Chameleon Magazine

Beneath the shell of the fractured planet Cyrn, an ocean swirled in silence—a vast abyss of black water untouched by suns, unfelt by winds. In this ink-dark sea, life pulsed in strange rhythms. Creatures with crystal-veined fins and translucent bones glided through the pressurized gloom, their bioluminescence sketching galaxies in water.

Among them was Nithari, a being no larger than a child’s hand, born from an egg nestled in the warm crevice of a hydrothermal bloom. Her kind shimmered with liquid light, but Nithari’s glow was different—it pulsed in slow, deliberate waves, like a heartbeat resisting the current.

As eons passed, whispers moved through the currents—of vents, thin cracks in the ceiling of the world, where pressure thinned and steam danced. Legends spoke of those who reached them, whose bodies changed and rose, leaving behind the water, ascending into the “Above”—a place without tides, where stars did not burn but still glowed.

Nithari felt the pull. It was not hunger, not instinct. It was a yearning etched into the spirals of her bones.

One cycle, as the great bloom pulsed and tides shifted, Nithari followed a vent’s tug. Her body began to change—fins thickened, shimmering membranes stretched and caught currents like wings. Her eyes adjusted to the thinning dark, to the shimmer of mist instead of water. Through the vent she soared.

Out into the void.

There was no sky, only black. No warmth, only drifting clouds of glowing vapor. Yet Nithari flared with light—her wings trailing pale ribbons as she glided through the exosphere, joining others who had ascended before her. They circled the fractured crust like silent comets, weaving patterns in bioluminescent arcs.

She was no longer a sea creature, nor truly of the void. She was something in-between, a myth in motion.

And the ocean below, sensing her flight, pulsed anew with hope.

“When you outgrow the deep that made you, rise into the dark that calls you.”