Everything was too bright and nothing was okay. The harsh yellow light—a vomit-adjacent kind of yellow—radiated out from under the cabinets that served as a barrier between the kitchen and the living room. Isaac ignored the moth-like instincts that tried to compel him to wander into the kitchen, to stay safe in the artificial light, to satiate his munchies by hiding in meaningless consumption. He forced his eyes from the light.

“You don’t have to do this,” he whispered again as he tied a plastic bag tight to his ankle. Water lapped at his bare feet as they dangled over the off-white couch, gentle waves cresting at the shoreline the sofa had become. “It isn’t too late to just enjoy the high.”

It was too late though. His sweaty palms, his erratic heartbeat, his mounting anxiety all demanded this release. There was no other way. A heavy breath whistled out from behind his teeth, a breath that tried to calm the frenetic nerves dancing inside. The breath meant nothing, was just another puff of air that served no actual purpose outside of clearing his lungs, but placebos often ignore rational thought when inexplicably working.

“Remember. Remember why.”

Memories flashed across his vision, single frames from one magic night seared into his drug-addled grey matter, images of blood and pain and regret. Images of her, of Michelle, after her father had put one too many away and reached out for his favorite punching bag. Images of her tears, spilled so many times for the same god-awful reason. Images of the knife, his knuckles white from exertion. Isaac inhaled, a sharp intake of air holding those images in place, while he looked out beyond his couch.

The ocean before him was vast, the puke-light from the kitchen doing a piss-poor job of dispelling the darkness sprawled out to infinity. He knelt down again, ensuring the knot around his ankle was tight enough, almost losing what little balance he had situated on the sofa as he was and tumbling into the black waves splashing into the couch. Confident he wouldn’t lose his cell phone, keys, and half-full Powerade—such scant provisions to take on this journey—he stood back up, reaching for the spear he had stashed behind him. He looped the strap around his shoulder, needing the weapon but not wanting it to impede the swim, not daring to check how sharp the tip was. He adjusted the water-proof headlamp one last time, making sure it was tight enough.

Before he could take a final steadying breath, before he could look back wistfully at his kitchen, before he could reach for the remote floating somewhere in the water and turn the television on, Isaac dove off the couch. He hit the ocean swimming, his arms taking measured strokes, his legs kicking with a fury he shouldn’t possess. The bag felt awkward, like a too-scratchy shirt tag, but it was secure; the spear made breathing to his left side impossible, so he accepted the cramp breathing to his right caused.

Isaac swam without stopping, ignoring each new pain and ache that settled in his muscles and bones, spitting out the water on which he nearly choked with each breath. In the dark, away from the fake and bright of the kitchen, it was impossible to tell where the drop off was hiding, where the ocean opened up from shallow to deep; he hoped that he’d know when he got there. Exhales escaped his mouth as groans the farther he went, the kind of exhaust usually reserved for lifting heavy shit, but he didn’t relent, couldn’t stop. Water caught in his moustache, the facial hair keeping it from pouring into his open mouth; without the beard, he likely would have already drowned.

How far had he gone?

“Not nearly far enough,” he yelled into the water, the final syllable tagging along with his breath when he surfaced, a pained and guttural sound. The water was frigid, much colder than the ocean at night should be. Steam wafted up off his body. His muscles were lead, the lactic acid settling in them wanting nothing more than to drag his tired body down into the briny deep. “Not. Yet.”

The waves became choppier, the wind riling their anger into a seething frothiness on the brink of violence. They crashed concussively into him, each one wanting to be the wave that sank him. He dove headlong into the mightiest ones, the ones that rose out of the sea like walls, swimming under and through them. He jackknifed around the smaller ones, the ones that twisted and contorted like vipers lunging at prey, swimming round them. When the wind realized its frenzy wasn’t enough, it called upon the sky for help.

Lightning split the night into pieces, a fractured mirror that loomed overhead, thunder cracking once to signal it had in fact shattered. Shards of broken sky began to fall, the collapsing night crashing into the sea. Isaac flipped onto his back, straining his eyes to make out the falling sky in the sheer black that it left in its wake. His legs kicked faster, the exhaustion that had settled in like cancer making them almost too heavy to move. He dodged what he could, snaking around the water, diving into waves still angry at his presence; he took the blows he had to, slivers of fractured night piercing his flesh and drawing blood.

None of it stopped him.

With the sky sinking to the bottom of the ocean, there was nothing above Isaac save for inky blackness. He switched on the headlamp mid-stroke, giving himself just enough light to see a few feet in front of his face. Under the waves, the light allowed him to see the few tiny fish that hadn’t abandoned the shallows for the deeper waters in the midst of the storm. These surface thoughts avoided him; he likewise ignored them, knowing his attention was needed elsewhere. The wind wasn’t done with him yet.

Instead of turning the sea around him into projectiles or barriers, the wind focused its energy on one wave. It created near the horizon a monster, a rogue wave capable of drowning entire cities. Surely it would suck Isaac down into the depths and there crush him. It had to be several miles high, though without the sky to stop its elevation, it could have reached out into eternity. Isaac’s headlamp faltered against an obstruction of this magnitude, so he chose not to waste time looking at it. He put his head down and swam in its general direction.

The wave rumbled, shaking the sea, as if it had a voice capable of traversing through an ocean. It was issuing a challenge, so loud, so forceful, Isaac had no choice but to stop.

“I’m here for the beast,” Isaac called out to the force of nature. “I’m here . . . for the beast.”

The wave pondered this, scrutinizing the man who had faced everything its ocean had thrown against him. Isaac waited, naked under that eyeless gaze, his breath evening out as he faced the silent question the wave was asking.

“You know who I am,” Isaac said, his voice steadier than he had expected it to be, staring straight ahead at the wall of water that meant to fucking kill him if it didn’t like his answer. He ground his teeth in anxious anticipation when the wave didn’t immediately respond.

After a stand-off that could have lasted seconds or eons, the wave dissolved in silence, drowning the wind instead of drowning Isaac, and the violent ocean became serene. Isaac’s breath shuddered out of him, a ragged sigh that wanted so desperately to be a scream but had to settle for existence as a sigh. He closed his eyes, floating on his back in water that no longer wanted him dead. The reprieve couldn’t be anything but short-lived though, he knew; the more time he spent resting and waiting, the less desire he would have to see this through.

Isaac looked back once, his kitchen so far gone he couldn’t see it shining out at all. His too-bright apartment was back there, lost somewhere in reality. He was over the horizon now, no longer occupied the same space or same time as that apartment. Another shaky breath escaped his pain-wracked body, this one with the desire to be a wail. He couldn’t give his breaths the kinds of lives they wanted.

The steam roaring off his body had become but a whisper in the darkness. Blood still oozed from a dozen different wounds, blood he refused to acknowledge. If he looked down at the crimson staining his limbs, Michelle’s blood-caked face would render him impotent. Focusing instead on the headlamp that had begun to dim, Isaac knew he could see maybe ten feet in front of him. Such a paltry distance, but there had been few options for this journey. He could have ingested more chemicals, could have brought a more powerful light, but then he wouldn’t have made it this far. It would have been impossible to swim this distance if he hadn’t packed light, if he hadn’t taken only what he needed and nothing more. Isaac shrugged the strap of the spear off his shoulder, testing the heft of it again. He thrust the weapon once, knowing that under the waves his strength would be diminished.

“You better be sharp enough for this,” he encouraged the spear, though his growl made it sound more like a scold. If the spear noticed or was even a little frightened about the next leg of the journey, it kept that to itself. “At least one of us can pretend to be brave.”

With too many second thoughts swimming around, nibbling at those still-bleeding lacerations, Isaac dove under the surface. He kept his legs together, the rhythmic dolphin-kick starting from his hips and working down to his toes, his spear gripped in both hands leading the descent more than the feeble light bobbing from his forehead. The bag itched his ankle, but it was a small discomfort, one that barely registered. The surface was close to empty, the few musings that had nipped at his injuries too afraid to come any closer. He had very little time to spend on these surface thoughts. He was here for the things hiding much deeper, scurrying around near the ocean’s floor.

A pain in his chest began soon after he started the dive, the crushing pressure of the ocean around and above him igniting a slow-burning fire in each of his lungs. If Isaac wasn’t hallucinating already, the lack of oxygen would probably make him start seeing things. He stifled a laugh as he watched that thought swim lazily past his field of vision, inferring he needed what little air he had left to continue. The farther down he swam, the more distance he put between himself and the surface, the more be began to see.

Thoughts swam all around him, some half-formed and misshapen, no more than a handful of neurons firing. They mostly stayed out of his way, a few words here and there that might have been part of a complete sentence, but in all likelihood weren’t. There was one however, that showed more than a bit of interest in him. It scuttled near him, slowly throwing its human-like arms forward and pushing water behind it. Those arms were muscular, grossly muscular, like someone had given steroids to steroids before injecting them. The rest of the thought was malnourished, emaciated, anorexic, and sickly green. Its nose drooped into its mouth, the under-bite allowing it to settle just behind a row of jagged teeth.

“What do you think Ray Bradbury would think of Twitter if he were still alive?” it asked as it pulled itself along in front of Isaac. “What would David Foster Wallace have to say about Netflix? Wouldn’t they want to light fire to the world because we ignored their warnings? Shouldn’t we want to light to the world?” Isaac watched as it pulled itself deeper into the water, disappearing into the blackness from whence it came. He followed the thought down, though he couldn’t catch up to it.

The deeper he went, the more the fire in his chest raged, an inferno that engulfed each lung and wouldn’t stop until there was nothing but ash inside his charred ribcage. It hurt like hell, or least how Isaac assumed hell would hurt, but he kept kicking downward, kept heading deeper into the ocean of his mind. Pain existed in an acute way when you found yourself over the horizon, on a molecular level this deep inside your own skull. Isaac knew that fire couldn’t cause real damage to his lungs, that the cuts and abrasions he had sustained weren’t actually bleeding, but that knowledge didn’t stop the pain from feeling real.

He howled and screamed, his open mouth letting out all of the oxygen he had stored up for this dive, the bubbles racing for the surface as he kept kicking at his frantic pace for the beast or the bottom, whichever he found first. Losing all that air didn’t cause him to drown, though the realization that he didn’t need to hold his breath didn’t make the pain in his chest any less severe. It seemed to intensify, as if pain itself needed to remind him of the kind of control it still held over him. Even here, inside his own head, pain was god.

While distracted with that metaphysical agony, Isaac didn’t see the predator skirting around the edge of the light his headlamp cast. The thing was pale, translucent, its veins and other innards visible through its thin skin. Barbed tentacles swished all around it, impossible to count, even if one were so inclined to count tentacles, and it moved with the kind of grace reserved for boggeymen and nightmares. This thought was fully formed, a mainstay of Isaac’s consciousness, one that had grown vicious over all the years.

It hissed when it struck, its maw cavernous and lined with wicked needles, the sound of its hunger grating and exhausting. Isaac had been sucked down that razor lined throat on more than one occasion, chewed up by those prick-like teeth only to be regurgitated and devoured all over again. Depression had a very strange digestive cycle.

“Yeah?” Isaac snarled as he grappled with those countless tentacles, trying to get his spear aligned just right before pushing away, a tactical move he knew the thing would be unable to see coming. “If I don’t matter, then what the fuck does that say about you?”

He stabbed, the spear striking true, poking right down the back of the creature’s throat, skewering the damned mental illness until its needle coated maw bit into the tender flesh of Isaac’s knuckles. There was no time to bask in the glory of the kill. Depression hunted in packs.

Smelling the death of one of their own, thousands of the ravenous things exploded into a blood frenzy, erupting out of the dark water to feast on whatever was in their way. Isaac dived deeper down, feeling the leaders of the swarm nipping in vain at his heels, trying and failing to ensnare his feet in their tentacles. All he had to do was outpace them for a time, just long enough for the ones in back to start eating the ones in front. He barrel-rolled, twisting and turning his body in various directions, always headed deeper and deeper. Maneuvering around and away from the swarming turmoil of the depression became his sole focus. Isaac ignored the hunger of the swarm, refused to let himself be sucked into those waiting mouths, only to be consumed over and over again. There was too much at stake this time to succumb to those thoughts.

The swarm began to devour itself, those in the back tearing with glee into the ones in front of them. A sick sense of satisfaction settled amidst the pain still in his chest; there was something too satiating in watching his mental illness descend on itself instead of onto him. But, more than that, going deeper than depression’s domain meant entering a place dominated by the darkly intellectual. Thoughts here would be less predatory, but far more terrifying. Looking at his spear, at the limp body of the thing that had caused so much pain throughout his life impaled on the dull tip, Isaac flipped the thing off.

He kept swimming down, kept pressing forward, pretending that the pain in his chest wasn’t getting worse the deeper he went. The raging inferno had become a wildfire rampaging through every part of his torso, unrelenting, insatiable, omnipresent. He gnashed his teeth, felt as his bottom molars cracked under the weight of his top, but that didn’t lessen the pain in his chest.

“Did you expect this to be easy? Did you think you could just come down here to our domain, and we wouldn’t try to stop you? Do you think you’re welcome here?”

The thought in front of him was pain incarnate. It was his sister’s overdose and coma personified, his father’s suicide attempt anthropomorphized, his mother’s cancer brought to sickening life. It was the big bang, reality itself roaring into existence, floating there in the dark recesses of his mind. It was entropy, the death of all conceivable universes, taking on grotesque form at the edge of Isaac’s consciousness. Language offered no adequate way to convey the utmost terror emanating from what was speaking, leaving Isaac unable to properly unpack everything that comprised that horrifying, disgusting visage.

“I . . . I’m not here for you,” he finally managed to stammer, holding his spear out in front of him in as threating a manner as he could muster. “G-get the fuck out of my way.”

“No, that’s right: you’re here for the beast,” the thing mocked, using what could only be described as a tentacular finger—or maybe that was the howling shrieks of every life extinguished during the Holocaust wrapped into something resembling a finger, Isaac couldn’t be sure—to move the dull tip of the spear harmlessly away. “You’re here to confront that which you carelessly locked away so many years ago. Can you still remember it, that night? Can you still hear her crying, see the blood smeared on her face? Have you ever let it go?”

Tendrils darker than the sea around them erupted out of the thought, enveloped themselves tightly around Isaac, weaved their disparate strands together like a cocoon. He was trapped inside, trapped with the universe’s pain inside a memory he couldn’t forget no matter how many times he tried, no matter how much whiskey he poured down his throat or how many pills he swallowed all in an attempt to kill every brain cell attached to it.

And then, he was there, back in his parents’ living room. Michelle had called him crying and he was waiting for her to arrive. The text he received was a single word: outside. She had parked several houses down; she could never remember which one was his. He opened her door, got in her front seat, turned to look at her.

Isaac’s breaths left his mouth heavy, his exhales threatening to become cries.

“Look. Look at what you think is so important. Watch the night you locked the most powerful parts of you inside. Watch how banal it all is.”

Michelle had two black eyes, the bruises already forming even though the blows that caused them had only landed several minutes prior. Her nose was situated at a disturbing angle against her left cheek, dried blood caked just above her lips. Her right sleeve was dripping blood onto the center console, drip-dripping from a wound on her forearm. Isaac didn’t have to ask what happened or who had done this. He just quietly led her inside so he could clean up her father’s handiwork.

“How many young women bear the brunt of their father’s anger? Because Michelle was nothing special in being abused. And you were nothing special in how you reacted,” the thought said with a voice comprised of both human decomposition and a dying star’s final moments before implosion.

“Yeah?” Isaac asked through tears. “Maybe you’re fucking right. That doesn’t change anything.” He swung the spear with wild abandon, tearing through the chrysalis of high definition memory, leveling his only weapon. There was a savagery about him as he prepared to defend the few square feet of water he could claim as his own inside his near-subconscious. “Now. Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Way.”

“It should change everything. Perhaps we should just finish the night?”

Michelle had cried in the bathroom, shed her tears with a quiet dignity—or was it silent contempt?—that Isaac had found so brave. He left her alone in that bathroom, let her expel as much of her sadness and anger and heartache on her own. Aside from his shoulder to cry on or his torso she could use as a punching bag, he owned no comfort that he could offer her. So he set out to do what had to be done, car keys in one hand, knife in the other. He stopped walking halfway between his parents’ house and his own car, his father’s eyes burning holes into his back.

Isaac watched it all, watched the moment he had let his resolve crumble, the moment he had first felt capable of taking human life, standing there in the shadows of the North Texas street, unable to do anything for himself any more than he could have done anything for Michelle. He walked back inside, the him from eight years ago, back inside to hold a terrified girl who would dump him in less than a month. His own crying had stopped when the darkness began to abate.

“When will you stop letting that night haunt you? When you will own what you did and didn’t do? Maybe we could go now to when your sister was in the hospital, to when you decided to pull the plug on her. Or maybe I could take you to the moment the human race expires, and you can hear the sputtering and coughing as the last of your pathetic species goes out with a whimper. Would you like to feel that kind of pain?”

“What I would like,” Isaac snarled as he stabbed forward, impaling the thing through its middle on his spear, depression’s tentacles flopping around with the motion, “is to finish what I started.”

It pulled itself forward on the spear, its simmering face—can you call that collection of death masks a face?—so close to Isaac’s he could smell the putrid hate of its breath.

“You’re going to have to square with me one day, boy. So why not now?”

Rearing back, Isaac smashed his forehead into the part of the thing that exuded language. Maybe it was a mouth, maybe it was just an informational black hole. A wheezing sound, horrific laughter no doubt, a wheezing comprised of black plague victims being torched and burned in collective graves escaped that hole. He pulled the spear out of the thing, thrusting hard into that laughing maw, using what was left of the sharp euphoria to expunge the chilling void of human suffering. Isaac let the weapon go, its inertia and prickly ecstasy catapulting it and the thing through the dark waters, deeper and deeper into the ocean. Breathing stabbed into Isaac’s sides, cramps that had been just whispers under opium’s spell roaring into cacophony.

“Some other time,” Isaac promised to the universe’s pain. Or was it just his own pain? Or some sick combination of the two? Is that what hid inside the subconscious of every human, of every living thing that possessed a subconscious? Reality-spanning anguish? He chose not to follow those thoughts as they swam around in front of him, letting them remain half formed, continuing deeper into his mind before they could turn on him. He was unarmed, the last of the opium’s piercing exhilaration now gone, and too close to let any other distractions stop him.

With both of his hands now free, breastroke became his preferred method of travel, even though he had always been a shitty breastroker. Deeper and deeper and deeper still, his tiny headlamp no longer penetrated the dark waters in any meaningful way. He could see the white tips of his fingers and nothing else; the LSD that lit his way so far had done its job, but now he was on his own. The change in pressure around him was the only way he knew he had arrived. Swimming in a meandering sort of way was the well-constructed thought he had journeyed through this ocean to find.

It dominated the profound abyss at the recesses of his mind, this whale with a body wrought from steel. The hull had held all these years, even down here at the bottom under an insane amount of pressure. Isaac called out, grabbing the leviathan’s attention with his shouting. It turned, set its bulbous eyes on the puny man swimming through its domain. It had been designed with two instincts: eat without digesting; and never expel the contents of its stomach. Whatever was foolish enough to swim into this brute’s territory would be summarily devoured, never to wander the ocean depths again. That single-minded hunger was now being let loose on its creator. It opened its cavernous mouth, and Isaac accepted with more than a little fear being swallowed hole.

The leviathan’s throat was massive—much larger than depression’s—and Isaac walked down the length of the esophagus. Slime dripped down the rusted metal walls, dead thoughts that hadn’t found their way into the beast’s cell lay decomposing on the wet floor. He ignored most of them, though a few showed signs of life and tried to snag his bare feet. Those he kicked half-heartedly away, pretending that these bad dreams and suppressed nightmares didn’t terrify him. The end of the esophagus was blocked by a door, a heavy prison door, built right into the wale-like structure. Kneeling down, Isaac untied the bag from around his ankle, fishing his keys out. Before he could pacify himself with a steadying breath, before he could run back up this thing’s throat and try to escape through a mouth he had created to not allow such things to occur, before he could avoid the very thing he had come here to do, he unlocked the door and stepped fully into the cell.

There was no light in the cell and his headlamp had dimmed to the point of being useless. Isaac removed it and let it fall to the floor, knowing that if the beast wanted to be seen it would be seen. It smelled clean inside, artificially so, like bleach and chlorine. The noxious sanitation burned his nostrils. He detected movement near the back of the cell, the shuffling of feet all that alerted him to the beast’s presence.

“Two pot brownies, three tabs of acid, a nugget of opium nestled inside a bowl of kief, and six bowls of marijuana.” The beast spoke the list of illicit substances in a clinical sort of way. “Is that what it takes for you to make an appearance?”

“Getting this close to your own subconscious isn’t exactly easy,” Isaac responded, his voice strong despite the fear. “Wasn’t exactly sure that would get me here if I’m being honest.”

Quiet footsteps became running stomps, the beast breaking into a sprint despite the lack of adequate space. The floor of the cell shook with the exertion, a loud clang reverberating off the walls when the beast launched itself off the ground, soaring through the air. It pinned Isaac to the door, its three pronged claws gouging into the steel. Hot breath cascaded out of each of its mouths, mouths situated where eyes should have been, mouths lined with jagged knives. Its one eye sat where a set of lips should have been, four tentacles writhing around the bloodshot thing.

“It’s been eight years,” the beast seethed, each of its mouths sounding out every other word. “Eight years since you locked me away, eight years since you abandoned me, eight years since you walked away from everything we could have been. What makes you think you’re welcome here now?”

Isaac refused to look away, stared down the beast’s one eye with his two. He took the grotesque thing before him all in, not just the angry face inches from his own or the angrier claws still shaving the metal door. It was skeletal, the beast, taut skin draped over sharp bones. Its stomach distended, no doubt from years of starvation down here at the bottom. The few strands of hair still stuck to its skull were wispy and grey. The beast was more pathetic than it was terrifying, more pitiful than it was frightening.

“I know I’m not welcome.”

“No, you are not.” The beast punctuated its growl by punching the door. “So why are you here?”

“Because we needed to talk,” Isaac said. “You thirsty?”

He reached for the open bag at his feet, not once taking his eyes off the beast, grabbing the half-empty Powerade bottle and raising it to his lips. He took a small swig before offering it. The beast took the bottle in one of its clawed hands, inspecting it with its eye.

“Purple? Who the fuck drinks purple?”

“I know, right? Fuck this city’s lack of blue Powerade.”

The beast drank, taking sips into each of its mouths, backing off somewhat to allow Isaac room. A dingy light had settled about them, the same vomit-yellow as his kitchen. Getting down here had taken all of the chemicals he had ingested and now that he was coming down, Isaac knew he didn’t have a lot of time.

“Two mouths for eyes, huh?” Isaac chided instead of getting down to it. “How very Corinthian of you.”

“It’s the form, the body, you gave me. If you want to complain about unoriginality, do it into a mirror.”

“It’s more original than your first look.”

Hearing the same bitter laugh escape two mouths was grating on Isaac, but he let the beast snort and snicker.

“I was your salvation once, your goddamned happy place, your escape from everything wrong with out there.”

“That was before you almost killed Michelle’s father.”

“We walked halfway to the car before dad stopped us and you know it. Yeah, I wanted to kill him, wanted to rip his still beating heart out and shove it down his throat. But we hesitated, faltered, and in that moment a crime of passion became premeditated murder. I wanted him dead, but not badly enough to land us in prison.”

“Your desire to kill scared me.”

“Everything scares you. Everything worries you. Everything fucking frightens you. Besides, he deserved to die.”

The beast finished the Powerade, tossing the empty bottle back to Isaac. It hit him in the chest, landed somewhere in the cell.

“You don’t get to make that call. We don’t get to make that call.”

“And yet he got to make the call to beat his daughter?”

Isaac’s silence was the only answer he could offer.

“You’re still playing by a set of rules that has been proven time and time again to be bullshit. The embargo on taking human life is not set in stone anywhere, is not written in reality. It is based on the flawed assumption that human life holds any intrinsic value, an assumption that can’t be proven. Yet you hold onto it like some sort of fucking security blanket instead of accepting that it is just another belief, a belief that allows our species to coalesce into civilization and societies, but a belief that has to be challenged like all other beliefs.

“We didn’t touch him, even though he badly deserved it for what he did. And instead of facing that reality, you ran and hid, leaving me to starve down here because you were scared that I might actually kill somebody one day. The ugly truth is I might and I’m you. You hate the fact that you might kill somebody one day. Because of that hatred, you have locked everything that others might view as negative about yourself up in the hopes that squashing your anger, your fierce intellect, your ambition and drive will make you a more palatable person to be around. How’s that working out for us?”

“You’re right,” Isaac said, his voice blank and monotonous. “You’re right.”

The beast perked up, cocking its head to one side. It furrowed the skin between its nose and eye, trying to create the appearance of confusion. Isaac found it hard not to laugh at the attempt.

“What do you mean I’m right?”

“Everything you just said is true. I denied myself who and what I am because I was fucking terrified. That fear can’t rule me anymore though, can’t rule us anymore though. You are a part of me and I am a part of you. This whole goddamned ocean—the one that tried so hard to crush me, to drown me, to devour me—and everything that resides in it, is ours.”

“W-what are you s-saying?” the beast stammered.

“I’m done being half a person just so I can hopefully fit in. I’m done being afraid of you. Getting here was a pain in the ass, literally and figuratively. I want us to work together to clean this shit up. Because there’s a whole lot of bad out there, outside of this ocean, a whole lot of bad that we have to do something about. We can’t fix the world until we fix ourselves.”

The leviathan groaned and lurched. The steel of the cell began to bend and warp. Screws exploded out of their holes, pinging off the walls and door. The whale-prison started to collapse in on itself.

“What’s happening?” the beast demanded.

“I’m no longer keeping this together. You’re in for a hell of a swim. It doesn’t appear that you need to be armed with chemicals though.”

The beast swiped at Isaac, its claws sailing through the man who had begun to fade. Isaac just smirked in response before disappearing completely, the effort and energy of staying so close to his own subconscious burning through the last of the LSD.

Isaac coughed and choked, coming to on the floor of his apartment, next to the couch. He spat water up, trying to empty his lungs of it. Heaving breaths settled down into a normal rhythm, his erratic heartbeat calming as he rested against the sofa. His hair shouldn’t be wet, and yet it was soaked as he raked his fingers through it.

“Hurry to the surface,” Isaac whispered. “There’s work to be done.”