Page 32 of Music of the Ocean

The farther they descended, the more the world faded. The crowd noise of a thousand minds, and the chaos of emotion and need and memory all peeled away, replaced by a steady, soothing hush.

Indigo rolled a tentacle along the wall as he led the way. The city’s pulse thinned around him. In its place was the beat of the microfauna lining the walls, the tectonic groan of the planet far below, the slow metabolism of the city as it consumed and reconstructed itself.

This was better. Indigo relished the silence the way a starving creature savored its first meal. Some mornings, before the day’s work began, he’d come here and float for a time, letting the world’s clamor recede until he was ready to face the day and all its problems.

His earliest memories were of utter silence. No voices, no projections, no accidental brush with another’s thoughts, just himself, suspended in darkness. Sometimes, he missed that peacefulness, which was why he came here.

Indigo glanced back. The crease between Saxby’s brows had gone. His hands, which had been drawn into fists at his sides, had opened. Indigo turned back toward the open water and kept swimming. Saxby was feeling it, then. Good.

The corridor widened as they went, and the water temperature dropped a few degrees. Buttresses of living stone rose to either side and met overhead in long, curving arches.

Indigo dragged his fingers along one as he passed. A faint shimmer moved through the stone where he touched it. His body heat translated into a signal that carried down through the rock into the foundations below.

Everything here was connected. Every thought, every touch, every molecule of water was threaded together into a lattice of sensation and memory. He led Saxby around the last bend, and they emerged into a chamber carved from the bones of the city itself.

The walls pulsed with a softer light, the kind that soothed rather than stimulated. Here, the link between minds thinned, the background hum dropping to a whisper.

Saxby folded his arms, glaring at the floor. “What do I do?”

Indigo considered. “Start by listening. Not for sound, but for the feel of other minds. Well, my mind. There is always a pressure, like a tide. Most never notice it, but you must.”

Saxby closed his eyes, jaw tight. Indigo felt the human’s focus, the way he strained to shove the background noise aside.

Indigo reached out, not with his mind, but with a single tentacle, coiling it gently around Saxby’s forearm. “Let your mind drift and look for where the boundaries are. Then, visualize some sort of impenetrable barrier, like a wall or mirrors, or a reflective dome. Anything that deflects any psychic energy back to its source.”

Saxby’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. He let out a slow exhale, bubbles trailing. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, Indigo felt the flicker, a lessening, the faintest contraction of the mental link.

“That’s it,” Indigo said. “Filter it, like you would filter the taste of iron in the water.”

Saxby took another long breath.

This time Indigo felt the link dim. Some of the loudest currents of emotion, like resentment, loss, the endless litany of questions, went muffled, leaving only a thin, private channel between them.

Indigo released his tentacle, satisfaction running beneath his calm.

Saxby opened his eyes. “You’re still in my head.”

“I will always be in your head,” Indigo said. “But you decide how much noise gets through. The rest you can block. You can save yourself a lot of pain that way.”

Saxby rubbed the side of his face, gills fluttering. “I don’t know if I want you in my head.”

A pause hung in the water, longer than either of them expected.

“That I cannot change. A link formed the moment you touched the water, as it does with anyone, but it was different with you. More. So much more. A thread formed from me to you. A bond. That was new, and I… wanted that,” Indigo responded. “But you can choose not to engage with me. That I will respect.”

Saying that hurt. He rubbed his chest as he turned, drifting away, uncoiling along the chamber’s edge. If Saxby wanted help, Indigo would offer it. If not, Indigo would try not to push. Indigo had learned, after a thousand such encounters, that letting go was sometimes the only way anything was kept.

But Indigo didn’t go far. He hovered in the outer reaches of the chamber, among the pale veins of bioluminescence, his silhouette blending into the ambient glow.

He would give Saxby space, but not enough to be mistaken for abandonment. That wasn’t the point here. Indigo had spent centuries managing the anger, grief, and denial of new arrivals.

He’d learned the precise distance at which presence stopped feeling like surveillance and started feeling like silent camaraderie.

Indigo watched as Saxby stood motionless in the gentle current, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched. The human radiated heat and misery, a signal flare of pain in the water.

Indigo could have smothered it, could have pressed his mind into Saxby’s and forced calm, but he refused to take that shortcut. Besides, it wasn’t needed this time, thankfully. Adaptation meant little without struggle. Transformation was empty if it wasn’t first resisted.

Still, he wanted to offer comfort, perhaps a touch, a shared memory, a song of the ocean’s depths. But that wasn’t what Saxby wanted. Indigo curled his tentacles around himself and let the silence build, constructing a cocoon of gentle absence.