It started with the fish.
At first, it was barely more than a sidebar in local papers. A few strange fish on Kerala shores—no big deal. The sea had its moods and temperament and now and again things that rested in the depths found their way to the surface.
But it did not relent.
The beaches were strewn with them by the end of the week. Not ordinary fish—alien ones.
Finless silvery forms. Bulging and glassy eyes that had never seen sunlight. Translucent and distorted tissue that had been warped by pressure in the depths. A few still wriggled in the sand weakly, their movements slow as having been forced up too hastily.
The fishermen were among those who first sensed it.
Something had changed.
The water felt.different. Heavier. Colder. As if the ocean had held its breath. Nets were hauled in half-full and yet caught nothing that made sense.
The old men murmured amongst themselves in hushed and anxious tones.
"The ocean is warning us..." one of them declared.
But nobody in the world listened.
Then came the sounds...
Initially, only the hydrophones recorded it. A low, faraway pulse. Too slow, too deep. Not like the familiar hum of the ocean—the moving currents, the faraway whale calls, or even Earth's faint vibrations.
This was different.
It came in waves. Measured. Like a breathing.
The scientists played the recordings over and over again, their faces impassive as they stared at the spectrogram. No ocean life. No earthquake. No thermal vents.
It wasn't natural.
And it continued to get louder.
Something shifted under the water.
Deep in the depths beyond the shallows where light could not reach, it awoke.
Far down, where water had turned black and pressure had pushed out nearly everything save only the strongest of life, silence had been unbroken for centuries.
Until now.
The first had been small—barely notable. A shift in the seafloor, a wave across the abyssal plains. The kind of movement that the Earth made continuously, unnoticed by anything except machinery programmed to detect it.
But then there came the second.
Then the third.
By the fourth shaking that had run through the depths, water itself appeared altered. More dense. More unsettled. As if something beneath it moved—something immense.
People felt it on the surface as well.
The fishermen on the water clung to their boats as waves came rolling in with unnatural surges, not wind, not tide. Currents drew in in nonsensical ways, sweeping nets into concealed powers beneath.
A grizzled man, with more years spent at sea than on dry land, stood at the bow of his vessel, gazing into the black water. He sensed something. Not merely a current.
A presence.
His radio crackled.
"Does anyone else feel that?" a voice asked.
Quiet.
Then came another response, this one from a ship several miles away.
"I believed that it was only me...what in the world is happening here...?"
Then for the very first time in history, they saw it.
A shadow.
Not a whale....Not a school of fish.
Something much...much greater.
It went beneath the boats, so low that only the absence of light gave it away. A moving shadow, deeper than water. It went without a sound and without effort, like a mountain floating in water.
The men on the boats said nothing.
Because they understood one thing—it had always existed.
And now....
It woke up.