Umin struck the soupy surf feet first, and was swiftly swallowed up. Imbibed by the Great Lower Sea’s torpid, black salinity.

He was able to draw a single, sufficient breath before plunging through its thickly striated darkness. 

The sea’s bituminous blood-heat, like that of a welcoming womb.

Down he languorously sank, casting about left right, and below, seeking Pyna’s incandescently pale shape within the mass of mucky malignancy that sank alongside him.

Soon he despaired as the obsidian-dark density of the waters enfolded, leaving him struggling blindly.

Still, what filled Umin with a greater terror beyond even the sightless, engirding void, was the creeping fire in his breast, as his breath was slowly spent.

Recalling his precious frost-light, he fished the cool, stony object from out the folds of his now sodden sea-robes.

Well knowing what perilous attention the illumination might draw. 

Pinching it firmly between forefinger and thumb, as a cold refulgence bloomed, painting the thick, eerie striations of the black, salt sea with a reflecting white-fire. 

Treacly, addled abominations that had followed Umin overboard joined him in his slow, bubbling descent.

Some reached for him as they sank past soporifically, mouthing and gnashing soundlessly through their caked filth and ordure. Begrimed claw and rotten blade hampered by syrupy waters. 

Umin kicked and pushed the stray horrors aside, as he swam towards the looming pile of obscenities. 

Which plunged ever more swiftly as it agglomerated a putrid weight. 

Where is she?

His anguish grew heavier with the burning in his lungs.

Umin’s frost-light only served to illuminate the nightmarish mass’ vilely worming surface. 

Bony protrusions, and rotten mockeries of the erstwhile faces of long dead men. Their odious jaws working and chewing on watery emptiness.

It was then that a gnarled shadow, perverted by the jigging, aqueous illumination of Umin’s frost-light, cut across the surface of the conglomerate. 

A sinuous vastness of contrasting edges, and spines. Of spicules of shredded adumbration.

A cold terror pulled Umin’s gaze away from the mass and to the unfathomable darks below, where a long, and snaking osseous thing, shedding its own odd, sickly luminance lashed the salty, stippled depths.

Its shredded, boney snout and seemingly eyeless cranium contorted and came about, pulling and distorting the waters by means of its hulking and terrible density. 

Sending ripples that tore a number of the rotten, tumescent things into a pasty ruin.

It speared through the waters and snapped at Umin’s frost-light.

And would have torn him into a bloody half had he not hidden the stone swiftly in his palm, at the same time as he rolled along its passing flank.

Abrupt, stygian darkness flowed over Umin, as the creature whipped away, shaking its pocky and petrified snout.

He reached out, and grasped a cartilaginous concretion that protruded from the thing’s shredded flank, as it shuddered and tore the waters in its passing.

Dragging him along, and deeper, like a ribbon caught in a careless river-current.

Towards the distended underbelly of the putrid mass they moved, where it struck out again, ripping something else porcelain and luminous from out the addled agglomeration.

Pyna…

Her blood in the dimness, black against black. Bloomed and curlicued across the lazy currents. 

While Pyna’s limbs were pulled and twisted, like that of a boneless marionette, as the beast shook and dragged her viciously through the waters.

Umin’s lungs burned now beyond what he thought he could endure.

He wrenched out his long-knife, and stabbed fruitlessly at the creature’s foul, osseous carapace as his lungs deflated.

He recalled diving, as a young boy, into cool, pungent forest ponds. Pulling his fingers through the green, mucky darkness in search of bottom-dwelling silt-fish.

He had learned to hold his breath for long measures, but never under such duress.

It appeared then that Pyna had remarked upon his presence. 

As she bent her doll-delicate body across unlikely, and inhuman angles.

Then pushed and crawled like a corpse-thing, upwards and over the sinuous monster’s blindly lashing snout. 

Pyna’s teeth flashed in beastly agony, as she ripped her tattered limb free and out, from the creature’s edge-rows of ragged fangs.

Coming to rest nearly nose to nose with Umin.

Ghastly, and splendid in the unclean ghostlight.

Her wheaty mane floated leonine and mad through the streaming, oily-dark sea. 

Discomposingly weird, opaline eyes that glistened bright with an awful delight. 

Pyna’s bloodless little fingers reached for him.

Spent, Umin yielded to the waters. Falling into a black and breathless senselessness.