Free A Lonely and Curious Country by Matthew Carpenter, Steven Prizeman, Damir Salkovic

plunge. I barely had time to recover before I was caught in the speeding waters and shot down the river over a third drop. This time I was able to avoid any rocks and regain my bearings. I pushed off the hard bottom of the pool and sped down river.
    In the lower part of the river I could taste the freshwater of the Manuxet mixing with the brine of the harbor. I swam forward and with each stroke I could sense more of the open sea and less of the river. I cleared the river mouth and moved quickly through the harbor. The small bay tasted of diesel and rotted wood and dead fish and something else, something chemical that reminded me of gunpowder and dynamite. It only took a few strokes to propel myself across the harbor and out of the inlet. In the open ocean all the smells and tastes of the Manuxet faded, and soon all I was left with was the feeling of the sea as it passed through my gills, and the voice in my head calling me, urging me forward, louder than ever.
    I swam east towards the rocks that marked Devil Reef. The sun was bright and flooded the surface layers of the sea with light. Around me small fish, cod and blues, swam gracefully in the clear green waters. A bull shark, presumably drawn by my blood, stalked me from a distance, circling, looking for a weakness it could exploit. When it finally decided to move off and leave me alone I felt a wave of relief pass through me. Not that I couldn’t have taken the animal, he was no match for me, but I had no desire for a confrontation. I had had enough of conflict, of doctors, of nurses, of soldiers, and of boats that suddenly were coming for me. I could hear their engines and the men screaming orders. Soldiers were searching the waters for me. I slipped under the surface and dove deep, leaving the sunlit world of soldiers behind.
    The water was thick with oxygen and my gills felt rich as it ran past them. I sped down with powerful kicks and not a backward glance. I had thought that the descent from the surface to Y’ha-nthlei would be a phantasmagorical transition from one world to another, but the only thing that happened as I fell into the deeper ocean was that the sun slowly died and the darkness grew. I went deep, deep beneath the surface, down past where the fish danced in the last dim light from above. Beyond that there were still fish, but they were no longer joyous creatures of the shining sea, but rather dark brooding things with huge mouths that lumbered through the thick dark waters and menaced each other with long predatory investigations. As I fell, there began a kind of precipitation, not unlike snow in appearance, but entirely unlike it in composition. This strange pale fall was neither rain nor snow, but the accumulated particles from the upper levels which, for one reason or another, had lost their buoyancy and were now slowly falling through the abyss. It was a detrital rain, composed of plankton, algae, plants and even the carcasses and bones of fish. We all fell together, and I hoped that I was more than just another piece of decayed refuse raining down in the dark.
    The great flat expanse of the ocean floor, covered with rock and silt was a desolate place, filled with batrachian beasts that could barely be called fish. Huge black shapes that were little more than mouths with fins hunted chimerical horrors that lay on the floor sifting nourishment from the rain of decay. Horned and hungry crabs picked through the carcass of an ancient whale, while great gelatinous worms bored through the bones with grinding teeth. I dared not pause but instead followed that siren call in my head and angled myself to fall below the surface and into the secret trench in the sea floor that seemed to crack the very world itself. I cut through the waters like I belonged there, like I had been made to dwell and sail in the dark and empty depths of the sea.
    I was there, floating in an ocean that was both abyssal and subterranean, when I first caught site of the lights of the