The sea was always mine. Long before sails, before harpoons, before names.
I moved with the currents, slow and immense. I followed the cold, the light, the songs of others deep below. The old ones called it the whale road, and we believed it sacred—a path laid before time, glimmering with silence.
Sometimes, I would breach the surface and feel the sky shiver against my skin. Sometimes, I dove so deep that the sun vanished, and the water held only memory.
Then they came.
Small at first. Curious. Splashing, bobbing, trailing noise and scent. They floated on the world’s skin, like driftwood that had forgotten how to sink.
I circled them once, not in anger, only wonder. They carried thunder in their arms and fire on their breath. I did not know what they wanted, but their eyes held something I had never seen before: hunger shaped like fear.
They pierced me once. I remember that.
I moved away, as any creature would. I did not know I had become a legend.
One followed.
He screamed through the wind. His ship cut the waves like a wound. I passed them again, only to see if the storm had taken them, but they were still there. Eyes burning, ropes ready. He looked at me not as I was, but as something else—as if I were the reason the stars went out.
I turned and struck. The water swallowed wood and voice.
I did not hate him.
I do not know what hate is.
But when I dove again, the sea was quiet. The whale road rolled on, unchanged, unjudging. No songs that night. Only the cold trail of salt and starlight.
I moved forward.
Always forward.
Because the sea has always been my way.