This particular bend of the river always soothes him; he finds time every day to break away from guarding the trading post to sit on the bank, watching the water burble by. It’s a gentle scene, accentuated by the nearly fluorescent flowers growing along the river’s edge, and it allows him to escape running off bandits and menacing uncooperative merchants.

It’s early evening during one of his sojourns that he first hears the voice.

It’s a whisper on the absolute edges of his senses, the barest brush of something across his ear, the faintest sensation of sound, so vague among nature’s ambient noises that he almost doesn’t notice it. But it is there: a word, though not in any language he’s heard before. This surprises him – in his line of work, it pays to speak a little of everything, given how many people from how many places come through here. To encounter a language he’s never heard at all…

There’s the word again, and he still can’t understand it.

“Hello?” he says, placing one hand on the hilt of his short sword. He doesn’t take the bigger sword on these little escapes; somehow it seemed obscene to bring so much sharp metal into so peaceful a place.

He hears the word again, a third time, low and lilting, but louder, and he stands up from his seat among the flowers. He feels the sensation of…something…pulling away from him, and without quite understanding why, he reaches one hand out toward the open air.

“Wait,” he hears himself say. “Who are you?”

 What did he mean by that? He withdraws his hand and touches his fingers to his lips as though they were foreign to him. They felt foreign – he doesn’t know why he asked that question. There’s no one here but him, isn’t there?

The word comes singing on the wind, clear now, and he catches himself repeating it.

“Opilia,” he says. “Is that your name?”

The river before him, impossibly, comes to a halt. The water doesn’t turn to ice; it simply ceases to flow, glimmering in strange suspension.

He stares, transfixed, and then kneels, reaching out once more to place his palm along its surface.

The impression of an incomprehensibly huge presence, of unbelievable size and power, washes over him, strong enough to drive him backward. He leans back on his hands, his eyes locked on the motionless water.

“That’s…you?” he breathes, somewhere between awe and terror. “That’s…what you are?”

There’s another word, a different word, and something in his mind twists horribly, and then he knows: the word means “yes.”

“How did you get here?” he murmurs, resuming his kneeling position to better examine the water. “Where are you?”

More words. More twisting, almost painful, causing him to grimace – but now he understands these, too.

“Under the earth,” the voice says. “Beneath the water.”

“Oh,” he says. It’s all he can think to say. He knows he should be fleeing the bank. He should run screaming toward the trading post. He should shout and warn them all that something huge, something impossibly powerful lies beneath.

He cannot leave. He does not want to do so.

“Who are you?” the voice inquires.

“I am called Decus Vim,” he replies. “I’m a guard at the trading post nearby.”

“What is a trading post?”

“It’s…well, it’s a place where people trade things,” he says, uncertainly, and then, after a beat: “They give each things in exchange for other things.”

“This is understood,” the voice replies.

His hand lingers over the water as he thinks of what to say next. The memory of that incredible presence gives him pause, but something in him wants to brush his fingers across it again, to see it once more.

“What…what are you?”

This time there is no twisting; he simply understands the words as they enter his ears, as though he’d known them all along.

“I do not know, Decus Vim,” the voice says. “I simply am. I have spent so long in the dark, and now I’ve found a light, and I have discovered something new.”

“The dark?”

“The dark. An endless dark. Now there is soil. There is water. There is something new.”

“What do you mean, something new?”

“There is…a sensation,” the voice murmurs. “An ache…the absence of something.”

“Longing?” he returns. The sun was setting before he arrived; now, as daylight disappears over the hills, he can see the glow of the flowers reflecting in the still water.

There is something else in the water.  A shape, round and dark and nearly the width of the river, surrounded by a halo of dim light.

It’s an eye.

It blinks, and shifts, and he gets the impression it is staring back at him.

Against all reason, against every screaming nerve in his body, against the wave of revulsion that washes over him as he realizes what he sees, he reaches out and touches the water again.

A vision washes over him: of a creature too big to fathom, floating in abyssal dark, its bulk alive with limitless power, which crackles in vivid purple arcs along its gargantuan flanks.  There are many eyes, many mouths, all speaking in unison, all murmuring in a language that, to his horror, he understands wholly.

They speak of want. They speak of want. They speak of longing, deep and aching, of a void, a wound so far down he can’t understand where it leads, of a yawning nothingness where something should be.

His mind pulses, throbs with the effort of comprehension; a splitting pain sends shadows skittering along the edges of his vision. He does not pull his hand away. He does not move. He does not want to move.

“You…want,” he snarls through gritted teeth.

Yes, the mouths murmur in their brutal chorus, and he finds his free hand clutching at his temple. We –

“—want,” comes the lilting voice again, and as he looks up from the water, he sees a child standing on the bank, one hand on his shoulder. The pain has vanished, taking the vision with it. There is only her, painfully thin, dressed in simple rags.

“Opilia,” he breathes. “I will give.”