oceanus
many and many a year ago,
in a kingdom by the sea
He doesn’t remember dying any better than he remembers living. His life had been a half life, wasted on broken souls and broken men and women. He was broken himself, after all. More than once he’d covered the hips of a sweat-slicked woman, only to leave her breathless and wanting. But he wasn’t built for love. The creator had made him to hurt, to be broken and mended and shattered again.
He remembers waking up though.
There had been darkness, the kind of inky blackness that seems to feel heavy. It had settled around his mind while the water had flowed onto his remains. Time is a foreign concept to the dead, so he has no real idea of how long it had lasted. Months, years, maybe as short as a day. Then, as quickly as the darkness had settled in, the light had come flooding back. He remembers his eyes flying open, and the very real feeling of water on skin. But it was all strange, dream-like even. Whatever it was he rose to the surface instinctively, though it appeared that his lungs didn’t actually need the air. He breathed anyways, grateful to feel his flat lungs expand once more in some semblance of living. Sea creatures of all sorts clung to his tattered hide, starfish and coral filling in the spaces that the monster had consumed. Finally, he makes it onto the beach, a patchwork mess of sea and earth. A dry cough leaves his mouth, expelling great bouts of seawater and phlegm. But he was alive, or something of the sort. The ocean had given him back in some way.