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Razor-sharp rain lashes Alex as he hauls the wooden dinghy across the green-sludge slick pebbled beach. Breathlessly he slips and lands hard, his cries drowned by the crash of the lake’s storm-churned waves and the countless thundering impacts of freezing blades of water shattering on the scummy froth. Soaked to the knees and beyond, he stumbles and sobs his way to the shallows – squinting at the rapidly leaving, smoke belching, trawler. Its smell catches oily in his throat, and its jaundiced lights grow paler hidden behind sheets of driving rain. With one last heave, Alex frees his little boat from the stones and casts himself into its belly. Tossed, rain soaked, and freezing, he scrambles to his knees – dark woollen trousers tear heavy and sharp against his skin – and before the fishing trawler disappears entirely, he flips down the small outboard motor and yanks it to sputtering life. Around him, his precious equipment – useless to him now – binoculars, a camera, boxes of blurry Polaroid photos and leather-bound notebooks stuffed with sketches, dates and times. Alex hauls on the tiller as the motor kicks the dinghy forward, and he slips – a box of tags spills with a kick, scattering fountain-coins of yellow-amber numbered discs of celluloid.

The wind bites. The rain tears at him like knives and hauls the hood from his yellow anorak. The waves throw him and slam him and knock the wind from his lungs and turn him purple. White fingered, he clings to the tiller’s handle with one, and the dark-ochre lip of the hull with the other, even as the waves crash over and over.

Slowly – so slowly – he urges the tiny boat after the fishing trawler as it heads for the deeper parts of the lake – its dieselous rank ever thicker. A splash – loud enough to pierce the storm – and Alex sees the start of the net thrown overboard, and his blood boils. Faster, he pushes, faster and closer to the sickening orange buoy that marks where the illegal – immoral – fishing begins. For all of Alex’s research – for all of his studies of the endangered gwyniad fish of Llyn Tegid, his tagging and measuring, his photographs and sketches and months of careful observation – none of it stood a chance against the thirty pieces of silver the fishing companies offered. And when Alex had taken the matter further – the fishing company’s thugs had made it clear they weren’t to be trifled with. Alex’s ribs still ache, and his lip hasn’t healed.

The injunction should have stopped them – their mercenary fishermen and their indiscriminate ravenous reaving of the lake’s precarious life – but here they were, under cover of the storm, having slashed Alex’s tires in one more attempt to fend him off.

Well he was not going to let them get away with it!

Gritting his teeth, Alex and his tiny battered boat reach the first buoy and he stops the engine hard. He reaches – edge of the boat slamming into his soft, jumper-covered stomach with an oof – and precariously pulls the edge of the net close. A flick, and he grabs for his knife, flashing silver in the cloud-paled light. He saws. Even as the waves kick and pummelled him. Even as the cold lake water drenches him from nape to ankle – he saws and saws and saws at the heavy, black rope. Release! Its ragged edge slips free from the hanging line, and tumbles into the black.

Alex grimaces – gap-toothed teeth showing – with something like satisfaction. He hauls himself, by inches and wave-pushed yards, along the orange-bobber buoyed line, to the next target. More sawing, more gnawing, as the small blade bites deep into the rough and bristly rope. A wave crashes hard, and Alex splutters to breathe, choking and almost dropping his blade. He’s almost through – the rope twisting and fraying held by an old hemp thread. Suddenly, cutting through the crashing and thundering – a man’s yell. Then another. Then, as the rope dies and slips hot and burning through his hands, Alex is drenched in sickly yellow light. He squints, and sees he’s caught in the baleful glare of the trawler’s two searchlights – furious fishermen scuttling across its surface as they see what he’s done.

Alex smiles again, though it doesn’t reach his eyes.

His hands burn cold, and his arms ache with exhaustion, and yet he stashes his knife in its sheath on his belt, and lays hand over hand on the net’s headline to continue his grim task.

He doesn’t make it.

The men – strangers to the village with dark beards and hard eyes – reach him first. He’s called every name and they make every awful promise, and the trawler turns and banks and broadsides Alex’s tiny little wooden craft. This close, the huge metal hull is a cliff of crushing death – scarred by claw marks as long as Alex is tall – and the waves smash them closer and closer together.

Still Alex holds to the net.

Cold fire burns in his chest – anger and betrayal, the curling sharp pain of the unfairness of it all, and Alex’s tears are whipped away in the wind. He’d done everything right! He’d measured and noted and filled out forms and waited interminably in hallways and still – and still – they’d done it anyway. Even with his notes – enough to fill a book – on the fauna of the lake! Even with his certainty, his utter certainty, that there was so much more to learn if we would only stop destroying it for a second! Even with his theory, whispered and cautious, that there was something else, within the deep. Even then – none of it mattered to these men!

Alex’s hands are stumps of cold lard on the ends of his arms, and still he grips. When the water rises up and smashes the ships together – still he holds fast! The men scream bloody murder, waving oars and poles and nets on sticks, the wind bites his face, and water crashes over to soak and ruin paper and photo and book. Inches separate Alex from his goal.

White light. A deafening sound. And then blackness as something heavy and hard strikes his head.

He feels so cold.

He blinks. He blinks and drifts so slowly, head loose on his neck, and sees the sky a roiling plate of boiling green glass. Shadows – one large, one small – high above him, get smaller and smaller. The crashing and screaming and the hissing, crackling rain, becomes distant and inconsequential – muffled and bassy and deep. A gently turning square of grey and black and green-tinted white, drifts past, melting in the water. A scrap of paper, daubed with charcoal flutters slowly close by. Golden coins of science pirouette about him like leaves in a once dreamed autumn.

All over, a tightness – pressing and pushing on limb and skin and blurry eyes – but tighter still the twisting bite on his ankle, and the cruel sharp crushing around his chest.

And yes; he’s cold. Alex feels so very, very cold.

Another blink – the lake water stinging his eyes – and he tries to focus. He shakes his head, but it’s slowed by the water. He clenches his hands and tries to move – but the sinking rope of the net has him trapped – chest and leg.

Realisation.

Alex fights. Ice hands scrabble at the rope, twisted and caught in his water-billowing jacket. He kicks with all his strength, and only one leg can move – the other caught fast where the rope has coiled upon itself, the inexorable weight of the netting an unstoppable force hauling him towards inky darkness and cold, certain death. Panic bursts from his mouth in screamed bubbles – escaping to the surface in his stead. Shimmering silver, they fracture and tremble and pop unseen far above Alex where the emerald chaos glows with shattered, yellow beams of light. Every second, he sinks further from life.

He pulls hard on the rope – pulls hard on his anorak – kicking and flexing and twisting in distress. The rope has kinked tight with a twist, and caught the fabric biting it against his body where he cannot wriggle free. He tries and tries, his all but numb fingers burning with the scrape of hemp that only grows stronger in the wet.

His knife! Alex scrabbles for it at his hip, and holds it two handed for safety.

He saws at the rope and stares in the lessening twilight – watching scant fibres peel away with each sawing motion. He stabs, and does even less. A sob of frustration leaks from burning lungs to smash a single bubble into his own face.

Instead, Alex takes hold of his anorak’s collar, and slashes downwards. The waxed cotton cuts like butter, and Alex loses more bubbles to the relief through his nose. Down and down, sawing and tearing, and the jacket is shorn. He does the same with the woollen jumper below – its teal fibres grey in the water – struggling them off with the rope’s bitter help.

As the yellow fabric billows away like some startled creature, and as the teal threads loosen and lose their shape to unspool forgotten in the black, Alex jackknifes in slow motion, naked body blinding white, to reach for the rope at his ankle. He hacks at it and feels the knife skitter and slip. Numb-fingered, Alex almost drops it – and gasps his horror.

Underwater.

He chokes and splutters, coughs and burns and burns and burns – his lungs scream at him as air like blood spurts into the freezing water. Sparkling, gleaming, glinting – they catch the light just the way the knife does as it tumbles from his spasming hand into the black.

Alex tries to groan without breathing, and gets nothing. Just the silence beneath the water where only the thunder of his heart deafens. A flash of light as the trawler’s searchlights scour the water, but it’s weak and Alex’s vision greys. Another, even weaker, as the green turns blacker and blacker – as Alex exists in the nothing. No up, no down but the ombre shadows – the rope the only tether to the world he has.

His chest heaves. His lungs fighting to burst from their cage, desperate and mostly bereft. The thunder in his ears, he feels across his body – feels it pulse a little more grey into the edges of his vision with every thumping, desperate beat.

At least his leg doesn’t hurt any more – the gnawing of the rope is a distant memory in a leg now too cold to feel. His body goes limp – pulled through a void of reference without anything to remind him what side of death’s door he’s on. Peace, then. Even as his eyes fail him, and as tears of air weep from the corner of his mouth, as the territory of warmth and feeling shrinks down to a hot burning star in his chest – the only thing left in the whole wide world – Alex groggily finds silence is suddenly a friend. He’d fought, but now he could stop – had to stop – and no-one could blame him for this.

A surge, and his breath blooms like a desert flower – beautiful and brief. A constellation in a green, fluttering sky.

A surge, and Alex’s naked chest trembles. Shudders. His limbs sway. Movement. Fast and thundering and close. Darkness in the darkness – a shadow both pale and midnight flashes on the ragged edge of the dregs of his vision. Pressure. Something huge. Something huge.

Then warmth. And touch. Burning points in the nothing cup his face. Whiskery heat on his lips.

Air.

Alex heaves, spasming to the ends of his fingers as he explodes with air. Sweet air. Precious air. Filling his lungs that sear with it and sing with it and soar with it. Air, from a soft sealed kiss on his blue-cold lips. Air, that he sucks and gasps and shudders around. Alex’s eyes snap open – the colourless nothing shattering as life courses through his veins once more.

He must be dreaming.

Ink-black eyes gaze into his own – impossibly close. White eyelashes blink, slow in the water, revealing white skin, pale as the moon. Glimmers of shining gold twinkle at the edge of Alex’s blurred sight.

Warm lips on his own. Warm hands cup his face. Burning in the ice of the lake. Burning against his skin, in his lungs, in his mind.

Alex panics.

Fisted hands shove against warm skin, Alex kicks with his one good leg, and he tears his face from the vision before him. He fights and he struggles and jerks, wanting more than anything to get away!

He sees it; a monster. A creature huge beyond measure, coiling pale and shimmering in the weak light of the deep. Serpent-like – ophidian – its white bellied body coils weightlessly in the water, thick and strong and muscular. Fins of grey and gold shimmer and shadow all along its length before exploding into an enormous, gossamer tail fin, huge and billowing like a sail. At the other end of that body, a chest as broad as a barrel – muscles hidden by layers of precious, life-giving fat – shoulders thick and powerful, and a face that’s human and not.

A man’s face. With gills slashed all along the flanks of his neck. A man’s expression, played out on bloodless white skin, raised brow, and whiteless, confused, eyes.

Alex falls.

The creature moves, muscles undulating beneath soft plush white skin, and he slices through the water in a blink. Shimmering scales of gold flash away, hidden by swirling flurries of grey pennant fins, and the creature is gone.

And still, Alex falls.

Possessively, bitterly, the rope at his ankle pulls Alex down and seconds ago, he'd made peace with it. But not now!

The breath he never dreamed of burns bright within his chest – as bright as gold in yellow searchlights – and he fights. He fights and struggles and kicks and cries. He scrabbles with his fingers and twists like a fish on the line. He has to survive this – he has to live – he has to see the creature again, somehow.

Pressure.

Alex feels it against his naked body, like the boom of silent thunder. He snaps alert – remembering – eyes widening in the dark. White. Gold. Grey and black. Huge and fast. A storm in the water – a tempest beneath the waves. The pressure peaks, crushing force of water shoved, and all Alex can see is claws and teeth and pitch black eyes.

Alex screams sweet air.

Release.

The rope flies free, his leg untethered, and the creature is everywhere around him. White and gold and grey spiral endless, coiling, brushing gently with fins as light as the ghosts of feathers – diaphanous and faint. Alex is enveloped. Enfolded. The merman’s skin is so warm against his own, and tears helpless, hopeless, shivers out of Alex as the blue numbness retreats from the touch.

A surge as Alex’s lungs don’t gasp. His chest heaves without success. His blue lips tighten, his throat tight and choking, and then those eyes – dark as a moonless sky – appear before him again. Alex reaches for him – desperate – and touches him for the first time. Real. Alex had started to doubt it, but he was real. Real and warm and smooth; slick under his fingertips, even as Alex reaches for his shoulders and pulls with desperate need.

They kiss.

Alex opens his mouth and gasps the creature’s breath inside himself. Alex pulls him closer, chest to massive chest, and feels borrowed heat fighting the water’s death away. He inhales and inhales until he’s shaking – tense and needy, desperation in every cell of him – and his fingers find no purchase on the slick shoulders of his saviour. They slip and slide and pull, closer and closer, until they catch – and find shivering, trembling, edges of skin where surging currents of water – freezing and warm – pump thunderously through the merman’s gills. Alex hesitates. His lungs full to bursting, they sting and ache, and with a choke, he pops – air escaping in a deafening, rushing bubble-storm from his mouth and nose and thundering in the precious gap between their close-pressed faces.

It tickles – their beards bristling against each other’s skin, their hair – Alex’s short and auburn-touched, and the creature’s longer and bone-white – shaken, tossed, and tousled.

Alex feels hands wrap around his waist – burning against the cold – smooth and slick and holding him closer. Their lips press again, warm against warming, and Alex melts in those strong arms. They breathe together – Alex’s heart thundering and calming and thundering once more as the press of his body and the gentle pricks of webbed hands of razor-sharp claws hold him and keep him and bring him to life.

A hand moves, and Alex would frown, but that it moves to cup the side of his face so softly. Then the other, this time to squeeze between the press of their bodies and wrap – faintly-sharp – about Alex’s soft stomach, his soft, greying body hair swaying as they move.

Alex exhales, the deep deafening burbling cutting between them again, and when he takes the next long breath in, he feels the creature start to move. That hand upon his abdomen flexing as it swells with the inhale. The hand on his face holding him tighter, their lips sealed, but only just, as the man moves the slightest bit back. And under Alex’s fingertips – hesitating at the gill openings all along the creature’s neck where the tide of his watery breath surges and feels so intimate – Alex feels the creature suck in water with a force of a tidal wave. Alex slows, but the creature exhales harder – filling him up and up. Deeper and deeper – harder until bubbles leak between their soft pressed lips – then the creature pulls back, and Alex blurts a burbling whine.

But he holds his breath – just as the creature intended – and Alex opens his eyes to see the creature’s own eyes sparkling back, a soft, lopsided smile on his whiskery, pale face. Alex smiles back – in awe.

A flash of movement, a twist, and the merman dives – his beautiful billowing tail a heartbeat behind him as he surges through the water like thought.

It’s so cold. So dark. And Alex starts to sink again.

With a shake of his head, Alex kicks – sculling at the water at hands that still tingle where they touched warm skin. Where the hair on the backs of his fingers still shiver, remembering the tide of the creature’s breathing. Above him – the surface – Alex sees it as if from the bottom of a well of soft green blackness where ugly, angry men roar and yell and curse. Where the sky stabs with water hardened and sharp, and wind smacks hard on the face, first from one direction and then without warning, another. Where the sky roars and flashes, and boats crunch and crush and splinter.

Alex kicks. But not powerfully.

Instead he looks down the way the merman had gone. Deeper into the gentle darkness. Plunging into this silent, soft, slow-moving world with a flash of white. A hint of beautiful gold. Where the whole world embraces you in her cold, but gentle, press. Alex gulps, his limbs already bluing in the twilight world. His chest hair shivers with every movement like seaweed in the shallows, but does nothing to stop the heat bleeding from him.

He looks up again – to the surface – to safety. Alex could kick and fight and haul and maybe reach it. Could be tossed on the storm-shattered waves, gasping for rain-thick breaths, as blood-red men spit hate at him.

Was the creature even real?

He touches his lips, and finds them haunted by the ghost of his warmth, and Alex’s eyes flutter shut. He touches his face where the creature had touched it, and the echo almost punches the air from him.

He was real. He was real, and gone, and Alex could hold here, in the cold, breathless death and cling, trembling, to hope.

Alex hangs in the water, falling no further, rising no higher, and hopes.

His eyelashes flutter, every hair on Alex’s body shivers, and Alex feels him approach like a breeze on a fresh spring day. A swoosh nearby, and Alex opens his eyes to see him rising from the darkness, face upturned to the pale light, dark eyes fixed on Alex. He sparkles. He glows. He undulates and thrusts and dances through the deep with a powerful elegance. Alex sees tatters of rich red aquatic plants garlanded around his shoulders, trailing across that broad, powerful, chest – his arms cradling spheres of emerald algae against his body as he reaches Alex and the wake of his water ruffles Alex’s hair.

A dart, and the creature kisses him – briefly and breathily – and Alex lives for every place their bodies touch. Then he parts and Alex sighs soft and bubbling – the sound of it destined for the stars high above.

He hurts whenever the creature isn’t touching him – the cold of the water all claws and bites – trying to take the joy that coils tight around Alex’s heart. Then he swims back, fixing Alex with his gaze, and grasps one of those fist-sized spheres he’s carrying – those seaweed-like ribbons forming a blood-rich halo as they drift – and grasps it in his webbed white hand. The black claws pierce the green skin until it pops – Alex watches as thick goop spurts into the water, dark as moonlit grass – and the creature grasps a huge handful and wipes it in a broad streak down Alex’s freezing chest.

It’s warm.

Alex’s eyes widen. Where the goop touches, the ice of the water cannot reach, and he sobs, shining and silvery, at the relief. The look he gives the creature, then – his own salt-water mixed with the fresh of the lake – as he pulls him in for a kiss, feels like it burns. A kiss not for air, not for living – but for love. For gratitude and wonder and warmth and hope. Alex presses his lips to his and pulls him close – hand tangled in his shivering hair – and kisses him hard. Kisses him soft. Whines burble from his nose, pushed hard against his saviour’s beard to fizz against their skin. He kisses him and holds his face and pulls him and feels him close and real and wonderful. Alex licks across his lip, and the creature growls.

The lake trembles with it.

So does Alex.

Then he feels hot lips against his neck as he head falls back in the water – pearls of shimmering moans trailing to the heavens. He feels the pin pricks of claws against his throat. Feels the hot scrape of sharp teeth against his skin. Feels a burst, a torrent, and more of that warming stuff stroked over his body. Smoothed, grasping, down his body – slicked thick and dark over the hair of his chest. Cupped over the swell of his fluff-touched shoulders. Rubbed firm and possessively over the swell of his lightly pot-belly.

Alex loses himself as everywhere the merman touches, his body tingles and heats and comes back to life. A bite into the curve of Alex’s neck – gently sharp and shocking – and Alex’s mouth blows open with the last of his breath. Then the creature is on him, breathing him alive again, and Alex mouths and licks and gasps every bit of air from between the creature’s dark red lips.

He’s covered – caressed and touched and cherished – and burns with a blush his body’s free to feel again. Cradled, a red-green surface, as Alex lives harder, brighter, hotter than he’s ever lived before – deep beneath the cruel world above.

His hand moves, and Alex’s fingers brush down the trembling gashed gills along that muscular neck, and the creature shivers and groans – and Alex’s eyes snap open, a perfect bubble-ring bursting from his o-shaped mouth. He finds the creature’s eyes rolled back, white in the pale-light, before he blinks and they’re dark and full of desire – a smile full of teeth dawning over him.

A crash – a smash that sounds everywhere at once – and the merman’s head snaps back – snaps up – and finds the surface. Alex follows his gaze, and finds a blooming darkness. Nets – trawling nets – splash and smash and crash into the water from the distant shadow of the trawler ship.

Instantly, the creature releases Alex – his grin replaced with a grimace of fury that chills Alex more than the lake ever could. The creature growls and it builds and builds and Alex feels it shake his lungs. Then the merman tenses – his torso flexing – and Alex can see what’ll happen. Then whoosh – he darts upwards, his enormous tail and fins sleek and dart-like – a javelin of pearl-white rage shooting at the hard metal hull.

Alex reaches – trying to stop him – but he’s gone. Instead, he yells – a scream in the water, caught and muffled and exploding with precious air – and the creature stops, shocked and looks back.

Alex kicks, trying to get closer – following, though his kicks are slow and his swim feels clumsy and weak. The creature looks between him, and the billowing, deadly, net of ropes still drifting into the deep – torn. Alex reaches, and touches his tail – delicate and enormous, soft as silk and gleaming bright – and pulls. The creature frowns, confused, and Alex points – at himself and the boat high above. Himself and the boat. ‘Me’, he tries to say, ‘to the boat’. He wills the creature to understand. Put me on the boat – and he fixes the creature with a stare, so serious and determined, that Alex gets a raised brow in return.

His lungs start to hurt again, but he ignores them.

‘Take me’ he thinks, deafening in his heart-thundered head. ‘Take me there’.

The creature’s tail whips out of his grasp, as he veers and turns and darts through the water in a twisting coiling spiral, and then Alex’s is in his arms. Held tight and moving through the water so fast, it would steal any breath he had.

Everything gets brighter. Louder. And then it all explodes at once.

Alex is in mid air – the creature leaping from the water, breaching it by yards, and the chaos and horrors of the surface assault them at once. Searchlights and screams, crashes and thunder and air thick with fumes. Alex gasps, and finds it bitter. They hang for what feels like a hundred years – yellow rainbows cast by the spray of the merman’s sailed-fins – and then Alex falls. Launched from strong arms to land, scrambling and slick, on the deck of the trawler.

He’s crouched, hears the booming splash of the creature behind him, and then Alex stands. He’s tall, in the lands of men, and he looms over the cowering, craven, ugly-hearted cowards. In their wide, trembling eyes, he’s a demon from the water – a drowned spectre mounted atop an afancod – a lake dragon of Welsh myth – returned for bloody vengeance from the dead. Dripping and oozing blackened green of the depths, his broken, furious grimace glinting, half-hidden beneath blood-red streamers.

They scramble and fall back, screeching their terror in the wildly swinging yellow light.

Alex casts around, breathing heavily, heart thundering, and finds the heart of the beast. Slopping, soaking, he easily rides the storm-tossed, bucking deck, and stalks towards the exposed engine of the ship – snatching a cruel, metal, hooked pole as he does.

He roars as he brings his weapon down upon the choking black machine. He roars louder than the storm, louder than the cries of the men, louder still. He roars into the sky, the mountains, and to the deepest darkest depth of the lake. He beats it sparking, he beats it bent and finally, he beats it broken – bursting into dark red flames that hiss and spit in the rain. Alex falls back, brandishing the pole, wild eyed and maddened.

The fisherman crouch and hunker, their rubber boots squeaking, drawing knives and desperately searching for their courage. Alex is limned by flame, a demon of the depths – a vengeful angel of the waters – and they fall and yell and scramble as he darts forward to threaten them in turn.

A lever catches Alex’s eye – holding the fat and bulbous net of yet-squirming fish and other gasping, dying life. He hefts his stick, spinning it in white, clawing hands above his head and clangs it, stinging all up his arms, into the controls – and the net bursts over the water.

Yells, as the fishermen’s greed wars with their fear, and finds it stronger. One rushes him, and Alex spins – catching his knee with the pole, and sending him flying back as the wave crashes and tilts that way. Another circles, cunning and low, and Alex growls, scampering up in the fisherman’s face with such rage in his nearly-all-white eyes that the man's courage shatters on the cliffs of Alex’s fury and the man dives off the deck to land with a wailing crunch in the liferaft.

A door smashes open, and every man looks – the captain bursts from the bridge, a red gun clutched above his head. He levels it, and before Alex can flinch – fires it, red and burning and bright and and choking – as the flare slams into Alex’s goop covered shoulder. Flesh and ooze sizzles as smoke billows, pouring over the deck. Alex scrapes at it – the flare knocking free – but the pain is mind-whitening. A hole that sears, a scream that he realises is his own, and the fishermen smell blood in the water.

Underlit in red, Alex is a shadow in the steely rain. He drops the pole, and backs up – hand clapped over the burning, screaming, agonising wound. The men circle closer and closer – their sharp and jagged knives flashing red like their eyes. Alex bumps into the gunwale, its low wall catching on his sodden woollen trousers, and he climbs atop it, balancing precariously between the dark waters and the murderous men. The ship bucks, and he almost falls. The valley of the waves stealing the ship from beneath his feet, before he lands, wobbly-legged once more. The men get closer – their grins more terrifying than anything Alex had seen beneath the waves.

Behind him – beneath the white and black chaos – a sinuous shadow flashes by – and Alex smiles.

He turns for one last look at the real monsters of the lake – and then red ribbons streaming behind him – dives into the water with barely a splash.

Peace. Pressure. Relief.

Then a tempest of pearl and gold and the grey of a perfect storm envelops him, and Alex closes his eyes and reaches – finds a bearded face, finds lips and warmth and breath and hot, perfect, kisses.

His creature holds him – hands clawing and grasping and suddenly Alex cries out in agony. The hole in his shoulder burns and stings, and he looks to see it seeping black-red into the water. The merman gasps water, and brings his pale hand with its delicate taut skin between his fingers to cover the wound. Agony flares, and Alex’s lungs empty in an explosion of air that leaves him empty of anything but pain. He’s held closely – and air breathed into him – but his mouth twists, hard, with the pain. Another look, and the water shivering around him coils with twisted red threads of his inner warmth as the cold slithers into his veins.

The bleeding won’t stop.

Black eyes wide and scared look back at him, and Alex wants to hold him. It’ll be alright, he wants to tell him. Wants to reassure him. He’d never meant to live this long. He’d never thought to feel this way.

The blood won’t stop coming.

It turns the water around them wrong – it touches them both and washes across the pale of that beautiful chest.

The creature’s mouth opens – a wordless grimace of despair – and Alex cups his warm, anguished face with his good hand. He cradles it there – the bristles of his beard brushing against Alex’s palm, even as the feeling leaks from his body in clouds of deepest red.

Alex smiles at him; his beautiful mystery, his lover of the depths.

Salt tears and precious blood become part of the lake they float in – part of the peaceful, beautiful, precious world he wishes he could live in for just a little longer.

A kiss. Just one. Soft and trembling, as bubbles spiral through the darkness taking his hope and happiness where Alex cannot go. And then, darkness – swirling, swishing thundering – like the wings of angels – and Alex welcomes them.

He wished he could have said goodbye.

“Get that fucking stuff of him!” someone yells too close.

It’s loud, it’s agony, and he’s being dragged and shoved and hefted.

“Out of the way! Move!” the someone barks, and Alex’s eyes flutter open, painful and squinting in the rain-spattering air.

A man, huge beard and dark skinned, with black framed glasses, glares ahead, angry at unseen others that Alex hears muttering and shouting and slipping and scrambling on the pebble beach. Beneath his fingers, Alex feels heavy canvas, and sees two more men grimly holding the handles of the stretcher he’s been dumped on. They lurch, and he lurches, his shoulder screaming, and he does too.

“Fuck sake!” the man roars, pressing a pad of white against the bleed site.

“Where’s… where’s the… the creature?” Alex mumbles.

“What?”

“The creature – the monster – he saved me. Where—? I need—” Alex pushes himself up off his other elbow, frantic now. Looking desperately at the sliver of storm tossed lake he can make out behind the body of the broad shouldered local carrying the foot-end of the stretcher.

He’s shoved back, hard, and he falls with an agonised gasp.

There are other gasps, from other people, at his words.

“—Good god, he’s delirious. Alex, is it?” the man asks someone somewhere else. “Alex! Alex listen to me. You’ve been hurt! Lie still.”

Alex can only obey – the strong hand at his shoulder pinning him with pain. Gritting his teeth, his eyes scrunch with the agony, then flicker open fast enough to catch a knowing look between the man carrying him, and someone else. A look of a secret kept – a suspicion confirmed.

The man sees Alex looking, and just very slowly, eyes locked, nods at him.

Alex’s face twitches – pain and confusion, exhaustion and relief, and finally as another wave of blackness darker than the lake washes over him, he passes out.

The sun beats down on a reddening Alex as the lake water laps gently against the side of his wooden dinghy. He leans back, stretching his neck, looking at the charcoal sketch on the board on his lap. Swirling, curves of black trace the shape of his dinghy from a bird’s eye view – the water suggested with smudged lines and sharp wave edges – and black and massive, dwarfing this little boat and the even smaller man sketched inside it – the shadow of a sinuous form.

He wipes sweat from his forehead, and calls it done – slipping it from under the metal spring clips and placing it carefully inside the folder with the dozens of others from the last two months. Of a muscular, broad, endless body. Of the dizzying impression of movement of billowing sails of silk. Of a handsome face with ink black eyes, lopsidedly smiling into his soul.

Alex rolls his shoulder – still stiff, still white and tight, over where the hole had been. ‘Lucky to be alive’ the bearded doctor had said. ‘Lucky I’d been visiting’, he’d added. Lucky.

Alex shakes his head.

The net attached to the side of the boat twitches once, twice, and Alex scrambles to reach it. Beneath the still waters, he sees a flash of white and grey, and hauls the net and its floundering contents into the bottom boards. The gwyniad flops and flaps, shining in the sunlight, and with practised hands, Alex pushes the tag’s wire through the fish’s skin, just behind its top fin – the golden yellow disc hanging free, its black carved number clear. Holding its muscular body tight, finishing the tag, Alex presses a quick kiss to the flat of the yellow celluloid – and hefts the fish back into the water to wriggle free once more.

Alex shakes the water off his hands – his thin white vest soaked, and already smeared with charcoal – and notes the day and time in the logbook. When the local government’s involvement in the illegal fishing had been exposed – his own dramatic actions causing a newsworthy stir – the Welsh government had gone scorched earth on them. Every charge – every fine – even faintly applicable, had been thrown at the fishing company who had already been raked over the coals in the court of public opinion. The local politician, pockets overflowing with filthy money, now floundered in jail, his ill gotten gains confiscated. And Alex had gotten his funding, at last, before the last of his five minutes of fame had faded.

Journals published his papers. Universities let him speak. And the precarious position of the gwniad fish became a point of Welsh pride.

Alex… Didn’t talk about the other thing.

In fact, when offers for assistance rolled in – assistants or students – he turned them down flat.

Instead, he found the locals warmer than he’d known them. A knowing glance. A sympathetic pat on his hand, as he nursed a pint down in the local, a wistful look in his eye. He’d already eaten the sandwich an old Welshwoman had pressed into his hands at the dock, a wet-eyed smile in her eyes that she refused to explain.

And yet, he’d been out on the water every day he could – long before the doctor permitted it – and he’d had no sign of his…

Alex struggled. The words swimming from him as he reaches for them in his mind. Monster. Creature. Merman. Love.

He’d read up everything he could. He’d asked, and gotten slyly circumspect non-answers instead. ‘Afancod’ or lake-dragon was the most they’d give him, before insisting they were just silly old stories. Alex tried to name him – based on his similarities to the gwyniad – and came up with nothing, until a visiting journalist mangled the name of the Welsh fish so badly, it came out as ‘grwyg’, or ‘gru-ig’, and Alex had found himself thinking of Grueg nearly every waking moment.

Grueg. Monster. Creature. Love.

Alex sighs, the sun getting low at the end of another lonesome day, promising another lonely night. Grueg. He closes his eyes and just like every blink of the last two months, he sees darkly sparkling eyes. The pain around his heart long since eclipsing the dulling ace of his shoulder.

Alex shuffles down, rocking the tiny vessel, and curls up in the shade the boat offers in the moments before sunset. He rests his sun-kissed, tanned, face on his hands, and closes his eyes as the boat rocks him gently, softly, slowly.

He drifts.

A noise, and he jerks awake with a start – the moon fat and silver, lighting the world bright as day to a blinking, bleary Alex. He sits up, scrambling, and kicks something in his panic.

Lying on the boards, tied with a red ribbon of seaweed, shining bright and precious, Alex finds his knife. The knife he’d lost that day – that tumbled from his numb hands into the impossible blackness.

The boat is wet on one side, dripping lake-water, and Alex spins, frantic, at the sound of a splash. All he sees is the last flash of a huge, shimmering, gold-flecked tail and Alex’s heart explodes in his chest. Soars! Thunders and thumps, squeezes and burns; Alex coughs a sob as his eyes flash flood salty joy.

A beat, as Alex realises what this means. A flash as a hint of a shadow ripples in the deep. And Alex is on his feet.

Deep breath.

He leaps.