Somewhere deep and disparate, in a castle with no walls, old dreams are ending.

Impulses sway through brackish muck- coiling into scattered thoughts, dissolving into freezing water. Centuries of drowned evolution have shorn it of both an identity and a capacity for abstraction. There is no sense of curiosity, because there is no sense of anything. A bolt of stimulus arced down here, into the crushing cold, but the reaction has taken weeks to compile.

A relic, an actual thought, finally thrums through that inhuman house.

It’s returned.

Over the months it takes for her awareness to reassert itself, she understands that she did not ask it to come back.

Slow-churn thinking, a grey and shocking realisation: she is no longer alone.

Her limbs take far less time to assemble than her long-wrecked mind. It will be weeks before she realises what she is seeking, in any meaningful sense. City-long arms stretch, up up up, to taste the air on a million kelp-slick fingertips.

She was always very patient.