting silver fish above him heard. He looked up and with another instinctual flick was racing the bullet like shapes through the current, feeling the rush of the water through his hair and untiring lungs. In the vast expanse of blue, there was nothing but the unchanging liquid atmosphere around him as he sliced through the water like a hot knife through ice and he never looked back.