I walk out of the shadow of the beast, a Lab no more. Six slit pupils cut into the dark and right at me with a wicked snarl, but by the sword it's peace I seek and nothing more. In the pond my image stirs, sending ripples ashore. I extend my arm beneath the dock, but when my fingers touch the water's skin, his hand shoots out from the depths and clasps my own.
His oily brown fur made for a loose grip, but the hulking beast was outmatched and outgunned. "I've got him! Do it now!" For a heartbeat she seemed unsure, until her small face broke out into a shy smile. He barked in alarm when cold water blasted him from the backyard hose. He'd never known fear like the icy chill where his first ancestors first felt something akin to moonlight reverence, a canine religion.
Deep, deep into the waters. Down past any the natural boundaries. Beyond dark sand and oceanic trenches where shouts bubble and thoughts succumb to instinct. At pressures that would crush the skull of Jonah's whale, pressures that twisted the spine of the first fish into malignant leviathans. Where a thousand eyes glimmer like the surface stars, ceaselessly. To feel a heartbeat, at once pounding through the inside of your fingertips, fade slowly and lamely away, your vision blur into navy blue nothingness -- this is water death.
!" and she splashes into the deep end right past the buoys and pulls an arm so hard that I think it might come off and lets me breathe on air again
It's dark down here, and when I come up on the other side, I'll have been baptized for the life of the world to come.