Rose Blumen ~ Exogignesthai

(Rose)

I didn’t quite understand how it worked, but it worked.

After a long breath in, holding it now felt different. A slight fuzzy feeling tickling my head, tummy and chest. But I can walk for long minutes like that, without another breath. A feeling of different awareness goes through my body as I do that, and I begin to train to use it.

Nightmare looks more puzzled about the idea of swimming than about this modification to her body. She’s an expert at crafting biological bodies and metabolisms, but not at using them herself much. And water still is oddly unsettling to her.

I hold her hand. The wings circle in the sky above us. She has the most human reactions she rarely shows for a moment. Unsettled and intuitive fear course through her. A deep breath and we dive into the green to brown oily sea.

~

We slowly swam in the darkness as if it was crude oil. Deeper, colder. Until our eyes adjusted to the dim ambient light.

The slowly oscillating surface above us. The dusty clouds and snow of the water scattering the light in a mostly uniform glow.

And slowly, the shapes of the trees they mentioned began appearing to me.

The sunken landscape slowly appeared in this muffled sanctuary.

The trees with so little foliage looked like claws raised to the sky. Not an appealing lush look.

But a forest spreading around as far as we could see still appeared. The patches of oily substance here and there on the surface made the light come through as if piercing an uneven ceiling of clouds. Patches of the underwater forest appeared, swaying gently under the changing lights.

As they told me, the ground and earth was nowhere clear to be found. The entangled roots of the forest mingled along with dirt and boulders or rocks in a gradually more dense sponge.

However herbs and plants did grow all over these surfaces and everywhere. Should I say algae?

My perception of colours was dull under there, but I could see that most plants and trees were still green. And flowers were still colourful.

As were the swimming butterflies coming to investigate us. I never saw butterflies swim before. Could they even?

Blume nods negatively inside of my head. She doesn’t believe they could.

Here, they do. Slowly flapping very slowly and cautiously, easily being carried away by the faintest flows, but they can. They do.

Wild grapes and vines grew along an area on a hill a little further. I plucked some and put them inside my pockets. Outside, I would have tried immediately but here, I didn’t need to think strongly about it and had natural instinct not to open my throat to the water. My sinuses did get sunken though, though my glottis was shut. It was an odd sensation. Little bits of water and elements I could smell and taste even. But as long as I kept my breath shut, my lungs would be safe. And even if they filled, I would still have minutes to react before it would cause a real issue.

The fifteen minutes mark was unclear, but after a while, I could feel my need to breathe coming back to me with a headache. I didn’t have the instinct to gasp for air anymore though. I swam up toward the surface. I felt super fuzzy as I rose and resurfaced quickly. It felt oddly extremely cold in the air, not water. I was quickly accustomed to underwater conditions.

I vomited the water inside my sinuses and mouth. After a few coughs, I was able to exhale.

As I was catching my breath there, Nightmare resurfaced as well. It was a little harder for her to swim in order to stay afloat, so she quickly dove under again.

I looked around. The wings were still circling above us. The shore was already farther than I expected in the distance. I wondered about it.

Should we?

Till the ocean?

Blume simply smiled. I don’t know why she didn’t want to utter a word at that time.

I dove back to the depth of water.

~

Streams of bubbles rose from the depths of the ground on various places. They were easy to spot for there was more lush and abundant life around them. Including fishes from sea or rivers I didn’t recognised. Along with now swimming squirrels and other mammals I wouldn’t have expected to adapt to underwater life.

Some of them resurfaced like us mostly human creatures. Others just seemed to work differently. I saw crawling along trees leaves and branches some very large insects I only heard existed before. Phasmatodeias. Some of them, and the smaller ones carried bubbles stuck to them. Like bees gathered pollen, some insects carried small bubbles stuck to their limbs.

I saw spiders jump from a tree and swim away, with a tiny bubble along with them. I soon lost their sights in the oceanic green snows and streams. It wasn’t a verdant jungle down there the way I envisioned it. Colours were very dull to my eyes and leaves were rare. But it was as lively a swampy sea as any jungle can be.

We saw fishes munching with other animals onto the corpse of one of their own a little further. Nightmare was also surely keeping an eye open for real game, but we didn’t notice any animal or insect bigger than a squirrel in the surrounding bowl of sea we were in.

Even amongst the fishes, things were rather small around here.

The sea went a little deeper as we kept swimming away from our shore recklessly. A few dozen metres now separated from the cloudy surface.

Nightmare and I couldn’t speak down there. We could just point at things to look at.

And goodness there were so many things to look at. Especially after these barren landscapes of late.

When we resurfaced together, as night was falling, we discussed about it, holding onto each other to float.

R – Should we try it?

I was excited.

N – ... Fine.

Now I beam. We will swim our way through this sea and all its hidden wonders, until we reach the outer ocean.

~