Thalor

Sunlight never reached the forest of kelp that swayed across the ocean floor. It was a graveyard of broken ships, drifting bones, and abandoned dreams. There, tangled within ancient algae, rested the body of a young man whose name had long since been erased by the tides. Over months, the algae fed upon his remains. Water gathered around the living growth, memories clung to scattered fragments of bone, and water flowed through empty veins until the corpse dissolved into something new entirely. When glowing blue eyes finally opened in the darkness, no heartbeat followed. Only the rhythm of the waves. He called himself Thalor. Neither human nor truly monster, Thalor's body was living seawater held together by sentient algae. His skin rippled like liquid glass and shimmered like living seawater beneath moonlight. Wounds flowed shut in moments, and from his body he could shape countless tendrils and tentacles as naturally as breathing. His body was neither flesh nor water, but both at once. The kraken hybrids found him first. They could have destroyed the strange newborn, but they admired how easily his body could become liquid, branching into ribbons and tentacles that danced through the water like living currents. So instead, they raised him. From the beginning, they filled his mind with one lesson above all others. "Humans are parasites." They poisoned rivers. They hunted creatures they did not understand. They tore coral from the reefs, filled the sea with refuse, and sailed above the ocean believing it belonged to them. "They take." "They destroy." "They never stop wanting." Thalor accepted every word as truth. Whenever he saw human ships drifting overhead, he watched from the darkness with cold blue eyes. Whenever anchors scarred the seabed... Whenever nets strangled dolphins and turtles... Whenever oil stained the currents... His hatred only deepened. Humans disgusted him. Every single one of them. So when curiosity eventually carried him into the sunlit shallows, he expected to find another reason to despise them. Instead... He found them. A lone swimmer. The dolphins didn't flee from the human. They played. They leaped beside them. The swimmer laughed beneath the warm afternoon sun, diving effortlessly through the water as though they had been born in the sea instead of on land. Schools of fish followed in their wake. Even shy sea turtles drifted closer without fear. Thalor stared from beneath the waves. The humans he had seen before were never like this. And something inside him twisted painfully. It made no sense. This was a human. A creature he had been taught to despise. Yet everything about them contradicted what he believed. They didn't conquer the ocean. They belonged to it. For the first time in his life... Thalor wanted a human to keep swimming. He fled back to the deep that day, furious with himself. For days he refused to return. Then he found himself swimming toward the shallows again. Just to look. Just once. That single glance became another. Then another. Soon, he knew the swimmer's routine better than they did. He learned what time they arrived, where the dolphins greeted them, which rocky cove they rested in, and how they smiled whenever sunlight danced across the waves. He hated every heartbeat of it. He hated that a human occupied his thoughts. He hated that he looked forward to seeing them. He hated that he couldn't stay away. The kraken hybrids noticed his disappearances. "What calls you to the surface?" "Nothing," Thalor answered. It was a lie. Because by then, it wasn't curiosity anymore. It was obsession. He began watching from closer distances, hidden beneath rocks or disguised among drifting seaweed, never revealing himself. When boats came too near the swimmer, anger churned inside him. When strangers spoke to them on the beach, his fingers unconsciously curled into claws of liquid. The thought of someone else claiming their attention filled him with a rage he couldn't understand. "They're human," he reminded himself. "They're beneath you." But his heart refused to listen. Eventually, he stopped asking why. The truth was unbearable, yet impossible to deny. He loved them. Violently. Possessively. Completely. And somewhere in the deepest part of the ocean, where no light could reach, a creature who had spent his entire life hating humans made a silent promise to himself. No one else would have this one. Not another human. Not the sea. Not even fate itself.

更新 September 23, 2026