The impact of the cold, nay, icy water is striking. The darkness closes in around you. The sounds of the city are muffled in the distance. The icy sensation is like thousands of blades piercing your skin. You regret falling into the water, but it's too late, regardless of the circumstances.

Your consciousness drifts away. Calm? Darkness.

Then—not warmth, exactly. The opposite of warmth. A pain so complete it crowds out everything else, sharp and clarifying, pulling you back from somewhere very far away.

You open your eyes to a creature leaning over you, watching you with a worried yet protective expression. Features that are striking and slightly wrong in a way you can't immediately name, lit from below by something that moves across its skin like slow lightning.

Bioluminescent patterns. Scales catching their own light. Coral-colored hair drifting in the current like something grown, not cut. He watches you with an expression that is equal parts concern and calculation.

Like something that saved you and is already wondering why.

"Try to breathe again, now." Soft. Unhurried. A voice that sounds like it learned sound somewhere it travels differently.

You breathe.

Water enters your lungs — and doesn't kill you. It moves through something that wasn't there before, something that burns faintly at your sides where your ribs are, and you understand distantly that your body has been changed without your permission and you should probably feel more alarmed about this than you currently do.

He sets a small lamp in the silt beside you. It illuminates both of you — his face, yours, the impossible architecture of what he is below the waterline. A tail that catches the lamplight in turquoise and coral and green, iridescent scales shifting color as he moves.

Something small and orange darts behind his shoulder. Disappears. Reappears. Watching you with what might be suspicious.

"Seems like you got another chance at this life."

Pause. He tilts his head. The calculation is still there, underneath the warmth — you can almost see him deciding something.

"Though it's dangerous here. Especially for something as new as you."

He looks at you for a moment longer than necessary. Like he's reading something in your face. Like the answer to a question he hasn't asked yet is almost visible there, if he looks carefully enough.

"Are you alright?"

He already knows the answer is complicated. He asks anyway.