[???]
It was cold.
So very cold.
Not the gentle cold of distant currents or the familiar bite of deep water pressing against skin, but an unnatural chill. It sank into bone, into thought, into whatever fragile thing remained that could still feel. It lingered there until even the act of existing within it felt painful.
And that was what made it so strange.
She had always known the cold.
The abyssal depths of the ocean were her cradle and her dominion. Places where light surrendered, where pressure crushed lesser beings without ceremony, where the water clawed and pulled and demanded submission. Cold lived there too and it was absolute and endless—but it had never troubled her. It was a sensation she acknowledged, nothing more. A fact of the deep. Gods did not recoil from such things. Primordial Gods least of all.
It had never been this uncomfortable or wrong.
But this was so very different.
This cold made her uneasy.
