Again, the sea-witch. I adore the sea-witch. I'd like to do more with this, and with her. It's an interesting topic.
This one is just a fragment, and I don't much care for it. I'll perhaps return to the image later.
"Fragments of a Dialog At Sea"
There was a surge of interest, about 25 years ago now, but that faded. It was the wrong kind of interest anyway; men (almost all men) thinking they'd slay the big bad monster of the deep.
Oh, not much interest. After all, it was told as a children's story and who takes them seriously? Nobody but the children.
The children are a bit older now and some of them have looked out to the sea. It's the sensitive ones, the dreaming ones, the ones who never learned to stop taking stories seriously. Some of you started lookat the older tellings of the tales, to try to drink in the truth.
Some of you don't bother.
You talk about duress and trickery and unholy power, but you don't really believe that, do you?
Do you?
No, you think I'm a monster because I'm fat, because I have tentacles instead of legs, because I've found comfort and a home in the dark places far from where you live, in the places you fear.
Anyway, it isn't that lonely out here. After all, I still have her voice. I sometimes use it to whisper into the pulsingbright veins of light your people have stretched across the seabed. It's how I lure men here still, now that ships have gone all automatic.
Oh, you didn't think I still had it? That's what you get for reading the children's version of the story.
I gave her something much, much better. I could give you the same.
Or not.
I am, after all, the sea. And I can be fickle.
And you no longer amuse me.
Don't worry. You'll get another chance.
The stories don't say it, but I'm fair. I give people what they need. And what you need most of all now is to start over.
May the taste of saltwater remind you of your failings.
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