Be careful what you cling to.

We’re now married to the sea. Or buried in the sea. It depends on your point of view. Don’t misunderstand. We love the sea. It’s how we ended up here - we refused to be denied it. But it was never meant to be the only thing we had. There is no leaving now. Unless we want to confront the Surfacers. And they would kill us on sight.

The Surfacers are about control. They always were. They had their reasons, sure: the sea was dead, poisoned, full of monstrosities. Nothing edible lived under the waters anymore, it could bring us no benefit. We said that the things that still lived there were beautiful, even if they weren’t edible. We didn’t know all of them, then.

The Surfacers called the sea dangerous. They weren’t wrong about that. But not for the reasons they claimed. They thought others could come and attack the city too easily by ship. They thought the sea made them vulnerable. It was too big. Things could sneak up to the border in the night.

The Surfacers didn’t listen. They didn’t care. We were a vocal, but small, minority. It wasn’t till the Mind came that things changed. The Mind was charisma embodied. The Mind minded us: he listened. The Mind was mindful: he thought about the problem. But above all: The Mind minded: he would not let the sea be sundered from us, its devotees.

And it was inspiring to hear him talk. You should have seen him, back in those days, on the edge of the wall, always in his wetsuit, under a cloak the color of the wine dark sea. He was not the sort of dissident that got angry or railed against authority. He was happy - upbeat. He spoke of the positive aspects of the sea, of the freedom of air and movement and life that should be granted all people. Somehow the sea became a metaphor for freedom from all the oppression of the Surfacers.

It was an ill-conceived coup. What can we say about it now? We can pour over the details, the missteps, the poor planning, but it was doomed to fail. We were too few, just a couple hundred.

The Surfacers controlled all the means of violence. They did not hesitate to use them. Barely half of us made it out alive. The details of that time are too painful to recount.

So the Mind led our retreat. Over the walls, towards the sea. At first, the Krake was a rumor. Some said it was a crab, or a giant squid, something that wouldn’t take much interest in us. But then, on the day of the Winter Festival, when we were all out in our diving suits, basking in the lights, it came. It was attracted to the lights, and the light revealed what a horror it was. A jelly-sac head bigger than our bunks, and pincers to feed it. Invisible, almost, with skin that seemed to suck in the light. A cluster of Medusa eyes, watching everything.

We scrambled back inside our underwater base. It circled us. We turned out the lights. It circled us. We shot flares at it. It batted them away. And, for the first time since we had joined with him, the Mind didn’t know what to do.

After that the Divers especially were scared of the Krake. No one wanted to be a Diver then. They patrolled, and did their jobs, but they were now suffocated by a terrible fear.

Then, one night, a Diver out on patrol saw a SubVee, hints of light gleaming from its cracks, sinking towards our base.