This is a story about falling into the sea.

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I don't remember the shipwreck so far as to say my world turned upside-down from where I sat in that leaking cabin and a slab of rotting timber swung about to black out my memory of the event.

Whilst the Spanish trading vessel I had stowed upon crumpled into the ocean's depths, I had somehow been carried almost safely to that place that haunts my waking dreams. One that I'm not even certain you'd believe exists. I will tell of how I came to be there and the strange events that came to pass, but it would make sense to begin where it really began.

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Sodden and freezing, I woke up slumped against the splintering, barnacled hull of a ship's belly. And a monster was staring at me.

I wish I knew how I'd had the energy to scream. I'd never believed or imagined such creatures existed. Black, onyx eyes set in a face as craggy as a reef; spiny rivets along its cheeks, with seaweed veins and membrane-webbed ears.

At the sound of my stirring, it had hissed and shown teeth like mussel shells. At my scream, it hollered in my own language into the gloom.

"It'ss here!"

I heard the scraping and squelching of others gathering towards me, each creature's flesh similar in texture but every one different. Some I swore had limpets, live ones, clamped or crawling on their arms. There were species of plant life growing on some of them.

"What is it?" one of them gurgled. "It doesn't look like a proper man."

A large beast with a shell for a nose boomed, "It is not a man. Can you not even remember a part of your old weakness? That is a female human; a woman."

At this word, a number of them gasped in horror and began whispering furiously. I did not know, then, that these were not monsters at all, but had once been men, many of them sailors. They had forgotten humanity, they had forgotten civilization, but they had not forgotten superstition.

"Throw it overboard!" one of them squeaked.

I felt a slimy hand tug at my arm.

"No!" roared another. "Make it work for us! Trade it for a few less years!"

The waterlogged folds of my dress almost tore as I was wrenched by yet more gnarled fingers. I whimpered as their sharp scales scraped the skin of my ankles, pleading for the nightmare to end.

The debate only lasted a few more moments.

An echoing clunk struck the boards in the darkness and sent a chill through every soul below deck.

"Captain," they muttered.

The mob withdrew and the clunk sounded again, and again, like the ominous din of the cog teeth in a gargantuan clock. The monster crowd hushed as their assumed master approached and cast his unearthly shadow over me.

Hardly daring to look up, I managed to tilt my head to see what they shrank from. All words dried up in my throat.

The Captain fixed me with a poisonously adamant stare and his low voice rumbled like the last level of the sea itself.

"Hwhat are yew dewing on mai shep?"

At first the dialect was alien to me, harsh and warped, but it did not take long for me to adjust to it – a northern tongue from my homeland.

I couldn't answer, choking through fear and the granules of salt clogging my lungs. My silence seemed to fuel his anger. This chief…creature…shot forward, as close to me as inches, showing me the full horror of what he was.

A curling, writhing mass of tentacles served as hair and beard around his face. Though he looked more like a man than some of the crusting crew, his nose and mouth were cemented into the smooth beak of an octopus. He looked almost comical under his leather tricorne, but the steely glare of his eerily human eyes would not let me laugh.

"Are ye deaf as well as foolish?" he barked. "Hwhat purrpose have yew here?"

"Don't kn-now," I stammered at last.

"Yew daunt know?" he repeated softly. He straightened up and smiled terribly, then burst out into a tumult of laughter. The crew joined in as though it were a duty, but jumped with fright as soon as he had ceased.

"She doesn't know why she is here," the Captain shouted with amusement in the ensuing quietude. "Hwhich means…someone brrought her…"

He spun around to face the crewmen. They cowered back as his darting glances struck through them.

"Where is Turrner?" the Captain demanded.

It was in those few minutes I noticed the further mutations of this awful tyrant. It had taken little guesswork to know that the Captain was missing his right leg from the knee downwards, for instead was a dark peg of hard wood. What disturbed and shocked me the most was not the great crab claw of his left arm, nor the slimy suckered limb of his right. My stomach revolved at the sight of the vile, pulsing sac that was the back of the Captain's head.

I swallowed my revulsion as amongst the squabbling sea monsters, a man was dragged into view and thrown before their master. I stifled a gasp.

This wretched thing still looked for all the world like a human. His pallor was theirs and a fat starfish had planted itself on his middle-aged face, but he was clearly a man.

"Turner," the Captain growled at the trembling crewman. "Hwhat have I told yew about rescuing the damned?"

"Forgive me, Captain," the man answered hoarsely. "But she's only young. It's not right that she should die so."

"What makes yew think yew have the rright to judge who the sea should claim? If her ship fell foul of the waters, so she falls foul with me!"

The vast pincers of the Captain's claw flew out and clamped around my neck like a vice. It took all of my strength to keep on tiptoes as I was thrust forward before old Turner.

"No!" he cried.

"This girl should not be alive," the Captain snarled. "It serves that spilling her blood will appease the laws unwritten."

The other crewmembers gargled loud approval.

"No, please!" Turner begged. "I will bet for her!"

Again, silence.

I felt myself lowered and the pressure on my throat loosened. Too dazed to consider escape, I watched numbly as the scene unfolded.

"Yew say you will bet for her?" the Captain asked, his tone purring out more evenly. He made a sniggering laugh. "Young she is, Turrner, and too young I'd say for a man of your years. What could yew possibly want with a curséd thing like this?"

The pincers squeezed suddenly, making me cough. Turner tried to argue more urgently but the Captain spoke again.

"Ai see how it is. Yew do not want her for yourself, but she reminds yew of your wee offspring, is that not right?" He smiled at his aghast crewman. "The ocean holds no secrets from me, Turner."

The Captain released me and addressed the man who would bargain for my life.

"Your challenge is accepted."