• Softly floating blots of what appeared, to him, to be melanin-tinted ink drifted before his eyes. From sepia, he presumed, though it seemed too thick to come from a cousin of his. He chanced that it came from above; it did not really concern him, though, as he sat on the still sands amongst mates and rivals; the sea swirling and shifting, surrounding his form.

    The source of the ink came into view. A metallic fish with eight, flat eyes and a plump form. An angler, perhaps, for it had a light antennae emerging from its dorsal. He raised an arm towards the creature, but quickly recoiled as his teeth snapped against a rotating fin. Four arms more surrounded the iron angler as it broke waves in an attempt to escape him.

    His head was soon bombarded with pellets, crystalline rocks that shattered against his skin and treated him with a shock. Though his arms thrashed and shook the angler and the sea alike, he glimpsed at the emerged figures from the metallic beast. They held long sticks, which seemed to excrete the burning shots. However, no sooner did he see the attack than they abandoned them in favor of mounted, sharpened shells, held in their arms with wood.

    With an arm still trapped between the circling tails of the beast, he grabbed wildly at the armed beings, clasping one between his suckers and tearing through his flesh with his ridged teeth. An onslaught of stabs and bites from the shell-shaped weapons then raged against him as he dropped the bloodied and mangled corpse into the waters around them.

    He and they fought long through the hours of sunlight, their leader taking the front as water dripped from his eyes. By nightfall, however, he had fallen. His arm was stripped from his head and strewn across the rear of the fish; his teeth were blunted and his suckers had sunk; his head was gored by the beast’s weapons. He sank to the bottom of the sea where he had rested earlier, surrounding in the ink of the angler and his own.