I would walk 10,000 miles [working title]
The last thing he truly felt, he thought, was the sharp pang of freezing seawater on his tongue. Unremarkable for a sailor, perhaps, but it was all he had. Even now. Oceanwater, grimy and dark and relentless, choked him on all sides.
And not a drop to drink.
A glimmer of scales. Funny how the damn things flickered around him, popping up whenever he decided to have a thought. Some time ago they'd all been ghostly white and pulsing. The sight of scales—recognizable, even to his hazy and clouded mind—urged him forward, forward.
Forward to...something. Something other than inky blackness and the swaying of the ocean and the occasional fish or monster. He was just so damn bored of goring the same 10 sea monsters again and again. His anchor never got heavier, and he never tired, but he could only shatter rows of razor-sharp teeth so many times before it got old.
And there was the anger, he supposed.
The cold bubbled inside him constantly. He'd never been quick to anger (he hoped) but his grudge churned and foamed like choppy seas. Whomever it had been that doomed him to this endless trudging along the ocean floor—they'd have to pay. Hanging, or goring them like deep-sea monsters, or perhaps he'd just crush them under his heavy boots. Without knowing his own appearance, he was sure that the sight of whatever he was emerging from the deep water would be punishing in its own.
His boot clanged against something heavy and his mind and eyes lifted from the deep.
The water was murky instead of opaque. And—by the Bearded Woman, he could see. He could spot eels and fish wriggling in each other's grasp more than an arm's reach away. Scraps of...cloth floated in the water around his head. Tilting his head up as much as he could manage, he saw shapes and shadows. Unremarkable in an ocean full of monstrosities, but these were oblong and slow and long chains like his own stretched from them to the ocean floor around him.
If he could run, sprint, swim, he would have in his frenzy. But his heavy waterlogged boots kept him at his same slow trudge forward. But now it was different. This felt real.
Forward, forward, to vengeance and anger and justice and something other than oceanwater and monsters. Forward to answers.
The swarms of fish and refuse turned into forests of the dead and the dying, cluttered around buoys as though desperately clambering back to the surface. Tiny fish flitted in and out of empty eye sockets. Jaws drooped from rot and seawater. He stretched out a glove and lifted one half-skeletonized man's jaw.
You'll catch flies, he bubbled amusedly. Or fish.
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