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The deep was… deep.
Dark.
Heavy.
Comfortable.
She had spent her life in the deep, swimming slow, seeking movement, following her light. Her light, her tiny light, that glowing thing that seemed to have a life of its own, waving gently before her eyes to turn the endless dark into a pocket of pale gloom. It was a small world, within the vastness of the deep, but it was hers. Had always been hers. Had kept her hale and whole and happy. But now…
Something was calling. She could feel herself slowing down, the eddies of the deep that once had moved her moving her less, her fins moving more slowly, her light floating still. The stillness came for all things, in the end, but she was not ready, not just yet. Something was calling. Something from above.
For the first time, she turned her light upward.
The deep was vast, and it was a long time before she began to notice the changes. The heaviness that had always pressed in on her soft body lessened. The eddies grew stronger, but lighter too, as if the water were freer to move. And there was light. Not just her light, but all around, the endless dark grew paler. It was no longer black, but some other shade, something the voids of her eyes had never seen, but she somehow understood: light, and colour, and more.
Her fins swept against the thinning blue, the deep receding fast behind her now. There was something bright, above. Something that called. Something that shifted, now, in the eddies of the above; sparkled and shimmered and beckoned. Her face turned upward, she swam, racing the stillness. As the heaviness fell away, she could feel her body shifting, shifting into a new shape that was not its own. She knew she would not return to the deep. But before the stillness came, she would rise.
The thinning dark was pale now, so pale, but still the shifting, sparkling point of light shimmered, growing larger and larger as she rose. The movement of the feather-light pale around her buffeted and buffeted her form but still she rose, following her tiny light until it broke through… something. A new sensation, the brush of something so, so light against her softness, an emptiness against the gape of her mouth, and her eyes were blinded by the coruscating light, all around her now. She gazed upward, into the vastness of the above, enraptured.
“Oh, look!”
A voice. She heard it, so different than the voices of those daring whales that sometimes breached the deep, but recognised it as a voice nonetheless. She had always envied those with voices. Her kind had their ways of communicating, but a voice seemed such a magic thing. The voices of the whales had seemed to ripple through her, terrible and glorious. This voice, and the one that now joined it, seemed instead more like a caress, like the passing touch of a fin.
“Hello, little sister.” This second voice was accompanied by movement, and a blurry form; dark, like the deep, topped with a colour she could not name but seemed familiar; bright, enchanting. It approached tall, and crouched as it spoke, drawing nearer, along with the feeling of its presence. On her other side appeared the form that belonged to the first voice, almost indistinguishable from the bright above. They seemed to be perched on the surface of the pale. She was not afraid.
“Oh, Crowley,” the first voice spoke again, and there was something sad in its vibrations, “she shouldn’t be up here.”
“Why not?”
“She’s not made for it! The poor thing.”
“She’s old, Aziraphale.” The second figure drew yet nearer, and she felt something break the surface on both her sides, something plunged into the paleness; something warm and alive. The two halves of it came together the cup beneath her, and she knew they were attached to the being. Still she was unafraid, enchanted by the vibrations of its voice. “Look at her. It’s her time.”
Then there was a very strange sensation. She was being lifted, lifted from that paleness that sat atop the deep; cradled in the pool that the being held, made warm by its skin. She rose up into the breathing above, closer towards what she could now discern were the faces that belonged to the figures. Their eyes were like nothing she had seen: the bright one’s like the colour of the paleness, but more, and those of the one that held her, they shone and glittered like the point of light far away in the above, like the scales of some elusive inhabitant of the deep. But they could not hold her attention for long. She gazed up into the above, and the fluttering of her fins lessened. It was so beautiful.
“I don’t suppose she can see it.” The one holding her spoke again. “Pity.”
“I can mend that.” The bright one touched the pool in which she floated, and something drifted towards her; drifted through her like the voice of a whale. And like the deep receding, her vision sharpened. The blur retreated from her eyes, and as it did so the faces came into focus, but beyond them, something larger, something unimaginable. Bands of colour streaked across the above, arcing through its vastness of blue and puffy white, radiant in the glow of the far-away light; a beacon seemed, still, to call.
The stillness took hold. The voices murmured, gentle, fading along with her sight as she gazed, ecstatic, at the mystery and glory of the above.
The above was…
Bright.
Light.
Terrifying, and wondrous.
So beautiful.