a beckoning

It beckons me. In my deepest sleep, dormant, my mind sinks into the abyss until I become a single eye and nothing more. The lid flicks open in the darkness at the bottom of an indigo sea. I feel creatures. My eye grows legs.

From black to violet to a murky haze to radiant streaks of illumination, I'm surrounded by a vast liquid expanse with a rhythmic glow in the distance. It beckons me, narrows to a singularity - a sapphire wrapped in far away night, a freshly lit spotlight calling my new name. The now chartreuse gulf holds me, and I do not float. The deepest part of this sea is a dead place.

The legs of my eye twitch and live and move. They kick against the current, and I stride, surrounded by a slow tide. Forward toward the beckoning, verdant point an infinity away I go. Ahead are the creatures; their movements cast as shadows in the water, and there is no horizon, just the green beams leading the way to their brilliant hub. "Float to the other side and be with me," it seems to whisper through the watery loam beneath my feet, vibrations to my mind's eye.

The brine tickles my flesh, but it does not burn my sight. The siren movements of the light causes my iris to flux as they cross over me. I live a dream of immersion and a struggle for movement across an endless aquatic landscape. I smell kelp though I have no nose. I taste salt though I am mouthless. The fingers of phantom arms stroke ambient liquid while the legs of my eye propel me toward the creatures and the light.

Magnificent beasts pour through the water around me, shifting forms, growing limbs and absorbing them just as quickly. Their eyes are black from rim to center and their shifting skin is only but a shade darker than the murky olive sea we share. One at a time, what must be hundreds of them, all sizes and forms, all black-eyed and curious, inspect me, close in on me, surround me, feel me, impede me. I blink. They scatter, recede, and wait. This ring of unknown intent buffers my path towards the beacon ahead.

I've traveled a thousand miles now, my eye. I've made one million strides, my legs, but the beacon is unchanged. It is no closer. This journey is futile.

A figure approaches - the shadow of a man slipping through the sea. His arms stretch out and, in a vortex, the water parts before him. At its height, the opening of the conical separation reveals a star pocked sky when a ball of bright blue bursts forth from the figure and illuminates the heavens. I watch through the wall of water before me as it swirls from its base at his hands. The creatures, in unison, begin glowing and spinning around us in a halo. Their movements become erratic as their slippery limbs shift in and out of their bodies in apparent praise for the figure and his power. The blue ball expands until no sky behind it can be seen. The figure grows as well, first doubling in size, then doubling again, and again until his head nears the air above when suddenly with a booming, blinding shock the ball explodes before the figure deflates and then recedes back into the abyss. The creatures slow, their glow dimming until they are as they were - formless shadows in an endless expanse of green.

My beacon calls to me again, and I feel but a speck and helpless. I continue.

The creatures are docile now. Losing interest in me, they swim in seemingly random patterns, sometimes bumping into me while others turn to dots in the distance. My legs keep kicking though I have no compass, no purpose - only a destination I cannot seem to reach. Other figures appear from time to time and the creatures reassemble to view the entertainment and perform their ceremony. Explosions of gold and turquoise, blinding shapes and sky consuming fire dwarf me and the beacon before each figure recedes as the first one did. The creatures work themselves into a coordinated frenzy every time, only to recoil and glide, morphing calmly after each explosion.

After a while I look down to see that my legs have grown bigger. They are at least one and a half times the length they were when they sprouted, so I kick harder. The harder I kick, the longer and bigger they grow. I stare into the light and beg for it to receive me, lead me. Years pass, or minutes, and I finally seem to have closed some distance between me and my beacon, my sapphire spotlight. My eye shifts and radiates the farther I go. An eon, two, eternity, I approach the light and the creatures begin to circle again. I reach the surface of the sea.

The lid of my eye flaps against the waves beneath a small green light that hovers just above. As though it knows me, while my legs churn to keep me up, it lowers and caresses my lashes. It rolls along the rim of my iris until I consume it through my pupil. I feel warmth within.

A burning in my core lights my senses in urgency. I cannot escape it for it is me now. I grow. As I swell, I can see the clouds open, and the deep space of the night lays above the sea waiting to be called to. I will explode. I am floating above the waves as the current begins to churn around me. A storm approaches. I am one hundred times bigger than when I awoke, and I pound against the ripping surge. The torrent elates me. My power will eclipse it soon. Instead of clouds, the space above me shifts into a luminous distortion, a warping universe. The creatures beneath the waves circle so violently they've become a single ring of light glaring through the sea, displaying its depths and inhabitants. I finally erupt.

A green beam fires from my pupil into the expanse, driving me back into the sea. My eye plunges to the depths below underneath the force of the rocketing flare as it is taken in by the distorted heavens and billows, fanning out as thunder above the earth. I've reached the bottom.

The creatures calm. I am empty. I am small again. My legs recede into the base of my eye which closes slowly and is consumed by the rows of hands lining the bottom of the abyss. The hands pull me into them and feel over me telling me I am not alone, that this is the journey of many, and that mine is complete.

I slip away into nothingness. It is not dark. It is not anything at all, and I am gone.