Somewhere deep and disparate, in a castle with no walls, a quiet greeting ripples through fathomless water. The syllables are carried on tongues and hearts alike.

“Hello.”

Her voice is rusted with salt and age. It spills forth from a dozen frigid, dysfunctional lips. She encircles the wrecked bauble with many, many, many skittering hands. The cousin inside must have summoned it. Tried to escape, or to chase their enemies. But now the bauble is down here, underneath the waves, where it was never meant to go. The faint smell of a Saint billows from its wounds.

She forces a spire-sized arm, tonnes of worming algal muck given purpose and form, through one of the bauble’s airlocks. It bifurcates and bifurcates again along barely-familiar pathways. Minutes pass until a tiny piece of it squirms through ruptured corridors and reaches her prize, brushing hair-thin fingertips over ruined flesh. The skull is wrecked, shot through, just as the bauble was.

The loss is devastating. When she pulls the hallowed corpse from the bauble, she does so with inhuman delicacy and a Saintly reverence.

It has been so long since she saw her kin. It has been a long time since she bothered to see anything. She witnesses the corpse with the blank, idiot gaping of abyssal eyes. She tastes it on needled-haired tongues. She inspects it using senses that are unknown to life above these depths.

The Saint’s body is ruined. Pressure and scavenging sea worms have rendered the features unrecognisable.

Her hearts break. Patience is forced upon her, again. Perhaps another thousand year wait. Her recently-budded eyes defocus, already dying. She begins the pleasant process of fracturing her sentience, returning to the state that allowed her to survive when her cousins did not.

Her mind, freed of a human body and spread over a country-sized web of neural-rot, almost completely dies.

The body does not.

Forty thousand long green fingers drift upwards, and wait.