Kyma wakes with a jolt. She is lying on a cold stone surface, the bottom half of her body resting in the water. She tries to move her legs, but nothing happens. Why can't she move? Kyma can feel the weight of her legs, they should be moving! She frowns. Does she really want to know the reason why she can't move her legs right now? No. She lifts her head up to see that she is in some kind of cave. It is surprisingly light inside, despite a lack of a nearby light source. Of course there is water behind her, that is the reason why she is lying in water. Beyond it is the cave mouth, which is significantly lighter. The light must be from outside the mouth. For some reason, there is a door carved into the stone walls, and Kyma squints at it, trying to make out more details.
She can't discern anything, so she drags her aching and heavy body over to the door. She bangs on it and shouts with all her strength, but no one answers her. Where is she? Is anyone even here? She grimaces slightly, due to a dull sting starting to form on the lower half of her body. Why does her body hurt? She slowly turns around to head back to the water because at least it's a bit more comfortable there and no one is answering her anyway. She drags herself back to the water and sees that if she goes farther into the water, she will reach an area that isn't in the small cave. She'll have to swim to get there though. When she reaches the water, she rolls over and stretches out her arms to grab her unresponsive legs and swing them into the water. But instead of feeling smooth skin, she feels a textured and slippery surface. She puts her arms beneath her and pushes upwards so that she can better see her legs.
When she sees that instead of human legs, she has a scaled tail like a fish, she begins to scream. That's why she can't move her legs, she doesn't have them anymore! When her voice is hoarse and raspy, she finally manages to stop screaming. At this point, her lower half is extremely uncomfortable, almost feeling tight. She reasons that her tail, however she got it, is drying out. At that thought, a tear slips down her cheeks, her heart wishing for her legs to return to her. But she doubts that wishing for her legs will make them return to her, or even inform her of how she lost them. Kyma stretches her hand out towards her silvery tail and grasps the cool scales before hauling it into the water, only for the pain in her tail to instantaneously disappear. She angles her hands behind her and pushes against the stone, forcing herself deeper into the water. The water reaches her waist, and she gasps as her skin is greeted by the cold water infiltrating through her swim shirt. Kyma frowns in confusion. When did she put a swim shirt on?
Kyma pushes herself further into the water, until she can begin the laborious journey to the outside of the cave, her tail dragging behind her heavily. Kyma stops momentarily at the cave entrance, blinded by the sunlight. When her eyes adjust, she continues on, before being suddenly dragged downwards two meters outside of it. She flounders, panicking at the downward pull of her motionless tail. She continues to panic, until her tail moves, guided by her instincts and pushing her easily back up to the surface for a much needed breath. The tail stops moving and her mind clears in shock, before she is dragged back down again. Determined, she tries again to move the tail, imagining it as her legs tied together. She performs a dolphin kick, and rises smoothly to bob at the surface. Kyma grins at her accomplishment and dives beneath the surface of the water, now swimming easily. She swims farther out before looking down at the floor - seafloor? - beneath her.
She almost inhales water in surprise at the new clarity of her eyesight. She pops her head out of the water only to see her vision the exact same quality it has been her entire life. She submerges her head again to realise that the reason her underwater vision appears so clear is because it isn't blurry like it used to be, although she could always see better underwater than most people as her vision was only slightly blurry. But now it might even be clearer than her eyesight above water. She shakes her head to shake away the whirlwind of thoughts, and dives gracefully beneath the water to investigate the distant bottom. Except for right by the cave, where it is stone, the ground consists of all sand. She continues on until she finds a small ecosystem of fish and vibrant, thriving coral. It is the sea! She goes farther, almost giddy at her discovery, only to halt in surprise when she reaches a wall. Why is there a wall in the ocean? She is about to rise to the surface to investigate there when she sees something along the bottom of the wall only a few meters down.
She cautiously swims toward it, and discovers that the entire bottom of the wall is made up of two-meter long, thick iron bars. There is enough room to fit her fist in between the bars, but not much more than that. But why are there bars here? Kyma follows the wall until it reaches a corner with another wall, and she follows that one up the sloping seabed until it reaches a disturbance. Her head breaks through the rippling surface of the water and her eyes widen at the sight of a waterfall flowing over a natural cliff into the walled in water, her enclosure? She recoils at that thought, not wanting to believe that she was kidnapped and put somewhere like a zoo animal. She approaches the waterfall cautiously, confused by its existence. You don't often see waterfalls right at the edge of the ocean, but then again, she is in a walled-in portion of the sea, so who's to say that this waterfall is natural? Before she enters the space behind waterfall, she turns to look out at the area she was just in. Kyma does some quick calculations in her head to determine that the enclosure is about a twenty meter by twenty meter cube, with the deepest point being twenty-one meters deep. The walls extend three meters above the surface, likely because whomever put her here doesn't want her to jump out of the enclosure due to the lack of a roof. As she stares at it, her mind finds increasing evidence that the place is like a large cell in a zoo. Kyma turns away and ducks behind the waterfall.
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Note: For those of you who are unaware of how long a meter is, 3 meters is about 10 feet.
Poor Kyma. What do you think has happened to her? What do you think will happen next?
Please send me art for this or my other books if you make any! And happy reading!
Here is your first picture of Kyma!
~Goddess of Fate, signing out.