Chapter 28: The Fish Who Wished
There was once a miserable fish that lived in a puddle fated to dry.
It had no name, no memory, no knowledge of anything beyond water and breath.
But when the sun clawed higher each day and the puddle shrank, the fish began to understand what fear was.
It wished.
It wished to breathe air.
And somehow, against every rule etched into its weak bones, the fish flopped its way across the dirt. Its scales hardened. Its gills twisted, burned, and reshaped into lungs.
However, every second outside the water screamed death. Every inch of ground it crossed was a gamble against a thousand predators.
So it changed.
It bent its bones. It stretched cartilage into legs. It studied the things that crawled past it, and it made itself more like them.
The fish always saw something, needed something, and wished for it, and it always tried to achieve it.
Wanting to live but there's no source of food? The fish began to change its diet to anything that is available around it, whether it is a corroding corpse, metal, soil, or even air itself.