It was the turn of a century.

Not necessarily this century, but the feel of change was in the air nonetheless.

 

here is a world that we know ­ we can sense it readily. Yet there are senses that we do not have, and therefore there are other worlds that we cannot sense so easily. But this fact does not subvert its reality. And just as there are other worlds, barely escaping our peripheral vision, these worlds surely intersect. In one of these places of magic, a world of ocean and a world of mountains cross. Someone lives here on this lonely beach, where one cannot say how fine the sand is nor what color the grains, for the words do not exist in any language I have spoken in my many lifetimes. But it is truer than the stars that I have never felt something so soft, nor seen something so beautiful, may I live as long again as I have already.

...Except for the girl who lives here. Her of dove-down skin and fire-opal eyes.

My kingdom is great, and all who live there do so happily. They sing my praise as the greatest king that this world of water has ever known.

It may have been a celestial cataclysm, or the birth or death of a god that created the disturbance that enabled me to spend a day on beach between this world and the neighboring. It was a gentle feeling, as if I was coming home. My whole life was a long journey leading up to these shores.

ut then I saw her, and all that I ever knew melted away. Everything I had ever known to be good, true or beautiful seemed irrelevant. I knew at that moment that I had been created to love this figure before me. It had been written all those centuries before my own aquatic conception.

It was mystery and it was tragedy, that I spoke to her, brushed against her hand and knew no more. Just as gently as I had come, I was back in my own chamber, in my own palace. Everything was as I had left it, yet nothing would ever be the same again. I cursed the gods, my kingdom, and myself, but it did not bring me back to her. Since that day, nothing gives me even fleeting pleasure, and my thoughts are only of how to gain another moment with the girl, just to see her again... to know her name.

to be continued...

 

The Octopus King, chapter 1 (2007)