In the teal cathedral of the deep where no human prayer has ever been spoken, she moves on in her crimson and purple magnificence, with the unhurried elegance of something that has never considered the concept of fragility — her body a living lantern of crimson and purple, painting the black water with color the way a calligrapher paints silence with ink. She is older than the coral reefs, older than the continental shelves, older even than the land that humans have come to think of as permanent — she has watched mountains rise from the seafloor and dissolve back into sediment. She reaches her luminous tentacles into the darkness, not searching for food or safety but with the particular gesture of something that is simply, perpetually curious