He was dreaming again.

The sea had taken him once more, stretching and pulling at his body until it broke and tried to piece itself back together.

It never came out right. He was some tiny thing, trapped in the infinite vastness of the water. The air, the City and the sun he knew seemed to fade from memory as he drifted in vacuo, letting the current take him wherever it wished. It didn’t matter where he went, anyways; he was never able to do anything but stare upwards at the blinding rays of light with what humans would eventually label as ‘eyes’. They were new to him – they must have formed some time over the past few weeks. The brine had all but taken him fully, by now. It was always this way, whenever he saw the world like this: the salt and the sweat snaked its way down his throat, poured into the tiny holes he called ears, and slowly drowned and consumed all his senses like a lamprey would its hearty meals of blood and iron. Eventually, everything would be gone…

Everything, except his eyes.

No matter what, no matter how far he sank, he was always able to see upwards, to bear witness to all those distant, delicious rays, and the intoxicating matter within that rendered those beams beacons of hope. Their light was the only way to see in this dark – the only *thing* to see in this dark – and, as they cumulated, served as the lodestar; by which the greatest and most voluminous would be able to navigate, assuming they themselves were no longer slaves to the pull of the current. Or, so he thought – it was hard to tell how much he truly knew of his surroundings. Perhaps it was his father’s experiences he had cached, and he was merely calling upon the things his father had done and seen. Father was always such a strong and impossibly great creature – so full of life, which was fleeting for all but him, who so graciously grasped the lights with his strong and sturdy hands to feed upon. He fed himself first, naturally, being the one closest to the source, but he always let his offspring swirl and swarm around his mouths, letting them feast upon the scraps that he did not finish nor find particularly delectable. Not as if he had much of a choice – he couldn’t help but feed his children. The umbilicals never let them get very far from Father, not until they’d grown to maturity, or to such substantial size that their fat and tissues severed the cord from the sheer pressure; regardless, they all needed to eat. Thus, they fed, feasting greedily on whatever sustenance their progenitor provided.

Holy incandescence.

Father had been like his own children, once. He took from Grandfather and fed himself on what could not be as easily digested, and eventually grew a palate exclusive to those things that were regurgitated and left half-eaten. The moment Father had severed himself at the umbilical and began to float away, he seized all of the light that he knew Grandfather would never dare touch. Leviathan fingers – as humans would come to label them – reached into the point whence it all came, and parted the rays themselves until the very water began to seep into the glow. His siblings, the brothers, sisters, and all else that he had grown alongside, all that was in the roiling sea, found themselves floundering, always waiting for seconds and morsels of the greater whole that Grandfather simply could not let pass by. They grew slowly, and even when they reached maturity, saw fit to squabble or remain subservient to Grandfather and his whims. When Grandfather became so large that he sank to the bottom, Father’s siblings found themselves bound to feeding him and the darkness he resided in – it was only fair recompense for all that they had taken from him.

Some ties may never be severed.

But now he, a son of Father in numbers unimaginable and irrelevant, had begun to feel the strain on the tether that held him close to the thing he emerged from and fed himself through. There had been moments in times eld, where the cord would strain and stretch far enough that his face bobbed on the surface – where he saw Milo, and would smile, a great, beaming grin, one he’d learned from the boy as he wreathed himself in his glow. The memories were faint, but they always seemed to surface again whenever his bloated body drifted upwards and promised to remain fixed there. He cherished such memories; the moments when he would take the boy and set him down the path of revelation were his favorite. ‘You should study after dinner,’ he’d recall saying. ‘You did it last night, remember?’

Whenever the boy had done what he’d suggested (and he often did), he felt the ardent light sink into his face, down into the narrow passages that had formed just beyond the skin. The light that Milo radiated was so wonderfully warm, fulfilling in ways words and emotions could never describe – they merely circumnavigated the point whenever they attempted to. The times when the boy held him and thanked him for everything were almost as beautiful and filling as the reward for setting him straight; the soft, gentle, sincere whispers of gratitude Milo fed him gave birth to an altogether new, but equally addictive, warmth. One that he had hoped would never disappear. Whenever he got the chance, he would drift and float upwards, desperately trying to surface and reach the boy. The sightings of him became more and more frequent as both he and the now-man grew, but it was evident that the man’s growth had made him less receptive to the friend that swaddled and cradled him in his delicate and violence-filled youth. That was okay. Whenever he found himself desiring Milo’s affirmations, he would speak to him, wrapped in the mystique and guise of another, simpler train of thought floating through the psychologist’s mind.

He often answered, when he was approached that way.