Blackness. Cold. Silence.
El-Mond's eyes snapped open.
Water flooded his vision.
Before thought could form, terror seized
his chest.
"I'm I'm underwater"
Panic exploded through him.
His body jerked instinctively, muscles
screaming as he forced himself upward,
arms cutting through the unseen depths.
His heart thundered wildly, each beat louder than the last.
"I have to breathe."
"I have to reach the surface"
The surface felt impossibly far away.
Yet
He was rising.
Fast.
Faster than he should have.
Bubbles trailed behind him like
scattered stars as his body surged upward, unnaturally light, unnaturally swift.
In the chaos of his struggle,
a strange thought surfaced.
"…Wait."
"How am I not dead?"
His movements slowed.
The realization crept in, cold and sharp.
"The water is deep."
"I fell for a long time."
"I was injured… unconscious,
...I should have drowned ...already."
But there was no burning in his lungs.
No crushing suffocation.
No desperate gasp clawing at his throat.
Instead
Breath.
He felt it.
Not air but something else. A smooth,
effortless flow moving through him,
as natural as breathing had ever been.
El-Mond froze.
His body drifted, suspended in the depths.
He lifted his hands Or tried to.
Nothing appeared before his eyes.
No fingers.
No palms.
Only shimmering water where his hands
should have been.
His pulse spiked.
Slowly fearfully he turned his head.
And then
The world shattered.
Reflected faintly in the wavering light
was not a human face…
But scales.
A sleek, unfamiliar body moved where his
limbs should be. A tail swayed behind him, powerful and fluid, responding to thoughts
he didn't know he had.
His scream burst out instinctively
But it came out as a stream of bubbles.
"I– I'M A FISH?!"
The cry echoed soundlessly through the deep, swallowed by the endless blue.
El-Mond stared at himself,
suspended between disbelief and terror,
his old life sinking somewhere far below.
To be continued…