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“I am No One”. I was born to this world, but I cannot remember it. I was born to live a life of love and warmth, but I did not get to live it. I was taken as a child for a changeling, or so I was taught as I grew cognizant of the world around me and learned what I was from those who had lived some of their lives before being taken as slaves to the Drowned God. I don’t know from what time I came, for time is a strange thing once you sink beneath the waves... I learned to speak English with a Victorian twang, from those fellow sacrifices who lived with me in the stagnant but air-filled slave-pens of the Drowned God. I was born a human... but I am that no more.

Men were not meant to live beneath the waves, and to live there first you must die: drown, and learn to breathe the magic in the water rather than the air in your lungs. Dying, unfortunately, was the easy part of living there... a life of service and toil gave the Drowned God his comforts, and those nice things others take for granted came from sheer muscle and hard labor. It makes little sense then to take a child, a helpless thing, drown it beneath the waves and expect it to go to work... but the lives of the men drowned to serve the god beneath the sea were brutish and short, for they lived in the realm of air and freedom, and all too often they died... their only means of returning to that freedom. Take a child and drown it beneath the waves and you shall find instead a child free of the notion of ‘freedom’, whose mind does not rebel against the slavery because it was never raised free. Take a child and drown it beneath the waves, let it grow to adulthood in the life below the crashing waves, and you will grow a creature that is no longer human but somehow suited to the life it lives, hardened sinew and slippery skin, made to work and swim and suffer.

I never had a name. I never had a life. I never said I was human... or at least I wasn’t until the day I broke free. Even a born slave can be pushed too far; even a creature that sups on torment as its daily bread can hurt beyond the breaking-point. The master priest directed us all in our toils, carrying rocks across the sea-floor to drop deep into the trench in which the Drowned God lives... and all too many of those adult slaves lose limbs beneath the grinding boulders as the slaves work to pass them even a foot, and the head is just another limb to lose as far as the stones are concerned. One very bad day the team of us were to move a cornerstone to drop into the trench, and in the last feet we lost an arm. The man screamed, as best one can with a mouthful of brine, and the sharks circled... but we fought them back, with the master’s help, for even a slave has some value to its owner. With the last foot to go before the stone would teeter over the drop, we lost a head... that woman didn’t scream, she merely died, and fed the sharks and lampreys as we dragged the slave away in a red haze. With mere inches to go, the boulder began to tumble... the most dangerous time of all. It was my job to push it, and escape the ripping current that it dragged in its plummeting wake, for I was strongest and hardest amongst the slaves, bred for a warm life but raised to the clammy murk, grown with a body to suit it.

This time, like so many others, the stone fell... but unlike those other times I was pulled in the current, and the strength of my legs could not drag me out of its fall. As the stone turned it pulled me beneath it, and I was to ride the comet of my doom to the sea-floor far below... and for once, the slave in me rebelled; I did not know freedom, but I did know life, and to embrace the latter I had to struggle for the former if I was to pry myself from that fate. Freedom is a tricky thing – teach a body a little of it and it will crave the lot of it. I struggled, nearing exhaustion as I tried to scrape myself from the killing-stone, swimming and climbing and cursing and screaming as I beat myself bloody against the uncaring rock. My doom rushed up for me before my eyes, but somehow I averted it... scraped free of the rock as it fell, far enough that the deadly current did not rip me down to the sea-floor behind it to my death. And I swam up the trench, swimming for my life, swimming for my freedom. Above me the darkness ended in murk, and above even that there must somewhere be light.

The priest screamed at me as I swam past, expecting me to meekly submit – I always had, after all, for I knew no other life, and I was raised to see the master-priests kill their mortal slaves for no better reason than the whims of the moment or the failure to keep some miniscule obligation that had been pressed upon them with their service. And I knew that first taste of freedom, and I knew that though I might be exhausted I was made to be hard and strong, harder and stronger even than the priests of the Drowned God, perhaps. I knew that somewhere there were waves, and above them, air... the end of the Drowned God’s realm, and the means for escaping his power. And so he screamed, and I swam... and the Drowned God had changed me to be strong indeed, living the life that I did, as hard as the rocks in his quarries and strong enough to move the immovable.

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