Notes:
Hasta la Eternidad (Spanish) - forever. Since the main action takes place off the coast of Spain, and the film itself is Spanish, I think it is logical to give it a title in the original language. Those who like to speak out about such things are not welcome here.
...as the saltwater embraced him, cutting him from the surface and extinguishing the flames that engulfed his body, Paul was strangely relieved. One minute he was ready to die, to follow Barbara to the other side, carried away by Dagon, and the next second he was glad to be alive. Not by his own efforts, of course, but by the dedication of Uxía, who had bravely rushed to his aid and risked herself (the flames could have spilled over onto her) to push him into a well of ink-filled seawater at the bottom. Marsh's, or rather Combaro's, joy, however, as it became known, was short-lived. Yes, the waves, beating in the captivity of the stone walls, had extinguished the fire, and the monstrous pain it was causing had subsided. But only for a moment.
Before he knew it, the salt was eating away at his burned, fire-ravaged body, scorching him like acid. Paul thought there could be nothing worse than skin-eating flames, but he was wrong-it was far worse. Remnants of air burst from his throat in a swarm of silver bubbles. The sea swallowed up the unhappy boy's scream, and the water, with the coppery tang of blood and some slime, gushed down his throat, filling his lungs with billions of needles. It was the end... but, at the same time, a new beginning.
Paul Marsh died in that instant, and Pablo Cambarro was born. Taking his last breath, which filled his lungs with fluid, the burned creature felt a sharp pain between his ribs. It was so intense that for a moment it overrode even the infernal burning he felt throughout his body. There was a muffled crack in the water column and the mutilated flesh on the boy's flanks ripped open, revealing three pairs of gill slits! Exactly like the ones he had seen on Uxía when, in the sudden surge of passion, he had caressed her body with trembling palms. The markings were the mark of the Cambarro that the octopus-like Javier had spoken of.
It turned out to be true. Pablo was once again convinced of this, but instead of rejecting the truth, as he had done a few minutes before in the temple, he rejoiced over it. This knowledge now seemed so simple and natural to him that it made him smile. The young man felt it blossom on his lips despite the pain that continued to torment his body. The gills on his sides opened and closed, supplying his body with oxygen, and it was good. It was the right thing to do. Pablo felt as if what was inside was finally falling into place. Like the missing piece of the puzzle, the absence of which was spoiling the whole picture, leaving it unfinished.
Until this moment, he had never felt whole. Never, not once in his life. He had everything he could ever dream of-
a prestigious job, a beautiful girlfriend, and rich friends-but it wasn't enough.
It was all wrong, and the young man secretly felt it.
During the day he still managed to ward off such thoughts, immersing himself in his work, but before going to bed they always came back, reminding him of themselves with a strange and inexplicable feeling of longing and filling his dreams with otherworldly images.
Dagon spoke to him through his subconscious. Calling to him, drawing alluring visions of the future, which Pablo mistook for nightmares. Now everything was falling into place. The veil of humanity had fallen from his eyes, and he, who had been born to the sea, had finally found his destiny. How insignificant Paul Marsh's completed, human life seemed to him.
Uxía was right-
Humans were pathetic creatures, fit only to be sacrificed to Dagon. Their lives revolved around such insignificant things as prestige, fame, and money. These wretched, land-skinned creatures chased after thrills, trying to taste as much as they could in their allotted (a short time compared to the eternity the Children of Dagon had planned for them) time.
It was pathetic.
Every time he closed his eyes and plunged into the visions inspired by the Call of the Deep, Pablo was vaguely aware that somewhere out there there was something far greater for him than anything land had to offer. Now that he was convinced of this, the smile never left his face. The movements of his facial muscles stretched his burned skin, but somehow the pain no longer seemed as intense as before. The saltwater still stung the self-inflicted burn wounds as before, but the sensation was quickly fading. It was as if the young man's body was beginning to lose its sensitivity, becoming only a crude shell. A cocoon that hid his inner splendor.
"It must be a shock," Pablo thought aloof, but his mind, contrary to his own hypothesis, remained as clear and clear as crystal. Trying to find a clue, He looked at his hands, noticing with amazement how they were changing. No, his skin was not recovering. Burnt and bleeding they were still hanging down his wrists, hands, and elbows in shreds, but a new one had already begun to grow underneath.
The one he would need to live in the ocean. In other Imbocians this process lasted for years, sometimes even decades, but the flames cleared Pablo of the human husk, allowing him to take at once a more perfect form, molded in the image and likeness of an ancient deity. Dagon, worshipped by the fishermen of Imboca, and now by himself.
He was apparently a hero of his grandfather, Orfero Cambarro, who had been rewarded with unprecedented health and vitality, which he then passed on to his descendants. Or maybe he favored him in particular, bestowing favors and blessings as a reward for the sacrifices he brought to Imboca, but somehow Pablo was able not only to survive but also to be reborn in order to go to the ocean. To his family.
The thought of Barbara being dragged to the bottom by the monster and having her arms torn off at the elbow caused a brief surge of fading feelings. No pain, but the memory of the pain caused by the loss of her beloved. Seeing the bleeding stumps of her hands dangling from the shackles, Paul became so desperate that he set himself on fire, first pouring oil on himself. Now his own actions seem strange to Pablo, to say the least. To give up an endless life for such a small thing. And on top of that, choosing an incredibly painful way to end his life.
No, setting public self-immolation was clearly not his best idea. Not at all the best.
Gloomy, ironic thoughts raced through the young man's mind as his humanity, along with the remains of his skin, peeled away from his new body, peeling off in ugly shreds and scraps and layers. He was changing. He was changing not only externally, but internally as well. He was changing more than he could ever have imagined. When Uxía told him that he would forget his world and his friends, Paul did not believe her. Indeed, how could you forget twenty-odd years of your life and the people who had spent no small part of it with you? Yes, Paul, by virtue of his limited human nature, could not accept that. But Pablo, who was no longer human, understood that Uxía, who did not speak English well enough, had chosen an inaccurate definition of what was happening to him.
He had not forgotten anything. The memory of human life was still with him. It just... it didn't bother him anymore. No more than a man would be disturbed by a dream he had at night. Yes, some dreams turned out to be vivid and colorful enough to impress and, perhaps, stay in memory. There was even a lesson to be learned from them, but no more than that. No one would be seriously sad about a dream for any length of time. And realizing that his entire human life was nothing more than a dream, Pablo found no regrets about it. This dream had to end, just as he had to wake up, opening himself to reality.
And for the one who had waited all these years for him. The hazy cloud of blood, of smudged debris surrounding the boy, began to dissipate, and he could see the supple silhouette of Uxía floating nearby. Without her clothes, unnecessary here underwater, she seemed even more beautiful than before, if that was even possible. Her pale face shone like the moon in the dusk surrounding them, framed by a cashmere wave of thick, black hair that swayed gently in time with her movements. His features were delicate and graceful, but also bore the mark of a peculiar beauty common to all the children of Dagon.
His cheekbones, for example, for all their height, were too wide, giving his face a heart-shaped shape. The mouth was a little too big, too, and the plump lips looked freakishly bright against the ivory-white skin. Pablo wanted to kiss them. Or touch them with his hand or his palm, it didn't matter. I wanted to feel their cool, wet kiss that made my skin burn.
But it was not them that captured the boy's attention; it was Uxía's eyes. They were large and slightly convex, shining like jewels rimmed by long eyelashes. Never before had he seen such a beautiful, captivating color, reminiscent of something as elusive as the sky, wrapped in a light veil of clouds. In their gaze toward him, Pablo saw the same passion and desire that seized him whenever Uxía was near him. Even now he stared at the other parts of her naked body below her eyes as she approached. The girl didn't mind at all.
On the contrary, she even twisted around for his pleasure, allowing him to see herself from all angles. And, as Paul once again pointed out, there was a lot to see. Because of her aquatic nature, Uxía was not just slim, she had a figure that any supermodel would kill for, as her grace was natural and had nothing to do with exhaustion caused by grueling diets. Her rib cage clearly marked under her skin in time with her breathing, causing her alabaster breasts to rise, defying the underwater current with the pearly tips of her the slits in her intercostal gills did not spoil the overall picture.
The same could not be said for the tentacles that replaced her legs. The lower part of Uhya's body looked more like a cuttlefish than a human being. Even her flesh here was white-gray and shiny, like rubber or rubber. Curious as to exactly how things were arranged there, Pablo let his gaze slip to where the curve of her back, transitioned to a smooth, pale gray surface, without any sign of buttocks, separated by a hollow fissure and any opening. It was strange. Perhaps even repulsive, but only by human standards. What Pablo was becoming found this feature beautiful. He was already impatient to weave tentacles with her and finish what they had begun in her, or rather their father's, house.
Seeing his impatience, Uxía smiled understandingly and took her lover's hand, brushing away the remnants of his dying skin. She tried to be gentle and not hurtful, but the young man twitched at her touch, uncomfortably startled by his own sensitivity. His gaze turned reflexively to Uxía's thin, webbed fingers, noting an amusing peculiarity. Her delicate hand was as pale as alabaster, and she had a silvery pattern of scales that he could only see through the shimmering light that filtered through the water above them.
Stunningly beautiful, though somewhat peculiar-it was the most appropriate definition for a beautiful sea-maiden.
Meanwhile, they reached the seafloor, paved with massive slabs larger than human height. The stonework stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, and its uneven texture reminded Pablo of the paving of a cyclopean sidewalk. The place was clearly inhuman, and so was the huge well at its center. He'd seen it in his dreams before, and so he wasn't surprised when he saw the perfectly round hole drilled (or, more likely, gnawed) into the rock. Framed by the symbol of the Church of the Order of Dagon, it resembled an enormous eye formed by two arcs crossing at the ends, with a ring in the center that acted as an iris around the "pupil.
The dimensions of the ritual structure were beyond all imagination. Pablo, for example, did not even dare to guess the diameter of the ring around the well. All he could say for sure was that it was huge. So large, in fact, that it made him and Uxía look like plankton by comparison. Small sea bugs, almost indistinguishable against it. Such a size should have been depressing. It should have given him a sense of insecurity and underlying fear of what might dwell in the depths of this abyss, but listening to his feelings Pablo realized that he was not afraid. The feeling that overwhelmed him as he approached the well was not fear, but rather the religious awe that enveloped all true believers as they entered the majestic vaults of the temple.
In addition to awe, though, Pablo felt a strange impatience at the thought of meeting a living deity. Not a silent symbol to which he could plead, but his incarnate form. The sacrilegious thoughts caused a rapture mixed with horror, a reflection of which he had seen in the eyes of the Imbocan during the Sacrifice. The feeling was so strong that the young man struggled to control it without letting the ecstasy overwhelm him. Resisting was like swimming against a current, so the great-grandson of Orfero Cambarro tried to distract himself. Turn his attention to something else.
His gaze flickered from the black hole in the well to the ring that bordered it. It was partially obscured by slippery black silt, but the pattern on its surface was still clearly visible. It consisted of circular symbols formed by a curious combination of fluidly curving lines and sharp serrations, whose arrangement had a certain regularity to it.
A secret meaning was hidden from the understanding of the uninitiated. Pablo wasn't familiar with the written language of the fish people of Imboka, but he guessed that the golden ring around the well contained the text of the litany they were chanting, and it was as if it had been embedded in his subcortex and remained there forever.
- Ya! Ya! Cthulhu fhtagn! - The words, older than humanity, escaped his lips and slipped to the surface, surrounded by swirling bubbles. Uxía, floating beside him, smiled understandingly and echoed after him, impetuously, sincerely.
Her fingers clutching his wrist trembled. Like him, the mermaid was overwhelmed with emotions too strong to be expressed in any way other than through a touch that told more than a thousand words. She was as afraid as he was. She was both eager to plunge into the abyss beneath them and terrified of what she might find at its bottom. She dreaded the encounter with the one she served, though at the same time she longed for it with all her fish-like being - a unity of contradictions.
The wide rim of the ring slid beneath them, giving Pablo a chance to examine the ornament up close. As he remembered from his dreams, it was far more complex than it first appeared. Each symbol was made up of hundreds of smaller images, hieroglyphs, and pictographs, all rendered in a very unique way. He had never been much interested in writing in ancient times, but even his poor knowledge of history was enough to realize that this type of writing had never been used in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or any other human culture. It was a language of images - succinct and symbolic.
It was understandable to anyone with an imagination. All kinds of sea creatures flashed before Pablo's eyes like a kaleidoscope. Blind-eyed octopuses, toothy moray eels, crabs with too many detailed limbs, sharks for some reason equipped with arms vaguely resembling those of humans, and other even stranger-looking inhabitants of the seabed. Some of them existed in nature, while others looked as if they had been generated by someone's alcohol-poisoned brain. For in their outlines we could also see human features. It was as if all of them were crawling out of the darkness of a mysterious abyss, much deeper than even the Marianas Trench, eager to spread out. Spread out across the planet.
He and Uxía were to go down there! Feeling fear rising, Pablo squeezed his sister's hand tighter, seeking comfort and support in that touch. The girl turned to him, her eyes widened with sweet fear and she smiled. Wide and open, the way only those truly close to her smiled. Her lips stretched out, exposing a mouth filled to the brim with teeth as sharp as bone needles. It might have been in the mouth of a deep-sea fish, but it certainly wasn't in the mouth of a beautiful girl. But he was neither disgusted nor frightened. After all, he already had the same nightmare sprouting in his mouth.
- We'll go deep down through countless black abysses, and there, in the heart of these unknown depths, we'll live on, surrounded by glory and splendor. Forever and ever," Uhiya proclaimed in a humorous voice, running her palm across her brother's face to brush away the remnants of his human skin. What he was before had no place where they were going.
- Cthulhu fhtagn... - Now that his outer shell was off, he couldn't help but marvel at how sensitive his new skin was, covered in the finest pattern of scales.
- Truly fhtagn... - Uxía's crimson lips pressed against his, embracing him in a kiss that could only be compared to falling into the abyss. The creature who had only recently been Paul Marsh knew that this was all wrong and that the girl he was clutching in his arms was not only half a cuttlefish, but also his sister. But he didn't care. There were no taboos about incest here, and the decision about this union had been made long before they were born. So the two heirs of an ancient family name simply surrendered to an all-consuming passion, making love over an abyss that stared at them with the black pupil of a gold-encrusted eye.
The deeper he plunged, the more his body changed. The outer cover was thinning, and the inner core was coming out from underneath. Uxia facilitated the process in every way she could. Pablo was left to sigh in her arms as her webbed hands slid over his body, freeing his arms, chest, back, and legs from the remnants of his burnt clothing and skin. It was wonderful, and not just because the beautiful girl was washing him. The boy rejoiced at the opportunity to shed his old shell and feel clean again. Unbound by humanity, the last remnants of which had dissolved into a murky, bloody cloud. Once Pablo had completed his transformation, he resembled Uxía in everything, becoming a young man of the sea with octopus tentacles below his waist.
The two black-haired creatures, with white skin and tentacles instead of legs, hovered above the black gap in the underground passage, enjoying each other's beauty and the sense of unity it carried. Brother and sister, resembling each other as reflections in a mirror, squeezed each other in their arms and, kissing passionately, began to dive, drawn into the unknown depths by the descending current. The current of water swirled and swirled in a wedding dance, but the lovers didn't even notice it, being absorbed in each other.
Pablo noted that the last time he had touched her when he was still Paul, Uxía's skin had felt cold and a little slippery. Not wet, but covered in a thin layer of slime, like the slime that fish and other sea creatures excreted to make it easier to slide through the water. Now the temperature of their bodies was equalized, and so the girl pressed against him felt warm and comfortable. Her slender fingers crawling up and down his spine made Pablo's mind spin with lust. His cock became as hard as the stone walls of the well they were floating on, and it was a pleasant surprise to the young man. Not only had it not been transformed into something more typical of sea creatures like fins or hectocotyls, but it had hardened and grown in size, and now it stood proudly between his leg tentacles, waiting to be noticed.
As if sensing his mood, Uxía was in no hurry to fulfill her lover's wish and, before moving on to the main course, once again pressed herself tightly against him. She wrapped her arms tightly around his body, rubbing her amazing breasts against his bare, muscular chest. As she did so, one of her palms slid down his back, reaching his ass, which, for now, he still had. The girl's thin fingers squeezed his buttocks with surprising force, making him shriek in surprise and a pleasant feeling of compression. With surprise and mild consternation, Pablo let out a stream of bubbles from his mouth that swirled in front of Uxía's smirking face, and his firm pole reflexively jerked up, slapping her belly as a... a reminder of herself.
Finally noticing this attention-hungry part of his body, the mermaid wrapped her fingers around the shaft and began slowly sliding it over, massaging it with her warm, mucus-wet palm. She moved up and down the shaft, stroking it and making Pablo emit grateful moans. Up and down. Up and down. The head was given special attention, so soon he was oblivious to everything in her caring fingers. Shyness, the last obstacle keeping the deep-sea creature's mind from becoming itself, was broken and Pablo came to Uxia with frenzied kisses and caresses, probing her modest breasts with his slippery, mucus-grown webbed palms and teasing the hard, pearl-like nipples with his fingers.
The sea maiden covered her eyes, her thin, fish-like body trembling with pleasure. The sounds on her lips were not human. They sounded more like the trills of a dolphin, the likes of which he had heard from the Imboks before. It had made Pablo nervous before, but now he enjoyed it, playing with Uxía's breasts and savoring the way she squeaked with pleasure. At one point his lips, were on her left nipple, gently sucking on it while his tongue played a figure-eight on the skin. This caused the mermaid to tilt her head back, exhaling a swarm of bubbles. The mermaid didn't stay in the passive role for long, however.
As if she'd come to her senses, Uhia grabbed Pablo's face with her hands, pressed her webbed fingers to his cheeks, and kissed him, pushing her tongue almost all the way down his throat. In one of the visions that had visited him shortly before his arrival in Imboca, he had dreamed of long, wriggling tentacles emerging from her open mouth. So when he felt the touch of a very ordinary, human tongue, Pablo was glad that the dream was not a dream. Otherwise, instead of a kiss, his throat would simply be stuffed with slippery tentacles. Yes, he no longer needed his lungs to breathe, but it still wouldn't have been pleasant.
And so they just shared another kiss. Deeper than all the previous ones. And much more prolonged. At the same time, her tentacles wrapped around his, squeezing and intertwining in a way that human legs never could. As a result, their bodies pressed against each other, and his unyielding cock was pressed against her entrance, which was just between her widely spaced tentacles. Brother and sister froze for a moment, staring expectantly into each other's eyes. Both were eager to be united, but neither wanted to make the first move. Pablo was out of indecision, which, so far, even the growing desire could not overcome, and Uxía because she had waited too long. She had delayed her own Immersion for years, hoping for the arrival of her lover, so she could wait a little longer. Of which she did not fail to inform her brother, with a gentle but sly smile.
In the end, he was the one who could not stand it first, pushing his hips forward - into her. The fully aroused cock slid in easily, taking the place it was supposed to. And it was beautiful. Unlike a woman's vagina, the mermaid's love canal had more inner layers, and so it was more firmly encased, making it feel incredibly good. As he penetrated his sister, Pablo even believed in the myth of incest, which stated that the similarity of the genitalia of relatives made sex much more pleasurable than with any other partner and that the fact of subconsciously conscious intimacy elevated the sensation to unprecedented heights.
Uxía was undoubtedly enjoying what was going on, too. Grabbing Pablo's ass, ringing the skin with her sharp claws, she pulled him toward her, helping him to push in the bubbling water around them. Her chin dropped to his shoulder, and her lips touched his ear, whispering sweet nonsense in an unfamiliar language that consisted of whirring, trilling, and whistling. Sometimes she allowed herself to kiss, or rather even bite, her brother, leaving a mark on his shoulder of dozens of small asymmetrical punctures. As a sign of her possession of him. So that no female fish would dare to trespass on him, as Barbara had once done. Pablo responded to her in kind.
Their hearts beat in unison, and their bodies became one with each other and with the water that surrounded them. The young man's mind shut down and instinct took over, making him feel as if he had been born to do this. All day, all night. Without stopping.
The bodies of the relatives surrendered to Dagon's blessed act of love and moved in unison. As one. A jolt. Retreat. Push. Retreat. Somewhere in this deep, bullet-like rhythm of the ocean, Pablo lost himself, forgetting the existence of time and even space. It felt as if the whole world had disappeared, being consumed by them. Two lovers, trapped in the middle of a torrent of water that carried them further and further into the unknown depths of the earth, filled with salty seawater.
Uxía was not exaggerating when she said that where they were going there would be no time. Not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow. Only Eternity. Eternity and Eternity. Forever. Mortals could not imagine it, for they were born to die, but the Children of Dagon were born to eternity, which Pablo had also tasted. And that eternity was filled with wild, animal pleasure.
Uxia took care of that, continuing to hold him in a ring of tentacles, moving her hips nonstop. She sped up, bringing her lover to the very top, then slowed down, working her way through their mutual pleasure. Their nervous systems seemed to connect, and so the sea maiden knew exactly how hard she could squeeze him inside before retreating, delaying the release. Holding him in a state of excruciating ecstasy. Pablo could feel her milking him, caressing his cock with her inner muscles. Squeezing, sucking, and retracting as if by hundreds of tiny suction cups. Despite actively starting now, Uxía was in full possession of him, using him for her pleasure and... insemination. For Dagon commanded his children to procreate and multiply.
- Just a little more... and we'll be one... -
The mermaid whispered in his ear, letting him sink deeper and deeper into her scalding wetness. Her strength and self-control were not limitless either, and so at one point on the endless journey through the black as the eternal night tunnel, she lost her rhythm, pounding against him with all her octopus-like strength. Feeling his orgasm rising from the depths, Pablo pushed upward with all his might, swiftly reaching the point of no return where the explosion was taking place.
They plunged into the sea of rapture almost simultaneously, voicing the walls of the well with a mutual cry of joy and release. Pablo felt his essence gush into his sister, along with his seed, as she clutched around him in an almost painful grip, shrinking and shaking from the force of her orgasm, which would not subside. He, too, was trapped in an incredible, ecstatic experience that kept boiling and bubbling inside him and would not subside. This was not like the usual pleasure of lovemaking. There was no equivalent in human physiology to Pablo's condition, but if he had been asked to describe his own experiences, he would have said that they were like a prolonged orgasm. Or rather a series of them.
He trembled and wriggled and squirmed, screaming in a state of absolute bliss and riding the waves of body-shaking pleasure that came over him one by one. And the scariest part (or maybe the sweetest part-it was hard to tell one from the other down here) was that despite the incredible sensations, his masculinity was not at all calmed down. In fact, Pablo felt even more awake than before. It was as if his fusion with Uhia was somehow incomprehensibly giving him strength.
Their copulation in the abyss continued. The mermaid's body shuddered, matching each movement with his own as he pulsed inside in sync with her contractions The euphoria seemed to last forever, and from the overabundance of pleasant sensations, Pablo began to lose consciousness. His eyes went dark, he would fall in and out, then come back to his senses again, looking into her enchanting, but slightly maddening smile and drowning in her enchanting, gray eyes again. Ecstasy burned in his body, and the love energy kept on and on, allowing them to continue. Eventually, the world for Pablo became a series of alternating flashes of light and darkness. Pleasure flashed brightly through him, darkening his consciousness until another flash came…
...After a certain indefinite, but a very long period of time, judging by subjective sensations, Pablo began to be vaguely aware that the light flickering between his half-lidded eyelids was real. The fluorescent spots of light looming somewhere ahead were not a hallucination caused by inhaling oxygen-depleted water, nor the aftermath of another orgasm that kept flashing through his body. There really was something glowing. Surprised that they were no longer descending vertically, but hovering in the dusky green depths, the young man looked out from behind a curtain of black curls that swirled through the waves, trying to see the amazing scenery of the underwater kingdom.
As it turned out, they had swum out into the open and were now drifting slowly among the huge, towering rocks, bursting with coral and algae. Judging by the lazy currents of water it was not an open space, but some colossal cave beneath the seabed. Pablo had heard the theory that voids filled with water existed in the planet's crust. The pressure in them must have been hellish, but they no longer cared. Dagon's blessing protected his children from the unbearable oppression of the water column, which could crush any living thing, and created a quite comfortable environment.
And that environment was densely populated. What the boy at first took for rocks turned out to be huge monolithic structures rising from the seabed. Each of them had dozens, if not hundreds of stories, but most of them were hidden by a murky, greenish-yellow haze. Pablo, frozen in Uxía's embrace, could see only the tops of the mysterious structures, decorated with carved sculptures of incomprehensible shapes. As he neared one of the mist-cloaked structures, he realized that it was cylindrical in shape and made of stone slabs that were blackened by the passage of time and uneven in shape. They were the same as those in the square near the entrance to the abyss. It was all he could make out before the building was out of sight, dissolving into a greenish haze.
However, several other similar structures appeared immediately behind it, which turned out to be the homes of the underwater inhabitants. Pablo realized this when he saw the reflections of yellow light through the narrow windows of the many stories. The buildings of the unknown city under the sea floor surrounded him and Uxia from all sides, hanging over their heads like surly and unfriendly giants. From there they had to sail through the stone forest, making their way through the shadows of dusky canyons, inaccessible to the fluorescence, the source of which loomed in the distance. Here algae and other inhabitants of the seabed, of which there were many, giving off light.
Shoals of unseen, deep-sea fish swam from place to place, slowly moving their fins. Glowing like magic lamps squid again around the houses occasionally swam inside. And in the dark corners lurked creepy critters that looked like giant moray eels or moray eels. They gawked angrily at their surroundings, waiting for the right opportunity to attack. Apparently, the villagers used them as watchdogs to ensure the safety and inviolability of their homes.
The orderly arrangement of the buildings seemed a formidable obstacle, but Uxía, who had taken the initiative, deftly found her way through the maze, avoiding such dangers as the branching coral that appeared to have been planted here as ornaments. The Imbokians had done a truly titanic job decorating a city that had grown on the seafloor by the will of Dagon. Pablo was left to marvel at the creation of these strange creatures whose silhouettes flickered between the monolithic towers. On land, they seemed clumsy and ugly. The first time he looked at them, he saw some degenerates and degenerates, wrapped in pathetic garments that smelled like fish. A tatter of indecipherable color hid deformities like deformed limbs, missing or missing body parts, and other equally disturbing anomalies. Out there in the streets of Imboca, they could barely hobble, leaning on crutches and rolling over on sleds like some cripples, but here in their underwater city, they swam with the dexterity and grace of true sea creatures. Seeing his ancestors in their native element, Pablo finally realized how beautiful they really were. Yes, exactly beautiful, with all their tentacles and fins protruding from scaly bodies that bore a distant resemblance to those of humans.
Meanwhile, as they moved deeper into the cave, the monoliths around them grew taller and taller. At least that's what it seemed to the boy at first. He looked more closely and realized that they were all about the same height, just that the bottom was uneven. The level of the bottom was rising, and the buildings seemed to climb up the steep underwater slope, creating a labyrinth, with an underwater temple at its center, which was an evil mockery of the places sacred to humans. The water and the glow that spilled around it distorted its contours, making it unbelievable and real at the same time. A dreamlike vision and a dark nightmare.
Feeling the desire to yield to the call of true nature, the Call of the Depths fighting fear, Pablo froze in place, unable to bring himself to approach this gleaming, alien, greenish-yellow structure with its many columns and twisted turrets surrounding its central dome. Over the centuries, the benthic currents have polished its walls, making them progressively whiter than alabaster... or the bones of the unfortunates who found their last resting place at the foot of the impregnable bastion.
From what Pablo saw on the surface, there were many sailors who found their fate at Imboca's shores as a sacrifice to Dagon. But he never imagined that their bones would become part of the decoration in his underwater temple. Fragments of skeletons decorated with shells, assembled into beautiful but disturbing structures that popular art galleries would pay a hefty price for, were visible among the coral gardens surrounding the temple as grotesque, postmodern installations.
Pablo looked at them, trying to find some sympathy for those who, like his friends, had been sacrificed to Dagon, but he could not do so. The only thing that bothered him a little was the possibility of being in their shoes. The thought must have been all too evident on his face because Uxía immediately began to soothe him with a gentle hug.
- Don't be afraid... Don't be afraid, my love," she whispered, stroking his face and ruffling the hair at the back of his neck. - You have nothing to fear. This is my destiny. This is your destiny. The dreams that brought you here were sent by him. Yet they brought you to me. Every dream is a wish. You are my brother. You will be my beloved. Forever. I will take care of you. Only joy awaits us here.
The words that Uxía whispered penetrated Pablo's very soul, and her caresses made him forget his fear. Glancing toward the temple again, the young man heard someone calling his name, filling his mind with visions of joy and pleasure. Here indeed a life of joy awaited him. Now aware of this, it was as if Cobmaro was dreaming in reality, imagining countless treasures and other long-desired things.
But the affectionate touch of his beloved sister, nibbling sensitively on his ear and pressing her breasts against his back, prevented him from losing himself completely, dissolving in the alluring Call of the Deep, which, without realizing it, he had heard all his life, but only now could truly grasp. That call came from here, from the Temple, but at the same time, it also resounded within Pablo himself. In his nerves and muscles and bones. In his blood. A part of Dagon had always been in him and it longed to return to the Source. For all life seeks its roots. All of his flailings were driven by the search for a way home.
As soon as Cambarro realized this, the gates of the underwater Temple opened, and from there, along with streams of enchanting, unearthly light, burst a turbulent current.
The couple he picked up rushed toward the aperture of radiant light, surrounded by the creatures dwelling in the depths, who swam out of their homes and cheerfully welcomed the new brother and sister who had joined them in Eternity.