Light from the sun has not touched the ocean’s floor since the beginning of time, and yet it cradles ten times more species than the land and sky combined. I admire the adaptability of those animals that have survived the tumult wreaked upon them by weather demigods. But their souls are brittle compared to those that thrive under water’s weight. Titans craft the creatures here in their own image out of the fleecy organic compounds and hot sulfur of the hydrothermal vents.
One sea slug extracts dissolved iron particles from the eruptions of the murky underworld. It then secretes them layer by layer into armor: a steely shell spirals from its shoulders, impenetrable and grand. It clads its own slimy feet with hooves. Its undulations transform into a trampling stride.
Elsewhere, a species of translucent crustaceans feel themselves so well equipped by their glassy exoskeletons that they bare all heart, nerves, abdominal organs, and ligaments to the sightless eyes of those around them. Each pulse and electric choice seeks–so often in vain–an unembarrassed witness.
A solitary animal with a wide plume like a fern sits on the end of a stony outcrop. It is still. It is breathless at its own beauty, with how its form complements the geometry of its rock. A year will pass like this. An inquisitive worm approaches it and discovers the tips of the softly glowing leafage hardening into talons that immediately seize and shred. Its carcass provides nutrition for the predator for the following year.
A certain jellyfish exists in a perpetual state of anxious panic, aware at all times of its smallness. It darts and grasps at scraps with diligent rapidity, at every moment fearing the day when it is discovered and devoured. It is unaware that it is unchallenged not because its vulnerability has been undiscovered but because others are hiding from it. Its ravenousness has made it mountainous.
A flamboyant cuttlefish sings in a crystal cave where through mastery of its own voice and understanding of the crystal’s resonances it is able to recreate the sound of an entire backing orchestra.
There is a tribe of worms that see each other as identical, equal, and united in the fact that each is a mouth whose purpose is to gorge for eternity on an immense blubbery carcass that has fallen from their milky heaven. Others insist on constructing their meals and offspring from chemicals spat from their hell.
All these creatures and the titans that create them lack of any concept of authority. This is the great irony of the game of chance my brothers played: one does not, can not, rule the seas as one rules the sky or the dead. Each being here is its own god of its own sea. The others look upon my coral and gemstone palace correctly: not as a seat of power, but as a shell like their own. They are perplexed only at why the doors are so often open.
