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His tail rippled, pushing him through the murk, down and down until the sunlight was a distant and diffused memory. He passed through gatherings of fish, the occasional eel or serpent, and whatever else spent its time down here in the depths. Some of these seemed briefly interested in him as he slipped along, but he paid these creatures no mind; he'd not let himself be distracted while he had someplace to be.
His lady was waiting.
Deep down in the silent, still dark, he again found her laid upon her side, solemn in her repose: his beautiful, broken ship, long submerged face-down in the silt. The faithful naval craft had sustained such damage to her hull at the front, tilting down, sinking lower and lower until her prow touched bottom and the rest all fell to place.
Every time he ghosted along her sharply-tilted deck as he did now, he could feel his own footsteps from when he had, upon seeing the extent of her wounds, begun to walk in measured stride to the captain's quarters beyond. Even as stragglers from the crew had made good their escapes, their yellings all echoing around him, he could clearly hear the steady clip-clop of his own hoofbeats - dull and hollow as they were - against the wood below him. He had stepped into his familiar cabin and closed the door behind him, locking it for good measure.
He had wanted to be proud and noble, to stand on the deck at the front of his ship and face the oncoming wash head on. But to go down with the ship was his fate, and he was going to accept it with both certainty and finality: he would not let himself be swept away by the rushing waters, because he would not be separated from his lady.
Yet while he could face this fate with certainty, he could not face it without fright. He had fought to keep his composure as the sky turned into sea, as water seeped in through cracks and gaps in wood and began to fill the now-askew cabin, as the windows that once gave him a beautiful view of the horizon made aching crick-crack sounds at their frames under ever-building pressures. His heart was pounding and his breathing was quick, the water continuing to surround him like an embrace, and he struggled against his instinctive, panicked reactions: he'd made his choice, and even if he had to utilize every single scrap and shred of his willpower, he would abide by it.
When the rising tide had finally and fully enveloped him, he let his eyes close gently: here was his finality, and he found some small peace in this. With one final exhale of the breath that had been burning inside of his lungs, he let himself slip into the encroaching darkness.
-- then, so suddenly, he had felt himself awaken, tried to take in a gasping draught of air and felt nothing but stifling, claustrophobic seawater all around. Yet, he had still taken in a breath - and he understood well enough what this meant. He knew, well enough, what he had become: he'd heard the whispered stories of witch-touched miserables and the pubroom tales of mutated beasts from the ocean's depths, and though they were superstitious tales of warning for all who braved the oceans, they had not given him so much as a single flinch in fright.
And this was true even when he had seen himself - when he found his bearings in the hazy water of the sea bottom and turned to look at his own reflection in the cracked mirror that had once been hung upon his wall and now sat, like discarded debris, among the pile of his belongings that had fallen down to the bottom wall of his cabin.
A medusa-coil of ragged, shaggy, and sodden wool draped atop a barnacle- and seaweed-laden body had met his gaze, his heavy-lidded eyes now dimly luminous in the shade. His skin had been painted with witchmarks in the shape of delicately twisting curls and gentle full-moon disks, his ears having become delicate membranous fins, his tail grown long and scaled - such transformation had taken him, but yet for all the tales of horror passed around the portside bars he had frequented, he did not feel anything but dulled disinterest.
If anything, he found it fair: he had given himself to the sea, and not only had the sea accepted this, but it had remade him as its own. Such was its will.
Here and now, as he passed through the doorway of his cabin, its hinges broken and door long since swept away, he exhaled slow and steady. As he drifted past the mirror, still settled where it had fallen, he didn't so much as give it even a passing glance. Beyond his own transfiguration, he mused, so little had changed from the day the ship had gone down - as if these waters, frigid and sunlacked, had somehow frozen everything in time.
He settled himself gingerly into the nest he'd built from his old, destroyed furnishings. Even now, even in her state, his ship was there for him: to keep him safe from the beasts of the deep, to keep him out of the currents of the undertide, to give him peace of mind. As she had been his home upon the wide ocean waters, so she was his home here in the shady depths. In exchange for little more than his companionship in the lonely abyss, she offered him such solace and protection, and he, as any captain, was both proud and grateful.
And in his own way, he perhaps loved her, as well. Her aches and pains, breaks and splinters, her cracks and her creaks - sometimes he felt these in his own old bones, as if in sympathy. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be all along: that this sorcerous curse had left their futures entwined and their fates shared. He did not presume to understand such witchcraft, but during those times when he felt worryingly unsure of why he had been given this new life, he found this rationalization the most comforting of all -- so much so, in fact, that he had even taken her name as his own, so that they could be as one in all ways.
With one last gaze out of the broken windows that had once been on the back wall but were now like a skylight in the ceiling above, Stillwater nestled himself down, coiling his tail close to him and tucking his muzzle into the fur atop it. He closed his eyes lightly, giving one soft sigh of a breath that sent a few bubbles drifting up through the shadowy water towards the surface, and he let himself slip into the dark of a restful sleep.