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The sun would have boiled him alive. Tsunami took a deep breath before poking his nose out of door, gripping his surfboard steadily before getting out of home. He walked the path towards and then jumped the pit without even opening the little gate his dad had built just a few years ago, feeling progressive doing so, because apparently people in Okinawa couldn’t jump two feet of fence.
“I’m going,” he exclaimed, not sure to whom, since his mother was inside caring for his little sister.
Not that he minded, because the sea was just a few meters away. If he went on by sea, he would have reached the reef to the other side of the island in less time and he would have been home by dinner before she even noticed. She would have screamed at him to use some after-sun, for sure, but at least he would have been home and that was the only thing she cared for.
He threw the board in the water and it wobbled against the thrust of the waves. As he placed his chest on the fresh surface, he felt quite better already.
That wasn’t enough to satisfy him, he already knew.
He padded with his hands at the sides of the board, dipping happily in the water as his pink hair started getting wet (pink was a good choice, he looked like a coral and the thought made him wheeze every time).
Tsunami reached the first row of rocks and easily surpassed them. He didn’t want to get too close to the land, but he still needed a place to rest whenever he wanted to resurface and chill a bit. He knew that reef like his pockets, maybe better, and he knew exactly where to go. Not far from the land, but neither too close for him to hit his head, there were two massive rocks that were definitely his thing. They were easy to spot, he could surf without worries because there wasn’t anything else in proximity, so his board was safe for once… his grandpa would have killed him if he had broken another one because he would have had to work for it until next Christmas. He wouldn’t have been too happy, either. No surf for half a year seemed like pure hell.
He jumped happily on one of the rocks, the flatter one, feeling it scratching his bare feet.
And then he noticed something.
A group… no, more like a trail of scales all over the rocks, so bright and silvery that their reflection hurt his eyes for a moment. “What the…” he exclaimed, bending down to see them better. “Bet these fishermen were madness reincarnated,” he observed, like if he wasn’t completely alone. It wasn’t like he cared too much about fishermen. He knew that for a lot of people in the island fishing was their only source of income, he was no one to judge. Seeing all those scales worried him, though.
“Who knows what they have done?” he asked out loud, before he looked at the ocean and… quite forgot about it immediately, he had some waves to ride anyway.
He dived into them, carrying his board with him and placing it in position. He was muscular enough to jump on it from there, but maybe they were all results of years of practice. As the first wave reached him, he got up and stood in equilibrium, feeling spurts of salty water on his face. That was his place, not too distant from the sky, still anchored in that world. That was difficult to explain, he wasn’t good with words, but at the same time… the ocean was the one helping him to communicate with the outside. When he referred to the ocean, anyone in the island seemed to understand him well enough. Tsunami had made up a lot of aphorisms from it, so much it would have been better if he had written it down. His mastermind was perfectly enough, he used to brag, but...
Is that a shark?
He could swear he had seen it, a glimpse of a huge, grey back of a creature swimming beside him. Tsunami held his breath, feeling like his heart was going to stop. To be fair, he had lived there for seventeen years already and hadn’t met a shark like this before, just little ones passing by without making a fuss. That one was clearly huge. He trusted his ocean enough to not be scared, but he had to move with more with caution now, maybe finding repair and waiting for it to leave.
“What an event!” he muttered, calmly swimming towards the rocks. Maybe, that explained the quantity of scales scattered over the place. Not that sharks had scales, maybe there were more of them, they were having a binge-eating contest before he came, and he had disturbed them. Who knew? Not him, he wasn’t a shark. As he sat on the surface, he looked around, trying to spot the creature: he was confident enough it hadn’t been an illusion, or a joke of the reflection, but he couldn’t see the shark anywhere. Maybe I should take these goggles off… he thought, feeling ridiculous. But as he brought his hands behind his head to unfasten them, he startled, hearing a huge splash behind him. Something towered over him, covering the sun.
He turned around immediately. Now he was scared.
That… that was a human being, wasn’t it? He couldn’t see it well in backlight, but the silhouette was an indicator already and whatever it was it sure wasn’t a shark. But it was huge… like, bigger than him and his board put together. Definitely bigger than whoever he knew. Tsunami crawled backwards until he reached the other side of the rock and then he knew there was just water and nothing else. He wouldn’t have ever thought that he could regret something like living by the ocean.
The creature moved quickly and bent down until their palms touched the rough surface in front of him. Tsunami just registered the fact that they were webbed. Of course. He noticed a shapeless tangle of blonde hair and algae, then their pearly and smooth back, exposed to the sun. And then their silver tail, half hidden under the surface of water, probably long twice his whole size, but he didn’t want to really know.
The creature was face down, seemingly awake tho, and two seconds passed like they were giving him time to register the whole situation. Tsunami gulped, feeling his eyes going wild from under the googles. Then they raised their head, looked at him, and it was hell.
Whatever that thing was.
It wasn’t human.
“Fuck!” he screamed at the cryptid, looking right into their blue eyes, their pupils covering all the space of the orbit. It was fascinating but obviously terrifying to see, and that sharp line of white teeth wasn’t helping him thinking anything else on the matter. They sure had a huge mouth, full of long canines, sharper than any knife he had seen on the hands of any fisherman. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated, as he saw the creature getting closer, crawling on the flat rock with his hands. Their tail was slimy, following their movements in a serpentine motion.
He walked backwards towards the higher rock, feeling it was a matter of life or death at that point. The cryptid wasn’t showing any emotion, lips slightly parted as they were trying to reach him. Whatever they wanted from him, it wasn’t good. Tsunami threw some kick in the air, crawling and climbing that rock as if he hadn’t any glimpse of coordination left. As soon as he reached the top he looked down in horror, the creature taking the whole space on the rocks and their tail circling them, half visible through the waves.
They were huge. And everywhere. Fast and clever enough to reach him, no matter what he would have done. Tsunami was a good swimmer, but he knew he couldn’t compete to whatever that thing was, their tail too flexible and quick. But he discovered quite soon that they couldn’t reach him, not with just a pair of limbs and the weight of the tail getting heavier on land. Tsunami looked down and just watched as the creature helplessly tried to climb the cliff.
For a moment, he had the illusion he could breathe.
The creature made a pause, too, looking at him in disbelief. But it probably was just like the size of their eyes fooling him.
“Hey,” Tsunami said, “What’s your plan here, dude?”
He decided they must be a dude because his first half resembled the torso of a boy, even if it was covered in scales and had a line of gills under his ribs. The thing tilted his head. Tsunami concluded by that that he could hear him, but not understand him. He sighed. “Are you going to eat me?” he asked anyway. “Like… I’m your prey? All set already?”
The creature answered with a low hiss, rumbling at the base of his throat. Tsunami sat down, legs crossed, feeling safe for the time being. The gesture made the cryptid more enraged, as he started to scratch the wall with his bare nails. Those seemed human ones, if nothing by the blood that started pouring on his pale skin as he was desperately trying to climb the rock. After a while, he gave up and his tale started moving in circles, but he didn’t take his eyes off him.
“What the hell,” Tsunami whispered to himself, because he figured out that the thing wasn’t willing to leave soon. There was no way he could have survived on that rock till the end of time, if anything because the sun was hitting hard on his bare skin and he would have ended up desiccated before dinner. Then the thing would have got him by exhaustion and made him turn into his dinner. Sounded like a perfect hunt.
The thing was, he couldn’t do anything about it.
Tsunami stared back, falling silent as he started paying more attention to the creature’s features. He wasn’t sure he could compare him to a human being, but in a way, he seemed one. He mostly resembled a moray or a sea snake, though. His pale skin was an indicator that he had never known the sun, or maybe the water protected him from its rays, in any case… Tsunami could perfectly imagine him, swimming from the depths of the abyss towards the surface in sinuous and strong swipes. The thing was: why?
The answer came when the cryptid noticed his surfboard, left in a corner and half washed by the waves. He grabbed it with his slippery, webbed hands and looked at it for a while, as he was probably trying to figure out what it was. Then he bited it.
“Hey,” Tsunami protested, as he noticed the teeth marks already impressed on it. “That’s not for eating!”
The creature didn’t pay any attention to him and kept munching the side of the board, handling it like it was a toy. When he tried to take a big bit all he achieved was getting stuck with his long teeth on the wood surface. It got a while before he could free himself, and Tsunami saw him struggling and growing more and more frustrated, until he snapped out of it and threw the board away. The guy followed its trajectory, mouth agape, less concerned about the board itself and more fascinated by the fact that the creature was able to cover all those miles with a single toss.
Eventually, the cryptid gave out completely and rolled his tail up, crouching on it with another hiss.
Tsunami looked at him in disbelief. He couldn’t believe that a creature like him could be so clueless and… so desperate. “You must be really hungry,” he concluded, almost feeling sorry for him. “That’s why you came all this way…” out of a nightmare. He kept the end of his sentence for himself.
But as if he could read his mind, the creature got angry and pounced towards him at full speed. Tsunami rushed up and squealed, staring as the other being brutally tried to climb the rock again. He had the feeling that a scene like that would have repeated itself over and over.
Eventually, the cryptid went quiet and Tsunami felt like he could relax a bit. That wasn’t a thing. He didn’t really know how he could make it through, possibly alive and with his limbs still there. He sat down again, feeling he was growing hopeless in the long run.
He remained there for what seemed like hours. He was in an uncomfortable position, sure, but it was still a safe place beside all that. The cryptid kept assaulting his fortress from time to time, hissing and growling every time he got almost there but he barely brushed his feet. He wasn’t going to leave. Not anytime soon. Tsunami sighed in despair as he felt the sun burning his back and making him feel all fuzzy and drowsy. He stared into the cryptid giant eyes, not knowing why, he just felt like if he had stared him long enough he could grasp a trace of his humanity. If he could find it, maybe he would have convinced him to spare his life. He would have had this long and profound talk about the ocean, about his immensity, about the things that tied him there, about the things that scared and fascinated him the most, and all the mixed feeling he felt riding those waves, and how he did want to feel them all over again, for eternity, for the rest of his life, and he didn’t want for him to take them away from him, he didn’t deserve it, and now…
Tsunami could see how his thoughts were becoming more incoherent and frantic, as he felt his hour getting closer. He couldn’t stand like that for too long. Soon, his limbs would have gave up and he would have fallen right into the cryptid’s mouth. That was the end for him. And for the first time in months he felt like crying, getting more desperate as the minutes went by, so he did. At first he sniffled a bit, feeling ridiculous, because he was a man. Then he started crying aloud because fuck it, yes, he was a man.
The creature stopped growling and Tsunami could only take a glimpse of him because of the veil of tears that was covering his vision, but it looked like he was still and quiet once again. He could tell those blue eyes were on him. He didn’t care. He kept crying as he was sad, lost and scared for his damn life.
But he couldn’t just cry and do nothing else.
As he got quieter, the silence made it more embarrassing an uncomfortable than ever. He wiped away the last tears and then he got up, thinking that if he really had to die there, he would have done it with dignity. “Listen,” he growled. “I don’t care if you want to eat me. Do as you please. You still are part of the ocean so I don’t really mind”.
Yeah, that would have been an honorable death. Eaten whole by the ocean. It just felt right for him, though it was still scary as hell, he just whished he wouldn’t have suffered too much. So as he jumped down the rock and hurt his feet as he hit the hard soil, he decided he had enough.
But the creature still wasn’t moving.
Tsunami looked at him, quite surprised, as he held out his arms. “So? I’m here”.
The cryptid kept staring at him and the boy could tell he was as confused as he could be. Tsunami kept his arms wide, feeling stupid all of sudden. Come on, he thought, I’m too tired for this. He wondered if he was going crazy, almost wishing to be eaten alive. Well, that would have possibly been the case, since it’s not like he thought something like this could exist, not in this world. Maybe he really was under one of his spells and was acting weird because the creature was forcing him to, even it all felt spontaneous at the moment. He grabbed his own chin, now pensive. “This is unexpected,” he mumbled to himself.
The cryptid was still there, quite shocked by whatever he had done or said. Then he started circling him, almost wary, like if he was trying to see if he was hiding something. He was not.
Then he spoke.
Tsunami gasped at that, now sure he was going out of his mind. “What?” he screamed at him, “What did you say?!”
The creature stood still, looking at him. Then he spoke again. “So…ri” he spelled.
“Sorry? Sorry, you said?” Tsunami grabbed his own hair, almost laughing.
“Sori,” the creature repeated, almost mechanical.
“Sorry.”
“Sori.”
“Why sorry?!”
The creature tilted his head. Tsunami could tell he didn’t own a big vocabulary, but now he was sure he was understanding him. Behind his monstrous look, there was something human there, after all. He understands me, he thought again. Then he had to correct himself: it was not like he understood everything, judging by the fact that he was acting quite confused, now moving his head like he was being exposed to countless stimuli. He seemed more like a dog, trying to catch any sound.
Tsunami realized that the creature was blind.
“What?” he exclaimed, “Could it be that you don’t eat humans? And you didn’t know I was a human being?”
The cryptid didn’t answer to that. Instead, he started crawling towards him and Tsunami squealed again. There was no way he could get up that rock again. He frantically tried to move backwards, searching for the wall behind him, feeling it with his hands as he desperately tried to escape from the creature. Maybe he wasn’t as much brave as he thought.
The creature got closer and closer, presenting his hand like he was trying to reach something. He was moving slower this time, like if he wanted to take his time. Tsunami gulped and flattened himself against the wall. The creature pressed his palm against his chest and stood still like that, like a sort of statue. It took a while for Tsunami to realize that he was feeling his heartbeat.
He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t understand me either, he realized once again, he perceives me. He perceives my emotions.
Those monstrous eyes laid on him.
He feels my thoughts.
The knowledge took his breath away once again, this time because of the wonder. That being in front of him had a consciousness, and he could get that by the way his head moved, almost pensive, like if… like if he was following the sound of his own thoughts.
This went on for a pair of minutes, then the creature withdrew his hand, pulling away from him with a composed gesture. Tsunami observed his face, looking for any kind of expression, but those eyes were unreadable, lips sealed for good. Then he looked at him as he slowly reached the shore, leaned over the water and dived, as simple as that, without saying anything or giving him any notice. Tsunami watched mouth agape his tail following him, crawling on the scratchy surface, leaving a trace of scales as it passed. The cryptid immersed his whole body and nothing more happened.
He stood still for many minutes, bewildered by what he had just witnessed. He sat down on the rock and tried to catch his breath, still expecting for the creature to appear again. But nothing happened for many minutes, maybe half an hour. Then he spotted something on the surface of the water. He would have jumped in fear if he hadn’t recognized his own surfboard, swimming towards him like if it was moved by a mysterious force.
There it ended Tsunami’s first encounter with the unknown.