Scylla swam slower and looked around the sandy bottom, her tracks the only thing visibly different- well, different since she'd first seen the roof of the ocean. It was beautiful, she'd never seen anything that shimmered like it did as it slowly moved above her. Sometimes light burned from it, and she couldn't look up for a few hours, but otherwise it had stopped her in her tracks when she'd realized what it was.
She'd met new animals- fish she'd never seen before, a big one with pointed teeth that called itself a shark, and two whales who didn't have pointy teeth at all. The closer she got to the surface world, the weirder things were getting... As the coral had bloomed more and more into color, and she'd found a few whales made of a light bone on the bottom, she'd begun to feel out of her depth. There was a great deal more life around, and the higher up she'd gone, the lighter and more disjointed she'd started to become. Everything was so light, like she couldn't feel her limbs.
She'd crawled, panting, into a cave, tentacles fluttering in her wake, trying to sleep. Eventually her swim bladder had fully adjusted her internal pressure- here the water couldn't suffuse her equally from all sides, and it had gone from eight tons of force to less than two- and when she'd woken up, she'd felt better. Better still after hunting down and devouring a big Grouper.
Now she'd ended up here, closer to the ceiling then she'd ever come before. It roiled and waved above her, painfully bright. Up here light was total sometimes, and her eyes hurt. Hiding helped when the light was out, like now. Something was wrong with the horizon- behind her was ocean and water, but in front of her the ground rose like a ramp. At it's edge, something was happening to the water- it was shattering and reforming, shattering and reforming for a line miles and miles long.
She rose from the depths, higher and higher off the ground, still shielding her eyes with her arms while her tentacles pushed her up. She had to see the edge of the world better, maybe there was something around here-
Her head broke the surface.
She knew the water had felt lighter; above and around her, it looked so light that it wasn't there. Instead there was another ocean above her, with big, fluffy white rocks floating on it's surface. A moment later she hissed and regretted looking up; there was an explosion happening up there, a big fiery ball that seared her eyes with white and red spikes. That explained why the light stopped sometimes...
Her eyes and limbs flashed yellow in alarm as she looked to where the Ocean was shattering into pieces, seeing the bone towers and the tongues spread out along the sand of the Surface. Things were sitting in them, pink and brown and red things. They looked like her, but not like her. They were shouting and yelling and coughing with their mouths while smiling. The spawnlings dug holes in the sand and threw water at each other, and as she bobbed in the wake of the waves, her tentacles twitched. Surface dwellers looked alien and unnatural, they didn't even have tentacles. The sounds and the still-present light were making her keep looking around, to see everything around her at once.
Something roared by her, and she shrieked in alarm, dropping down and releasing her cloud of ink. Scylla didn't quite see what it was- a squat, growling thing with a surface worlder on it's back, shooting a trail of water behind it- but she knew a predator when she saw one. Light stroked wildly in the cloud, almost at random as she swam and scrabbled quickly away through the blue.
A fair distance away, she watched whales swim up on top of the surface, sending out sounds from their heads. She knew they were looking for something, and it might've been her. She wondered, horrified, what the people up there ate. Even speaking the same language, she hadn't thought about what she'd do to bring her own food back- only that she had to.
Scylla hugged herself and sadly watched the waves from the bottom, waiting forlornly for the dark to come so she could hunt.
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