Here, Blackjack slowed and turned in a circle. Straight down.
"Thanks." Theseus said as tumbled off his back and plunged into the icy sea.
He'd gotten more comfortable doing stunts like that the past couple of years and could pretty much move however he wanted to underwater, just by willing the ocean currents to change around him and propel him along, breathing underwater, no problem, and his clothes never got wet unless he wanted them to.
He shot down into the darkness.
Twenty, thirty, forty feet. The pressure wasn't uncomfortable. and he'd never tried to push it—to see if there was a limit to how deep Theseus could dive. He knew most regular humans couldn't go past two hundred feet without crumpling like an aluminum can. He should've been blind, too, this deep in the water at night, but could see the heat from living forms, and the cold of the currents. It's hard to describe. It wasn't like regular seeing, but Theseus could tell where everything was.
As he got closer to the bottom, he saw three hippocampi—fish-tailed horses—swimming in a circle around an overturned boat. The hippocampi were beautiful to watch. Their fish tails shimmered in rainbow colors, glowing phosphorescent. Their manes were white, and they were galloping through the water the way nervous horses do in a thunderstorm. Something was upsetting them.
He got closer and saw the problem. A dark shape—some kind of animal—was wedged halfway under the boat and tangled in a fishing net, one of those big nets they use on trawlers to catch everything at once. He hated those things. It was bad enough they drowned porpoises and dolphins, but they also occasionally caught mythological animals. When the nets got tangled, some lazy fishermen would just cut them loose and let the trapped animals die.
Apparently this poor creature had been mucking around on the bottom of Long Island Sound and had somehow gotten itself tangled in the net of this sunken fishing boat. It had tried to get out and managed to get even more hopelessly stuck, shifting the boat in the process. Now the wreckage of the hull, which was resting against a big rock, was teetering and threatening to collapse on top of the tangled animal.
The hippocampi were swimming around frantically, wanting to help but not sure how. One was trying to chew the net, but hippocampi teeth just aren't meant for cutting rope. Hippocampi are really strong, but they don't have hands, and they're not (shhh) all that smart.
Free it, lord! A hippocampus said when it saw Theseus. The others joined in, asking the same thing.
He swam in for a closer look at the tangled creature. At first he thought it was a young hippocampus. He'd rescued several of them before. But then he heard a strange sound, something that did not belong underwater:
"Mooooooo!"
He got next to the thing and saw that it was a cow. he mean... he'd heard of sea cows, like manatees and stuff, but this really was a cow with the back end of a serpent. The front half was a calf—a baby, with black fur and big, sad brown eyes and a white muzzle—and its back half was a black-and-brown snaky tail with fins running down the top and bottom, like an enormous eel.
"Whoa, little one," He said. "Where did you come from?"
The creature looked at him sadly. "Moooo!"
But he couldn't understand its thoughts. He only speaks horse.
We don't know what it is, lord, one of the hippocampi said. Many strange things are stirring.
"Yeah," He murmured. "So I've heard."
He uncapped Riptide, and the sword grew to full length in my hands, its bronze blade gleaming in the dark.
The cow serpent freaked out and started struggling against the net, its eyes full of terror. "Whoa!" I said. "I'm not going to hurt you! Just let me cut the net."
But the cow serpent thrashed around and got even more tangled. The boat started to tilt, stirring up the muck on the sea bottom and threatening to topple onto the cow serpent. The hippocampi whinnied in a panic and thrashed in the water, which didn't help.
"Okay, okay!" He said and put away the sword whilst starting to speak as calmly as he could so the hippocampi and the cow serpent would stop panicking. He didn't know if it was possible to get stampeded underwater, but didn't really want to find out. "It's cool. No sword. See? No sword. Calm thoughts. Sea grass. Mama cows. Vegetarianism."
I doubted the cow serpent understood what was being said, but it responded to the tone of the voice. The hippocampi were still skittish, but they stopped swirling around quite so fast.
Free it, lord! they pleaded.
"Yeah," He said. "I got that part. I'm thinking."
He then thought of an idea, he told the three hippocampus to distract her and decided to sneak around Bessie. As they danced in front of her; Theseus, from behind, hardens the water into a dagger and swiped down freeing Bessie: "go girl, go." He said. As she swam off Theseus got the water to push him back into the beach and then went off to get ready for sneaking himself onto the quest.